RTHK: India monsoon death toll climbs to 159

The death toll from flooding and landslides triggered by heavy monsoon rains in India climbed to 159, officials said on Sunday, with rescuers searching for dozens more missing.

The country's western coast has been inundated by torrential rains since Thursday, with the India Meteorological Department warning of further downpours over the next few days.

Flooding and landslides are common during India's treacherous monsoon season, which also often sees poorly constructed buildings buckle after days of non-stop rain.

Experts say climate change has caused the annual deluge to increase in frequency and intensity.

In Maharashtra state, 149 people have been killed, including more than 40 in a large landslide that hit the hillside village of Taliye some 250 kilometres southeast of Mumbai Thursday.

Villager Jayram Mahaske, whose relatives remained trapped, said that "many people were washed away as they were trying to run away."

Dozens of homes were flattened in a matter of minutes, leaving just two concrete structures standing, and cutting off power, residents said.

In parts of Chiplun, water levels rose to nearly six metres on Thursday after 24 hours of uninterrupted rain. The water levels have since started to recede.

"Rain, floods, water are not new to the people here but what happened this time was unimaginable and they could not even save their belongings due to the rapid rise of water," Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray told reporters after visiting Chiplun on Sunday.

Eight patients at a local Covid-19 hospital also reportedly died after power supply to ventilators was cut off. (AFP)

This story has been published on: 2021-07-25. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
RTHK: Tunisian protesters march against government

Police and protesters clashed in several Tunisian cities on Sunday as demonstrators demanding the government step down attacked offices of Ennahda, the moderate Islamist party that is the biggest in parliament.

Witnesses said protesters stormed or tried to storm Ennahda offices in Monastir, Sfax, El Kef and Sousse, while in Touzeur they set fire to the party's local headquarters.

The violence came as hundreds of protesters rallied in each of the main cities after a spike in Covid-19 cases that has aggravated economic troubles and exposed the failings of a squabbling political class.

The protests, the biggest in Tunisia for months and the biggest to target Ennahda for years, were called by social media activists. No political parties publicly backed the rallies.

In Tunis, police used pepper spray against protesters who threw stones and shouted slogans demanding that Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi quit and parliament be dissolved. There were other big protests in Gafsa, Sidi Bouzid and Nabeul.

The protests raise pressure on a fragile government that is enmeshed in a political struggle with President Kais Saied, as the government tries to avert a looming fiscal crisis amid a weeks-long spike in Covid cases and increased death rates.

The pandemic has hammered the economy which was already struggling in the aftermath of the 2011 revolution that ousted long-time authoritarian leader Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.

Public support for democracy has waned amid surging unemployment and crumbling state services.

"Our patience has run out... there are no solutions for the unemployed," said Nourredine Selmi, 28, a jobless protester. "They cannot control the epidemic ... They can't give us vaccines."

Last week, Mechichi sacked the health minister after chaotic scenes at walk-in vaccination centres during the Muslim Eid al-Adha holiday, where large crowds queued for inadequate supplies of vaccine.

After a year of wrangling with Mechichi and the leader of Ennahda, Rached Ghannouchi, who is also parliament speaker, President Saied declared the army would take over the pandemic response.

Some analysts saw the move as an attempt to expand his powers beyond the foreign and military role assigned to the president in the 2014 constitution. (Reuters)

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RTHK: Madrid landmarks win world heritage status

Madrid's Paseo del Prado and Buen Retiro Park have been added to Unesco's World Heritage List, the organisation and the Spanish government said on Sunday.

The addition to the list of the world's most precious and significant sites was in recognition of the key role the Paseo, a wide tree-lined avenue that's home to prominent buildings such as the Prado Museum, and the adjoining Buen Retiro park, a 125-hectare green space, play in Madrid's history.

"New inscription on the Unesco World Heritage List: El Paseo del Prado and Buen Retiro, landscape of arts and sciences (Spain) Congratulations!" tweeted the UN agency, whose World Heritage committee is meeting in China for its annual session.

The area was exceptional because it was "the first promenade within the city limits of all European cities and capitals" for the enjoyment of "all citizens, without distinction of strata or class", Spain's foreign ministry said in a statement.

Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez was quick to celebrate the news, tweeting "Deserved recognition for a space in the capital that enhances our historic, artistic and cultural legacy".

"Proud of our city, and happy for Spain and the legacy of its capital," tweeted Madrid mayor, Jose Luis Martinez-Almeida. (AFP/Reuters)

This story has been published on: 2021-07-25. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
South Africa: President moves SA to Adjusted Alert Level 3

Inter-provincial travel for leisure may resume and the sale of alcohol will be permitted for off-site and onsite consumption from Monday as the country moves to Adjusted Alert Level 3 lockdown.

Addressing the nation on Sunday night, President Cyril Ramaphosa said the overall decline in new COVID-19 infections meant that it was possible to gradually ease some of the restrictions on gatherings, movement and the sale of alcohol.

Based on the recommendations of the Ministerial Advisory Committee on COVID-19, and inputs from the Presidents Coordinating Council, Cabinet this afternoon decided that the country should be moved from Adjusted Alert Level 4 and be placed on Adjusted Alert Level 3.

This will take effect later this evening once the regulations have been gazetted, he said in his address.

Under Adjusted Alert Level 3:

- The hours of curfew will stay the same, starting at 10pm and ending at 4am;

- Interprovincial travel for leisure may resume;

- Non-essential establishments like restaurants, taverns, bars and fitness centres may be opened. These establishments will, however, need to close by 9pm to allow their employees and patrons to travel home before the start of the curfew;

- Gatherings will be allowed but will be limited to a maximum of 50 people indoors and 100 people outdoors. Where the venue is too small to accommodate these numbers with appropriate social distancing, then no more than 50 percent of the capacity of the venue may be used.

The President said gatherings that will be permitted under Adjusted Alert Level 3 include religious services, political events and social gatherings.

The limits on venue capacity also apply to restaurants, gyms, fitness centres, bars, taverns and similar places.

Attendance at funerals and cremations may not exceed 50 people and all social distancing and health protocols must be observed. Night vigils and after-funeral gatherings are still not allowed.

The President said the sale of alcohol from retail outlets for off-site consumption will be permitted between 10am and 6pm from Monday to Thursday. Alcohol sales for onsite consumption will be permitted as per licence conditions up to 8pm.

Schools will re-open tomorrow, Monday the 26th of July, according to strict health protocols and other measures announced by the Minister of Basic Education.

The President said despite the easing of regulations it remains mandatory for every person to wear a face mask that covers the nose and mouth at all times when in public spaces.

Owners and managers of public buildings, centres, shops, restaurants, taxis and buses all have a responsibility to ensure that people on their premises or in their vehicles wear masks.

They must also ensure that the appropriate social distancing measures are in place and are adhered to. It is important to remember that it is a criminal offence if the number of people on these premises exceeds the maximum number of customers or employees allowed.

Age group 18-34 to be vaccinated from 1 September

The President said in the last few weeks, the countrys vaccination campaign has gained momentum, with more than 240 000 vaccines being administered every weekday.

A month ago, this figure stood at around 100 000 vaccines per weekday.

As a result, we have now administered more than 6.3 million vaccines, with over 10 percent of our population having received a vaccine dose. This has been possible through close collaboration between government and the private sector and with the active support of other social partners.

The President said in the coming weeks, government will substantially increase the rate of vaccination. This as government increases the number of vaccination sites and improves the vaccination registration system.

We will also increase our vaccination capacity on weekends.

We will now allow people between the ages of 18 and 34 to be vaccinated from the 1st of September 2021. This will be in addition to the age groups that are currently eligible, which is everyone over 35 years of age.

He said that the substantial increase in the rate of vaccination will be made possible by improvements in the supply of vaccines.

Within the next two to three months, we are scheduled to receive around 31 million additional doses from Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson. We are taking decisive action now to secure the livelihoods of millions of people that have been threatened by both the pandemic and the unrest, said President Ramaphosa.

Social relief grant reinstated until March 2022

Meanwhile, the President announced a range of measures to support the recovery of the economy and provide relief to the poor and those who are vulnerable as a result of the measures government had to impose to deal with COVID-19.

To support those who have no means of supporting themselves, we are reinstating the Social Relief of Distress Grant to provide a monthly payment of R350 until the end of March 2022.

This has been made possible by the slight improvement we have seen in our revenue collection, he said.

The number of people who are eligible for this grant has been expanded by allowing unemployed caregivers who currently receive a Child Support Grant to apply.

The President said government was working on a support package for small businesses, formal and informal, who are uninsured and who were impacted by the riots in parts of Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal.  SAnews.gov.za

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China should teach U.S. to treat other countries equally: Chinese FM

Xinhua) 08:57, July 25, 2021

CHENGDU, July 24 (Xinhua) -- Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said here Saturday that if the United States has not learned to treat other countries equally, China and the international community have the obligation to help the United States make up for this lesson.

Wang made the remarks when holding the third strategic dialogue between China and Pakistan with Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi.

In response to U.S. State Department spokesperson's comments made before the visit of U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman to China that the United States will deal with China from "a position of strength," Wang said the United States always wants to use its strength to pressure other countries and thinks it is superior.

However, there has never been a country superior to others in the world, and China will not accept such a claim by any country, Wang said.

(Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun)
We Are China

Xi visits Tibetan village on rural vitalization

Xinhua) 09:15, July 25, 2021

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has visited a village in southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region to inspect work on rural vitalization.

(Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun)
Scientific evidence already refutes lab leak conspiracy theory: Wuhan Institute of Virology

09:47, July 25, 2021 By Wan Yu ( People's Daily

Photo shows Yuan Zhiming, professor with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences as well as director of the National Biosafety Laboratory (NBL) at the WIV answering questions of journalists at a press conference held by the State Council Information Office of China on July 22. (Photo by Xu Xiang/Website of the State Council Information Office of China)

It has become a general consensus among scientists and scholars that the novel coronavirus originated naturally, and scientific evidence has already disproven the lab leak theory, stressed a professor of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where it has been claimed that the virus might have escaped from.

Yuan Zhiming, also director of the National Biosafety Laboratory (NBL) at the WIV, made the remarks at a press conference held by the State Council Information Office of China on July 22, in response to a question on the COVID-19 origins asked by a reporter who cited an article published by some scientists on the peer-reviewed academic journal Science in May, in which they pointed out that it is necessary to consider the possibilities that the virus either arose naturally or escaped from a lab.

On July 5 this year, 24 world-renowned experts once again published a paper in The Lancet, a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal, in which they stressed that there is no scientific evidence to support the theory that the novel coronavirus leaked from a Chinese lab, Yuan noted.

Later on July 7, experts from the U.S., the U.K, and Australia published a preprint of their findings on Zenodo, a European platform for scientific data sharing, pointing out that there is no evidence that the virus came from a Wuhan lab, the early cases were connected to the WIV in any way, or that the WIV had or studied ancestors of the COVID-19 before the outbreak of the pandemic.

Just a few days ago, 22 Chinese and foreign scientists published an article in a Chinese academic journal Science China, in which they demonstrated convincingly why the virus could only have evolved naturally and couldnt be man-made with classical evolutionary theory and methods and refuted the lab leak conspiracy theory with scientific evidence.

The NBL, a P4 or biosafety level-4 (the highest level) lab, is as good as any other P4 labs in operation in the world in terms of hardware facilities, management, team composition and working protocols, Yuan said.

Since it was officially put into operation in 2018, the NBL has not had any incident of leakage or staff infection, according to Yuan.

Designed, constructed and operated according to international requirements and the national standards of China, the NBL has not only been equipped with stable and reliable biosafety protection facilities, but established a complete biosafety management system and a professional team to support, manage and maintain its operation.

Before Dec. 30, 2019, the WIV hadnt come into contact, stored, or researched the COVID-19 virus; and it has never designed, made or leaked the virus, Yuan stressed.

After the sudden attack of the virus, the WIV promptly identified it, isolated the virus strain, and determined its whole genome sequence by making use of its platform, technology, and talent advantages accumulated over the years. Besides, it reported the whole genome sequence of the virus to the World Health Organization (WHO) in time on Jan. 12, 2020.

After isolating and obtaining strain of the virus, we began the screening of antiviral drugs, vaccine research and the establishment of animal models, providing effective support for the fight against the pandemic with scientific and technological means, Yuan said.

When asked about a WIV virus database at the press conference, Yuan pointed out that the database is actually a preliminary framework established by research teams of the WIV, and its structure and content have been continuously improved.

Considering that the website of the WIV and the work and private mailboxes of many employees have suffered from plenty of malicious attacks, the database is only shared within the WIV at present.

It is a tradition in the scientific circle that a research team publishes its findings in the form of papers after analysis and systematic organization of some primary data in the database, and then makes its papers available for viewing and retrieving in databases, Yuan noted, adding that the WIV will display and share its database while strictly conforming to the rule in the scientific circle.

Yuan also contradicted some doubts about the WIV with solid facts. Having always upheld the idea of sharing scientific research information in time, the WIV reported the whole genome sequence of the virus to the WHO promptly after it acquired preliminary results of pathogen identification.

Back on Feb. 3, 2020, the research team of Shi Zhengli, a WIV researcher, published a paper in Nature, a leading multidisciplinary science journal, pointing out that the COVID-19 came from nature. One day later, researchers at the WIV published in an international magazine their research results of the antiviral activity of several drugs at the cellular level.

The WIV has also actively participated in international video and audio academic conferences held by the WHO, National Academy of Sciences of the U.S., French National Institute of Health and Medical Research, Russian Academy of Sciences and other organizations, and shared with its international counterparts in a timely manner its results in the establishment of animal models, antiviral drug screening, and development of inactivated COVID-19 vaccines.

No country can survive the raging pandemic all by itself, said Yuan, who believes only through cooperation and coordinated actions can countries contain the spread of the virus effectively and bring people around the world back to a prosperous and harmonious life.

The WIV will continuously contribute to the fight against the pandemic together with scientists from across the world with an open and transparent attitude, Yuan said.

(Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun)
China calls for multiple-site origin tracing of COVID-19

09:53, July 25, 2021 By Gu Yekai ( People's Daily

The State Council Information Office holds a press conference on the novel coronavirus origin-tracing work in Beijing, July 22, 2021. Photo shows Zeng Yixin, deputy head of China's National Health Commission answering questions. (Photo by Xu Xiang/www.scio.gov.cn)

Origin tracing of COVID-19 shall be conducted in multiple countries and regions based on extensive consultations among WHO member states, said a senior official of China's National Health Commission (NHC) at a press conference on the COVID-19 origin-tracing work Thursday.

Zeng Yixin, deputy head of the NHC, said he was "shocked" to learn that an origin-tracing proposal released by the WHO last week has listed the hypothesis that violations of laboratory protocols in China could have resulted in the virus' leak as one of the major research objectives.

"In some respects, this plan disrespects common sense and defies science. It is impossible for us to accept a plan like this," he said during the news conference held by the State Council Information Office.

Up to now, none of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) staff members and postgraduate students have been infected by the novel coronavirus, the lab has not carried out the gain-of-function experiment on the pathogen, and there is no so-called artificial novel coronavirus in the WIV, he reiterated.

In addition, WHO experts concluded that lab leak is extremely unlikely after personally visiting the WIV, Zeng said, adding that such conclusion must be respected as the experts were elaborately selected by the WHO and are very authoritative and experienced in their respective fields.

On March 30 this year, the WHO officially released a report on the global tracing of COVID-19 origins. The China part of the report made a good start of the global tracing work, Zeng remarked. More and more scientific evidence indicated that the report is valuable, authoritative, and able to withstand the test of science and history. The conclusion of the report is science-based, and the report was also made upon scientific principles, he said.

Through joint efforts of scientists from multiple countries, positive progress has been achieved in the study into the origin of the coronavirus. Xu Nanping, vice minister of the Ministry of Science and Technology introduced that as of July 19, Chinese scientists had issued 225 papers on COVID-19 origin tracing in cooperation with research teams from the US, the UK, and other countries, and 352 papers had been released by domestic research teams. Besides, Chinese and US medical experts had convened six video conferences on epidemic prevention and control.

According to Xu, the COVID-19 information database established by China National Center for Bioinformation has collected and shared 2.53 million genome sequences, providing services for nearly 300,000 users in 177 countries and regions around the world.

Zeng said the Chinese government has always supported science-based origin tracing, but it opposes politicizing the work. The second-phase study shall be an extension of the first-phase one, and be conducted based on extensive consultations among WHO member states, he added.

What was done in the first stage of origin tracing, especially by those that have reached a clear conclusion, should not be repeated. What should be carried out is the origin tracing of early cases, molecular epidemiology, and intermediary hosts in multiple countries and regions based on extensive consultations among WHO member states, Zeng said.

At present, the academic community generally believes that the novel coronavirus originated from the nature. Wang Chen, president of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College said at the conference that cold chains remained an important transmission channel amid the epidemic, and the evidence chain of transmissions by cold chains is relatively substantial. Given global trade and exchanges of personnel and goods, the human-to-object transmission in cold chain environment has made pathogen transmission even more complicated. Wang suggested that cold chains should be a significant clue in ongoing virus origin tracing.

The appeal for launching wide-ranging investigations worldwide is becoming stronger, as more evidence pointing to earlier infections outside China has surfaced recently, said Liang Wannian, team leader from the Chinese side of the WHO-China team studying the origins of COVID-19.

For instance, a skin sample taken from an Italian resident in November 2019 yielded traces of the virus, and traces also were found in human sewage samples collected in Brazil in November 2019. The first infection in Wuhan was reported on Dec 8, 2019.

"These examples show that Wuhan may not be the ground zero for virus spillover," he said, adding that the virus likely underwent a complicated transmission cycle between animals, humans and objects.

Studies of early patients, bio samples, genomic sequences, natural hosts, intermediate hosts and cold chain infection, cannot be conducted without joint efforts of multiple places worldwide, he noted.

Wang said origin tracing is complicated and diverse, adding that vision shall not be restricted, but broadened in order to find the origins of the coronavirus. It is important to get the direction of origins tracing multiple-site, multiple-orientation and systemic research and study around the globe, he remarked.

(Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun)
U.S. is fooling itself by attempting to cover up failure in response to COVID-19 through political manipulation

09:56, July 25, 2021 By Zhong Sheng ( People's Daily

People walk on a street in New York, the United States, on July 20, 2021. COVID-19 cases and deaths are surging again in the United States as the highly transmissible Delta variant is taking hold and vaccination efforts are stagnating in the country. (Xinhua/Wang Ying)

By changing evaluation indicators, American media recently ranked the U.S. first among 53 economies in the world for its return to normal life amid the pandemic in its COVID Resilience Ranking. Ironically, core indicators of the COVID-19 situation in the country, such as the daily numbers of newly confirmed COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, rebounded seriously. Increase in the number of COVID-19 infections is rising in all of its 50 states, while growth in vaccination rates has all but stalled.

The contrast between the ridiculous COVID-19 resilience ranking and the harsh pandemic situation has revealed how anxious some people in the U.S. are to cover up the countrys failure in response to the pandemic, which is also the root cause of the attempt of some U.S. politicians to shift the blame for their own incompetence in fighting the pandemic to other countries by stigmatizing acts of other countries regarding the pandemic, attaching geographical labels to the virus, and politicizing COVID-19 origin tracing.

However, no matter how certain U.S. politicians indulge themselves in wishful thinking, they cant rid themselves of the burden of social problems at home.

The deep-seated social problems in the U.S. are unavoidable pitfalls in the countrys response to the COVID-19. Issues like racial divide, the gap between rich and poor, and social division are profound and important reasons behind the countrys failure to control the pandemic.

The inaction and misconduct of some U.S. politicians, both in the past and today, have pandered to the countrys reality of social division and worsened the impacts of social division, dragging the countrys pandemic situation into a vicious cycle of deterioration-alleviation-rebounding.

In the U.S., where the society is deeply divided, fighting the COVID-19 through solidarity seems merely a slogan out of reach.

Nations, like individuals, reveal themselves at times of crisis, wrote BBCs New York correspondent Nick Bryant in an article published on the website of BBC.

Rather than a coming together, the crisis has demonstrated how for decades Americans have conducted a political version of social distancing, the article said, going straight to the heart of the matter.

In a poll carried out by NBC News in April, 82 percent of the respondents said they believe the U.S. is divided and racial and political tensions are escalating in the country.

Well-known American political scientist Francis Fukuyama pointed out that in the face of an unprecedented pandemic, Americans should have put aside differences and fight the crisis in solidarity, but overall, the COVID-19 has exacerbated political polarization in the U.S.

In the U.S. society plagued by deep-rooted racial divide, the process of combating the COVID-19 tells more of a story about inequality. Compared with white Americans, people of the ethnic minority groups in the U.S. have faced much higher risks of infection, hospitalization and death, and yet shown far lower vaccination rates.

According to data released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in June this year, Hispanic Americans are twice as likely as whites to be infected with the novel coronavirus, 2.8 times as likely to require hospitalization for the treatment of COVID-19, and 2.3 times as likely to die from the virus.

As of May 12, 2021, the vaccination rate of white Americans was 66 percent higher than that of Latino Americans and 56 percent higher than that of African Americans, as revealed by data from the CDC.

The experience of being unfairly treated makes it hard for African Americans to trust medical institutions, said Samantha Artiga, member of U.S. health policy research institute Kaiser Family Foundation.

Its a story of structural racism that has its origins over the past centuries, David Asch, executive director of the Penn Medicine Center for Health Care Innovation, recently said after conducting studies of COVID-19 related racial differences.

In the U.S., a country that faces widening gap between rich and poor, the amount of wealth determines individuals rights to life and health. A reality that many American families have to face is that they dont dare to receive medical treatment because they dont have medical insurance.

Poor people are being hit the hardest by the COVID-19 in the U.S., said Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, explaining that the poor in the U.S. are more susceptible to the virus and face a higher mortality rate from the disease.

The COVID-19 pandemic has further broadened the gap between rich and poor in the U.S. When tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs and sources of income because of the pandemic, over 650 billionaires in the country saw their combined wealth increase by $1.3 trillion during the past year.

The COVID crisis is crushing people of color and low-income workers while billionaires who are nearly all white have seen fortunes skyrocket, pointed out Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness.

The COVID-19 pandemic has become a magnifier and catalyst for social problems in the U.S., exposing a typical American-style crisis. Such a socially divided country is doomed to failure in the fight against the pandemic. And placing the U.S. at the top of the COVID Resilience Ranking is merely a self-deceiving trick the country plays.

Those U.S. politicians who are obsessed with crooked ways had better bring their minds from delusions to the reality and face up to and solve internal problems of their society, as it is the only right way. If they continue to pass the buck, they will only add to the suffering of people in their country.

(Zhong Sheng is a pen name often used by Peoples Daily to express its views on foreign policy.)

(Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun)
US indeed the one being irresponsible and dangerous on origin tracing

10:10, July 25, 2021 By Zhong Sheng ( People's Daily

Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, attends a hearing of Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee titled "The Path Forward: A Federal Perspective on the COVID-19 Response" in Washington, D.C., the United States, on July 20, 2021. (Stefani Reynolds/Pool via Xinhua)

The US, saying Chinas stance on the next stage of the global origin-tracing issue was irresponsible and dangerous, revealed its indifference to common sense and arrogance for science. Whats behind such accusation is its intention to hide its own failure in pandemic control and to escape the blame for hindering the global efforts to fight COVID-19.

At a press conference held on July 22, China said the second-phase study shall be an extension of the first-phase one. It shall be guided by relevant resolutions of the World Health Assembly and conducted based on extensive consultations among WHO member states. What was done in the first stage of origin tracing, especially by those that have reached a clear conclusion, should not be repeated.

Chinas stance reflected a responsible attitude to advance the origin tracing work with scientific principles, and mirrored the consensus broadly reached by the international society.

Whos being irresponsible and dangerous on origin tracing? The international society has a fair judgement. For some time, some people in the US have made origin tracing a political issue and done everything to frame other countries with unreasonable suspicions. However, they are quite silent when it comes to how and when the novel coronavirus started spreading in their own country. Transparency and responsibility are pet phrases of Washington when it demands investigation into other countries, but it stands dumb as the international society raises doubts against itself. Such a sharp contrast comes from the White Houses conventional double standard on international affairs, and makes people think what on earth it is hiding?

The international society has every reason to request origin-tracing investigation into the US.

According to American media, the National Institutes of Health of the US has turned up evidence of coronavirus infections in five US states as early as December 2019. As many as 171 people in Florida may have been infected with COVID-19 before officials said the virus was in the state.

The mayor of Belleville, New Jersey, was tested positive for COVID-19 in November 2019, over two months earlier than the first confirmed case reported in the US. In July 2019, multiple states in the US were stricken by the e-cigarette or vaping use-associated lung injury, or EVALI, which shows extremely similar symptoms with those of COVID-19.

Donated blood check-ups in nine US states found that 106 blood samples, ranging from December 13, 2019 to January 17, 2020, tested positive for coronavirus antibodies. And what's on this list also includes Fort Detrick lab and the over 200 bio labs of the US overseas repeatedly questioned by the public.

Obviously, the US owes an explanation to all the people in the world and the international society.

The origin tracing work concerns global public health security, as well as whether the mankind will be able to cope with impacts from similar epidemics in a more effective manner. If Washington really wants an answer to the scientific issue and cares about global public health security, why does it always keep silent on its own problems and refuse to respond to the international society?

We are well-founded to doubt that origin tracing is nothing but a disguise of the US under which it plans to achieve other goals not in the sphere of science. It fully reveals the hegemonic pursuit of the country that drives it to do whatever it wants.

To deceive the world, some American politicians even resort to origin-tracing terrorism. It is reported that multiple scientists committed to origin tracing with scientific principles have encountered political pressure, online abuse and even threats of harm just because they made impartial remarks on origin tracing. A Western scientist who had joined relevant studies told the media that it is an organized political campaign. Such immoral practice must be opposed by the international science community and justice.

Jeremy Farrar, director of Wellcome Trust, a charitable foundation in the UK, stressed that origin tracing of COVID-19 can rely only on solid scientific evidence, and there is no place for unsubstantiated rumor, or conspiracy theories often fueled for political purposes.

Origin tracing of the novel coronavirus needs investigation into multiple countries and regions around the world. Practices done for the sake of private interests, running against the scientific spirit and out of political manipulation will only lead to severe impacts on global anti-pandemic cooperation and intense dissatisfaction and opposition from the international society.

Whats urgent for the US is to right its wrongs and respond to international concerns, rather than making groundless and irresponsible remarks to shift blames.

(Zhong Sheng is a pen name often used by Peoples Daily to express its views on Chinas foreign policy and international affairs.)

(Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun)
China will take countermeasures against foreign bullying: spokesperson

Xinhua) 10:43, July 25, 2021

BEIJING, July 24 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese government spokesperson on Saturday said that any bullying sanction will meet harsh countermeasures.

The spokesperson for the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office of the State Council expressed resolute support for the Chinese foreign ministry's decision of imposing reciprocal sanctions on six individuals and one entity from the United States.

They have been harming China's national interests by fabricating facts and spreading rumors on Hong Kong-related issues and should be held accountable and punished according to China's Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law, the spokesperson said.

China has never bullied, oppressed, or subjugated people of any other country, and will never allow such things to happen to it, the spokesperson added.

(Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun)
South African epidemiologist calls on international community to approach origin-tracing matters in science-based way

11:01, July 25, 2021 By Wang Lei ( People's Daily Online

Recently, the SA Health Products Regulatory Authority gave conditional authorisation for use of the Coronavac vaccine from China in South Africa.

Prof. Salim Abdool Karim, the director of the Center for the AIDS program of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA), said South Africa has a rigorous regulatory process. When we look at the approvals that they have made, theyve ensured that medications that are approved are of high-quality, that they are safe and they are effective.

With more variants of the SARS-Cov-2 emerging around the world, Karim warned that if a new variant can escape vaccine immunity and spread rapidly, we can expect the next set of variants to pose a challenge to our existing vaccination program, and may need to give people a booster dose.

We will no longer simply be able to just vaccinate and hope that everything's going to go back to normal We now have to remain vigilant. We have to monitor each new variant. We have to assess it. And we have to be assured that the new variant is not escaping immunity if we are to aim to get to any semblance of normality, he said.

Karim also agreed that the international community should look at origin-tracing matters in a science-based, objective and fair manner, and oppose politicizing the origin-tracing of the virus.

It's very important that we identify sources of new viruses because it gives us clues as to what we can expect in the future This is not a time for political posturing and finger pointing. We need to do so in a transparent way so that all the different possibilities are explored, the evidence is collected and the answers are obtained. Its in everyone's interest to get an answer that is scientifically credible, he said.

(Web editor: Hongyu, Liang Jun)
Namibian people appreciate 13th batch of Chinese medical team service

Xinhua) 11:11, July 25, 2021

WINDHOEK, July 24 (Xinhua) -- The people of Namibia have lauded the outgoing 13th batch of the Chinese medical team at the Acupuncture Department at the Katutura State Hospital in the national capital of Windhoek for better health.

The team delivered Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) services treating diseases such as body pain, chronic issues, muscle and joint pains, paralysis, and migraine at the department between January 2020 and July this year.

Mina Kazapua, a resident of Windhoek, said she brought more than three family members to the department, all of whom showed impressive improvement in their health.

"I experienced it first-hand. The Chinese doctors left a mark on the hearts of many people they treated in Namibia," according to Kazapua.

The team's timely and caring delivery of TCM has also contributed to locals' quality of life and mobility.

Martin Indongo from Windhoek turned to acupuncture following severe backache and pain in the leg and foot.

"At a time in life, I had given up hope. But acupuncture has had such a good effect on me. I can only thank the Chinese doctors for giving me hope again," said 54 years old patient Indongo.

While 46 years old, Idda Haufiku, who came for acupuncture following testimonials she heard from others, emphasized that Chinese medics' dedication and beneficial results of acupuncture treatment have won over her heart.

"My head and neck were in pain, but the TCM treatment helped. I can see a change. So I hope that if I continue to get good results," Haufiku said.

Moreover, for Haufiku, the team performed miraculous work, evident in the testimonies of better health, seen by locals as a second chance in life.

"Even people who got injured from car accidents were also helped here. Some came on wheelchairs, but after the treatment, they were able to walk on their own," Haufiku added.

Apart from treating patients, the team also undertook a skills exchange programme to build the capacity of intern doctors at the University of Namibia's School of Medicine.

The team also contributed significantly to the COVID-19 pandemic fight, donating ant-epidemic materials to the hospital in April this year in an effort to fight against COVID-19.

"You uplifted the level of service in our hospital," said Dr. Nelago Amagulu, the medical superintendent at Katutura State Hospital.

Meanwhile, the Namibian government also commended the team for the diligent and professional service provided by the Chinese medical team.

Kalumbi Shangula, minister of Health and Social Services, said that the knowledge and skills of the medical team have also greatly contributed to the government's efforts in accelerating health access, ensuring the health and well-being of the nation.

"One of the consistent and much-valued support over the years came through the Chinese medical teams. Now that the term of the team from Zhejiang province has come to an end, allow me to express my sincerest appreciation to the team for the services rendered to the Namibian people," Shangula said.

Namibian Founding President Sam Nujoma said that the sustained quality service delivered by the 13th batch of the Chinese medical team further cements China-Namibia ties.

"The People's Republic of China is indeed Namibia's all weathered friend," Nujoma added.

Fang Lianqiang, medical team leader of the outgoing 13th batch, said the team treated more than 7,000 locals from across Namibia during the 18 months of service.

"It makes one happy to impact the lives of others positively through health," Fang said.

Since 1996, a team of traditional Chinese medical practitioners has been stationed in Windhoek as part of the collaborative medical programmes between China and Namibia.

(Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun)
Lost Buddha statue returns to China's relic-rich province

Xinhua) 11:14, July 25, 2021

Photo taken on July 24, 2021 shows a stone Buddha head of a statue, which belongs to Cave 8 of the Tianlong Mountain Grottoes, at the Tianlong Mountain Grottoes Museum in Taiyuan, north China's Shanxi Province. A long-lost Buddha statue of Tianlong Mountain Grottoes made its public debut in Shanxi Province Saturday after being returned from Japan. With a history of over 1,400 years and originally stored in the eighth cave of the grottoes, the statue arrived in Beijing from Japan on Dec. 12, 2020. The statue will be permanently exhibited in the Tianlong Mountain Grottoes Museum in Shanxi's capital Taiyuan. (Xinhua/Chai Ting)

TAIYUAN, July 24 (Xinhua) -- A long-lost Buddha statue of Tianlong Mountain Grottoes made its public debut in north China's Shanxi Province Saturday after being returned from Japan.

With a history of over 1,400 years and originally stored in the eighth cave of the grottoes, the statue arrived in Beijing from Japan on Dec. 12, 2020.

The statue will be permanently exhibited in the Tianlong Mountain Grottoes Museum in Shanxi's capital Taiyuan.

Nestled on a mountain on the outskirts of Taiyuan, the grottoes currently comprise 25 caves and more than 500 statues, representing the fine arts from the Southern and Northern Dynasties (420-589) to Tang Dynasty (618-907).

In the 1920s, the grottoes were plundered and more than 240 sculptures stolen, with over 150 of them known to be scattered across the world, either in museums or as part of private collections, said the museum.

Between 2021 and 2025, China will try every means to ensure more lost cultural relics are recovered and returned, Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Li Qun said at the exhibition.

(Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun)
China-funded projects, investments transforming Zambian lives

Xinhua) 11:38, July 25, 2021

LUSAKA, July 24 (Xinhua) -- There is no doubt that any investment a country attracts will result in the transformation of not only the economy but people's lives as well.

There is, therefore, no doubt that Chinese overseas investment has gone a long way in transforming not only economies around the world but in improving people's lives.

Zambia is an example where Chinese-funded projects and investments are transforming lives.

For instance, the construction of a 750 megawatts power project in Zambia funded by the Exim Bank of China as well as other financiers has not only enabled the country to become energy secure but has had an impact on the lives of the people.

Construction works of the Kafue Gorge Lower Hydropower Station situated in Chikankata district, about 90 kilometers from Lusaka, the country's capital, started in 2015 and already both socio and economic benefits are being seen.

Apart from the creation of about 4,000 jobs during the construction period, the project, once fully completed, will provide another 400 permanent jobs.

The project has also seen spillover effects in other industries such as suppliers of steel as well as consultancy services while local people are benefiting through the provision of various small businesses such as selling foodstuffs to construction workers.

Senior Chieftainess Nkhomeshya Mukamambo II, under whose chiefdom the project is located, is grateful that the project will not only enhance power generation but also benefit local people who have been employed.

She commended China for the support, adding that China has been an "all-weather friend" to Zambia even in times of difficulties.

The residents of the districts are happy with the project as it has transformed their lives.

Agnes Bwenvya, a 24-year-old resident of the district is among other residents that are benefiting from the project.

Bwenvya, who is involved in the business of selling foodstuffs, says construction workers have become her major customers resulting in her business improving.

"This project has been good to me as a single mother of one child. I am now able to take care of myself and my child because business is now growing," she said.

Anderson Zulu, a 21-year-old resident is one of the casual workers employed during the construction of the power plant said he is elated that his life has been transformed from the time he started working.

"The salary I am getting here has enabled me to take care of my needs and I am so happy that now I have a regular income," he said.

Zebedia Hampande is one of the residents employed as a driver at the construction site and he is happy that he now has a regular income, which is making him take care of his family.

Liu Kai, a representative of Sinohydro, said his company is committed to improving the living standards of the people within the locality of the project.

He said apart from the creation of jobs, a school has since been built while boreholes have been drilled to ease people's problems of access to clean water.

The company, he said, has also trained 350 local people as technicians at the project while some have been sent to China for training, adding that the company has planned more projects for the community.

(Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun)
Chinese energy products boon for Kenyan traders

Xinhua) 11:39, July 25, 2021

NAIROBI, July 24 (Xinhua) -- Four shops of energy items line up the main road in Kitengela, a fast-growing residential and commercial hub, on the south of Nairobi, Kenya's capital.

The shops are in close proximity to each other but this does not seem to bother the owners, as none is eating into the market of the other.

They have co-existed for the last three years and others have come up in the vicinity as the market for energy items that include those powered by solar and those recharged using electricity grows in the suburb and in others across Nairobi and the east African nation.

Among the popular energy products Kenyan traders sell are outdoor and indoor lights, lamps, torches, chargers, batteries, bulbs, water heaters and solar panels.

All the energy items are sourced from China in a booming business that is rising as prices fall, encouraging Kenyans to embrace micro energy systems.

"Business is there, that is why you are seeing many shops coming up. People are buying solar items and rechargeable gadgets in particular," Anthony Kuria, who runs one of the energy items shops in Kitengela, said recently.

Chinese made solar security lights are among the fastest moving products in the market, according to Kuria.

Just as many other Chinese-made energy products, prices of the gadgets have declined significantly in the last two years.

From a high of 8,000 shillings for 50 watts of light, one now buys 100 watts of light for the same amount, said Kuria.

Similarly, prices of other energy items have fallen in a similar fashion thus appealing to the bottom segment of the Kenyan market, some who have no access to electricity.

These include poor households in slums and rural areas that mainly relied on kerosene for lighting, small traders and shopkeepers.

"Thanks to my rechargeable light, I am able to sell for longer hours at night," said Caroline Musya, who runs a roadside vegetable stall in Nairobi.

Musya normally opens her stall from 5:00 p.m., targeting people returning home from work.

Without the light, she would only work until 7:30 p.m., but with the source of light, she goes until 9:00 p.m.

Thousands of other small traders like Musya have the Chinese rechargeable electric and solar lights to thank for extended business hours.

It is a similar case for millions of households in Kenya who would switch to using kerosene lights or candles in times of blackouts.

While some traders import the gadgets directly from China, others source them locally from importers.

River Road and Luthuli Avenue, business streets in downtown Nairobi, host dozens of Chinese-made energy items wholesale shops from where small traders source.

Kwame Owino, the chief executive of Institute of Economic Affairs, a Kenyan think tank, during a recent webinar said search for alternative energy sources in Kenya boils down to economics.

According to him, Kenya's power system is one of the most-expensive in the world when compared to incomes, thus, many are looking for alternatives and Chinese energy items are offering them.

Ernest Manuyo, a business lecturer in Nairobi, noted that Chinese energy items have replaced those from western countries and they are popular because they appeal to all economic segments of the society creating business for traders.

Nationally, Kenya has also embraced solar energy, with the east African nation in 2019 launching a solar plant in Garissa town constructed by a Chinese company.

(Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun)
EU policy tools should avoid discriminatory impact on foreign firms: Chinese chamber

Xinhua) 11:40, July 25, 2021

Flags of the European Union fly outside the EU headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, May 21, 2021. (Xinhua/Zheng Huansong)

"They should avoid having a discriminatory impact on foreign companies, or leading to new distortions by offering privileges to EU locally owned companies, for instance in acquisition transactions or procurement processes," said Xu Haifeng, Chairman of CCCEU.

BRUSSELS, July 24 (Xinhua) -- Any policy tools introduced and adopted by the European Union (EU) institutions shall "ensure legal certainty for the business community, and openness and fairness in the market," the China Chamber of Commerce to the EU (CCCEU) has said.

"They should avoid having a discriminatory impact on foreign companies, or leading to new distortions by offering privileges to EU locally owned companies, for instance in acquisition transactions or procurement processes," said Xu Haifeng, Chairman of CCCEU, in a statement. He added the chamber's members "would appreciate that the European market could remain open, competitive and fair."

The chamber released the statement after submitting on Tuesday its feedback to the European Commission's proposal for a Regulation on foreign subsidies that was unveiled in May this year.

In September 2020, the CCCEU already participated in a public consultation on the EU White Paper on distortive foreign subsidies.

"We are now pleased to see that some of the comments we made back then were taken into consideration by the European Commission and are reflected, either fully or partly, in the proposal for the draft Regulation -- in particular those related to the thresholds triggering the investigation, the balancing test, the right of defense, and redressive measures, among others," said the statement.

The CCCEU, speaking on behalf of some 1,000 Chinese companies operating in the EU, said in the statement that some issues remained unsolved.

In Tuesday's feedback, the chamber expressed caution about the "increasing obstacles and barriers" that the draft Regulation will pose to foreign companies.

It said the draft Regulation failed to provide legal certainty to the companies which might be affected by this new legislation, as many "key concepts and legal standards/thresholds remain ambiguous."

It said the Regulation proposal might place foreign companies in competitive disadvantages compared with EU locally owned companies. "We believe that the draft Regulation should extend the existing EU State Aid rules to guarantee non-discrimination between European and foreign companies."

The chamber said it also believed that the current proposal possibly underestimated the administrative burdens that non-EU companies will need to handle, in particular with respect to the notification obligations.

"EU companies are not subject to similar obligations regarding the State aid they received within the EU, at least not at similar scale. Understanding the burden our members will face, we recommend reconsidering the scope of reporting for notification purpose and limiting the burden to the one borne by EU companies," it said.

The European Commission's latest round of public consultation concluded on Thursday, receiving 47 feedbacks from companies, associations and others in the EU and beyond.

The draft Regulation, aiming to tackle foreign subsidies that have a distortive effect on the EU's single market, would give the European Commission the authority to investigate foreign subsidies in mergers and acquisitions, as well as bids in large public procurement procedures.

(Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun)
Washington's sincerity essential for meaningful talks with Beijing

Xinhua) 13:34, July 25, 2021

Photo taken on May 4, 2021 shows the White House in Washington, D.C., the United States. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)

Continuing to engage with China from "a position of strength?" Washington, make the right call, please.

BEIJING, July 25 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman is traveling to China for a two-day visit starting on Sunday, during which she is scheduled to meet with senior Chinese diplomats in the Chinese coastal city of Tianjin.

For a strained relationship that bears extensive global significance, dialogue is absolutely welcomed and expected to bring about tangible progress.

To make the talks between the two sides productive, it is essential for the U.S. side to demonstrate sincerity and work with China to put in place a set of guardrails for the long-term development of what many deem as the world's most important bilateral relationship.

That starts with Washington calling off its aggressive actions that grossly interfere with China's internal affairs and hurt China's interests.

It is sad to see that the current U.S. administration seems to be still taking its cue from the China policy of the wrongheaded previous White House.

People walk on a street in New York, the United States, on July 20, 2021. (Xinhua/Wang Ying)

Over the past few months, Washington has continued to slander China on such issues as COVID-19 origin tracing, human rights and cyberspace security, and has been seeking to form an anti-China alliance with its treaty allies. As a result, China-U.S. relations are facing an unprecedentedly difficult situation.

Beijing's stance on issues concerning China's sovereignty and territorial integrity has always been clear and consistent: there is no room for compromise.

If Washington continues with these contentious moves against China while expecting meaningful talks with Beijing, it must be daydreaming.

The United States should also abandon its condescending attitude, and learn to treat China and other countries as an equal and with due respect.

Photo taken on Dec. 14, 2020 shows the U.S. Capitol building in the rain in Washington, D.C., the United States. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)

Ahead of Sherman's visit, U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said the United States will continue to engage with China from "a position of strength."

Such arrogant and bullying rhetoric reveals just how overbearing Washington is. In fact, Washington's outdated ego also shows that many of the country's political leaders are still thinking in Cold War terms.

However, in today's world, no country, not even the United States, has the right to dominate global affairs, control the destiny of others, or keep advantages in development all to itself.

As always, China welcomes exchanges with the United States, but that does not mean Washington is entitled to lecture China or strong-arm Beijing into giving up its legitimate rights to development.

Most fundamentally, leaders in Washington should be keenly aware that a healthy and stable relationship between the world's top two economies is conducive to the interests of not only China, but the United States, and the wider global community.

Yang Jiechi, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the CPC Central Committee, puts forward China's stands on relevant issues at the start of the high-level strategic dialogue with the United States in the Alaskan city of Anchorage on March 18, 2021. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)

Climate cooperation is one example. The future without China and the United States joining forces to mitigate the worsening climate change is unimaginable. Yet if Washington keeps believing that it can have Beijing's cooperation in addressing daunting challenges while at the same time suppressing China, it is hugely wrong.

Given the mounting tensions that are troubling the China-U.S. relations, it is true that it is impossible to solve all problems at once. But it is important for the two sides to keep up with candid and productive communication, like the high-level strategic dialogue in Anchorage, Alaska in March.

If Sherman and her team this time can engage with their Chinese counterparts not from a position of strength as they wish, but with sincerity, respect and good faith, the meeting in Tianjin can be constructive and may lead to further talks between the two sides. Washington should make the right call.

(Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun)
China has every right to reject WHO's embrace of lab leak theory

By Danny Haiphong (CGTN) 15:17, July 25, 2021

The State Council Information Office holds a press conference on the novel coronavirus origin-tracing work in Beijing, capital of China, July 22, 2021. (Photo/ Xinhua)

Editor's note: Danny Haiphong is an independent journalist and researcher in the United States. He is a contributing editor to the Black Agenda Report, co-editor of Friends of Socialist China, and founding member of the No Cold War international campaign. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

Deputy of the National Health Commission Zeng Yixin asserted that China will not follow the World Health Organization's (WHO) suggested plan to focus second phase research into the origins of COVID-19 on the lab leak theory. The remarks came at a press briefing held on July 22. Outlets such as CNN and Reuters reported on the development with a strong negative bias. Each report appeared to conclude that China was shirking its commitments to the international effort to uncover COVID-19's origins.

Yet China has every right to be suspicious of the undue focus that has been placed on the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The lab leak theory emerged from far-right political forces in the United States such as Senator Tom Cotton very early in China's battle with COVID-19 and has since been mainstreamed by the likes of Donald Trump's former Center for Disease Control (CDC) Director Robert Redfield.

Current President Joe Biden ordered an intelligence investigation into COVID-19's possible origins in Wuhan after a Wall Street Journalreport claimed that workers at the WIV had become ill in November 2019.

Michael R. Gordon co-authored the report using evidence from anonymous former intelligence officials. Gordon also co-authored the famous article in 2002 with Judith Butler which claimed that Saddam Hussein was harboring Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in Iraq. This report was influential in the U.S. decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Over eight years, U.S. military forces were culpable in the death of nearly one million people and the massive instability currently plaguing the region.

The lab leak theory is a highly politicized framework for pursuing answers into the origins of COVID-19. That China would exercise caution in supporting an investigation that possesses far-from-impartial motives should come as no surprise.

An exterior view of the headquarters of the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, March 30, 2021. (Photo/ Xinhua)

The WHO's study into the origins of COVID-19 released this past March declared that a lab leak was "extremely unlikely." From this vantage point, Zeng remarked that any follow up investigation on the origins of COVID-19 should build upon the basis of the first study.

COVID-19 is an extremely complex phenomenon. It will likely take years for scientific experts to fully understand a virus that has facilitated such a historic public health crisis in every part of the world. China has been targeted unfairly by U.S. and Western governments for the virus' origins without any evidence. Without full and equal cooperation among all governments and countries, more questions than answers are likely to arise from investigations into COVID-19's roots.

China is not turning its back to the international effort to understand the development of COVID-19, but is simply asking that fairness be exercised in the process. The undue focus on WIV ignores several additional indications that the virus may not have emerged from the first known outbreak in Wuhan. Traces of COVID-19 were found in Spain's sewage system as early as March 2019. Research further suggests that COVID-19 was spreading in Italy as early as September 2019.

That the lab leak theory would be a priority at this time is neither consistent with these developments nor the global situation. Millions of Chinese netizens have signed a petition demanding that the U.S.'s lab in Fort Detrick become subject to international investigation. Fifty-five nations have denounced the politicization of investigations into COVID-19's origins. China is thus not alone in its rejection of the WHO's intention to investigate the lab leak theory.

Experts who attended the press briefing made clear that they supported a wide-ranging investigation of COVID-19's origins that takes more than just a few, politicized hypotheses into account.

Detractors in the U.S. and the West will undoubtedly argue that China is not being transparent in its rejection of a lab leak investigation. But facts are stubborn things. China has been a model of transparency throughout the duration of the COVID-19 crisis. Health and government officials in China have worked tirelessly with the WHO and countries around the world in the fight against COVID-19. The U.S. and West, on the other hand, have latched onto a theory of the virus' origins which relies upon arguably the least transparent institutions in the world: their own intelligence agencies.

Experience is the greatest teacher. The U.S. and West have yet to contain the pandemic and lead the world in global cases and deaths. China is rapidly vaccinating its population and has already provided hundreds of millions of doses to beleaguered countries after bringing COVID-19 under control last year. It should be clear by now that those who have accused China for lacking transparency during this delicate moment are in fact the ones placing the interests of hegemony over the needs of humanity.

(Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun)
Finding the origins of COVID-19 and preventing future pandemics

(CGTN) 15:23, July 25, 2021

A staff member carries out testing at the inactivated COVID-19 vaccine quality inspection lab of Sinovac Life Sciences Co., Ltd. in Beijing, capital of China, December 23, 2020. (Photo/Xinhua)

Editor's note: Jeffrey D. Sachs, University Professor at Columbia University, is Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

Where did COVID-19 come from? The source of the pandemic is a subject of immense importance. But more than 19 months after the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19), the question of the pathogen's origin remains unsettled. More transparency and clarity on the debate could help to resolve the source of the virus and also head off future pandemics.

There are two main hypotheses. The first is a natural occurrence in which SARS-CoV-2 passed from an animal to a human in a natural setting, a farm, or a food market. The second is an infection related to research work that was underway on SARS-like viruses (that is, viruses related to the virus that caused the SARS epidemic in 2002-04). If we are to prevent future outbreaks, determining the source of the current one must be a high priority.

The two hypotheses direct our attention to two different sets of concerns and policy measures, both of which require our attention. Diseases that emerge from the transmission of viruses from wildlife to humans (so-called natural zoonoses) call for precautionary measures in human interactions with animal reservoirs of potentially deadly pathogens, for example in land-clearing, farming, consumption of bushmeat, and rearing and trade of livestock. Natural zoonotic events have caused many deadly epidemic diseases in recent decades, including HIV/AIDS, Ebola, SARS, and MERS.

Emerging infectious diseases can also arise in the course of research on viruses and other pathogens. History records cases of scientists and laboratory workers being infected by pathogens they were studying. In the case of SARS-CoV-2, a research-related infection could have occurred in many ways. A researcher might have become infected while collecting samples of viruses and viral particles in natural habitats of horseshoe bats or other animals that may have harbored the virus.

Or an infection may have occurred in a laboratory where scientists were working with previously collected virus-containing samples or virus isolates. Another, related scenario involves infection of research personnel with viruses collected from a natural source and subsequently genetically manipulated in the laboratory, including changes that might make a bat-origin virus more likely to infect humans.

Both hypotheses  natural zoonosis and research-related infection  are viable at this stage of the investigation. Those who have claimed that a natural origin is the only viable hypothesis overlook the extensive research activity that was underway in the field and in laboratories on SARS-like viruses, including in Wuhan, China, and in the United States. Those who claim that a research-related infection is the only viable hypothesis overlook the frequency of natural zoonotic transmissions of viruses, such as the SARS outbreak.

There are many ways that a natural event could have occurred with SARS-CoV-2 somewhere in China and then been brought to Wuhan by an infected individual or an animal brought to market. And much confusion has resulted from conflating a research-origin hypothesis with a particular version of this hypothesis, in which the infection occurred following targeted manipulation of the virus to enhance its human adaptation.

Since the start of the pandemic, proponents of each hypothesis have made exaggerated, premature, and unjustified claims. Early in the epidemic, several scientists declared that there was overwhelming evidence that SARS-CoV-2 originated in wildlife and that alternative theories of a research-related release of the virus amounted to "conspiracy theories." Other early observers, followed by several U.S. politicians including former President Donald Trump, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and members of Congress, claimed that there was enormous evidence of a laboratory release of the virus, pointing to the research activities underway in laboratories in Wuhan.

People wander near the White House in Washington, D.C., the United States, June 22, 2021. (Photo/Xinhua)

The state of the debate

Some scientists noted early on that both hypotheses were plausible. The subsequent research into the origin of COVID-19 has so far proved to be inconclusive, not only keeping both major hypotheses alive, but also undermining strident claims by some representatives of the two main camps. Originally, there was some hope that the SARS-CoV-2 genome itself would quickly reveal the origin of the virus, either by finding a nearly identical virus in nature (such as in a horseshoe bat or in an intermediate host such as a pangolin) or by proving definitively that the virus had undergone genetic manipulation in a laboratory setting.

Those hopes for a clear and quick resolution of the debate have not materialized. The SARS-CoV-2 genome is consistent with either a natural occurrence or a research-related occurrence. This is clearly the case if a researcher was infected while collecting virus samples in the field, because the virus would have arisen directly from nature, but the origin would still be research-related. To add to the complexity, the field researcher might have had a mild or asymptomatic case, so that even the researcher and his or her colleagues were unaware of the infection from the field, and that it was now being transmitted directly to other humans.

On the other hand, the SARS-CoV-2 genome displays no conclusive "genomic fingerprint" of artificial manipulation, such as a clear recombination of genetic material that would have been impossible in a natural setting.

For their part, proponents of the view that SARS-CoV-2 arose from a natural zoonotic event hoped that the animal harboring SARS-CoV-2 might be quickly identified, for example, on farms or in wet markets, or that the virus would be found directly in horseshoe bats. This hope, too, has so far failed to materialize, though of course it still might. Such discoveries often occur many years after an initial outbreak. But the fact remains that scientists have not yet identified a bat reservoir or intermediate mammalian host that may have served as the natural reservoir of the virus.

Nonetheless, there are some very important and concerning facts that have arisen during the first year and a half of the epidemic that bear heavily on its origin. The public and policy community have become increasingly aware of the intensive research on SARS-like viruses that was underway in the U.S., China, and elsewhere, both in collecting viral samples from the field and in studying their infectivity and pathogenicity (ability to cause disease) in the laboratory. We have learned that much of this work can be classified as "gain of function" (GoF) research.

This generic term involves modifying viruses to acquire new biological functions, and particular attention has been focused on so-called GoF Research of Concern (GOFROC), a category that includes research that may enhance the human transmissibility and/or pathogenicity of potential pandemic pathogens. Experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) involving the modification of bat-origin coronaviruses to express proteins that are likely to enhance entry into human cells are viewed by many scientists as falling squarely into the category of GOFROC.

Many biosafety experts have long argued that such work  used to reveal target hosts more quickly, improve prediction of outbreaks, and develop vaccines and therapeutic drugs  requires much greater oversight, control, and scrutiny, including a transparent account to the public of the research activities.

In the U.S., National Institutes of Health (NIH) guidelines include the proviso that, "To the maximum extent possible, agencies' enhanced PPP [potential pandemic pathogen] review mechanisms should provide transparency to the public regarding funded projects involving the creation, transfer, or use of enhanced PPPs."

We have also learned that NIH funded U.S. and Chinese scientists to work collaboratively on collecting samples of SARS-like viruses in the field, and bringing them back to the WIV for advanced genetic analysis. Within the WIV research work, studies have included the creation of chimeric genetic recombinants of SARS-like viruses to study their capacity to infect human cells and to cause disease.

We have also learned that some of the viral clone work at WIV took place in BSL2 facilities, which many scientists consider to offer inadequate protection against a laboratory release of viruses, even if the NIH seems to approve such work in BSL2 facilities.

Science vs. Secrecy

NIH recently declared that it did not support GoF research that could have led to the COVID-19 pandemic, saying that it had never "approved any grant that would have supported 'gain-of-function' research on coronaviruses that would have increased their transmissibility or lethality for humans."

Unfortunately, NIH has not yet revealed the actual research that it has financed and supported. It is in fact common knowledge in the U.S. scientific community that NIH has indeed supported genetic recombinant research on SARS-like viruses that many scientists describe as GOFROC.

The peer-reviewed scientific literature reports the results of such NIH-supported recombinant genetic research on SARS-like viruses. But the process for reviewing the biosafety of possible GOFROC studies is opaque, revealing to the public neither the names nor qualifications of the individuals involved in the review process, nor the substance of the discussions, nor even the investigators or projects being reviewed.

More specifically, it is clear that the NIH co-funded research at the WIV that deserves scrutiny under the hypothesis of a laboratory-related release of the virus. This research has involved the collection in natural settings of potentially dangerous SARS-like viruses and infection experiments on these viruses, resulting in peer-reviewed publication of results. A recent NIH grant to co-fund work at the WIV describes Aim 1 and Aim 3 of the research project as follows (excerpted from the Abstract):

"Aim 1. Characterize the diversity and distribution of high spillover-risk SARSr-CoVs in bats in southern China. We will use phylogeographic and viral discovery curve analyses to target additional bat sample collection and molecular CoV screening to fill in gaps in our previous sampling and fully characterize natural SARSr-CoV diversity in southern China. We will sequence receptor binding domains (spike proteins) to identify viruses with the highest potential for spillover which we will include in our experimental investigations (Aim 3)."

"Aim 3. In vitro and in vivo characterization of SARSr-CoV spillover risk, coupled with spatial and phylogenetic analyses to identify the regions and viruses of public health concern. We will use S protein sequence data, infectious clone technology, in vitro and in vivo infection experiments and analysis of receptor binding to test the hypothesis that % divergence thresholds in S protein sequences predict spillover potential."

(Aim 2 involves surveillance of high-risk populations that have contact with bats.)

It is also clear that the NIH-supported Chinese and U.S. scientists have much more to share about the nature of this work. This includes records of trips to horseshoe bats' natural habitats and other settings to collect specimens of SARS-like viruses; safety precautions taken or not taken during such visits; and the repository of viral samples, live viruses, genomic sequences, and other relevant genetic information.

It also includes the laboratory records of experiments on SARS-like viruses, including the record of chimeric viruses produced, tested, and cultured in the laboratory; the safety precautions taken or not taken during such research; other laboratory-related data; and a full accounting of potential infections among WIV workers.

Top researchers on the WIV projects have stated categorically that they were not investigating viruses that are close to SARS-CoV-2. All laboratory notebooks and other relevant information should be opened by the Chinese and U.S. scientists working on this project for detailed scrutiny by independent experts.

The real issue

The question about origins is not about one government or another, much less a geopolitical issue or a matter of blaming China and exonerating the U.S.

If there was indeed a laboratory-related release of SARS-CoV-2, it may well have occurred in a project funded by the U.S. government, using methods developed and championed by U.S. scientists, and as part of a U.S.-led and U.S.-financed program to collect and analyze potentially dangerous viruses, including in China.

To learn as much as possible regarding the origin of SARS-CoV-2, an international and independent investigation to examine the alternative hypotheses is urgently needed, and the U.S. and Chinese governments should cooperate fully and transparently with such an inquiry. In the meantime, scientists, politicians, pundits, and those weighing in on social media should acknowledge the uncertainties that currently prevail.

They should also acknowledge that the tragedy of the pandemic has already shed light on how to prevent future outbreaks and pandemics. Because natural zoonotic events are inevitable, we must establish much better global surveillance and warning systems, and of course early response systems when outbreaks occur.

We need credible communications channels to prevent rapid global transmission of newly emergent zoonotic diseases, and we must create institutional mechanisms that enable the speediest search for potential treatments, diagnostic tests, vaccines, and other tools and best practices to contain an outbreak. In short, we must be better prepared to share relevant scientific and technological know-how in a more honest, transparent, and credible manner than has been true during the current pandemic.

But there is also a risk of future research-related outbreaks of pandemic diseases. Governments need to upgrade the transparency, oversight, and biosafety of any projects that actively seek dangerous pathogens in nature and return them to laboratories, recognizing the multiple risks involved.

Similarly, the tools of genomic manipulation have advanced so rapidly that the potential to create new deadly pathogens in the laboratory and accidentally or even deliberately release them is a very serious concern. The world currently lacks adequate international and national safeguards and transparency on such dangerous work, and the risks are compounded by the secretive bioweapons research programs several governments sponsor that help to sustain it.

The Lancet COVID-19 Commission, which I chair, will carefully scrutinize these issues in advance of its final report in mid-2022. The Commission's overriding aim is to recommend policies to prevent and contain future disease outbreaks, and its technical work will be conducted by independent experts who were not themselves involved directly in the U.S.-China research under scrutiny.

The scientists who were involved should explain fully the nature of their work. In the meantime, the Commission will tap biosafety experts to help assess the relevant hypotheses on the origins of SARS-CoV-2 and to recommend ways and means to prevent and contain future outbreaks, whether resulting from naturally occurring zoonotic events or research-related activities.

(Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun)
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Saturday that Afghan leadership is consolidating its forces around key population centers ahead of efforts to retake territory lost to the Taliban while the U.S. was withdrawing most of its troops from the country.

"The first thing to do is to make sure that they can slow the momentum, and then be able to put themselves in the position where they can retake some of the gains that the Taliban, some of the ground that they have lost," Austin told reporters traveling with him to Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska.

Austin said Afghan military leaders are "committed" and capable of stopping Taliban gains.

"They have the capabilities. They have the capacity to make progress and to really begin to blunt some of the Talibans advances, but well see what happens," he said.
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Check out Erin Heist's debut EP 'Another Rainy Day'

Erin Heist didnt grow up dreaming of being a musician. Despite spending much of her life in Juneau, where she makes her home, frequently attending the Alaska Folk Festival there, she said it wasnt until adulthood, when she saw a band playing traditional American music, that she had that moment that I think a lot of musicians have which is, I want to do that. I want to feel that way, and make other people feel that way.

This was only a few years ago. But after picking up a guitar and woodshedding in local music circles, Heist has just released her debut EP, Another Rainy Day. She also has studio time in Oregon booked this fall to record a full length album, and appears poised to become a new name in Alaskas vibrant music scene.

I really havent had the opportunity to be the front person or be the leader in a lot of the music that Ive done, she said. Im usually a bandmate.

Another Rainy Day is a five-song collection of stripped down Americana songs that wander from bluegrass to space country to folk. Produced by her cousin, Patrick Troll, it includes three originals, one cover, and an intriguing remake of a traditional Western ballad.

I specifically chose songs that were more suited to that stripped-down feel, something that Patrick and I could do together, she said of the song selection.

Heist explained that her decision to make this EP was prompted by her plans to record an album. She had never done any previous recording, and felt that before working with a full band, it would be good to get some studio experience first. It turned out Id never actually heard my own voice before, she said.

Heist flew Troll to Juneau from his Seattle home in April. The duo settled in to Betsy Sims Studio A for four days, joined for one of them by Heists husband Andrew Heist, who added backing vocals, fiddle, and mandolin to the spare but evocative recordings.

For Heist, the songwriting and recording processes are attempts to dig deeply into traditional American song structures, and then move those styles into the 21st century.

The EP opens with Train to Cheyenne, a slow country song about woman in the 1930s, boarding a train to enter into an arranged marriage with a man she has yet to meet. Its a song about my great-grandma Betty, who was essentially a Depression era mail-order bride, Heist explained.

Heist, who holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alaska Anchorage, said she had struggled for years to find a way of telling this story of her ancestor, who was a single mother in Chicago during an age when unwed mothers were generally shunned by society. She answered a marriage advertisement by a cowboy and, with child in tow, left for Wyoming. The marriage would last for sixty years and become part of her familys history. I cant wrap my brain around what that must have been like for her, Heist said.

This song was the first she wrote as part of a self-challenge for 2020. Before the pandemic swept the world and changed everyones plans, she had determined to write one song a month for the entire year, a goal she met. And then 2021 came along and I thought, all right, I have all this original music. I should start recording, Because thats what people do.

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The EPs title track was also a result of that songwriting process, Heist said. That was a song that came out of a lot of frustration. 2020 was an exceptionally rainy summer even by Juneaus standards, she explained, and since outdoors was the only place musicians could gather and play, the weather washed out any chance of this.

The piece has a sense of timelessness to it, which is intentional, she said. Shes trying to write songs that hit that same chord that some of these traditional songs hit, but does it from more of an Alaska perspective.

On the traditional cowboy ballad Bury Me Not On the Lone Prairie, Heist makes that connection in an unstated manner. The story of a dying mans last wish for his soon-to-be corpse is rooted in an even older song about burial at sea, Heist said. This put her in mind of Alaskas fishermen and fisherwomen, who she feels have carried on that frontier spirit.

The arrangement diverges considerably from the standard approach to the song, and is augmented by some studio wizardry on Trolls part. We borrowed this really beautiful vintage style tube amp and ramped up the space sound effects to eleven, Heist said. And then ran Andrews fiddle through that tube amp. Then Patrick plays some electric guitar on there, through that same super spacey tube amp.

This is the song that veers into space country territory, and it results from the collaboration of two markedly different musical approaches. Troll comes from more of a pop background, while Heist is a traditionalist, and the production here merges the two approaches. Heist loves how it turned out and said this is the joy of working with a sympathetic producer. She wouldnt have come up with this on her own.

Recording is a pretty vulnerable process, and getting to do that with somebody like Patrick was the dreamiest.

Reckoning on the Line is closest to the bluegrass/old time style Heist plays when she performs with her husband Patrick in a duo. It was the first song she ever wrote, back in 2017, and it was born in a conversation she was having with a friend. Discussing a mutual acquaintances self-inflicted, troubles Heist said at the time, Theres a reckoning on the line for her.

Heists friend immediately replied, Thats a song. So Heist wrote it.

The closing track, Rock Bottom Riser, is more of a folk track, written by Bill Callahan, who performs under the name Smog. A big part of my pandemic year was working really hard to improve my guitar skills, Heist said, explaining her choice to include the cover. Shes been working on crosspicking, and said this song popped into her brain as a good vehicle for that. She said she isnt even sure what chords hes playing in and had to create her own take on it. I got obsessed with playing it, she said. I love that its a moody song, but also has a sense of drive to it.

Heists next album will be entirely composed of original songs and she has a full band slated to join her in the studio. In the meantime, shes taking advantage of the slowly returning opportunities for live performance. She might have waited until adulthood to take up music, but for Heist its now its a lifetime commitment. Once youre on a stage and youre playing your first gig and youre watching 200 people waltz in a circle, youre done, she said. Because thats the best feeling in the world.

Erin Heist can be found online at http://www.erinheist.com/. On Bandcamp, shes at https://erinheist.bandcamp.com/releases.
Press Release

July 25, 2021 Lacson, Sotto: We Will Not Fail the Filipino People More at: https://pinglacson.net/2021/07/25/lacson-sotto-we-will-not-fail-the-filipino-people/ We will not fail the Filipino people. This is the rallying cry of Sen. Panfilo M. Lacson and Senate President Vicente C. Sotto III as they seek to restore Filipinos' trust in the government. "I will not fail you. I will not fail the Filipino people. We will not fail you. This is our last hurrah in public service, there is no room for selfish interests or personal motives," Lacson said in an interview on DWIZ radio Saturday. "We have no other agenda. Considering our age and track record in public service, we have something to offer the Filipino people," he added. Lacson, who has decided to run for the presidency in 2022, said Filipinos can only be guided by one principle, which serves as his personal motto: "What is right must be kept right; what is wrong must be set right." He reiterated the need for fiscal discipline - a trait that the government can learn from the private sector to maximize limited resources - and doing away with wasteful and unnecessary government spending. The nation is struggling to recover from its harsh beating from the pandemic, ranking second to the last out of 53 economies in terms of resilience to the COVID-19 pandemic, he noted at the meeting of the Rotary Club of Alabang Madrigal Business Park. On the other hand, he pointed out a recent Social Weather Stations survey showed 48% of Filipino families consider themselves poor; while some 4.2 million Filipinos experienced hunger in the past three months; and jobless Filipinos hit 4.14 million in April 2021. Lacson said it is imperative for the next administration to address the challenges of the pandemic and eradicate graft and corruption. "The top priority in these trying times is the pandemic. There are things to be attended to with urgency. For example, we have not been proactive in responding to the pandemic that hit us way back in January 2020," he said. He added it is high time the government adopt a proactive approach in addressing the pandemic and its effects, and learn from the lessons of early 2020, when it allowed the virus to spread due to its lack of efficient contact tracing and failure to bar the entry of visitors from Mainland China. On the other hand, he said another priority should be eradicating graft and corruption, with leaders practicing leadership by example, which he said is second to none. He recalled that when he headed the Philippine National Police from 1999 to 2001, he solved the problems of the PNP with a disciplined and reformed police force: "no more 'kotong' cops in the streets, no kickbacks in procurement under a strictly supervised 'no-take policy' imposed from top to bottom." "After I got elected as a senator of the Republic, whenever I am confronted with a similar question about the biggest problem of government, my response has not changed - it is government, bad government. And, the solution lies in the face of the problem itself - it is called good government," he said. "Unless government officials see people at the top practicing what they preach, any effort to fight graft and corruption will not succeed," he added.
Press Release

July 25, 2021 Senate buckles down to work on priority measures The Senate will resume its hybrid session on Monday, July 26, to continue its work on priority measures for the 3rd Regular Session of the 18th Congress. Senate President Vicente Sotto III, who will deliver his speech during the opening of the morning session, said the Senate will work for the passage of 10 priority measures which include the Amendments to the Foreign Investment Acts (FIA), Amendments to the Public Service Act (PSA), Government Financial Institutions Unified Initiatives to Distressed Enterprises for Economic Recovery (GUIDE), Department of Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos Act, Package 4 of the Comprehensive Tax Reform Program (CTRP) or the Passive Income Tax and Financial Intermediary Tax Act (PIFITA), Virology Science and Technology Institute of the Philippines (VIP), Rural Agricultural and Fisheries Development Financing System Act (Agri-Agra) and Package 3 of the CTRP or the Valuation Reform Bill. Majority Leader Juan Miguel Zubiri earlier said the Senate will work on the passage of the following measures: Modernization of the Bureau of Fire Protection, Increasing the Statutory Rape Age Act, Military and Uniformed Personnel Insurance Fund Act, Philippine Center for Disease Control and Prevention Act, the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) Extension Law and possibly the Bayanihan 3. Like the previous year, visitors and guests will not be allowed inside the Senate premises due to stringent health protocols and regulations. Family members of senators, former senators, government officials and media personalities will also not be allowed inside the gallery hall. Only selected Senate employees will be allowed inside to assist during the session. As per tradition, a photo session of senators will be arranged for the 14 legislators who will be physically present during the proceeding. This will be followed by a virtual press conference with the Senate President, including some senators who may wish to attend the said briefing. After the morning session, Sotto will lead some senators to the House of Representatives for a joint session of Congress to hear President Rodrigo Duterte's last State of the Nation Address.
Press Release

July 25, 2021 MARINA partners with the Villars to vaccinate Pinoy seafarers RECOGNIZING the advocacies of Sen. Cynthia A. Villar and daughter Las Pinas Rep. Camille Villar in helping our Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs), MARINA has partnered anew with them for the upcoming Moderna vaccination rollout for their seafarers. In a letter, MARINA Administrator retired VADM Robert Empedrad of the AFP thanked the Villars for championing the cause of our seafarers especially for hosting the Pfizer inoculation of their seafarers last June 25 in the family-owned The Tent in South Global City, Las Pinas. A total of 1,086 seafarers were vaccinated. "As the esteemed Sen. Cynthia Villar had perfectedly coined, our seafarers are the sustainers of global economy,' and thus, we wish to prioritize them with the necessary preparatory intervention for their overseas deployment so that they may contribute to sustain the world trade," Empedrad said in his letter. Empedrad also pointed out that they are a step closer towards ensuring the safety and health of our modern-day heroes as well as their families and co-workers through this collaboration effort with the Villars. Through the Villar SIPAG, Sen. Villar said they have been espousing on the rights and welfare of Filipino migrant workers. They annually hold OFW Summit to educate them to protect their hard-earned money, invest them wisely and grow their income. They are also being informed protection against human trafficking, illegal recruitment and investment scams. The Villar SIPAG, also has been helping in the repatriation of our distressed OFWs and providing them invaluable assistance to start a new life in the country. "We are always ready to help our OFWs especially those in the shipping sector who are the hardest hit by the Covid-19 pandemic," said Villar. Once fully vaccinated and protected, she stressed that our seafarers can return to their job which was disrupted due to the corona virus. "They can go back to their ships and voyage and earn a living for their families. They are also protecting their families from potential infection in the process," also said Sen. Villar as she commended Filipino seafarers and their families for their contribution to the Philippine economy. Despite the global health crisis, the country's maritime sector continued to deploy Filipino seafarers who remain in great demand for their skills and hard work. The Bureau of Immigration reported that it processed and cleared more than 112,000 seafarers who joined or left their ships last year. Sen. Villar stressed the vaccination program for seafarers will ensure that our role as the world's leading provider of the best seafarers shall remain, much to the relief of our global traders. The Department of Transportation said Filipino seafarers comprise 25% of the 1.5 million seafarers in the world. MARINA or the Maritime Industry Authority is an attached agency of the Department of Transportation responsible for integrating the development, promotion and regulation of the country's maritime industry.
The United States wants that the next strategic dialogue with Kuwait takes place soon, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Arabian Peninsula Affairs Daniel Benaim told reporters on Friday.

I am sure that the topic will come up and our governments are in constant cooperation and contact about the next dialogue that we hope will be soon, Benaim said during a press conference.

During the fourth US-Kuwait Strategic Dialogue held in Washington, D.C. in November 2020, the two countries reaffirmed their shared commitment to promote the stability and security of the region.

The US-Kuwait Strategic Dialogue process began in October 2016.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to India and Kuwait on July 26-29 to discuss a host of issues with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and senior Kuwaiti officials, the State Department said earlier on Friday.

Antony Blinken will be joined in Kuwait by Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Joey Hood.

Before flying to Kuwait, Joey Hood will visit Algeria and Morocco.
According to information published by the Russian press agency TASS on July 25, 2021, in August 2021, Russia will conduct a test-launch of Tsirkon hypersonic missile from Yasen-class nuclear-powered cruise missile submarine Severodvinsk (K-560).

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Russian Navy Yasen-class nuclear-powered cruise missile submarine Severodvinsk K-560. (Picture source Twitter account WarshipPorn)

Russias Defense Ministry announced on July 19 that the frigate Admiral of the Fleet of the Soviet Union Gorshkov had successfully test-launched a Tsirkon hypersonic missile at a ground target. The missile flew at Mach 7 across a distance of over 350 km.

The Tsirkon also called 3M22 Zircon is an anti-ship hypersonic cruise missile fully designed and developed by the Russian defense industry.

The range of the Tsirkon missile is estimated to be 135 to 270 nautical miles (250 to 500 km) at low level, and up to 400 nautical miles (740 km) in a semi-ballistic trajectory. According to Russian media, the missile could reach a maximum firing range of 540 nautical miles (1,000 km) and for this purpose, a new fuel was created.

The Zircon missile can fly at a speed of Mach 8Mach 9 (9,80011,025 km/h). This has led to concerns that it could penetrate existing naval defense systems. Zircon exchanges information in flight and can be controlled by commands if necessary.

In the future, Russian navy submarines and surface ships will be equipped with the Tsirkon hypersonic missile systems.

The Severodvinsk (K-560) is a Yasen class nuclear-powered cruise missile submarine of the Russian Navy and the lead vessel of the class. The submarine was handed over to the Russian Navy in late December 2013. The flag-raising ceremony was held on 17 June 2014, marking its introduction into the Russian Navy.

The Yasen class, Russian designations Project 885 Yasen and Project 885M Yasen-M, also referred to as Graney class, are a series of the newest nuclear-powered cruise missile submarines designed by Malakhit and being constructed by Sevmash for the Russian Navy. Based on the Akula class and Alfa class designs, the Yasen class is projected to replace the Russian Navy's current Soviet-era nuclear attack submarines.

The Yasen-class nuclear submarines can be armed with land-attack cruise missiles, anti-ship missiles, anti-submarine missiles including the P-800 Oniks SLCM, Kalibr family SLCM or 3M51 SLCM. Kalibr-PL has several variants including the 3M54K (terminal-supersonic) and 3M54K1 (subsonic) anti-ship, 91R1 anti-submarine, and the 3M14K land-attack variant.
According to information published by the United States Navy on July 24, 2021, The U.S. Missile Defense Agency, in cooperation with the U.S. Navy, conducted Flight Test Aegis Weapon System 33 in the broad ocean area northwest of Hawaii, July 24, 2021.

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The U.S. Navy USS Ralph Johnson (DDG 114) is an Arleigh Burke-class of guided missile destroyers built around the Aegis Combat System and the SPY-1D multifunction passive electronically scanned array radar. (Picture source U.S. Navy)

The Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System is a United States Department of Defense Missile Defense Agency program developed to provide missile defense against short to intermediate-range ballistic missiles. It enables warships to shoot down enemy ballistic missiles by expanding the Aegis Combat System with the addition of the AN/SPY-1 radar and Standard missile technologies.

The objective of FTM-33 was to intercept a raid of two Short Range Ballistic Missile targets with four Standard Missile-6 Dual II missiles. Based on initial observations, one target was successfully intercepted. At this time, we cannot confirm the second target was destroyed.

FTM-33 was the most complex mission executed by MDA (a raid of two test targets and two SM-6 Dual II salvos consisting of four missiles). It was the third flight test of an Aegis BMD-equipped vessel using the SM-6 Dual II missile. The SM-6 Dual II missile is designed for use in the terminal phase of a short- to- medium-range ballistic missile trajectory.

FTM-33, originally scheduled for December 2020, was delayed due to restrictions in personnel and equipment movement intended to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Program officials will continue to evaluate system performance based upon data obtained during the test.



MDA's mission is to develop and deploy a layered Missile Defense System to defend the U.S., its deployed forces, allies, and friends from missile attacks of all ranges in all phases of flight.



The firing ship for the test was the USS Ralph Johnson (DDG 114), an Arleigh Burke-class Flight-IIA guided missile destroyer in service with the United States Navy. The Arleigh Burke-class is built around the Aegis Combat System and the SPY-1D multifunction passive electronically scanned array radar.
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Current Affairs

A irbnb believes in sharing the companys success with its stakeholders, including the communities the Hosts call home. Thats why Airbnb created the Community Fund to distribute $100 million over 10 years to organizations that are strengthening communities around the world, including $10 million distributed throughout 2021.



Today, Airbnb is excited to share the inaugural grant recipients of the Airbnb Community Fund, which include over 150 organizations from more than 40 countries and six continents.



These organizations are working to meet unprecedented needs brought about by the pandemic, and focusing on this years themes: COVID-19 relief, economic empowerment, and education.



In Jamaica these organizations are: Jamaica Red Cross, Society for Scientific Advancement, United Way Jamaica. In Dominican Republic these organizations are: Community Foundation in Favor of Single Mothers and Young Unprotected Funcomas RNC, Fundacion Grupo Puntacana and in Puerto Rico these organizations are: CMV Casa sin Fronteras, La Marana, Programa de Educacion Comunal de Entrega y Servicio, Inc.





Other recipients include the Mann Deshi Foundation in India, the Affordable Homeownership Foundation in the United States, Urban Refugees in France, and the India COVID-19 Relief Fund.





To determine how to direct these grants, Airbnb turned to its Host community. Airbnbs Host Advisory Board, a group of exceptional Hosts who act as the voice of the Host community to Airbnb leaders, selected the grant focus areas and worked with Airbnbs program partner, GlobalGiving, to compile a list of global organizations working to meet these needs. Members of Host Clubs around the world then voted on organizations they believed have the greatest impact in their regions.





I really liked how the Community Fund process was shared between different groups - not just Airbnb, but also the Host Advisory Board, Community Leaders and other Hosts. We are all equally responsible for our Community. I feel honoured to be part of the process. - Pascale Hasson, Host Advisory Board member from Bordeaux, France.



Grant recipients outlined the impact the funding will have for their organization.



This fund will be used to help us to continue alleviating suffering in Jamaica. It will be used to help us in food distribution across the island to deal with the COVID19 induced hunger. We will also use it to distribute masks and sanitizers to local communities. The Funds will also be used for providing psychosocial support to various communities across the island. Commented Kathlene Arnold from Jamaica Red Cross Society, Jamaica.



COVID-19 has exacerbated food insecurity. Daily Bread's member agency network is seeing over 105,000 food bank visits per month across the city of Toronto  50% increase compared to the year prior. Airbnb's donation will help to ensure that more than 15,000 people can access a supply of fresh produce, dairy, proteins, and shelf-stable groceries. It will also help us build new emergency response programs, such as meal delivery services, so that individuals impacted by COVID-19 - especially seniors or those experiencing isolation - can safely access the food they need. - Patricia Feehely, Daily Bread Food Bank, ON, Canada



The National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH) is so honored to receive the generous gift from Airbnb. NCH is a beacon of hope for those that are experiencing homelessness. We can only remain a beacon with the help of amazing companies like Airbnb. We thank you for your willingness to help us Bring America Home. - Donald H. Whitehead Jr., National Coalition for the Homeless, United States.



This funding will allow 300 entrepreneurs in Mexico to receive the training and support necessary to rescue, strengthen or boost their microenterprises, given the current economic situation derived from the pandemic. They may choose to focus on transforming their business models towards digital. Others could prefer to improve their sales and customer service strategies. And some may decide to finally launch that business idea that they long for and achieve self-employment. Regardless of which path they wish to take, we will accompany them and get ahead of this crisis. - Patricia Larios, Fundacion ProEmpleo Productivo A.C., Mexico.



This additional funding will allow us to go further in collecting evidence on the impact of strengthening the capacity of Refugee-Led Organisations (RLOs), to support our advocacy work. It will enable us to dedicate time to revising and enhancing our monitoring, evaluation and learning framework, and to involve Refugee-Led Organisations in this process as part of our capacity-building work. This framework will aim to inform international humanitarian actors and funders on indicators of localization and self-reliance of refugees, and to advocate for further efforts towards those objectives. - Alix Devillers, Urban Refugees, France



What will the additional funding mean for the Affordable Homeownership Foundation? We will be able to help more Veterans, Disabled individuals and Seniors in need, and the donation will allow us to expand our North Carolina efforts to house homeless Veterans. We are so excited, again thank you! - Lois Healy, Affordable Homeownership Foundation, Inc., United States





In addition to this process, Airbnb will direct grant awards to additional organizations they believe play an important role in communities around the world and Airbnb looks forward to sharing more later this year. To learn more about the Community Fund and the grant recipients, you can visit the Airbnb Community Fund page.



Airbnb was born in 2007 when two Hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to 4 million Hosts who have welcomed more than 900 million guest arrivals in almost every country across the globe. Every day, Hosts offer one-of-a-kind stays and unique Experiences that make it possible for guests to experience the world in a more authentic, connected way.






The OWO Residences by Raffles, Europes first Raffles branded residences, has become the latest addition to the luxury property market in London with sales drawing interest from regional as well as overseas investors.



Offering 85 distinct homes symbolising opulence and power within an impressive Grade II* listed building, The OWO Residences redefine luxury at every step. Having undergone a monumental and painstaking transformation over the last five years, the London landmark is set to complete in 2022 and will also comprise the capitals first Raffles hotel with 125-rooms and suites, a collection of nine restaurants and bars, and an immersive spa.



Charlie Walsh, Head of Residential Sales at The OWO, said: The OWO Residences by Raffles?in the heart of London represent an incomparable opportunity for?buyers seeking something more than a traditional branded residence.?This is a turnkey lifestyle?within a?new world-class culinary destination not yet experienced in the UK,?set within a building of remarkable?eminence. 



Situated at one of Londons most historically important and powerful addresses on Whitehall, The OWOs grandeur is accentuated with ceiling heights in residences that reach up to 4.4m and full-length windows to match. The interior proportions reflect classic Edwardian architecture that has been adapted for modern living. The residences feature interiors created by design studio 1508 London with bespoke handcrafted kitchens from British brand Smallbone of Devizes, American brand Waterworks brass ironmongery and Italian Onyx marble.



Many incorporate original heritage features such as oak panelling and mosaic flooring. The unwavering attention to detail in each residence demonstrates the years of craftsmanship that have been applied to every aspect of the majestic building.



Each residence is unique and specifically tailored to suit its location in the building; duplex, lateral and penthouse residences range in size from studios to five-beds. In addition, two spectacular turret residences, elevated above the London skyline, offer a home like no other.



In this unparalleled residential offering, homeowners will benefit from having all the facilities of a world-renowned hotel on their doorstep without having to compromise on the highest levels of privacy and seclusion within their home. This complex balance has been achieved thanks to the buildings majestic original architecture which lends itself perfectly to a mixed-use development of this stature.



At the helm of The OWO project is the Hinduja Group, an international multi-billion turnover group founded in 1914 and passionately committed to the building since its acquisition in 2014.



Gopichand P Hinduja, ?Co-Chairman, Hinduja Group, commented: ?"With the UK property market showing signs of a dramatic recovery after the past challenging 12 months, launching the sales of these extraordinary residences is a significant milestone for us as a family and for?the?project team at The OWO. It is one step closer to opening the storied building to the public for the first?time where branded residences will sit alongside a flagship Raffles hotel.



London is one of the best cities?in the world, steeped in history and?tradition, and has been our home for over forty years. With our?knowledge and experience in restoration of historic buildings, everything we do, and every decision?made on The OWO is underscored by our passion and respect for the heritage of the building and long-term commitment to London.



The Hinduja Group partnered with world-renowned Raffles Hotels & Resorts, who will be operating the 125-room and suite flagship hotel at The OWO, as well as the 85 Raffles branded residences. The service synonymous with the prestigious Raffles brand - gracious and intuitive staff, personalised attention and a timeless ambience - will be delivered seamlessly to the residents of The OWO and will set a new benchmark in London.



Sebastien Bazin, Chairman and CEO at Accor, added: We are proud to be working alongside the Hinduja Group to deliver this most exceptional new Raffles?destination in London. It is a remarkable building that lends itself?perfectly to a masterpiece such as The?OWO.



The inherent majesty and grandeur of this site is entirely in keeping with the Raffles brand and, ?to have unearthed an opportunity within such historic walls to deliver a flagship hotel and the first Raffles?branded residences in Europe, marks a significant moment for the Accor group.



Raffles is a pioneering?brand with British roots, named after the British statesman and founder of Singapore, Sir Thomas?Stamford Raffles, so it is very fitting that Raffles is coming home to the UK. We are tremendously excited?to introduce Raffles and its world-renowned service to London next year and look forward to meeting?our residents and guests, he added.



The OWO directly faces Horse Guards and is adjacent to the stunning 57-acres of St. Jamess Park. Residents, hotel guests and visitors will be a short stroll from Buckingham Palace, The National Gallery, The Tate and The Royal Academy, as well as the sought-after shopping streets of Regents Street, Bond Street and Jermyn Street. Sales are via Knight Frank and Strutt & Parker. Prices for a two-bedroom residence start from 5.8million.  TradeArabia News Service
Leading UK steel fabricator Cleveland Bridge, which is owned by Saudi-based Al Rushaid Group, has fallen into administration, reported the Construction Index.

The collapse of the top British engineering group came after Covid caused delays to several of its global infrastructure projects.

Joint Administrators Martyn Pullin, David Willis, and Iain Townsend of specialist business advisory firm FRP have been appointed to help save the steel fabricator, which has 221 staff at its Darlington headquarters and satellite office in Newport, opened in 2018. The business also has nearly 100 contracted workers on its books.

Cleveland Bridge has been a flagbearer for cutting-edge British engineering for more than a century.

Over 200 jobs are at risk at Cleveland Bridge, which helped build the Shard skyscraper in London, the Wembley Stadium arch and the Sydney Harbour Bridge, reported Daily Mail.

In addition to its Darlington base, the company has manufacturing facilities in Dubai and Saudi Arabia and can produce around 150,000 tonnes of steel annually. It engages 48 contractors in Darlington and 50 more at other sites.

The business was acquired by Saudi firm Al Rushaid Petroleum Investment Company in 2000.

Cleveland Bridges finances were hammered when a major bridge-building project in Sri Lanka was put on hold because of Covid, it stated, citing sources.

The British group held several rounds of talks with its Al Rushaid Group for an extra 6 million ($8.24 million). However, the Saudi owner made it clear that it won't put any more money into propping up the business and walked away.

With a full order book covering the next 18 months, in addition to its skilled workforce, expertise and prominent standing in the industry, there is optimism that a buyer for the firm can be found.

However, administrators from FRP Advisory have warned that the business will be wound up unless it receives significant investment.
In week 28 of this year, total worldwide air cargo volume did not change compared with the previous week. Worldwide capacity increased by +1%, according to WorldACD Market Data.

On a regional level, volumes from North America did best with a volume increase of +9% week-over-week, while Central & South America experienced the largest decrease (-5%).

The average worldwide yield/rate in week 28 was at the same level as in week 27.-- TradeArabia News Service
Increased safety in food production and other process applications is the declared aim of the joint venture between Endress+Hauser and Hahn-Schickard.

To this end, both partners have established Endress+Hauser BioSense GmbH based in Freiburg, Germany. Its aim is to enable rapid, on-site molecular analyses for the detection of bacterial or viral contamination in water and beverages, genetic modifications in food or contaminated milk.

The research and development service provider Hahn-Schickard has been working closely for many years with the Department of Microsystems Engineering at the University of Freiburg to develop rapid diagnostic tests that can detect extremely small concentrations of infectious pathogens with portable instruments. The joint venture is now aiming to transfer this technology from the field of medical diagnostics to industrial process and laboratory automation applications.

During the first few months, Endress+Hauser BioSense will operate in spaces located at the university and Hahn-Schickard. Next year the company will move into the universitys innovation center, FRIZ, currently under construction on the campus of the Faculty of Engineering. The start-up will thus expand Endress+Hausers activities in Freiburg, where developers are already working on new sensor technologies, biosensors and Industry 4.0 solutions.

In the development of equipment and methods for molecular analyses for process and laboratory environments, Endress+Hauser BioSense will be working closely with IST Innuscreen GmbH in Berlin, which is also part of the Endress+Hauser Group. IST Innuscreen offers a broad portfolio of nucleic acid isolation and molecular diagnostics products and among other things supplies kits and assays for PCR diagnostics.

The joint venture is 75% owned by Endress+Hauser, with the remaining 25% held by Hahn-Schickard. Dr Nicholas Krohn, who has in-depth knowledge and experience in the field of food analysis, will serve as managing director of the new company. Dr Stefan Burger and Dr Martin Schulz, two long-time employees of Hahn-Schickard who obtained their doctorates in the field of molecular diagnostics at the University of Freiburg, will round out the management team.-- TradeArabia News Service
The World Travel Market (WTM) has launched a new platform to inspire debate and provoke discussion about issues that need to be addressed within the travel and tourism sector with the aim of sharing solutions.



Launched within the WTM Global Hub, the Platform for Change will showcase tried and tested solutions to the many challenges posed by making tourism sustainable. Many solutions have been identified and tested through the Responsible Tourism Awards and panels held at WTM London since 2004. The solutions will be debated through to WTM London in November and then in 2022 promoted across the travel and tourism sector.



The outcomes will form a manifesto to challenge the industry into progressive development nearly 20 years on from the start of the responsible tourism movement.



Led by WTMs Advisor on Responsible Tourism Professor Harold Goodwin, the content on Platform for Change will consist of a series of blogs, a series of solutions webpages, one-to-one interviews, social posts and webinars.



Prof Goodwin said the aim is to provoke discussion about the issues which need to be addressed and the solutions which have been tried and tested.



He added: As President Biden has pointed out, this is the critical decade for action. Companies need to do things differently. We know the solutions and we need to apply them.



Topics high on Prof Goodwins list of practices that need to be addressed include sustainable aviation, making certification schemes more meaningful; adapting to the new normal of Covid-19 and how we shouldnt use COVID as an excuse to delay action on greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity.



Professor Goodwin said: At WTM London in 2020, we asked, "Can we make tourism better?" and we concluded that we could. We have many solutions tried and tested by businesses and destinations around the world. We need to share those solutions, and more of us need to adopt them.



There is no one solution, and priorities vary from destination to destination. We need a sector response and partnerships between tourists, businesses, communities and their governments if we are going to make tourism better.



We plan to work with businesses, local authorities, conservation organisations and communities to prepare a Platform for Change to be discussed at WTM London in November 2021.



And in 2022 to challenge the industry to adopt the tried and tested solutions that have been developed over the last 20 years, he added.



WTM London physical event will take place at ExCeL London from November 1 to 3, and will be followed by WTM Virtual  November 8-9.



WTM London, Exhibition Director, Simon Press said: The Platform for Change is an area where people can come together with ideas to confront different challenges and situations with one common goal: to make tourism of the future work for everyone involved.



Research



The Platform for Change comes as recent research shows 18% of Brits want to travel more sustainably but dont know how, with 16% believing sustainable travel is far too expensive.



Research also shows 8.4 million UK consumers (16%) think it is up to travel companies rather than themselves to make their travel experiences sustainable. Almost twice that figure (17.4 million) 32% intend to go on holiday in the next year and 9% cant wait to go, no matter what the cost to their wallet or the planet.



One in 10 Brits (10%) say theyve saved over the pandemic for a holiday of a lifetime in the near future. Just under a fifth (18%) say since the pandemic has opened their eyes on how we need to look after the world more, especially when it comes to travel.



The younger generation would pay more to travel in a sustainable way, if brands helped them to do so, (17% of 1624 year olds surveyed), such as carbon offsetting their flight with this intent decreasing to 9% of 35-44 year olds, yet the younger age group currently see sustainable travel as far too expensive, with 20% of 16-24 year olds thinking this, as they do not feel it is financially viable to holiday responsibly.  TradeArabia News Service
On the first day of World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly, Francis said that if young people and elderly dont meet and talk, life does not go on. He lamented the fact that every day in the world around seven thousand children under the age of five die due to malnutrition. The pontiff expressed hope that the Olympics can be a sign of hope and universal brotherhood. He also called for a prayer for flood victims in China.

Vatican City (AsiaNews)  Today was the first World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly. On this occasion, Pope Francis said that if young people and elderly dont meet and talk, life does not go on. [. . .] Grandparents have the right to dream while watching young people, and young people have the right to prophecy by taking sap from grandparents.

The call for young and old to walk together was echoed in the homily the pontiff prepared for the Mass celebrated in Saint Peters, which he mentioned after the recitation of the Angelus when he expressed the hope that the Olympics might be a sign of hope and universal brotherhood. Francis also called for prayers for floods victims in China and their families, expressing closeness and solidarity to all those who are suffering as a result of the calamity.

Archbishop Rino Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization, led the Mass in lieu of the Pope so that he may not further tire himself and may [instead] spend these days of rest to fully recover his strength and pastoral ministry.

In the homily, Francis stressed the need for a covenant between young people and grandparents. Inspired by the Gospel passage of the multiplication of the loaves, he said: Jesus sees the crowds hunger; Jesus shares the bread; Jesus asks that the leftovers be collected. Three moments that can be summed up in three verbs: to see, to share, to preserve.

To see. [. . .] Jesus, who is neither indifferent nor too busy to sense the hunger felt by a weary humanity. Jesus cares about us; he is concerned for us; he wants to satisfy our hunger for life, love and happiness. In his eyes, we see Gods own way of seeing things. His gaze is caring; he is sensitive to us and to the hopes we hold in our hearts. It recognizes our weariness and the hope that keeps us going. It understands the needs of each person. For in Gods eyes, there are no anonymous crowds, only individuals with their own hunger.

Our grandparents and the elderly have looked at our lives with that same gaze. That is how they cared for us, ever since we were children.

To share. [. . .] Today, we need a new covenant between young and old. We need to share the treasure of life, to dream together, to overcome conflicts between generations and to prepare a future for everyone.

Without such a covenantal sharing of life, dreams and future, we risk dying of hunger, as broken relationships, loneliness, selfishness and the forces of disintegration gradually increase. In our societies, we have frequently surrendered to the notion of every man for himself. But this is deadly! The Gospel bids us share what we are and what we possess, for only in this way will we find fulfilment.

To preserve. After the crowds had eaten, the Gospel relates that much bread was left over. So Jesus tells the disciples: Gather up the fragments, that nothing may be lost (Jn 6:12).

Even more so, no person is ever to be discarded. We need to make this prophetic summons heard among ourselves and in our world: gather, preserve with care, protect. Grandparents and the elderly are not leftovers from life, scraps to be discarded. They are precious pieces of bread left on the table of life that can still nourish us with a fragrance that we have lost, the fragrance of memory.

Let us not lose the memory preserved by the elderly, for we are children of that history, and without roots, we will wither. They protected us as we grew, and now it is up to us to protect their lives, to alleviate their difficulties, to attend to their needs and to ensure that they are helped in daily life and not feel alone.

Please, let us not forget about them. Let us covenant with them. Let us learn to approach them, listen to them and never discard them. Let us cherish them and spend time with them. We will be the better for it. And, together, young and old alike, we will find fulfilment at table of sharing, blessed by God.

Francis spoke about the Gospel story at the Angelus. Before the recitation of the Marian prayer, inspired by the story of the boy who donated his bread and fishes, he said that This is a great lesson for us. It tells us that the Lord can do a lot with the little that we put at His disposal. [. . .] This is how God loves to act: He does great things, starting from those small things, those freely-given ones.

We try to accumulate and increase what we have, but Jesus asks us to give, to diminish. We like to add, we like addition; Jesus likes subtraction, taking something away to give it to others.

Even today, the multiplication of goods cannot solve problems without fair sharing. The tragedy of hunger comes to mind, which affects the little ones in particular. It has been calculated officially that every day in the world around seven thousand children under the age of five die due to malnutrition, because they do not have what they need to live.

Faced with scandals such as these, Jesus also addresses an invitation to us, an invitation similar to the one probably received by the boy in the Gospel, who has no name and in whom we can all see ourselves: Be brave, give what little you have, your talents, your possessions, make them available to Jesus and to your brothers and sisters. Do not be afraid, nothing will be lost, because if you share, God will multiply. Banish the false modesty of feeling inadequate, trust yourself. Believe in love, believe in the power of service, believe in the strength of gratuitousness.
An actor from the hit series The Wire accused a Brooklyn journalist of sexually abusing him by touching his buttocks on two occasions  but the woman says it was in the context of a consensual relationship, her lawyer said.
Elsewhere in California, the 104-square-mile Tamarack fire south of Lake Tahoe continued to burn through timber and chaparral and threatened communities on both sides of the California-Nevada state line. The fire, sparked by lightning July 4 in Alpine County, California has destroyed at least 23 buildings, including more than a dozen in Nevada. It was 27% contained Sunday, and officials were able to lift evacuation orders.
The House of Representatives recently passed the INVEST in America Act and included two important provisions aimed to help combat this crisis: The Build More Housing Near Transit Act and the Promote Affordable Housing Near Transit Act. Both pieces of legislation would help promote the development of affordable housing near transit-served areas, which would not only help house renters who need quality, affordable housing, but would also help individuals access public transportation for work and social purposes, spurring economic activity.
Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari on Saturday rejected Prime Minister Imran Khan's proposal to hold a referendum in Pak occupied Kashmir to decide whether the residents wanted to live with Pakistan or as an independent nation.

The PPP chairman, speaking to media in Karachi, said PM Imran Khan always "always manages to say the wrong thing about Kashmir", reported Geo News.

"[He] considers the people of Kashmir fools and traitors. From the beginning, PPP has always maintained that the Kashmiri people should decide their own fate," added Bilawal.

His remarks came a few hours after Leader of the Opposition in the National Assembly Shahbaz Sharif had rejected the premier's statement assuring Kashmiris a right to opt for independence.

"The entire nation rejects anything other than Pakistan's historic position on the Jammu and Kashmir dispute and UN Security Council resolutions," Shahbaz said.

"The Jammu and Kashmir dispute will be decided according to a transparent and independent plebiscite held under the auspices of the United Nations and this is the position of the people of Pakistan and Kashmir," he said.

While addressing an election rally in Tarar, Imran Khan had promised the people of PoK that his government will hold a referendum in which they could choose to join Pakistan or become an independent state.

"... What I want to make clear now is that in 1948, there were two United Nations Security Council resolutions which granted the people of Kashmir the right to decide their future. According to the UN resolutions, the people have to decide whether they want to join Hindustan or Pakistan," the Prime Minister had said.

He went on to state that even after the UN-mandated referendum, his government will hold another referendum, where the people of PoK will be given the choice to either live with Pakistan or become an independent state, reported Geo News.

(ANI)

Also Read: Pakistani Army has always desired that judiciary toe its line, says analyst
Days after the bus explosion in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Director General (DG) Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Lt Gen Faiz Hameed arrived in Beijing on Friday to hold talks with Chinese officials.

It comes days after the deaths of nine Chinese nationals in the Dasu bus blast on a bus in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

DG ISI Hameed will be holding strategic talks with Chinese officials, sources told Geo News.

The visit of high-ranking Pakistani officials holds significance after a tragic incident in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's Upper Kohistan. It is to mention that Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi is already in China for a two-day visit.

Last week, a passenger bus had exploded in the Upper Kohistan district killing 13 people, including nine Chinese engineers. The explosion took place when the bus was on its way to the Dasu Hydro Power Project.

China has asked Pakistan to bring to justice perpetrators of the "terrorist attack" in the neighbouring country.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang had raised the issue with Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan during a phone call, where he stressed the need to "use all necessary measures" to probe the incident and hold the culprits accountable.

The Chinese company, which is constructing the Dasu dam, said it decided to suspend the work after a blast in the northern province that killed several engineers.

(ANI)

Also Read: China dismantling peace in Afghanistan by collaborating with Pak, Taliban, says columnist
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has said he wants to pass a bipartisan package and an accompanying $3.5 trillion budget plan before the Senate leaves for its August recess. He held a procedural vote last week to begin debate on the broad framework, but all 50 Senate Republicans voted against it, saying they needed to see the full details of the plan.
You had to earn the right for the Black population in Mississippi to decide that they were going to work with you because why should they risk everything to work with you if you were somebody or a collection of people who were just not serious? he said.
At least 12 people were involved in the crash, according to Larry Merritt, a spokesman for the Fire Department. Three men were taken to hospitals in serious to critical condition; two people were taken to hospitals in fair to serious condition; and one person was taken to a hospital for observation. Six other people refused to be taken to a hospital.
Details of the shooting were widely circulated because it happened just three blocks away and about 10 minutes before another shooting in which five people were wounded. That attack, in the 1400 block of South Ridgeway Avenue, left four teenagers wounded, ages 14, 15, 17 and 18, as well as a 22-year-old man. All of those victims were expected to survive, including the 15-year-old boy, who was an innocent bystander shot while seated in his fathers vehicle, police have said.
But police did not provide additional details such as how many times each man was shot, where specifically they were wounded or which victim was taken to which hospital. It also wasnt clear whether there had been more people standing in the yard who were not shot.
The teen approaches the victim by his vehicle, and he has a gun in his hand and said what is up, Garduno said. But it wasnt clear if the teen had intended to rob or carjack the man or what else he may have said to the 41-year-old; those details remain under investigation.
A 39-year-old man suffered a gunshot wound to the torso and thigh and was taken to Mount Sinai, where his condition was stabilized. A 55-year-old man was taken to Mount Sinai in good condition with a gunshot wound to the buttocks and thigh. The third man, 31, suffered a gunshot wound to the back and chest and was taken to Stroger Hospital in serious condition.
Its based on what was in the facility, including diesel fuel. As far as the totality of the chemicals that were in there, I dont know, but with fuel and other automotive materials, (the hazardous materials call) was issued as a precaution, Merritt said.
The outer reaches of this plan, such as the relocation of the McCormick Place rail marshaling yards and the acquisition of that property from the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, come with many conditionals and few precise details. Demand from tenants remains to be seen overall, especially if the recovery moves more slowly than anticipated. And the developers, who are paying about the same price for the land as the city paid more than a decade ago, have bargained for a good deal.
Kinzingers appointment comes after House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy pulled all five of his Republican members from what was supposed to be a 13-member panel after Pelosi vetoed two of them. She contended Republican Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Jim Banks of Indiana could not render independent judgment because of their past statements and support for Trump.
Still, it nagged at me a little in the days to follow. Even if it wasnt still burning when it landed, our pleasant experience sent trash to an unsuspecting corner of Chicagoland. A small matter, for sure, but enough to make me get rid of our remaining floating lanterns.
That humanity was the focus of Greens speech. He emphasized that history means much more than how it can be applied to our current situation. He said there is importance in the details of Williams life because he should be recognized as not just an important name from 1919, but also a boy, a son, a worker and much more. He applauded Gibson for doing something truly profound in reclaiming Williams story.
At the invitation of State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, the Maltese Minister for Foreign and European Affairs Evarist Bartolo, Pakistani Foreign Minister Makhdoom Shah Mahmmod Hussain Qureshi, Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto and Mongolian Foreign Minister Battsetseg Batmunkh will pay official visits to China from July 22 to 28. State Councilor Wang Yi will receive the foreign ministers of Malta, Pakistan and Finland in Chengdu, and foreign minister of Mongolia in Tianjin.

CCTV: We have noted that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has recently arranged trips for foreign envoys and representatives of international organizations in China to Guizhou and Fujian separately. Can you give us more details?

Zhao Lijian: From July 11 to 17, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs arranged separate trips for foreign envoys and representatives of international organizations in China to visit Guizhou and Fujian provinces. Through field trips, seminars and discussions, the envoys deepened their understanding of China and the Communist Party of China (CPC), and found more opportunities for synergizing the cooperation between their respective countries and China.

The journey helps participants to understand the magnificent century-old history of the CPC. After visiting the sites of Zunyi Meeting, Gouba Meeting and Gutian Meeting, the envoys commended the CPC for its strong leadership in the success of China's revolution. They said that to understand China, one must understand the CPC. Throughout its 100 years of history, what remains unchanged is the CPC's vision, perseverance and the founding mission of seeking happiness for the Chinese people.

The journey showcases the tremendous changes and development potential of the Chinese society. From the first poverty alleviation village in the Ningde city and the demonstration site of the housing project for residents who used to live on boats in Xiaqi Village in Fujian Province to the Haohuahong village of Buyi minority ethnic group and the poverty elimination demonstration village of Huamao in Guizhou Province, the envoys saw the remarkable changes China's poverty elimination efforts have brought to the people's lives. From the national big data comprehensive pilot zone and the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST, also known as China's Tianyan) in Guizhou to the high-tech microelectronics enterprises in Xiamen, the envoys marveled at the booming development of scientific and technological innovation in China. From the China Tea Expo in Guizhou to the Yundang Lake in Xiamen, the envoys have gained helpful experience from China's ecological and environmental governance.

The journey offers opportunities to learn about the profound Chinese culture. In Fujian, the envoys visited the Quanzhou Maritime Museum, where they appreciated the inclusiveness and historical charm of Quanzhou, the starting point of the ancient Maritime Silk Road that preceded the Belt and Road Initiative. They also visited the museum of Hakka family precepts in Tulou or earthen buildings in Yongding District, Longyan City, and experienced the historical inheritance of the fine family values of the Chinese nation.

During the visits, the envoys spoke highly of China's achievements in poverty alleviation, scientific and technological innovation, ecological progress and cultural heritage protection, and expressed their expectation to strengthen exchanges and carry out more mutually beneficial cooperation with Guizhou and Fujian. We will, as always, welcome foreign envoys in China and others to visit various parts of China and get a panoramic and multidimensional view of China as it is.

Xinhua News Agency: US State Department spokesperson Ned Price said the other day that the China-US relationship is fundamentally competitive at its core. There are elements of this relationship that are adversarial, but there are also going to be elements where our interests are aligned. As for Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman's upcoming visit to China, Price said that the US hopes this visit will help to advance US interests and values and allow it to responsibly manage the bilateral relationship. He said the US will continue to engage with China from "a position of strength" and there should be guardrails to ensure and to see to it that competition doesn't spill over into conflict. Do you have any comment?

Zhao Lijian: The so-called "competition, cooperation and confrontation" approach for dealing with China by the US side is in essence defining China as a competitor, stoking confrontation and containing and suppressing China's development. This approach does not distinguish between the major aspect and minor aspect of China-US relations. It is not in line with the facts, the fundamental interests of the two peoples or the trend of the times. It fundamentally originates from a zero-sum mentality.

I would like to stress that the US has repeatedly claimed to talk to China from "a position of strength", which reflects its arrogance and bullying. As China has pointed out many times, the US is in no position to lecture or point fingers at China, or to deal with China from "a position of strength". We didn't buy that in Anchorage, and we certainly won't buy that in Tianjin.

China always believes that China-US relations should be based on mutual respect, equality and mutual benefit, rather than one side taking the benefit only. The development of China-US relations needs a "guardrail", but it cannot be defined by the US unilaterally. The US should stop interfering in China's internal affairs, stop smearing China and harming China's interests. This is the "guard rail" for the bilateral ties in a real sense.

During Deputy Secretary Sherman's visit to China, we will continue to elaborate on China's principled position on developing China-US relations and firmly safeguard sovereignty, security and development interests.

CRI: Wendy Sherman, Deputy Secretary of State of the US, will visit China on July 25 and 26. Who will be the principal Chinese official to hold talks with her? Will State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi meet with her?

Zhao Lijian: Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng, who is in charge of China-US relations at China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, will be the principal official to hold talks with Deputy Secretary Sherman. The US side repeatedly expressed the hope of meeting with Chinese leaders. By convention, China considers the arrangement of a meeting between State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Deputy Secretary Sherman after her talks with Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng.

Hubei Media Group: The Australian Human Rights Commission recently released its Sharing the Stories of Australian Muslims Report 2021. It outlined widespread discrimination against Australian Muslims and the increasing risk of violent and terrorist acts by extremists targeting Muslims. Do you have any comment?

Zhao Lijian: We've also noted the report. It pointed out that Australian Muslims suffer from widespread discrimination, with 80% of respondents saying they "experienced some form of unfavorable treatment based on their religion, race or ethnicity" in public spaces like shopping centres and prayer spaces. One in four felt unable to speak up or act when faced with discrimination. According to the report, a study by the Australian National University found that job seekers in Australia with Middle Eastern names need to submit over 50% more applications to be granted the same opportunities as an applicant with an Anglo-sounding name. Many respondents say they experienced increasing harassment from extremists, which has taken a toll on their sense of safety. It also pointed out that some right-wing politicians in Australia, driven by personal political gains, often make irresponsible remarks on the Muslim community, misleading public perception and leading directly to the increase of violent and terrorist incidents targeting Australian Muslims.

The facts revealed by the report once again exposed Australia's hypocrisy and double standards on human rights. For some time, certain Australian politicians, based on lies and bias, have wantonly criticized the human rights conditions of Muslims in China's Xinjiang region and blatantly smeared and maligned China. This is beyond preposterous. They are in no position to do this. We urge some people in Australia to take off the hypocritical mask of "human rights lecturer", have self-reflection and earnestly tackle the human rights issues of Australian Muslims, rather than slander other countries under the cover of concern for Muslims' human rights.

AFP: Since the Pakistani Foreign Minister is here, are there any updates about the investigation into the recent bus blast that killed several Chinese nationals? Is it an act of terrorism? And if so, who is behind it?

Zhao Lijian: China and Pakistan are still conducting investigation into the terrorist attack. I have nothing to add for the moment.

Beijing Daily: On July 22, the US Treasury Department announced imposition of sanctions on Cuba's Minister of Revolutionary Armed Forces and other officials and institutions under the so-called Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, citing the so-called "repression of protests in Cuba". The US also said in a statement that it would "continue to sanction individuals responsible for oppression of the Cuban people". Separately, it's said that the US is trying to garner support among other countries to either sign a joint statement or issue a statement in national capacity in condemning Cuba. What is China's comment on that?

Zhao Lijian: China firmly supports the efforts of the Cuban government and people to maintain social stability. We resolutely reject any external interference in other countries' internal affairs, imposition of unilateral sanctions, and attempt to gang up on other countries under the pretext of "freedom", "democracy" and "human rights". As Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla suggests, the US "should rather apply unto itself the Magnitsky Global Act for systematic repression and police brutality that took the lives of 1021 persons in 2020". The US should first and foremost examine its own human rights issues, instead of wielding the big stick of sanctions, grossly interfering in other's internal affairs and creating division or confrontation.

China maintains that mutual respect, fairness, justice and win-win cooperation are the right way to conduct state-to-state relations. At present, Cuba is at a critical moment in its fight against COVID-19 and in its efforts to alleviate people's suffering. The US must immediately and completely lift unilateral sanctions against Cuba in compliance with the purposes of the UN Charter and basic norms governing international relations, and do more to improve US-Cuba relations and contribute to international and regional stability.

Shenzhen TV: The WHO Secretariat notified its member states of its work plan on the second-phase origins study on July 16 and asked them to give feedback before July 23. Has China submitted its feedback to the WHO? Will China participate in the second phase of origins study?

Zhao Lijian: At the briefing with WHO member states on July 16, China and some other countries already made clear their basic positions on WHO's work plan on the second-phase origins study proposed by the WHO Secretariat. The Permanent Mission of China to the United Nations Office at Geneva has also further stated its view and proposition in written form. We will continue to put forward China's proposal. I'd like to stress the following points:

First, this work plan is inconsistent with the requirements of the resolution of the 73rd WHA. The resolution clearly stipulates that the WHO Secretary-General will continue to work closely with member states to identify the zoonotic source of the virus and the route of introduction to the human population. This means that the formulation of the next-phase origin tracing work plan need to be led by WHO member states, and the WHO has to reach consensus with its members states after full consultation.

Second, this work plan is inconsistent with the conclusions and recommendations of the WHO-China joint mission report. The report was compiled by a joint team of experts from WHO and China, which is the China Part of the WHO-convened global study of origins of SARS-CoV-2. The authoritative conclusions and scientific recommendations in the report should serve as the important foundation for next-phase global origins study.

China, as well as many other WHO member states, noted with regret that the work plan was heavily disrupted by politicization and was a document that lost scientific principles and lacked a spirit of cooperation. Let me give you an example. The WHO-China joint mission report clearly concluded that lab leak is extremely unlikely, and there is broad consensus in the international scientific community on this. However, this work plan still lists the hypothesis that "a Chinese violation of laboratory protocols had caused the virus to leak during research" as a research priority, and deliberately ignores important research directions including the early cases globally and cold-chain transmission of the virus. One cannot help but think that this work plan is made to echo the "lab leak theory" advocated by certain countries such as the United States. And the lack of transparency in the drafting process also added to the suspicion that the work plan is the product of political manipulation.

To conclude, I want to stress that China always attaches great importance to the issue of origin-tracing and will continue to advance its own research in this respect. At the same time, as a leading country in cooperation with WHO on origins study, China will continue to actively participate in the next phase of global origin-tracing cooperation. We hope that the WHO will uphold the spirit of science, professionalism and objectivity, work with the international community to safeguard the scientific nature and seriousness of the origins study, resist the retrogressive trend of politicizing the issue of origin-tracing, and jointly maintain a sound atmosphere for global anti-epidemic cooperation.

Global Times: In response to a question concerning WHO's plan of phase two origin tracing at a briefing, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said "We are deeply disappointed (at the Chinese side). Their position is irresponsible and, frankly, dangerous...we continue to call for China to provide the needed access to data and samples. This is about saving lives in the future, and it's not a time to be stonewalling." What's your comment?

Zhao Lijian: The slander and denigration against China by some individuals in the US are disregarding common sense and defying science. China categorically rejects that.

In the face of the sudden onslaught of COVID-19, China contained the rising spread of the virus in little more than a single month; in around two months, the daily increase in domestic coronavirus cases was reduced to single digits; and in approximately three months, a major strategic outcome was secured in the battle against the epidemic. China has not only taken the lead in bringing the epidemic under control at home, but also provided more than 300 billion masks, 3.7 billion protective gears, 4.8 billion testing kits and other anti-epidemic supplies to more than 200 countries and regions, and over 600 million doses of vaccines to other countries, making an important contribution to the global fight against the epidemic. China's fight against COVID-19 can stand the test of history and the scrutiny of the people.

It is what the US has done that deeply disappoints its own people and the international community. Up to now, over 34 million Americans have been infected with COVID-19 and over 600,000 already lost their lives to the virus. Core indicators of the epidemic, such as daily new confirmed cases, hospitalizations and deaths, are all on the rebound. Compared to the white people, racial minorities in the US have a much higher risk of infection, hospitalization and death but a far lower rate of vaccination, with unevenly distributed medical resources. The US has fallen into the quagmire of "deterioration-mitigation-resurgence", but certain individuals still puts their selfish political gains above science. What they did is called extremely irresponsible, which has failed its own people and disappointed the world.

China has been open and transparent on the issue of origin-tracing and invited WHO experts to China twice. The experts went to every place they asked to see, and met everyone they wanted to meet. However, the US has yet to respond to the reports that there may have been COVID-19 cases earlier than had initially been reported. The National Institutes of Health found evidence of SARS-CoV-2 infections which was present in five states in the US as far back as December 2019. In Florida, 171 patients had coronavirus symptoms before any cases were announced to the public. The mayor of Belleville, New Jersey was sick with the virus in November 2019, over two months earlier than the first confirmed case in the US. Patients of the EVALI outbreak in July 2019 in several states in the US have symptoms highly similar to that of COVID-19. Donated blood check-ups in nine US states found that 106 blood samples, ranging from December 13, 2019 to January 17, 2020, tested positive for coronavirus antibodies. And what's on this list also includes Fort Detrick lab and the over 200 bio labs of the US overseas repeatedly questioned by the public. The US has all along clammed up and turned a deaf ear to the doubts and concerns of media and the public, which is more than dangerous.

The virus is a common enemy of mankind. Both prevention and treatment require a united response. Origin-tracing is a major and complex scientific issue, and it requires the collaboration of scientists around the world, as well as the joint efforts and cooperation of governments and people of all countries. Only by following the path of science and conducting science-based origins study with firm confidence, scientific attitude, scientific method and scientific facts can we finally uncover the truth. The act of politicizing the origins study and stigmatizing the epidemic will only be met with a public outcry and firm opposition from the international community and is doomed to fail.

CCTV: On July 20, a group of US lawmakers proposed the Taiwan Partnership Act, urging the US National Guard to establish a partnership programme with the Taiwan military to ensure a well-integrated defense force capable of fast deployment during a crisis. Separately, the US Senate Armed Services Committee passed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022 (NDAA), saying that the US should "maintain the ability to deter China from using military force to unilaterally change the status quo with Taiwan", and increase "defense cooperation with Taiwan". What is China's response?

Zhao Lijian: There is only one China in the world and Taiwan is an inalienable part of the Chinese territory. This is a historical and legal fact that cannot be altered by anyone or any force in any way. The US should earnestly abide by the one-China principle and the three China-US joint communiques, act prudently on Taiwan question, stop advancing the Taiwan-related bill, delete the articles concerning Taiwan, stop clamoring for military interactions between the US and Taiwan, and stop sending wrong signals to the "Taiwan independence" separatist forces.

AFP: The US Justice Department has charged two Chinese nationals linked to the "Operation Fox Hunt" that aims to repatriate alleged Chinese fugitives living in the US. US officials say "Operation Fox Hunt" involves extrajudicial repatriation squads that use intimidation and even blackmail to force individuals to return to China. What are your reactions to this? Are these unfounded claims?

Zhao Lijian: Fighting cross-border crimes, repatriating corrupt fugitives and recovering illegal proceeds are a just cause to uphold and promote rule of law. It is a practice widely recognized by the international community. When conducting law enforcement cooperation with other countries, the Chinese law enforcement authorities strictly observe international law, fully respect foreign laws and judicial sovereignty, and guarantee the legitimate rights and interests of suspects. Such operations are beyond reproach. The US turns a blind eye to basic facts and smears Chinese efforts to repatriate corrupt fugitives and recover illegal proceeds. China firmly opposes this.

The US has the largest number of Chinese fugitives suspected of corruption and economic crime. In recent years, the US has been inactive in responding to China's requests for cooperation on repatriating fugitives. This is against the spirit of the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime and the UN Convention against Corruption. We urge the US to correct its mistakes, actively facilitate China's efforts to repatriate corrupt fugitives and recover illegal proceeds, faithfully fulfill its obligations and commitments, and avoid degenerating into a safe haven for criminals.

Associated Press of Pakistan: You announced the visit of Foreign Minister Qureshi to China. Can you share some details of the visit? What topics will come under discussion during the visit?

Zhao Lijian: This year marks the 70th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between China and Pakistan. During Foreign Minister Qureshi's visit to China, State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi will hold the third China-Pakistan Foreign Ministers' Strategic Dialogue with him to enhance strategic coordination on bilateral cooperation and international and regional issues of common concern.

China and Pakistan are all-weather strategic cooperative partners. The two countries not only support each other for mutually beneficial cooperation and common development at the bilateral level, but also jointly safeguard international fairness and justice on the international stage and firmly uphold the international system with the United Nations at its core and the international order based on international law, which inject positive energy to world peace, stability and development. Under the current complex international and regional situation, China is ready to take the opportunity of Foreign Minister Qureshi's visit to enhance strategic cooperation, deepen practical cooperation in various fields, elevate China-Pakistan relations to a new level, and make positive contributions to the Belt and Road cooperation and the building of a community with a shared future for mankind. The two foreign ministers will also exchange views on deepening counter-terrorism and security cooperation and ensuring the security of Chinese personnel, institutions and projects in Pakistan.
A seminar held in Beijing on Monday praised a smash hit TV series based on ordinary heroes in the new era.

A seminar on the smash hit TV series, "New Generation," is held in Beijing on July 19, 2021. [Photo/China.org.cn]

The TV series "New Generation", produced by Huace Group, was aired on three satellite TV channels in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, as well as streamed on the popular sites Tencent Video, iQiyi and Youku. The series proved to be one of the highest rating shows in recent months.

The subjects of six standalone tales (each tale of eight episodes) of the anthology ranged from community volunteers, a technician, explosive ordnance disposal soldier, ethnic village doctor, college-graduate-turned-village-official, and a civil rescue operative in different regions of China.

Every tale was based on a true figure, which proved to be the TV series' best part: totally realistic and down-to-earth.

"Being true to reality is the first key for realist creation, and we must go on the path and walk in the totally realistic way," said Fu Binxing, Huace Pictures chairwoman and vice president of Huace Group who attended the seminar.

"We summoned a team of outstanding directors, screenwriters, and actors who were willing to enter the prototypes' life and feel in person how they were ordinary, dedicated and struggling for a better life. Through this project, my team and I are more resolute than ever about people-centered realism creation, while grasping the pulse and characteristics of the era."

Liu Wenfeng, director of the art division of the TV drama department of the National Radio and Television Administration, praised the TV series for focusing on the new era, being young in terms of narrative, and presenting not only figures and events, but also the spirit of the time.

Zhang Su, deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Radio and Television Bureau, added that "New Generation" had expanded the territory for mainstream shows. "It not only attracted a large number of young literary and art talents to invest in this creation, but more commendable was that it spawned and cultivated a creative mechanism for works of realistic themes."

Li Zhun, former vice president of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles and a well-known art critic, said the six protagonists organically integrated their personal pursuits with the needs of the time. "The pursuit of their dreams and realizations are the unified result of free personal growth and free social development."

Yin Hong, deputy chairman of the China Film Association and a professor at Tsinghua University, added that this TV series had offered vivid expressions on themes, with a strong youthful vibe, leaving room to show the growth and spiritual inheritance of young people. "No one is born a hero. The six tales all throw protagonists into scenarios where they needed to fight and stand up, with no way back, finally growing into great and noble persons."

A poster of the TV series "New Generation." [Photo courtesy of Huace Group]

Zhang Ting, one of the directors, highlighted the episode of Chinese explosive ordnance disposal specialists. He was in awe of such soldiers' dedication and hardship, and said that if it hadn't been for this TV series, there would always have been a regret in the Chinese TV history.

"The heroes of this era are these people in our daily lives, going against all odds without complaints when you need them, quietly leaving when you don't need them. They are amazing people," he said.
You are here: Business

China's top market regulator on Saturday ordered Tencent Holdings Ltd. and its affiliated companies to relinquish exclusive rights to music labels.

To restore market competition, Tencent and its affiliated companies must end their exclusive music copyrights within 30 days and stop charging high prepayment and other copyright fees, according to an online statement released by China's State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR).

Tencent should not demand superior treatment compared to competitors from copyright owners without justified reasons, the SAMR added.

The company was also fined 500,000 yuan (about 77,340 U.S. dollars), according to the SAMR.

China's market regulator started investigation into Tencent in January after receiving market reports about the company's acquisition of China Music Corporation (CMC) in July 2016 which could cause market dominance.

The probe showed that Tencent owned more than 80 percent of exclusive music library resources following its acquisition of CMC.

The status could give the company ability to get better trade terms compared with other competitors or make rivals' entry harder, said the SAMR.

This is the first ruling since China took necessary measures to restore market competition since the introduction of antitrust law, said the SAMR.

Those penalizing measures will help reshape the competition and lower the barrier for market entry, it said.

It is also conducive to reducing operation costs, nurturing new market players, providing a fairer competition environment for existing companies and safeguarding consumers' rights of choice, it added.
China will begin establishing another 16 regional health centers in 2021 to provide the public with easier access to quality medical services, according to an official with the National Health Commission Saturday.

In addition, the country will also push forward the establishment of national medical centers and national research centers for clinical medicine, said Li Bin, deputy head of the commission, at a conference on the reform on medicine and healthcare system held in Hefei, east China's Anhui Province.

The effort is in line with the State Council's requirement to balance the distribution of medical resources and improve the tiered system of diagnosis and treatment, conveyed in a document released in May.

The major task of the reform in the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-2025) is to ensure that patients receive proper medical services without leaving their native provincial-level regions, and that treatment for minor illness can be provided at their doorstep, said Xu Shuqiang, another commission official.

Previously, China had already established regional health centers in eight provinces. "Next year, regional health centers in China will basically cover all provincial-level regions," Xu added.
You are here: China

Typhoon In-Fa, the sixth typhoon this year, made landfall at Putuo, Zhoushan in eastern Zhejiang province, at around 12:30 on Sunday, with maximum wind speed reaching 38 meters per second.

Moving northwestern with gust and heavy downpours at a speed of 15 kilometers per hour, it is expected to swirl through the Hangzhou Bay and make landfall again between Jiaxing in northern Zhejiang and Pudong of Shanghai Sunday evening.

Zhejiang province upgraded its emergency response to the highest Level I from Saturday noon, the provincial emergency management department said.

The Zhejiang emergency management department has urged immediate flood prevention measures, saying that school classes, production, market, and road traffic shall be suspended when necessary.
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Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said here Saturday that if the United States has not learned to treat other countries equally, China and the international community have the obligation to help the United States make up for this lesson.

Wang made the remarks when holding the third strategic dialogue between China and Pakistan with Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi.

In response to U.S. State Department spokesperson's comments made before the visit of U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman to China that the United States will deal with China from "a position of strength," Wang said the United States always wants to use its strength to pressure other countries and thinks it is superior.

However, there has never been a country superior to others in the world, and China will not accept such a claim by any country, Wang said.
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China stands ready to work with Pakistan to promote the building of a closer community of shared future in the new era, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Saturday.

Wang made the remarks when holding the third strategic dialogue between China and Pakistan with Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi.



Noting that this year marks the 70th anniversary of setting up diplomatic ties between China and Pakistan, Wang said the two countries have worked together to overcome many difficulties and obstacles, and established an all-weather strategic partnership of cooperation.

"China is willing to work with Pakistan to take the 70th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations as an opportunity to accelerate the construction of a closer community of shared future in the new era, bring more benefits to the two peoples, and make greater contributions to regional stability and prosperity," Wang added.

Qureshi expressed condolences to China regarding the severe floods in Henan Province. He said Pakistan thanked China for its valuable support for Pakistan's fight against the pandemic, and condemned all smears against China.

On the Dasu attack that happened in Pakistan, Wang said both China and Pakistan are victims of this terrorist attack, and the two sides should work closely to bring the perpetrators to justice at an early date.

Qureshi said Pakistan will spare no effort to safeguard the safety of Chinese personnel and institutions in Pakistan, re-organize the special forces to strengthen related security work, and resolutely prevent similar incidents from happening again.

At a joint press briefing after the dialogue, Wang said the two countries agreed to continue the high-quality construction of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, strengthen coordination in international and regional affairs, jointly oppose hegemonism and unilateralism, and maintain the international system with the United Nations as the core and the international order based on the international law.

On the current situation in Afghanistan, Wang told reporters that as neighboring countries of Afghanistan, both China and Pakistan are most directly affected by the situation in Afghanistan. After in-depth communication, the two sides decided to carry out joint campaigns in the following five areas, Wang said.

He said the two countries agree to strive for peace with all the strength to avoid the spread of war as a top priority, actively promote peace through talks and advance intra-Afghan talks, work together to combat terrorism and push all major forces in Afghanistan away from terrorism, agree to promote coordination and cooperation among neighboring countries of Afghanistan, and urge the United States to earnestly fulfill its responsibilities for the peace and reconstruction of Afghanistan.
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A Chinese government spokesperson on Saturday said that any bullying sanction will meet harsh countermeasures.

The spokesperson for the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office of the State Council expressed resolute support for the Chinese foreign ministry's decision of imposing reciprocal sanctions on six individuals and one entity from the United States.

They have been harming China's national interests by fabricating facts and spreading rumors on Hong Kong-related issues and should be held accountable and punished according to China's Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law, the spokesperson said.

China has never bullied, oppressed, or subjugated people of any other country, and will never allow such things to happen to it, the spokesperson added.
Recently, a story has unfolded of the NZ Armys writing competition for soldiers of the rank of private. After running it and selecting a winner, they then contradicted themselves like a decaffeinated sugar-free energy drink and depublished it from their website.

This was done, says NZ Defences Chief of the Army, Major General John Boswell, because the essays views were not compatible with the culture we are building.

An academic and former army officer, Dr Ellen Nelson, also weighed in, calling the essay not a credible piece of writing. Apparently, she and the others she interviewed were appalled that the winning essay was published and labelled the army tone-deaf for doing so.

Essentially, based on the response to the essay, the privates views are to remain, well, private. This is undeniably strange in light of the stated purpose of the competition which was to encourage Army personnel to think deeply about subjects ... and to encourage debate (per Major General John Boswell above).

So, I went and read every word of the essay in question looking for things people could conceivably find appalling.

Was there anything hateful or offensive? No.

Was there anything racist or sexist? No.

Was there anything insulting, unnecessarily provocative, or just plain mean? No.

Was it well-written, reasonable and deserving of a top spot based on the quality of writing alone? Yes. I am utterly confused as to what made certain people look at the white between the lines and see red.

Titled Can the Army Afford to go Woke, Benign Social Progress or National Security Threat, the essay was an argument against mandated diversity based on race, gender and sexual orientation in the NZ Army. The author, N Dell, argues that the Army should instead be more exclusive by having the standards for soldiers raised to maintain effectiveness [emphasis original].

Importantly, Mr Dell did not say diversity in itself is a bad thing, he said that theresources spent on engineering diversity at the expense of the Armys duty to defend New Zealand is a bad thing.

If you disagree with Mr Dell, go ahead and disagree. If it is a poorly-argued piece of drivel, it should not be too difficult to blast to smithereens. And surely, there will be capable writers available to do the blasting.

Hate speech in Aotearoa

The whole essay debacle feeds into the current NZ governments proposed change to the Human Rights Act and the Crimes Act, that is, the so-called anti-hate speech laws.

Obviously, no one likes hate speech. I mean, what reasonable citizen could be pro-hate? The problem is the unclear and ill-defined wording of the proposed law change. Particularly problematic is the addition of the phrase stirring up, maintaining or normalising hatred to the current Human Rights Act provision and including the phrase in a new section in the Crimes Act.

What is hatred? Who defines normalises?

Recently, I came across an opinion piece by Donna Miles titled, New hate speech law needs our love. In this article, Ms Miles makes the claim, there is no legal definition of hate speech, but you know it when you see it in every successful prosecution.

But Ms Miles, who knows it? And when who sees it? It is the arbitrary and subjective nature of the wording which makes it unacceptable.

If, currently, an essay that was neither trying to offend nor peddle hate is considered intolerable to those with the influence to depublish it from the NZ Army website, then how can we not expect a possible future muzzling of every single viewpoint that doesnt match up with safe, conforming views?

To be clear, the point is not that Mr Dell could or would be considered a hate speech criminal under the proposal. The point is that, as we have seen, one persons reasonable opinion is anothers appalling and tone-deaf polemic. So too, one persons expression of personal views could be another persons normalising hatred. And seemingly, the same kinds of people will be making both decisions.

Am I going too far in extrapolating from the response to Mr Dells essay to then making conjectures on how the hate speech proposal will play out if turned into law? Maybe. Maybe this is not an early warning sign. But maybe it is the warning sign of an early warning sign. The canary in the coal mine might not be dead, but, boy, he sure is looking woozy.

So, in the meantime, I will be making my submission on the proposed changes to the Human Rights Act and the Crimes Act. And to Mr Dell, a private you may be, but I salute you.
Mac Paul Tillery, 38, of Philadelphia, was driving north on Route 15 near Woodbridge around 4:30 a.m. when he stopped his car in the left lane of a two-lane stretch of road and got out of his vehicle, according to a state police report.
Ill tell ya  she had a crush on me when I was a kid. Because when I used to go over her brothers house, I could see her and her girlfriends peeking out of the door to see us. We were the older guys, Gillistro said. He says she was always like a sister, and Billy would kick the bologna out of me if I tried to date his sister.
Its not a surprise that we have this little bump in the road, Dr. Deidre Gifford, acting state commissioner of public health, said Wednesday. But were very lucky that we have three highly effective vaccines, and that is the way that were going to get to the end of the pandemic: for almost everyone to get vaccinated.
As the rich and privileged (they are not always the same) continue their march on powerful public offices, a local caucus can provide opportunities for those who would otherwise be locked out of the first round in the election cycle. A caucus is a basic political feat of strength. It serves as a substitute for a local party town committee making essential political decisions in a community. It provides a path to hardworking newcomers who may possess spirits that prevent them from following a party line no matter how preposterous or damaging. Blessed may be those with minds of their own, but they will struggle in modern politics.
In an authors note Muller explains the subtitle of Dark City. The word lost refers to the sense of angst and alienation that permeates the films. But it also refers to the movies themselves, physical copies of some of which have actually been lost or nearly so. Thanks to the efforts of Muller and the Film Noir Foundation, the new edition of Dark City includes movies once feared lost forever, gems such as Woman on the Run, Too Late for Tears, The Guilty, Trapped and The Man Who Cheated Himself. 
He just expressed to me how much he loved me, that he loved his daughter and his kids, and told me everything was going to be all right, she said. I told him, Just hang on, and give me a chance to see what I can do to help you.
Shilpa Shetty, wife of businessman Raj Kundra who was arrested on charges of being involved in the production and publication of pornographic material through apps, has denied any role in the business, while simultaneously insisting that it is erotica, not pornography, that is streamed on Hotshots, the app which is now under the scanner.

Shilpa told the police, The kind of content available on Hotshots is there on many OTT platforms, some of it even bolder, but they do not amount to pornography. She had further stated that her husband was innocent and had no hand in the content creation, an official stated. Kundras lawyer Abad Ponda, too, had claimed that no sexual act was shown in the app, and argued that, If its not actual intercourse, its not classified as porn.

The Crime Branch searched the couples Juhu residence on Friday night, and have recorded Shilpas statement. Kundra was also taken to the apartment by the police during the search. Electronic gadgets and obscene images and videos were reportedly seized from his residence and office, apart from over Rs 7 crore.

Denying any role in the production of the pornographic material, the couple has named Pradeep Bakshi, Rajs London-based brother-in-law, as the key figure in the activity through Kenrin, his firm which was distributing the banned content. But police claim Kundra had set up a company named Armsprime Media, which, through Kenrin, bought the Hotshots app to upload pornographic content.

Police are looking at the possibility of the earnings from the pornographic content being used for online betting, and are probing Rajs links with a South Africa-based firm, and the large money transactions between the two. Meanwhile, Kundras police custody has been extended till July 27, and his bail plea was turned down.

In seeking extension of his custody, police had told the court that Kundra had plans to sell 119 adult films to a person for a sum of USD 1.2 million, and they wanted to probe this further.
In his reply to an MPs question in the Rajya Sabha, V. Muraleedharan, minister of state for external affairs, said that the Minimum Referral Wages (MRWs) for employment in six Gulf countries is the same now as it was in 2019-20.

Hyderabad: Gulf migrant activists welcomed the announcement of the external affairs minister regarding the restoration of minimum wage structure for Gulf workers.

In his reply to an MPs question in the Rajya Sabha, V. Muraleedharan, minister of state for external affairs, said, "The Minimum Referral Wages (MRWs) for employment in six Gulf countries is the same now as it was in 2019-20. For a brief period of 10 months, MRWs were adjusted downwards to protect our employment in the Gulf. As the labour market has stabilized, the earlier MRW has been restored."

In September, the Centre brought out two circulars reducing the minimum referral wages (MRWs) from 30 to 50 per cent for workers employed in six Gulf nations, which drew instant condemnation from the Gulf activists.

Telangana Gulf Workers Joint Action Committee (Gulf JAC) led the movement demanding the abolition of the two circulars and succeeded. There are around 15 lakh Gulf migrants from Telangana state.

A Gulf JAC met Muraladheeran in New Delhi while MPs cutting across party lines submitted joint petitions. The JAC team included Guggilla Ravi Goud, Swadesh Parkipandla, Patkuri Basanth Reddy and Kotapati Narasimha Naidu.

Speaking to Deccan Chronicle, Emigrants Welfare Forum president Bheem Reddy Mandha, who filed a public interest litigation (PIL) in Telangana High Court in February, seeking the repeal of the two circulars, said, "We are happy with the latest decision taken by the government. This will ensure that all those aspiring for Gulf jobs will be paid proportionate to their work."

He said apart from 15 lakh from Telangana, approximately 88 lakh Gulf migrants will stand to benefit.
NEW DELHI: While a large number of people have immunity by now against coronavirus due to previous infections or vaccination, a guarded approach is needed in terms of implementing restrictive measures so as to avoid a second-wave-like crisis, experts said.

Dr Yudhyavir Singh, managing the Covid19 ICU at AIIMS here, admitted that it is important to lift a few restrictions to resume economic activities when cases are low.

However, one should not lower his guard. Adopt a guarded approach in terms of following Covid19 -appropriate behaviour and implementing restrictive measures, he said.

Dr Singh said Delhi may have already achieved herd immunity, considering the massive number of cases seen during the second wave.

However, Dr Pooja Khosla, consultant (department of medicine), Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, said the second wave has taught us that cases can increase suddenly. There are warning signs from abroad. In India too, a small increase in cases has been recorded. Infections can increase exponentially anytime. I think one should not assume anything and make all efforts to prevent a second-wave-like crisis, which was a nightmare.

Opening everything is not appropriate. Everyone has been saying the third wave is a couple of days away, Dr Khosla added.

Pragya Sharma, professor, department of community medicine at the Maulana Azad Medical College, said a third wave is certain but the number of people it will infect will depend on the implementation of preventive measures and the pace of vaccination.

Even if there are breakthrough infections among the vaccinated people, the severity will be less and hospitals will not be overwhelmed, she said.

Sharma thinks the implementation of preventive and restrictive measures is an issue. People either don't wear masks or don't wear them properly. Most of them use cloth masks, which do not serve any purpose. There is hardly any vigil being maintained in crowded areas, she said.

After a devastating second wave of the coronavirus, people had started taking vaccination seriously. There would be queues at vaccination centres, but things have changed again. There is laxity on the part of the people, Dr Sharma said.

At the inoculation centre at MAMC, only around 50 people are getting vaccinated a day, while we can vaccinate around 200 people every day. Vaccines are available, but the people are not coming forward, she said.

Dr Jugal Kishore, head of the community medicine department at Safdarjung Hospital, said around 80 per cent of the people have immunity against the virus either due to previous infection or due to vaccination.

The Delta variant of coronavirus was responsible for upto 60 per cent of the cases during the second wave. We haven't observed any major difference between 'Delta' and 'Delta Plus' variants. So, a sudden spike in cases is not expected, until a new, more infectious variant emerges, he said.

Still, there are a percentage of people who have not been infected or did not develop enough antibodies despite getting vaccinated. This set of people, which is almost 30 per cent of the population in Delhi, is likely to get infected.

Two scenarios are possible; first, the virus continues to infect people slowly until heard immunity is attained; and second, a new, more infectious variant leads to an increase in cases till everyone has developed immunity. It seems the third wave won't be as severe as the second, he said.

With the lifting of restrictions, people from rural areas have started coming to Delhi, or those who have remained isolated so far are stepping out. If such people go to crowded places, then there is a possibility of a spike in cases, he said.

There is also a possibility that a new variant bypasses the immunity achieved through vaccination and previous infection. If that happens, it will be a huge problem, Dr Kishore added.

Niti Aayog member Dr VK Paul has also told the Delhi Government to remain watchful as the next three months are important and unlocking activities can lead to an increase in cases.

A third wave of Covid19 is unlikely to be as severe as the second wave, Dr Samiran Panda of the Indian Council of Medical Research had told the Delhi Disaster Management Authority during a meeting on July 9. A substantial third wave would be plausible if any new, more infectious variant of the coronavirus emerges and escapes prior immunity in the absence of adequate lockdown measures, he had said.

Dr Panda suggested that vaccination efforts be ramped up to strongly mitigate the impact of a possible third wave.

Delhi battled a brutal second wave of the pandemic that claimed a large number of lives, with the shortage of oxygen at hospitals across the city adding to the woes. On April 20, Delhi had reported 28,395 cases, the highest in the city since the beginning of the pandemic. On April 22 the case positivity rate was 36.
A mobile application for the e-Karshak system to register crops grown by farmers which is mandatory to avail benefits of various welfare schemes launched by the government. (Representational Photo:PTI)

KADAPA: The government has developed a mobile application for the e-Karshak system to register crops grown by farmers which is mandatory to avail benefits of various welfare schemes launched by the government. Farmers must join e-Karshak and register the crops they cultivate. Some changes have been made to the previous policy and a new e-Karshak application form has been issued to farmers.

As per an estimate, 1,06,323 hectares will be cultivated in kharif this year across the district. Of this, paddy is estimated at 36,715 hectares, groundnut at 24,824 hectares, cotton at 16,574 hectares, red gram at 8,450 hectares, turmeric at 4,066 hectares and onion at 3,105 hectares. Apart from these, sorghum, maize, ragulu, black gram, green gram, sunflower and castor seeds are also cultivated.

The department of agriculture launched the mobile app to make various schemes available to farmers. All previous apps will be covered under this new mobile app. It is called the unified digital platform (UDP). As soon as the crop is harvested, the concerned farmer has to go to the nearest village secretariat office and register by providing the crop type, acreage, survey number, Aadhaar and land passbook details. All the details related to this land which is under the respective Rythu Bharosa Kendra (RBK) will be displayed based on the newly arrived app. Details of the land where the geo-fencing is located can be found on the internet so that the relevant horticulture or agriculture department employees can go and do the e-Karshak. The digital certificate goes to the concerned farmer's mobile as soon as e-Karshak is registered.

Every scheme and programme implemented by the government depends on this e-Karshak system. If crop insurance is sanctioned, it will be examined whether the concerned farmer has registered at e-Karshak or not. If this is not done, the farmer will not be considered for crop insurance payment. Free crop insurance from the government, investment subsidy, zero-interest loans and purchase of crop products at support price will be available on this platform.

Registration on E-Karshak should be done for kharif crop from June 1 to September 30 and for rabi crop from October 1 to February 28. The full details of farmers should be registered in the new app.

Juttiga Muralikrishna, joint director, department of agriculture, told this newspaper that there had been a number of allegations against the e-Karshak registration in the past. He said the new unified digital platform application was brought in to see that it did not happen again. He said through this app, it would be possible to know whether the cultivated crop became e-Karshak or not.
. The proposal had been that these practitioners will have to take a test after their classroom and field training for one year. Only those who pass the test will be given a certificate to extend medicare, though limited to first aid and treating minor ailments.  Representational image/DC

HYDERABAD: The Telangana High Court has found fault with state government for putting on the shelf GO No. 428 of June 29, 2015, aimed at introducing a one-year community paramedical training programme for RMPs (Rural Medical Practitioners) and PMPs (Private Medical Practitioners). With five years passing since issuance of the government order, Justice T. Amarnath Goud directed the government to consider commencement of such training.

The petitioner contended that the state government is reluctant about conducting the training programme even though it itself has proposed it. The petitioner pointed that the government has even sanctioned the amount for meeting the expenses of community paramedical training programme for one year.

The state government proposed this training as there had been several complaints over allowing RMPs and PMPs to work as medical practitioners, particularly in rural areas, despite having no medical degree. The proposal had been that these practitioners will have to take a test after their classroom and field training for one year. Only those who pass the test will be given a certificate to extend medicare, though limited to first aid and treating minor ailments.

But, as the training programme has not been conducted for more than five years, RMPs Association submitted a representation to state government on the issue. With no response received on this representation, the association approached the High Court.

This has led to High Court directing the state government to consider the representation of RMPs body for commencing the training programme immediately.
Bail was given to both Kavitha and Shaukat Ali, and they were given time to challenge the orders.  DC Image

Hyderabad: Maloth Kavitha, the TRS Lok Sabha member from Mahbubabad, and her associate Shaukat Ali were convicted and sentenced to undergo imprisonment of six months and pay Rs 10,000 each, in a case registered by the Burgampahad police for bribing voters in the 2019 general elections.

The special court to try criminal cases against MLAs and MPs pronounced the orders on Saturday. Bail was given to both Kavitha and Shaukat Ali, and they were given time to challenge the orders.

The Election Commissions flying squad had caught Shaukat Ali when he was distributing money to voters to cast their vote in favour of Kavitha. He admitted that he was doing so at the behest of Kavitha. Around Rs 9,500 was seized from him.

The police registered the case listing Ali as the first accused and Kavitha as the second accused. Ali admitted to the charges before the court.
When Priyanka Gandhi Vadra joined politics in early 2019, she confined herself to the handling of Uttar Pradesh affairs to ensure she did not overshadow her brother Rahul Gandhi. But three years on, the third Gandhi has emerged as another power centre and the partys chief troubleshooter. This was evident recently when the Congress Central leadership was engaged in resolving the face-off between Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh and his bete noire Navjot Singh Sidhu. It is Priyanka Gandhi Vadra who pitched for Sidhus appointment as Punjab Congress chief, ignoring the objections raised by the chief minister. Again, it was Priyanka who called up Congress general secretary K.C. Venugopal on Sunday night and asked him to issue the press release announcing Sidhus appointment immediately though it was earlier scheduled to be put out the next day. The announcement was rushed following reports of a show of strength being planned by Amarinder Singh. However, Priyankas open partisanship towards Sidhu did not go down well with many Congress leaders who privately admit they are unhappy at the treatment meted out to a senior leader like Amarinder Singh. They feel she should have displayed greater political maturity in handling the situation.

Information Technology minister Ashwini Vaishnaw made his first statement on the Pegasus spyware controversy on the opening day of the Monsoon Session of Parliament. But this official statement, delineating the government position, was clearly not enough for the government. Later that day, newspaper editors and channel heads were repeatedly told by the governments media managers that Home minister Amit Shah would be putting out an important statement and that they should ensure adequate coverage for an important announcement. It was expected that the home minister would have something new to say about the Pegasus spyware since the intelligence agencies are under his charge. However, the much-expected statement turned out to be a damp squib. It was nothing more than the usual diatribe against the Opposition.

After delivering a blockbuster electoral victory for Mamata Banerjees Trinamul Congress in West Bengal, poll strategist Prashant Kishor is now looking at playing the role of a political kingmaker. According to the Delhi grapevine, Mr Kishor is said to have impressed upon Sonia and Rahul Gandhi at their recent meeting that the Congress should go in for an alliance with the Samajwadi Party in next years Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls. He even offered to mediate with SP chief Akhilesh Yadav provided the Congress agreed to contest on only 40 Assembly seats. He is said to have argued that the Congress is on an extremely weak wicket in Uttar Pradesh and that another disastrous poll result would reflect poorly on Priyanka Gandhi, party general secretary in charge of the state. Moreover, many Congress state leaders, it was pointed out, have started exploring other options in the run-up to the polls. It is not clear if Mr Kishors proposal has been accepted by the Gandhis but it is no coincidence that on her last visit to Uttar Pradesh, Priyanka said the Congress was open to alliances with like-minded parties.

Senior Congress leader Digvijaya Singhs younger brother Laxman Singh, has been constantly overshadowed by his older sibling despite his best efforts to emerge as a person in his own right. More recently, Laxman Singh, an MLA in the Madhya Pradesh Assembly, authored a book titled Environmental Challenges and Human Response, which was released in Bhopal by former chief minister Kamal Nath. But, here again, there was no escape for Laxman Singh from his brothers omnipotent presence. Speaking at the release function, Kamal Nath could not help but take a dig at the author when he remarked that if Laxman Singh had written a book on his brother Digvijaya Singh, he would have had a bestseller on his hands. As it happened, this remark became the talking point instead of the book.

Though he has served as a minister in Bihar, Pashupati Kumar Paras, late Ram Vilas Paswans younger brother, found himself out of depth when he was briefed by officials of the food processing ministry allocated to him in the recent Cabinet reshuffle. Paras was, however, honest enough to admit that he was a newcomer and that it would take him some time to come to grips with the working of the ministry. He then turned to his junior, Prahlad Singh Patel, minister of state in the same ministry, and asked him to guide him and deal with the officers in the initial period. This candid admission by Paras, however, left everyone wondering if he was up to the task of managing his party affairs since he too, like Laxman Singh, was overshadowed by his brother Ram Vilas Paswan. Paras recently took over the Lok Janshakti Party after ousting his nephew Chirag Paswan as party president. The joke is that Paras will perhaps be guided by Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar, who is said to have played a key role in splitting the LJP.

Anita Katyal is a Delhi-based journalist
A Pakistan-dependent dispensation in Kabul, especially one that has strong Chinese backing, a prospect made feasible on account of the US departure from Afghanistan on account of war-weariness, will also seek to deny India a physical link to Central Asia. (Twitter)

Afghanistan, an embattled neighbour to which India has given considerable developmental assistance and security backing, finds itself once again in the throes of war, political uncertainty, and everyday dramas attended by violence as the Taliban attempt to tighten their grip. New Delhi, however, is yet to enunciate the precepts that would guide its near and longer-term thinking in regard to Kabul.

Pulling away, leaving Kabul to its fate, can hardly be an option. Even if India does not have a direct border with Afghanistan after Partition, that country lies just beyond our borders, and its strategic value is all too obvious. Also, arguably no country enjoys as much goodwill in Afghanistan as India does. This remains an important ingredient that can stand us in good stead if we choose our instruments wisely and in timely fashion.

No matter how unlikely for now, despite Talibans swift military moves, if a Pakistan-backed order does come to prevail in Kabul as a result of an outright Taliban battlefield victory, Kashmir can conceivably again be brought under inordinate military pressure through the resumed full-time  and intensive  deployment of non-state actors, as was the case not so long ago.

A Pakistan-dependent dispensation in Kabul, especially one that has strong Chinese backing, a prospect made feasible on account of the US departure from Afghanistan on account of war-weariness, will also seek to deny India a physical link to Central Asia.

This point cannot be emphasised enough when the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, visits this week. There are, no doubt, important questions to be discussed which the US may like to flag  such as those concerning the Quad and the Indo-Pacific, climate, and human rights. It is up to India to escalate Afghanistan in a discussion with Mr Blinken. The US is a departing power from the Afghan battlefield and may not have strategic interests there, but India does.

External affairs minister S. Jaishankar was spot on when he said in Dushanbe recently that Afghanistans past cannot be its future. The point, however, is to ensure that this does not happen. And in order to do so, the needed instruments have to be forged. What are those? That is the question.

Countries of the region that share Indias anxiety on Afghanistan, in whole or in part  such as Russia, Iran, and some Central Asian capitals  will of course be in that conversation. During Mr Blinkens visit, New Delhi will do well to probe
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Cabinet Secretary Brian Blalock in his office in 2019, soon after he assumed his position as the head of the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department.
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Woori Bank CEO Kwon Kwang-seok presides over a virtual corporate strategy meeting, July 23. All Woori employees attended the meeting via W, its in-house communication platform. The meeting assessed the bank's performance during the first six months of this year and explored ways to apply a virtual artificial intelligence (AI) banker system in the second half of this year using AI and deep-learning technologies. Courtesy of Woori Bank




Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Hong Nam-ki. Yonhap
Wolsong Nuclear Plant units 1 to 4 in Gyeongju, North Gyeongsang Province, are seen in this photo. Korea decided to phase out nuclear energy under the Moon Jae-in administration. Korea Times file



By Kwon Mee-yoo



Korea is one of the world's largest nuclear energy producers. But in 2017, the country chose to phase out nuclear power plants citing concerns of possible accidents. However, the emergence of global pledges to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 casts a cloud over Korea's nuclear phase-out policy and complicates the dynamics of the presidential election scheduled for March 2022.



An anti-nuclear policy was one of the key campaign pledges of President Moon Jae-in. About a month after his inauguration in 2017, Moon announced that Korea would halt plans to build new nuclear power plants and would not extend the lifespans of existing ones. The announcement was made at a ceremony commemorating the permanent closure of the Kori-1 nuclear reactor in Busan, the first nuclear power unit in Korea that had been operating for about four decades.



As the government went ahead with its nuclear phase-out plan, the construction of units 3 and 4 of the Shin Hanul Nuclear Power Plant in Ulsan was shelved right before breaking ground and plans for other new plants have also been scrapped.



Unit 1 of the Wolsong Nuclear Plant, the country's second-oldest unit, was decommissioned in 2019, three years earlier than originally scheduled. The move sparked investigations into the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy and two state-run energy firms over allegations of manipulating feasibility studies that were conducted to justify the early shutdown of the facility in line with the Moon administration's nuclear phase-out policy.



Mounting opposition to the government's nuclear phase-out policy has prompted presidential contenders from the opposition bloc to promise to restore the use of nuclear energy, highlighting the fact that it is the cheapest and cleanest alternative to fossil fuels in Korea, which relies entirely on imports to meet its petroleum needs.



Choe Jae-hyeong, former head of the Board of Audit and Inspection who turned into a presidential contender of the main opposition People Power Party, was the one who led the state audit into the early decommissioning of the Wolsong-1 unit and found that the efficiency of the nuclear reactor was undervalued. The controversy over the shutdown and the audit eventually led Choe to resign from his post and enter politics to vie for the presidency.



Another opposition presidential hopeful, former Prosecutor General Yoon Seok-youl, also expressed his dissent from the Moon administration's anti-nuclear policy, emphasizing that political attacks he suffered after the prosecution looked into the Wolsong-1 nuclear reactor case made him quit the top prosecutor post.



Yoon met Joo Han-gyu, professor of Nuclear Engineering at Seoul National University, earlier this month, and agreed that the Moon government's nuclear phase-out plan was irrational.



Joo has been openly opposed to the Moon administration's nuclear phase-out policy, believing that it should be scrapped right away.





Presidential hopeful Yoon Seok-youl, right, talks with Joo Han-gyu, professor of Nuclear Engineering at Seoul National University, agreeing that it is irrational for the country to phase out nuclear energy in Korea, July 5. Korea Times file



"There are strong fears over nuclear power, but most of them are superstitions. There is only one nuclear accident that led to death  the Chernobyl accident  and divided by the amount of electricity produced, 0.5 people could be killed out of 1 trillion kilowatt-hour, equivalent to the amount generated for 100 years from a nuclear plant, so it is much safer than other energy sources," Joo explained.



Joo said the economic viability research on Wolsong-1 was tampered with to shut down the plant prematurely.



"The study lowered the rate of operation of the unit and presumed the cost of electricity lower than the production cost to reduce the economic feasibility of the nuclear plant," Joo said. "Yoon clearly understood that Moon's nuclear phase-out policy defied existing laws and killed off Korea's top-notch technology in nuclear power generation."



Korea has been constructing nuclear reactors for decades, so it has advanced technology and supply chains for making nuclear plants, according to Joo.



"Korea has stable supply chains in all stages of making nuclear plants, from design, construction to operation and has won contracts in overseas markets, including the UAE. Korea's nuclear power technology is recognized internationally, but the phase-out plan dampened its export prospects," Joo said.



Nuclear energy is a major power source for Korea, producing 29 percent of its electricity as of 2020, just after coal, which accounts for 35.6 percent.



"Korea does not have underground energy resources such as oil and coal. Renewable energy is not very efficient in Korea. Wind power is weak and solar power generation is available only during the day and it costs even more to store the amount for night. They cannot compete with nuclear energy in efficiency," Joo said.





Small Modular Reactor (SMR) refers to nuclear reactors with power outputs less than 300 megawatts electric (MWe). Rep. Song Young-gil, chairman of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea, proposed installing and exporting SMRs in June. Courtesy of Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction
By Shlomo Ben-Ami





TEL AVIV  Across the Middle East, alliances are shifting in unexpected ways. What does the emerging configuration mean for a region that is seemingly eternally walking a thin line between war and peace?



The ongoing shifts are largely driven by Iran's growing influence. Gulf countries, fearing that the United States, their longtime ally, is unwilling to do enough to stem Iran's rise, are simultaneously reaching out to the Islamic Republic and moving toward deeper security ties with Israel. Meanwhile, the historically close relationship between regional heavyweights Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is becoming increasingly tense.



But Iran is not the only factor. In the eastern Mediterranean, the discovery of energy reserves in Israeli, Cypriot, and Egyptian waters over the past decade has brought together old enemies. Jordan has a 15-year agreement to buy gas from Israel, despite political tensions between the two countries.



Even gas-rich Egypt is purchasing Israeli supplies  a reversal from just a decade ago, when Egypt supplied some 40 percent of Israel's gas  in order to boost its profile as an energy-transit hub. (Energy superpowers such as the UAE and Qatar have also acquired stakes in Mediterranean gas fields, in a bid to bypass the Suez Canal.)



Now, an eastern Mediterranean energy community is emerging. The first annual Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum (EMGF) was held in Cairo in 2019. Last year, that forum became an intergovernmental organization, with an exceptionally disparate group of members: Cyprus, Egypt, Greece, Israel, Italy, France, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority.



The notion that this will lead to the emergence of a political-economic union in the eastern Mediterranean might seem farfetched. But it would not be the first time an energy-security alliance gave rise to a regional strategic community: the European Economic Community emerged from the European Coal and Steel Community in the 1950s.



Israel, for one, has good reason to continue to deepen its engagement with partners in the eastern Mediterranean. Already, Greece has offered access to its airspace for Israeli air force training, in exchange for Israeli gas, defense technology, and military intelligence. Last April, Greece hosted a multinational exercise, in which UAE aircraft flew alongside Israeli fighters. Israel could achieve a level of strategic depth in the eastern Mediterranean that it never gained in the continental Middle East.



But one country is conspicuously absent from recent efforts to deepen cooperation in the eastern Mediterranean. Turkey has been locked in maritime disputes with Greece practically as long as the two states have existed, and now they are at loggerheads over competing claims to energy reserves in contested waters.



Greece is part of two blocs countering Turkey: one with Cyprus and Egypt, the other with Cyprus and Israel. The latter group agreed in January 2020 to construct an eastern Mediterranean pipeline to channel gas to Europe, thereby reducing the European Union's energy dependence on Russian supplies. For Turkey, which has long sought to position itself as central to any energy corridor between the eastern Mediterranean and Europe, this is very bad news.



Already, Turkey's relations with its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies in Europe have deteriorated sharply. Last summer, Turkish ships entered contested waters between the Greek islands of Rhodes and Kastellorizo, prompting Greece to move almost its entire naval fleet to the area, with a French naval contingent also providing support. Only German Chancellor Angela Merkel's intervention averted a major flareup.



At this point, Turkey's bid for EU membership is all but buried. Yet the country has also been frustrated in its efforts to assume a larger strategic role in the Middle East. In 2019, when Turkey signed an accord with Libya's internationally recognized government, led by Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, to defend Libya's exclusive economic zone under the Law of the Sea, it was partly seeking to ensure that no EMGF project in the area could exclude it.



More broadly, Libya has become a theater for ideological confrontation, in which Turkey, together with Qatar, favors Dbeibah, an old ally of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist groups, and Egypt and the UAE support the Libyan National Army commander, Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar. Russia also fights alongside Haftar's rebel forces in Libya, as part of a regional strategy that is as much about energy as geopolitics.



Russia has a 30 percent stake in Egypt's Zohr offshore gas field, and a 20 percent stake in a gas-exploration joint venture in Lebanon. It has acquired significant gas concessions from its client regime in Syria as well, and is involved in oil and gas projects in Iraqi Kurdistan. And the TurkStream pipeline, which supplies Turkey, was launched last year.



Russia hopes to keep the EU dependent on its gas and create a new gas corridor to southeastern Europe. But the threat it poses to core Western interests is containable. While Russia is a force to be reckoned with in the eastern Mediterranean, it lacks the economic and military capabilities required to fulfill the role of an uncontested regional hegemon.



Ultimately, the U.S. remains the Middle East's main military power and an indispensable guarantor of regional stability  despite its Gulf allies' fears and its withdrawal from Afghanistan. The U.S., with its NATO allies, is uniquely positioned to push back against anti-status quo powers, from Iran to Turkey to Russia, and ensure freedom of navigation in the eastern Mediterranean.



But direct confrontation would breed only chaos, with potentially catastrophic results. Instead, the U.S. should use its unique position to convince the EMGF, in which it is an observer, to reach a modus vivendi with Turkey, offering it some path to membership and eventually also a stake in exploration and a revenue-sharing deal. In short, the U.S. must display the same kind of balanced diplomacy it has often used to prevent confrontation between its own "friend-enemies" (U.S. allies but enemies among themselves) in East Asia.





Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former Israeli foreign minister, is vice president of the Toledo International Center for Peace. He is the author of "Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy." This article was distributed by Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.org).


By Cho Hee-kyoung





Earlier this month, two presidential hopefuls from the conservative main opposition People Power Party (PPP), Yoo Seong-min and Ha Tae-keung, pledged to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, if they win the presidential election.



Yoo promised to divert the money saved from getting rid of the ministry to young Korean men who have completed their military service. Ha argued that the ministry had outlived its purpose and was instead actually aggravating gender conflict in Korean society.



Weighing in on the debate was Lee Jun-seok, the recently elected young leader of the PPP. He called for all presidential candidates to consider whether the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family should continue to exist, questioning its role and effectiveness.



When accused of engaging in an opportunistic appeal to the young males in their 20s and 30s who have become an important voter base for the PPP, Lee defended himself by saying he believes in "small government." As if to shore up this small government argument, he later tacked the Ministry of Unification onto the list of government departments to be abolished.



"Small government" is a perennial hobbyhorse of conservatives. In fact, back in 2008, the Lee Myung-bak administration made the exact same argument for abolishing the gender equality and unification ministries, along with the ministries of science and technology, and maritime affairs and fisheries.



It was also under the same administration that the two public corporations, the Land Corporation and the Housing Corporation, were merged to form LH, which is now at the center of a public sector real estate scandal.



What does it mean to have "small government?" Does getting rid of government departments help achieve "small government?" Does it simply mean having the smallest number of ministries and reducing their budgets? And why would "small" governments be better than "big" ones?



The debate around what constitutes "small government" is about more than simply the size of the government or the number of government institutions. Behind the idea of small government are the libertarian beliefs that: Markets are "more efficient" than the government; governments are "leviathans" that "encroach" on personal choices and freedoms; governments use "coercive" power to "expropriate" personal property through taxation.



It is the philosophy of Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman that found its most passionate advocates and enthusiastic practitioners in the 1980s under the Reagan and Thatcher governments in the U.S. and the U.K., respectively, otherwise known as neoliberalism.



Back then, neoliberal privatization was the mantra. Governments and public corporations were seen as "wasteful," "inefficient" and "corrupt," captured by "special interests." A school of thought called public choice theory told us that politicians made decisions for their own personal interests and not for the constituents they were elected to represent. Almost everything that could be done by the government was supposedly able to be done by the private sector and better.



Areas previously thought to be the sole purview of public service were opened up to private competition: utilities, gas, electricity, telecom, water, railways, healthcare, the postal service, public broadcasters, airports, airlines, fungible currency and even prisons. Profit-driven companies would supposedly eliminate waste, cut out inefficiencies and offer consumers better quality products and services and more choices.



However, it did not turn out that way. Privatization did not deliver the savings, efficiencies and better quality outcomes it had promised. Instead it often resulted in bigger problems, such as extortionate prices, dependence on public funds and subsidies, and even the lack of essential services for so-called "unprofitable" areas (such as education and social services, among others). The fallout from both the global financial crisis and COVID-19 pandemic has underlined once again that there are certain things that cannot be left up to the market. "Small government" is not the panacea that its proponents claim to be.



But this fact is already known to the politicians invoking "small government" to justify their call to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. If they were indeed arguing from a belief in small government, they would have promised tax cuts funded by the budget savings. Instead, they earmarked those savings not to cut taxes but to spend them solely on a very specific population group of a particular gender whose support they are deliberately courting.



Their argument that the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family has not done anything useful in recent years is also false. Without it, there would be no center dedicated to victims of digital sex crimes, a huge, widespread problem in Korea. The ministry's portfolio encompasses the most vulnerable groups in society, including migrant women, children and teens. Without a ministry specifically dedicated to them, their needs would be overlooked.



The PPP's misguided promise reminds one of nothing so much as when former President Park Geun-hye declared the dissolution of the coastguard after the Sewol Ferry disaster. What we need right now is not to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, but to increase its resources and to bolster its leadership so that it can to live well up to its name.



It's time to eradicate the myths and falsehoods of "small government." "Small government" does not mean axing ministries that cannot be substituted for by the market.





Cho Hee-kyoung (hongikmail@gmail.com) is a professor at Hongik University's law school.


This is no time for policymakers to praise themselves



Finance Minister Hong Nam-ki said last week that "many people have benefited from revised rental and tenancy laws." During an economic ministers' meeting, he said that far more people have continued to live in their rental homes by paying slightly increased deposits and monthly rental fees since the new laws took effect a year ago.



However, leasing costs have soared, with rentals becoming far more difficult to find. Dual prices have been formed between new and renewed contracts, and home lease-related disputes surged. If the government's top economic policymaker turns his face away from such a harsh reality and sees only what he wants to see, that is irrational and irresponsible.



According to KB Kookmin Bank, deposits on rental homes in Seoul have risen by 25 percent on average in the past year. Some new tenants have to pay two times higher deposits for similar-sized homes in the same apartment complexes than those who renew their leasing contracts. Even if tenants manage to renew their existing contracts for another two years thanks to the revised laws, some landlords unlawfully demand much higher deposits in excess of the 5 percent hike limit.



Conflicts between tenants and landlords have also increased. According to the Korea Legal Aid Corp., the number of requests for dispute settlement regarding leasing contracts in the first half of this year rose by more than 10 times from a year ago. All this is due to growing difficulty getting a rental. According to Asil, a real estate big data provider, the number of homes offered for lease on a deposit basis has fallen by 15 percent over the past three months.



Still, the government is repeating the same remarks that the rental housing market will stabilize soon. For the government to ease tenants' difficulties, it should stabilize prices and supply far more homes than now. However, the reality is going in the opposite direction. It is a serious problem if the top economic policymaker cannot see the market as it is. Misperception of reality is bound to result in policy failures.


Tokyo should not deny wartime forced labor



A UNESCO committee has called for Japan to deliver on its promise to honor victims of wartime forced labor at an information center on its industrial revolution sites registered on UNESCO's World Heritage list. In an annual session Thursday, the World Heritage Committee (WHC) adopted a resolution expressing "strong regrets" over Japan's failure to keep its pledge. This unanimous resolution requested that Tokyo submit an implementation report on the follow-up measures by December next year.



The WHC action came after Japan was found to have failed to provide sufficient explanation about Korean victims of forced labor at the Industrial Heritage Information Center in Tokyo which opened last year. Japan promised to set up the center to remember the victims when 23 Meiji-era industrial sites were added to the heritage list in 2015. The promise was based on the recognition that Koreans and others were taken to some of the sites against their will and forced to work under harsh conditions in the 1940s. One such site is Hashima, also known as Battleship Island, where many Koreans were forced to labor as coal miners during World War II.



Regrettably, however, Japan has yet to carry out its pledge. On the contrary, it has only highlighted the achievements of its industrial revolution at the information center without mentioning the exploitation and suffering of victims at the sites. More seriously, the center displays false testimonies that there was no forced labor, no harsh work and no discrimination against Koreans. It can be said that Japan lied to UNESCO and the international community in order to gain approval for the World Heritage designation of the sites.



The resolution against Japan carries significant implications as it puts the brakes on the country's bid to deny or distort its disgraceful history of militarism and colonialism. Tokyo should stop glossing over its past aggressions and colonial rule of Korea and other Asian countries. It must face up to its history squarely and reflect on its wartime atrocities and misdeeds before it is too late. Then Japan will have to apologize sincerely to those who were subject to untold sufferings due to its crimes against humanity, including forced labor and sex slavery.



The industrial site episode is only the tip of the iceberg. Seoul-Tokyo ties have hit the lowest point since their diplomatic relations were established in 1965, due to Japan's refusal to honor the South Korean Supreme Court's ruling that ordered Japanese firms to pay compensation to surviving Korean victims of force labor. Without apologizing for its past wrongdoings, Japan has responded with trade retaliation against Korea. It has even scoffed at President Moon Jae-in's offer to hold a summit with his Japanese counterpart to resolve these thorny historical issues.



The Korean government and civil society need to step up solidarity with the international community to denounce Japan for its ill-conceived efforts to glorify its past. There is no hope for the future as long as Japan continues relapsing into historical amnesia and trying to sugarcoat its shameful history.


A market in Daegu circa 1900 / Courtesy of Diane Nars Collection



By Robert Neff



On the evening of Dec. 18, 1892, Father Jozeau, accompanied by his teacher and a servant, were passing "quietly" through the streets of Gimcheon. This month had been unusually cold and the three were trying to get to the home of a Korean Catholic as quick as possible.



The cold was not the only thing they were worried about. The people of this region tended to be intolerant to new ideas  especially foreigners and their religious beliefs. Despite the fading light, they were soon noticed by a crowd of men who recognized Jozeau as a foreigner. It is not clear but this day may have been one of the market days which would account for the large number of men in the city at the time. The market experience was often made more enjoyable with several cups of alcohol which may have contributed to their hostility.



They jeered at the small group and began yelling threats that they would stone the foreigner to death. Jozeau, however, ignored them and continued to walk quietly, intent on reaching their intended sanctuary.





A Chinese sketch of the battle for Asan on July 27-28, 1894 / Robert Neff Collection



According to one account, the crowd grew larger and the jeers and taunts became even louder and more threatening and it soon became evident to the French missionary and his companions that they were in a dire situation.



Just as they crossed the bridge near the market, they were suddenly attacked by a rowdy crowd of 500, although this seems like somewhat of an exaggeration.



According to one account:



"They [the crowd] threw themselves upon Jozeau, knocked him down, and kicked him to and fro. Ten times he managed to get to his feet, and was thrown down again; and after the mob had torn out his beard, they beat him unmercifully, and then tried to bury him alive in the sand."



Fortunately, as the sun was setting and the weather was growing cold, the crowd eventually dispersed, leaving Jozeau and his companions for dead. They were able to make their way to a Korean Catholic's home where their injuries were treated. For several days it was feared Jozeau might succumb to his beating but the 26-year-old Frenchman managed to regain his strength. His teacher nearly shared his fate as all of his hair had been "torn out by the roots, one arm was rendered useless and he was seriously ill-treated."





A sketch of Chinese soldiers robbing and killing Korean farmers in 1894/5 / Robert Neff Collection



Soon, word of the unprovoked attack reached Seoul. The enraged French representative to Korea, Hippolyte Frandin, demanded reparations and called for the punishment of those involved. The Korean government acquiesced and the three principal culprits were condemned to exile and proclamations were posted in the marketplace warning would-be agitators of their fate if such an incident should happen again.





Jean-Moyses Jozeau's grave in Seoul in 2021 / Robert Neff Collection




GM Chevrolet Bolt EV / Courtesy of GM Korea




New EQA manufactured by Mercedes Benz / Courtesy of Mercedes-Benz Korea


Description

Req #15448 Tuesday, June 29, 2021 Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE: GCI) is a subscription-led and digitally focused media and marketing solutions company committed to empowering communities to thrive. With an unmatched reach at the national and local level, Gannett touches the lives of millions with our Pulitzer-Prize winning content, consumer experiences and benefits, and advertiser products and services.



Our current portfolio of media assets includes USA TODAY, local media organizations in 46 states in the U.S., and Newsquest, a wholly owned subsidiary operating in the United Kingdom with more than 120 local news media brands. Gannett also owns the digital marketing services companies ReachLocal, Inc., UpCurve, Inc., and WordStream, Inc., which are marketed under the LOCALiQ brand, and runs the largest media-owned events business in the U.S., USA TODAY NETWORK Ventures.



To connect with us, visit www.gannett.com. LOCALiQ is the marketing solution from the USA TODAY NETWORK providing businesses the smarter way to reach local customers. As local marketing becomes more complex, LOCALiQ empowers local businesses with unique insights from 125 million consumers in our network of sites, apps and experiences and learnings from millions of local leads delivered each year. We couple that with end to end service from our experts using local marketing best practices proven across the country. LOCALiQ simplifies local marketing and provides our clients the confidence of growing.

Our core values:Community, Progress through Passion, Action with Purpose andBelief in People. If you share these values,come join our family! The Account Executive role requires a highly personable, intelligent individual with the ability tolead digitally focused sales efforts while maintaining an energetic, strategic and entrepreneurial spirit.



As a USA TODAY NETWORK Account Executive working with the Nashville Lifestyles brand, youll partner with clients to provide a broad set of solutions to include: Build Their Presence: Website, SEO, Local Listings, Reputation & Social Media

Drive Awareness & Leads: Search Engine Marketing, Social, Display, Video, and Mobile Advertising

Grow Audience and Connect: Brand Content Solutions, Social Media Marketing

Manage Leads and Customers: Lead Alert, Engagement and Tracking Tools

Know What Works: Reporting, Mobile Tools, Insight Solutions

Emerging technology such as Virtual and Augmented Reality We are dedicated to helping our clients grow based on their unique needs. When they win, we win!

As a Marketing Solutions Account Executive, you will: Be equipped with the regions best marketing services and solutions, empowering you to deliver unparalleled results to your customers

Develop partnerships with large local businesses and assist them in reaching their goals through integrated marketing plans and comprehensive media solutions

Identify customer needs to develop and execute account plans and custom client solutions that differentiate USA TODAY NETWORK from competitors

Help businesses maximize their online presence with a custom approach to digital marketing

Leverage multiple USA TODAY NETWORK resources and partners to develop optimal client solutions across our suite of products, with an emphasis on digital What you need to do to be successful in this role: Pursue and close new business and revenue streams

Retain, manage, and grow clients in the ever-changing digital landscape

Work within a team to manage the client relationship and retain and build account revenue

You will identify and understand market potential, develop and execute sales strategies across multiple platforms, including digital, mobile, targeted niche publications and the core newspaper

Articulate and present our suite of products to business decision makers

Communicate with customers proactively via phone, email and in person

Conduct face-to-face customer meetings, presentations, proposals and demonstrations

Manage a specified sales pipeline and develop a strategy for long-term sustained success

Conduct client check-ins, upsell/cross-sell accounts, and address client market share concerns

Utilize CRM (Salesforce) effectively and efficiently recording all sales activity What you bring to the table:

Aptitude or acumen for Digital Marketing

Bachelors degree preferred, or equivalent practical experience

Passionate solution-seeker

Competitive nature and a winning team spirit

Problem solver who thrives on challenges and can simplify the complex

Excellent communication and presentation skills

Willingness to continuously learn, try new things and adapt to change

Proficient in MS Office Suite including Excel, Word, Power Point and Outlook

This role requires a valid driver license, reliable transportation, and the minimum liability insurance required by law We offer an energized, passionate team within a fun & flexible workplace. We offer competitive compensation with uncapped incentives and world class benefits, including comprehensive Health, Dental and Vision coverage, matching 401(K), Paid Time Off and more. This is an opportunity to work alongside digital leaders and visionaries.

#LI-SM1

Gan.sales Gannett Co., Inc.is a proud equal opportunity employer. We are a drug free, EEO employer committed to a diverse workforce. We will consider all qualified candidates regardless of race, color, national origin, sex, age, marital status, personal appearance, sexual orientation, gender identity, family responsibilities, disability, education, political affiliation, or veteran status. Job Family Outside Sales

Job Function Marketing Solutions

Pay Type Salary Other details

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Requirements

None






Description

Req #15248 Wednesday, June 16, 2021 Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE: GCI) is a subscription-led and digitally focused media and marketing solutions company committed to empowering communities to thrive. With an unmatched reach at the national and local level, Gannett touches the lives of millions with our Pulitzer-Prize winning content, consumer experiences and benefits, and advertiser products and services.



Our current portfolio of media assets includes USA TODAY, local media organizations in 46 states in the U.S., and Newsquest, a wholly owned subsidiary operating in the United Kingdom with more than 120 local news media brands. Gannett also owns the digital marketing services companies ReachLocal, Inc., UpCurve, Inc., and WordStream, Inc., which are marketed under the LOCALiQ brand, and runs the largest media-owned events business in the U.S., USA TODAY NETWORK Ventures.



To connect with us, visit www.gannett.com. LOCALiQ is the marketing solution from the USA TODAY NETWORK providing businesses the smarter way to reach local customers. As local marketing becomes more complex, LOCALiQ empowers local businesses with unique insights from 125 million consumers in our network of sites, apps and experiences and learnings from millions of local leads delivered each year. We couple that with end to end service from our experts using local marketing best practices proven across the country.LOCALiQ simplifies local marketing and provides our clients the confidence of growing.

Our core values:Community, Progress through Passion, Action with PurposeandBelief in People.If you share these values,come join our family!



TheSales Executiverole requires a highly personable, intelligent individual with the ability tolead digitally focused sales efforts while maintaining an energetic, strategic and entrepreneurial spirit.

As aUSA TODAY NETWORKSales Executive, youll partner with clients to provide a broad set of solutions to include:

Build Their Presence: Website, SEO, Local Listings, Reputation & Social Media

Drive Awareness & Leads: Search Engine Marketing, Social, Display, Video, and Mobile Advertising

Grow Audience and Connect: Brand Content Solutions, Social Media Marketing

Manage Leads and Customers: Lead Alert, Engagement and Tracking Tools

Know What Works: Reporting, Mobile Tools, Insight Solutions

Emerging technology such as Virtual and Augmented Reality



We are dedicated to helping our clients grow based on their unique needs. When they win, we win!



As a Marketing Solutions Sales Executive, you will:

Be equipped with the regions best marketing services and solutions, empowering you to deliver unparalleled results to your customers

Develop partnerships with large local businesses and assist them in reaching their goals through integrated marketing plans and comprehensive media solutions

Identify customer needs to develop and execute account plans and custom client solutions that differentiate USA TODAY NETWORK from competitors

Help businesses maximize their online presence with a custom approach to digital marketing

Leverage multiple USA TODAY NETWORK resources and partners to develop optimal client solutions across our suite of products, with an emphasis on digital

What you need to do to be successful in this role:

Pursue and close new business and revenue streams

Retain, manage, and grow clients in the ever-changing digital landscape

Work within a team to manage the client relationship and retain and build account revenue

You will identify and understand market potential, develop and execute sales strategies across multiple platforms, including digital, mobile, targeted niche publications and the core newspaper

Articulate and present our suite of products to business decision makers

Communicate with customers proactively via phone, email and in person

Conduct face-to-face customer meetings, presentations, proposals and demonstrations

Manage a specified sales pipeline and develop a strategy for long-term sustained success

Conduct client check-ins, upsell/cross-sell accounts, and address client market share concerns

Utilize CRM (Salesforce) effectively and efficiently recording all sales activity



What you bring to the table:

2+ years experience in a high acquisition, consultative, B2B sales role

Aptitude or acumen for Digital Marketing

Bachelors degree preferred, or equivalent practical experience

Passionate solution-seeker

Competitive nature and a winning team spirit

Problem solver who thrives on challenges and can simplify the complex

Excellent communication and presentation skills

Willingness to continuously learn, try new things and adapt to change

Proficient in MS Office Suite including Excel, Word, Power Point and Outlook

This role requires a valid driver license, reliable transportation, and the minimum liability insurance required by law We offeran energized, passionate team within a fun & flexible workplace.

We offer competitive compensation with uncapped incentives and world class benefits, including comprehensive Health, Dental and Vision coverage, matching 401(K), Paid Time Off and more.This is an opportunity to work alongside digital leaders and visionaries.

#LI-SM1

Gan.sales

#JerseyShore

#AsburyPark

Gannett Co., Inc.is a proud equal opportunity employer. We are a drug free, EEO employer committed to a diverse workforce. We will consider all qualified candidates regardless of race, color, national origin, sex, age, marital status, personal appearance, sexual orientation, gender identity, family responsibilities, disability, education, political affiliation, or veteran status. Job Family Outside Sales

Job Function Marketing Solutions

Pay Type Salary Other details

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Requirements

None




Req #15831

Friday, May 28, 2021

Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE: GCI) is a subscription-led and digitally focused media and marketing solutions company committed to empowering communities to thrive. With an unmatched reach at the national and local level, Gannett touches the lives of millions with our Pulitzer-Prize winning content, consumer experiences and benefits, and advertiser products and services. Our current portfolio of media assets includes USA TODAY, local media organizations in 46 states in the U.S., and Newsquest, a wholly owned subsidiary operating in the United Kingdom with more than 120 local news media brands. Gannett also owns the digital marketing services companies ReachLocal, Inc., UpCurve, Inc., and WordStream, Inc., which are marketed under the LOCALiQ brand, and runs the largest media-owned events business in the U.S., USA TODAY NETWORK Ventures. To connect with us, visit www.gannett.com.

At ReachLocal, A Gannett, Inc. company and part of the USA Today network, we offer a total digital marketing system for local businesses, comprised of web presence solutions digital advertising solutions. Our mission is to help local businesses around the world get more customers. We believe in working hard to deliver results for our clients and having fun while we build meaningful relationships with everyone around us. That is why we are one of the first digital marketing companies to achieve the Local Search Association (LSA) Certification and have been named a Facebook Marketing Partner, a select group of companies recognized for their ability to drive exceptional advertising and marketing results from Facebook.



To work at ReachLocal as a Digital Marketing Sales Consultant is to be a part of something big! The DMC is a customer facing, field based sales role that acquires, manages, and retains clients. Working with the Marketing Expert, the DMC will be responsible for managing the client lifecycle through acquiring new clients, collaborating and working together with Marketing Experts to onboard, provide support, and retain clients.





As a Digital Marketing Sales Consultant, youll have an opportunity to sell a broad set of solutions from our extensive market-leading portfolio, such as:

Search Engine Marketing (PPC), ReachLocals Edge Solution, Display Advertising (Banner Advertising), Web Presence Optimization, including services for Organic Search, Social Media Marketing and Reputation Management, and wide range of business services, including Online Chat, Video Production, and Analytics.



YOU WILL Aggressively pursue and close new business and revenue streams. Effectively work with the Marketing Expert to manage the client relationship and retain and build account revenue. Skillfully articulate and present our products to Small and Medium sized business owners. Create and conduct face-to-face customer presentations, proposals and demonstration. Effectively coordinate all aspects of the sale from start to finish. Conduct client check-ins, upsell/cross-sell accounts, and address client issues. Attend regularly scheduled office meetings and developmental activities. Utilize CRM (Salesforce) effectively and efficiently recording all sales activity.



QUALIFICATIONS

DO YOU HAVE

At least 5 plus years experience in a high acquisition, consultative, B2B sales role ?

Have a proven track record of sales success and progression?

Have a passion for digital advertising and are you tech savvy?

Possess exceptional interpersonal skills, with strong communication, written, and organizational skills? Become motivated by a base salary, commission structure, and competitive benefits in an entrepreneurial environment?



WE OFFERUncapped commissions and residual income. Incentivized competitions and recognition throughout the year for top performers. A culture that is fun and innovative!



About ReachLocal, Inc.

ReachLocal is headquartered in Woodland Hills, CA, with over 35 locations throughout the United States, Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand and Brazil. ReachLocal is an equal opportunity employer. Applicants for all job openings are welcome and will be considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, sexual orientation, physical or mental disability, or any other basis protected by state, federal or local law. It is the intent of the Company to comply with all applicable federal, state and local legislation concerning equal opportunity in employment.



This job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of all activities, duties or responsibilities required of the employee.



#Sales
Req #14927

Thursday, April 1, 2021

Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE: GCI) is an innovative, digitally focused media and marketing solutions company committed to strengthening communities across our network. With an unmatched reach at the national and local level, Gannett touches the lives of nearly 140 million people monthly with our Pulitzer-Prize winning content, consumer experiences and benefits, and advertiser products and services. Gannett brands include the USA TODAY and more than 260 daily local newspaper brands, digital marketing services companies ReachLocal , WordStream, and ThriveHive and U.K. media company Newsquest. There's never been a better time to join our talented team. Visit Gannett.com/Careers to learn more about our opportunities, and visit Gannett Privacy Policy to understand our privacy policy.

Administrative Assistant II

Gannett Publishing Services

Sterling Heights, MI



This position is responsible for providing administrative support for specified production management functions and work centers that may include Production Administration, Imaging/Platemaking, Press, Packaging, Newsprint, Building Services and Systems. Provide administrative support potentially including correspondence, payroll, organizational charts, coordinating schedules, calendars, filing, meeting logistics, special projects and other general

administrative duties for the production department. Prepare and process reports including tracking production data, press and packaging reports, on-time performance, product quality, waste analysis, and other reports used for analysis and/or by other departments.

Maintain a clean and safe work environment.

Maintain employee documentation for required annual OSHA safety training programs.

Provide timely and accurate reports and information to the local operations team and GPS regional management. Education Highschool diploma or equivalent.

Experience- Minimum two years office experience required.

Experience in publishing industry preferred. English language fluency: Speaking, reading & writing. Proven above average verbal and written communication skills with a high degree of concentration towards customers (internal and external) required.



Experience establishing relationships, problem resolution, and sound decision making preferred. Proven ability to handle a variety of administrative responsibilities in fast paced team

environment under deadlines. Must be detail oriented with strong organizational skills.



Proven experience with spreadsheets with an understanding of financial information. Proficient PC Skills including Microsoft Office: E-mail, Excel, Word, PowerPoint. Proven ability to learn industry specific software.

Gannett Co., Inc. is a proud equal opportunity employer. We are a drug free, EEO employer committed to a diverse workforce. We will consider all qualified candidates regardless of race, color, national origin, sex, age, marital status, personal appearance, sexual orientation, gender identity, family responsibilities, disability, education, political affiliation, or veteran status.

Job Family Administrative Support

Job Function General Administration

Pay Type Hourly

Other details


Description

Req #16518 Thursday, July 15, 2021 Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE: GCI) is a subscription-led and digitally focused media and marketing solutions company committed to empowering communities to thrive. With an unmatched reach at the national and local level, Gannett touches the lives of millions with our Pulitzer-Prize winning content, consumer experiences and benefits, and advertiser products and services.



Our current portfolio of media assets includes USA TODAY, local media organizations in 46 states in the U.S., and Newsquest, a wholly owned subsidiary operating in the United Kingdom with more than 120 local news media brands. Gannett also owns the digital marketing services companies ReachLocal, Inc., UpCurve, Inc., and WordStream, Inc., which are marketed under the LOCALiQ brand, and runs the largest media-owned events business in the U.S., USA TODAY NETWORK Ventures.



To connect with us, visit www.gannett.com. LOCALiQ is the marketing solution from the USA TODAY NETWORK providing businesses the smarter way to reach local customers. As local marketing becomes more complex, LOCALiQ empowers local businesses with unique insights from 125 million consumers in our network of sites, apps and experiences and learnings from millions of local leads delivered each year. We couple that with end-to-end service from our experts using local marketing best practices proven across the country. LOCALiQ simplifies local marketing and provides our clients the confidence of growing. Our core values: Community, Progress through Passion, Action with Purposeand Belief in People.If you share these values, come join our family!

TheAccount Executiverole requires a highly personable, intelligent individual with the ability tolead digitally focused sales efforts while maintaining an energetic, strategic and entrepreneurial spirit.

As aUSA TODAY NETWORKAccount Executive, youll partner with clients to provide a broad set of solutions to include: Build Their Presence: Website, SEO, Local Listings, Reputation & Social Media

Drive Awareness & Leads: Search Engine Marketing, Social, Display, Video, and Mobile Advertising

Grow Audience and Connect: Brand Content Solutions, Social Media Marketing

Manage Leads and Customers: Lead Alert, Engagement and Tracking Tools

Know What Works: Reporting, Mobile Tools, Insight Solutions

Emerging technology such as Virtual and Augmented Reality We are dedicated to helping our clients grow based on their unique needs. When they win, we win! As a Marketing Solutions Account Executive, you will: Be equipped with the regions best marketing services and solutions, empowering you to deliver unparalleled results to your customers

Develop partnerships with large local businesses and assist them in reaching their goals through integrated marketing plans and comprehensive media solutions

Identify customer needs to develop and execute account plans and custom client solutions that differentiate USA TODAY NETWORK from competitors

Help businesses maximize their online presence with a custom approach to digital marketing

Leverage multiple USA TODAY NETWORK resources and partners to develop optimal client solutions across our suite of products, with an emphasis on digital What you need to do to be successful in this role: Pursue and close new business and revenue streams

Retain, manage, and grow clients in the ever-changing digital landscape

Work within a team to manage the client relationship and retain and build account revenue

You will identify and understand market potential, develop and execute sales strategies across multiple platforms, including digital, mobile, targeted niche publications, promotions and the core newspaper

Articulate and present our suite of products to business decision makers

Communicate with customers proactively via phone, video conference tools (i.e., MS Team or Zoom), email and in-person

Conduct face-to-face customer meetings, presentations, proposals and demonstrations

Manage a specified sales pipeline and develop a strategy for long-term sustained success

Conduct client check-ins, upsell/cross-sell accounts, and address client market share concerns

Utilize CRM (Salesforce) effectively and efficiently recording all sales activity



What you bring to the table: Aptitude or acumen for Digital Marketing (Google AdWords, Analytics certifications Preferred but Not Required)

Passionate solution-seeker

The ability to work independently to acquire new business remotely

Competitive nature and a winning team spirit

Problem solver who thrives on challenges and can simplify the complex

Excellent communication and presentation skills

Willingness to continuously learn, try new things and adapt to change

Proficient in MS Office Suite including Excel, Word, Power Point and Outlook

This role requires a valid driver license, reliable transportation, and the minimum liability insurance required by law We offer an energized, passionate team within a fun & flexible workplace.We offer competitive compensation with uncapped incentives and world-class benefits, including comprehensive Health, Dental and Vision coverage,401(K), Paid Time Off and more.

This is an opportunity to work alongside digital leaders and visionaries.

#LI-SM1 gan.sales #Sales Gannett Co., Inc.is a proud equal opportunity employer. We are a drug free, EEO employer committed to a diverse workforce. We will consider all qualified candidates regardless of race, color, national origin, sex, age, marital status, personal appearance, sexual orientation, gender identity, family responsibilities, disability, education, political affiliation, or veteran status. Job Family Outside Sales

Job Function Marketing Solutions

Pay Type Salary Other details

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Requirements

None




Benton PUD in Kennewick, WA is seeking an experienced

Electrical Engineer III or Senior Engineer with strong competency in the fundamentals of power system engineering coupled with experience and/or a desire to apply state-of-the-art electric utility technologies including advancing the Districts SCADA system. We are deploying a number of exciting

technologies and systems. Our engineers work to support many of the traditional elements of the electric utility business including 115-kV transmission lines, high-voltage substations, and distribution systems with the opportunity to apply innovative technologies. The work is diverse and challenging but our company is small and personal. Enjoy short commutes to work, great weather, outdoor recreation, and a strong sense of community. We offer a comprehensive compensation and benefits package that includes state pension, health benefits, wellness incentives and more!

For more information about the position and how to apply, visit our website at

www.bentonpud.org/careers .

Equal Opportunity Employer/

Veterans/Disabled

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Location: East Setauket - New York

Job Description Who is Rockwell Do you want to make a difference in the world? At Rockwell Automation you can do just that and more. Rockwell is a global leader in industrial automation and digital transformation. We connect the imaginations of people with the potential technology to expand what is humanly possible, making the world more productive and sustainable. Rockwell is recognized as one of the World's Most Ethical Companies in 2020. We place a high value on integrity which fosters an environment where all employees can and want to do their best work. To learn more about how we are bringing The Connected Enterprise to life across industrial enterprises, please visit www.rockwellautomation.com. What Rockwell Brings to You Rockwell cares about our employees and our benefits package is just one way we support you. Outside the industry expected benefits, Rockwell provides paid parental leave, flexible work schedules, summer hours depending on business needs and eligibility for an annual bonus. To learn more about our Benefits Package, please visit https://raquickfind.com/. What Rockwell Needs from You We need a diverse workforce to do our best work. We need the makers, the forward thinkers, the problem solvers, and everything in between. That is where you come in. We are looking for an Assembler Level 3 to join our diverse production team and be responsible for the assembly of various independent cart servo motion control products, including motors, encoders, etc. Experience will be the determining factor. Schedule: This is a 1st Shift Position, Monday-Friday 7:00 a.m.-3:30 p.m. Job Description Rockwell Automation is looking for a talented Electrical/Mechanical Assembler to join our production team. You will join a diverse production team and be responsible for the assembly of various independent cart servo motion control products, including motors, encoders, etc. Essential Functions and Responsibilities Desired employee will be performing a wide variety of electronic or electro-mechanical assembly operations on assemblies or sub-assemblies.

Determines and/or follows methods and sequence of operations in performing wiring, component installation, hand soldering and cable harnessing on assembly units.

Makes setups and adjustments holding tolerances to blueprint specifications.

Works on assignments that are semi routine in nature but recognizes the need for occasional deviation from accepted practice.

Normally follows established procedures on routine work, requires instructions only on new assignments.

Applies acquired job skills and company policies and procedures to complete assigned tasks. Basic Qualifications: A minimum of High School Diploma/GED OR 2 years of verified related experience

Legal authorization to work in the US is required. We will not sponsor individuals for employment visas, now or in the future, for this job opening Preferred Qualifications Mechanical Assembly Experience

Ability to read and interpret schematics/blueprints

Ability to work under pressure What Integrated Supply Chain Organization Does We are focused on the end-to-end supply chain for Rockwell. We are governed by our enterprise quality function and we plan, source, make and deliver Rockwell products and services to customers. We offer servo drives, servo motors and actuators to provide simplified machine design to provide more system flexibility and improve overall performance. We also provide a new approach to linear motors by using magnets instead of gear/chains and belts to allow for precise motion control with frictionless propulsion. The use of magnets results in reduced downtime and maintenance, decreased energy consumption and improved the ability to change machine profiles. We are an Equal Opportunity Employer including disability and veterans. If you are an individual with a disability and you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation during the application process, please contact our services team at +1 (see application details).


Grow your career and develop a team that shares your desire to make a difference.

Sodexo Education - Schools Division is seeking an experienced and hands on General Manager 2, Food to support a large high profile Regional High School in Mount Holly, NJ, serving 2,400 Students daily. This is a full responsibility Single Operator Account managing a long tenured staff of 20 employees. The best qualified candidate will have previous experience managing a National School Lunch Account with full knowledge of current USDA regulations. We are seeking candidates with strong financial & analytical skills, quality food presentation skills, and proven interpersonal skills.

This position offers the potential for career growth and the opportunity to make every day a better day for the Students in this District! Sodexo Education - Schools manages Student well-being activities for more than 480 School Districts across the country. We serve more than 2.8 Million school meals each week, from New England to the Great Northwest, and our experience and expertise help us to effectively serve the needs of our local communities, school administrators, principals, teachers, parents and students. Be a part of our success in NJ!

The ideal candidate will have experience in Menu Development, Nutrition Education programs, Nutrient Analysis Software, Production & Menu forecasting, Cost Analysis, Unit Operations, Community Involvement and Industry Awareness of new products to meet the current USDA guidelines.

The successful candidate will:

have oversight of day-to-day operations;

deliver high quality food service;

achieve company and client financial targets and goals;

develop and maintain client and customer relationships;

develop strategic plans;

create a positive environment; and/or

ensure Sodexo standards are met.





Is this opportunity right for you? We are looking for candidates who:

have a work history demonstrating strong employee engagement leadership skills, as well as previous supervisory experience and the ability to work collaboratively;

have culinary production experience and a strong background in safety and sanitation compliance;

can manage multiple priorities, demonstrate professional communication skills, and a passion for a high level of customer service;

prioritize tasks and exhibit flexibility to take on additional responsibilities as needed.

Learn more about Rancocas Valley Regional High School at https://www.rvrhs.com/



At Sodexo, we believe every employee should have the resources to be their best. As part of our overall rewards, we offer benefits programs designed to help you maintain a healthy lifestyle including health, dental and vision insurance. We also offer other benefits like paid time off, financial and savings programs, 401k, and access to our employee assistance program and other discounts. Click here for more information about Sodexo's Benefits.


Totowa, NJ Aroma Chemical manufacturer looking for an experienced, articulate, well organized person to join our Customer Service Team.

Good phone skills and computer literacy required.

Navision / Excel /Word a plus.

College graduate.

Minimum 5 years experience.

Bilingual preferred.

Starting salary 70K and up for the right person.

Benefits include: 401K, Health & Dental

Click APPLY NOW to submit your resume and be considered today!!

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2.0 FTE CLERK/TYPISTS



There are openings for (2) FTE Clerk/Typist positions in the North Rose-Wolcott

School District



Twelve (12) month position

7.5 hours per day, 5 days per week

Rate of pay per contract

The successful candidates must be reachable on the current Clerk/Typist list

established by Wayne County Civil Service, must have a Clerk/Typist classification

in their present position for hire via transfer or meet the minimum qualifications

to be a successful candidate and will be provisionally appointed until the next test

is offered.



MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS: Graduation from high school or a high school equivalency

diploma including or supplemented by a course in typing; or two years of clerical experience

which shall have involved typing.



NOTE: Applicants seeking employment in this position may be required to provide verifiable

training and/or experience in the operation of word processing equipment or personal

computer equipment where such skills are a prerequisite to the satisfactory performance of the

work.



Deadline for applications: July 20, 2021 or until filled

The North Rose-Wolcott Central School District is located in Central New York, on the south shore of Lake Ontario. The school district covers 162 square miles. North Rose and Wolcott are both rural, agricultural communities with a diverse population. Many residents commute to the Rochester and Syracuse regions for work.

North Rose-Wolcott Central Schools enroll approximately 1,200 students. Students in grades pre-K through four attend NRW Elementary School. Leavenworth Middle School serves students in grades five through eight. Students in grades nine through 12 attend NRW High School.

The mission of the North Rose-Wolcott Central School District is to prepare each student for a successful future.

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Magnolia, AR (71754)

Today

A shower is possible early. Some passing clouds. Low 68F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

A shower is possible early. Some passing clouds. Low 68F. Winds light and variable.
Magnolia, AR (71754)

Today

A shower is possible early. Partly cloudy skies. Low 68F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

A shower is possible early. Partly cloudy skies. Low 68F. Winds light and variable.
The Board of Directors of the African Development Bank Group has approved a $20 million flexible loan to finance Seychelles Governance and Economic Reforms Support Program, expected to help drive the island nations macroeconomic stability and recovery from Covid-19 in the medium-term.

The government program aims to deepen reforms introduced through the Banks Covid-19 Crisis Response Budget Support Program, approved in June 2020 for $10 million. These reforms are expected to advance fiscal sustainability, improve the business environment and Seychelles climate change and environmental resilience.

The Banks financing will complement funds from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in support of reforms that will benefit Seychelles private sector, dominated by small enterprises. By ensuring that such businesses stay afloat during these challenging times, the operation will positively impact women and the youth, while creating employment and equal opportunities.

Seychelles Minister of Finance, Trade, Investment and Economic Planning, Naadir N.H. Hassan, thanked the Bank for being a trusted partner in the countrys development. The facility comes at an opportune time and will provide much-needed relief given the economic hardship we are faced with in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. It will help the government meet the current budgetary financing gap and help achieve economic development targets as we steer the country on the path to recovery and debt sustainability, Hassan said.

The global downturn emanating from the Covid-19 pandemic has unfavorably impacted Seychelles economy, in spite of government interventions.

The Covid-19 pandemic has devastated the tourism sector, which contributes about 25% of GDP and accounts for the largest share of total employment, said Nnenna Nwabufo, Director General of the Bank Groups East Africa Regional Development and Business Delivery Office.

She noted that on the same day the loan was approved, the IMF and the Seychelles government reached a staff-level agreement for a $107 million arrangement under the Funds Extended Fund Facility, which underscores the timeliness of the Banks intervention and the strength of the partnership between the Bank and the IMF.

The pandemic has severely impacted Seychelles macroeconomic performance. Real GDP growth, which averaged 4.2% in 2016-2019, contracted by 12.9% in 2020. The overall fiscal deficit of between -1.4% and 0.7% of GDP in the 2016-2019 period widened to -19.5% in 2020, while public debt that stood at 62.3% of GDP at end-2018, is now projected at 87.7% by the end of 2021, according to the Banks appraisal report.

The Banks approved and ongoing portfolio in Seychelles as at July 2021 comprises five operations in the public sector totaling $45.7 million. Of these 53% are in the water supply and sanitation sector, and 47% in the multi-sector.
State police said emergency responders were called shortly after 3 a.m. Saturday to a collision involving two cars in the westbound lanes of I-76 in Lower Merion Township, Montgomery County. Police said the trooper was speaking with one of the drivers when a sport utility vehicle drove up on the right shoulder and hit the trooper and three firefighters as well as one of the cars.
Police havent found any gunshot victims, according to a news release from the department, but found ballistic evidence in the area after they responded to a report of gunshots at 9:23 p.m.
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National

Mamatas likely meet with Sonia in Delhi could thaw TMC-Congress ties

Mamata Banerjee

NEW DELHI, JUL 25 (AGENCIES) | Publish Date: 7/25/2021 1:11:48 PM IST

With an eye on 2024 Lok Sabha elections, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee will meet with the leaders of opposition over the next three days from July 26 during her Delhi visit, reports News 18.

But her likely meeting with Congress president Sonia Gandhi is what is gaining traction. Despite Trinamool Congress and Congress having frosty ties, Mamata had called up Sonia to inquire about her health, which magnifies the extent of their relationship unlike with Rahul Gandhi, who Mamata has been openly critical of.

In private, Mamata was often heard saying that it was former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi who had shaped her political career. When Rajiv Gandhi had noticed an angry Mamata, who had accused many Congress leaders of attacking her, he suggested that she contest against Left leader Somnath Chatterjee. Mamatas win marked the political significance in Bengal as it ended the 34-year-long Left rule in the state.

Interestingly, Congress took to Twitter on Sunday and said PM Modi took the adage, keep your enemies closer a little too far as it detailed the alleged spying on Mamatas nephew Abhishek Banerjee, who is also the All India General Secretary of the TMC. To which, TMCs chief whip in Rajya Sabha Derek OBrien responded Khela Hobe, referring to Mamatas slogan for the Bengal assembly elections.

The Pegasus issue is common between TMC and Congress as both Abhishek and Rahul figure in it. Many within Congress say its time the parties stick together on the issue inside Parliament.

During her three-day visit to the national capital, Mamata will reach out to all opposition parties in an attempt to lay the groundwork for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections thus hinting at a bigger role in the opposition after her massive victory in Bengal assembly polls. Even in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Mamata had tried to bring the warring opposition leaders together but failed. The Brigade Ground rally ahead of 2014 General Elections couldnt take off as Congress leaders didnt see Mamata as a powerful leader, hence they didnt turn up. But this time Mamata comes with hope.

With most opposition heavyweights such as TDPs Chandrababu Naidu down and out and Congress facing an identity crisis within, Mamata is now being looked up to as someone who could take on the might of Modi.

Mamata is also expected to meet the PM Modi July 27 for the first time since the state polls where she will bring up Covid management and vaccination issues. She is also likely to seek more funds for West Bengal amid the Covid situation.

There are signs that Mamata is working at playing the same role as Sonia did in 2004 when she kept the UPA intact. Abhishek is being pitched as the face of the TMC. He has been given important charge as the general secretary and is hobnobbing with all senior leaders. The Pegasus issue has put focus on Abhishek whose stature, may believe, has grown in a convoluted sense within the party because hes now been projected as a victim. Should Mamata shift her base and her focus on national politics towards the end of this Lok Sabha term and Abhishek handle state affairs is left for Abhishek to decide. According to TMC insiders, they have been made to understand that Abhishek would call the shots.

Its thus apparent that Mamata now does not want to give up any opportunity to project herself as the only alternative to Modi. And Congresss support is critical in her plan. But Congress has its own ambition and cannot be seen as subservient to a regional party like the Trinamool Congress. Also, in many states both the parties are clashing with each other but the presence of two senior Congress leaders at Shaheed Diwas event on July 21 showed that Congress understood that TMC and Mamata couldnt be ignored.

In this, election strategist Prashant Kishor played an important role. Kishor met with three Gandhis (Sonia, Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra) and sources said Mission 2024 was one of the agendas. Kishor had reportedly asked Gandhis that if the Congress had to cede space for a bigger cause then theres nothing wrong or humiliating for it.

Mamata will try and build bridges during her long-awaited Delhi visit. Shes would make it a point that she wouldnt be just seen as the CM of West Bengal but a national leader. More importantly, she will try to remind the BJP that she had inflicted a defeat on them in the high-stakes battle in West Bengal. As TMC says the game is on it is intriguing to see who will ultimately win match?
Scientists from Uganda described in their 2021 study a 'grisly encounter' among albino chimps back in 2018, when elder apes murdered a baby albino.

Spotting an albino chimp in the wild has been considered as a rare sighting according to researchers, in which only a few of the nonhuman primates with albinism was recorded so far, including some toque macaques (Macaca sinica), bonnet macaques (Macaca radiata) and spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi). Among the great apes was an albino western lowland gorilla which was captured in the wild when it was still a baby and had lived its adult life in the cage until its death.

It was only once that an albino chimp or western chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes verus) had been sighted. The chimp named Pinkie was sheltered in the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Sierra Leone, and also lived a short life (age 9).

The young ape had not provided much opportunities for researchers to observe its social interaction and behavior with other wild chimps, which is why the team had furthered their study on the brief life of an albino ape in the wild.

A Short-lived Life for the Young Albino Chimp

On the summer of 2018, earlier days prior to the young chimp's death, researchers had observed strange behaviors of eastern chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) in Uganda's Budongo Central Forest Reserve upon seeing the 2-and-a-half weeks old baby albino, with its mother referred to by the scientists as 'UP', a 19-year-old female chimp.

The chimp community, consisted of about 75 individuals at the time, started producing sounds of physical aggression and 'tantrum screams' upon seeing UP with its 'white' male baby chimp, as if warning for potentially dangerous animals. Days later, on July 19, the young chimp was found dead.

Field assistant Bosco Chandia of the Budongo Conservation Field Station and researcher Mael Leroux on the early morning found a male ape clutching the severely wounded albino infant to his chest and started "biting the fingers, legs and the right ear of the infant", while the others were producing 'waa' barks.

After the chimps left the mutated body of the infant chimp, the research team collected the body for an autopsy, revealing "sustained substantial injuries, including deep gashes in its head and a crack in its skull, revealing damaged brain tissue beneath."

Also read: Monkeys Capable of Picking Up New Accents to Communicate Better

An Unusual Reaction from Elder Albinos

The team wrote that the elder chimps' reaction upon seeing the albino chimp was 'unusual'. Typically, chimps react with curiosity to newborns, touching and grooming the infants as well as their mothers. But that was not the case with the poor baby ape.

The authors suggest that group might have perceived the baby chimp as a novel object, "or at least as an individual from outside their territory", Which can be explained by the white coloration of the infant which resembled to that of black and white colobus monkeys (Colobus guereza), a chimp's prey.

The team said they cannot draw a conclusion from the appearance alone due to several factors, which makes the community's reaction remain unclear.

Also read: What is Monkeypox Disease? UK Reports Two Cases of Rare Virus
Foreign minister AK Abdul Momen, along with Japanese ambassador to Bangladesh Ito Naoki, briefs the media at Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport in Dhaka on Saturday after receiving about 2.45 lakh doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine from Japan.  New Age photo

The government has decided to administer Covid vaccine to all citizens above 18 years of age for extending the vaccination coverage and keeping educational activities unhindered, health minister Zahid Maleque said on Saturday.

The Information and Communication Technology Division has been instructed for taking measures to facilitate registration for all citizens aged above 18 years through Surokkha app, controlled by the government, by lowering the minimum age of registration from 30 years, he said.

The government now has a stock of over one crore doses of Covid vaccines, said the minister at a function organised by the Bangladesh Private Medical College Association in the capital.

Bangladesh on Saturday received from Japan 2.45 lakh doses of Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, produced by the country, as gift.

In the 24 hours till 2:30pm on Saturday, 1,91,780 more people registered themselves for Covid vaccination across the country, taking the total number of registrants to about 1.18 crore since the launch of the campaign in February, according to the Directorate General of Health Services.

Among them, about 72 lakh people have received the first jab and over 43 lakh got both doses as a total of about 1.15 crore doses have been administered across the country, according to the DGHS.

In an effort to diversify the sources of vaccine procurement, the Bangladesh government has so far approved seven vaccines  Indian Covishield, also known as Oxford-AstraZeneca, Moderna of the United States, Sinopharm and Coronavac/ Sinovac of China, Sputnik V of Russia, Comirnaty of Pfizer of the United States and Janssen of Belgium.

Bangladesh has received vaccine doses through both bilateral purchase deals with India and China and multilateral grants under mechanisms, including Covax of the World Health Organisations.

The country has received about 1.02 crore doses of the Indian Covishield, also known as the Oxford-AstraZeneca, 2.45 lakh doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca from Japan, 55 lakh doses of the Moderna and 1.06 lakh doses of the Pfizer from the US and 51 lakh doses of the Chinese Sinopharm till Saturday.

The government is now maintaining a stock of about 3.27 lakh doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca, 40.47 lakh doses of the Sinopharm, 52.3 lakh doses of the Moderna and around 56,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccines, according to DGHS documents.

The health minister also said that the government would procure about two crore doses of vaccines by August.

There will be a stock of about 21 crore doses of vaccines in the beginning of the next year as the government will procure vaccines, including three crore doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca, three crore doses from China, seven crore doses from Russia and seven crore doses of the Janssen, from either Belgium or the US, he added.
THE South African Police Service (SAPS) has, with the help of the community, re-arrested three of the four armed robbers who escaped from a police van while being taken to court last week.

Only one of the suspects, Dennis Hove, has not been accounted for, while South African robber Figos Madisha, and two Zimbabweans Clifford Mutonhori and John Fine were re-captured.

The notorious robbers were arrested after committing a spate of carjackings, including hitting on two haulage trucks on the N1 Highway between Johannesburg and Beitbridge.

Police hail the total commitment and unwavering support displayed by ordinary community members and other organised community structures today, Saturday July 24, 2021, in assisting the police to rearrest three of the four dangerous criminals who escaped from a police motor vehicle on Wednesday July 21, 2021, SAPS Limpopo provincial Commander Thembi Hadebe said.

The criminals escaped last Friday while on a police truck which was taking them to court for sentencing along the R101 Road, south of Polokwane. They allegedly hijacked a truck and later abandoned it at Ysyerberg on the N1 Road, the South African police said.

Earlier, the suspects had allegedly hijacked another truck at Nyl Plaza tollgate, but ran into a police checkpoint as they were driving it, resulting in their arrest. Newsday
Keep in mind, the Suicide Squad are villains, Cena, 44, said. Theyre villainous characters, for whatever reason, that have been chosen to save the world. I believe at the core of every villain, unless they are truly a corrupted mind and truly just want to watch the world burn, they have to believe what theyre doing is right and theyre misunderstood. Like, the world just doesnt get it.
The New Jersey real estate executive wrote checks, many for $2,000 each, made out to cash that were deposited in Turners account, according to records. Documents filed by Kim show a total of $185,500 in deposits from an account in the executives name. The lighting designers company wired Turner a total of $116,000 over six years, according to bank records included in the court filing. Many of the individual payments were $10,000.
Music man: COVID, what COVID? Mayor de Blasio announced Thursday that the city will host five large-scale concerts next month and urged people from near and far to flock to the Big Apple for the unforgettable events. The five free concerts, one in each borough, will take place during the week starting Aug. 16, culminating in a previously announced Aug. 21 gig on the Great Lawn in Central Park. Meanwhile, New York is in the midst of a troubling uptick in coronavirus cases due to the delta variant. I am issuing a FOMO alert, de Blasio said, using the Fear of Missing Out acronym popular with younger generations. Unless you want to spend the rest of your life saying, oh my god I missed it, you should get to New York City in the month of August, where amazing things will be happening.
You could tell she was upset. ... She told me her boyfriend was in the accident, and she didnt know anything. I just stayed with her for five or 10 minutes and tried to give her some comfort, said Donna Odom. Its every parents nightmare.
He fought for our right to vote, our most sacred right, Johnson stated. He knew that justice, freedom and democracy were not a state, but an ongoing struggle. So may his light continue to guide us as we face another wave of Jim Crow laws. His example is more important now than ever.
A similar rescue was made earlier Friday by Maryland State Police Helicopter Trooper 1, regarding an individual who was hurt after jumping 20 to 30 feet off a rock in a creek at Gilpins Falls, authorities said on the departments Facebook page.
Hempstead Councilman Bruce Blakeman lost his temper at the local commissioner of waterways over the sight of a fishing boat in Reynolds Channel opposite the politicians stately townhouse in a May 2017 incident, according to a memo written by the commissioner at the time.
I think its going to be total chaos, said tenant advocate Cea Weaver of Housing Justice for All. Im really nervous about it. I also think that the crisis caused by COVID-19 is going to last longer than emergency measures. Its just an entrenched economic crisis now.
It is my responsibility as the speaker of the House to make sure we get to the truth of this, and we will not let their antics stand in the way of that, she said last week.
The challenge is ... you got folks who want to make big bold statements but sometimes dont want to roll up their sleeves, get into the details and make the very hard choices about where we find these pay-fors, he said.
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The TV outlet did not specify which day Snow died, but reported he decided not to join his wife when she left a hotel bar and went back to their room. She reportedly realized he hadnt come back after waking up at 4 a.m.
How dare you judge anyone, especially someone going through this process, Kloots wrote in an Instagram story. I will address this soon guys I promise. Theres too much to say and too much that widows deal with to not talk about it. Until then I will call out anyone who is rude enough to comment like this.
After Jenny from the Blocks very public split from ex-Yankee Alex Rodriguez in April, the slugger seemingly drove Lopez right back into the waiting arms of her ex, who was still moping around from his own breakup with Knives Out star Ana de Armas.
Honestly, I was working all the time, White said. I was always doing a Broadway show or some show somewhere. Also, I had two kids and I was a single parent, so I didnt have the money or the time to do it  like the way we were able to do it. Ive been working on recording and recording a little thing here and there but its taken until this time to actually get a full studio album produced with just me.
Investigators found one bullet lodged in the side of a small motorboat, though they never figured out where the fourth slug landed. They also discovered what proved to be a huge clue  two mens hats were under the boat. One was expensive with the initials B.B. sewed into the lining. The other was well-worn, had remnants of blond hair and dandruff  Bradway had brown hair  and was several sizes smaller than what the victim wore.
Miguel Arrellano Sanchez can be seen illustrated by the Human Services Resource Center. With Bill 2835 passing, there is more availability to aid for students at Oregon State through the efforts of HSRC.
This is Patrira y Vida hasta que se seque el malecon, Otero said, which translates to this is Homeland and life until the seashore dries, a popular saying in Cuba. The Hasta que se seque el malecon saying has been immortalized in a song by Gente de Zona, and has been explained as a metaphor with which Cubans identify because it exemplifies their capacity to overcome their infinite struggles and to always see life with optimism.
Police officers arrested James this morning with the help of witnesses in the area. She has been charged with attempted murder and detained at the Orange County Jail, OPD said.
My goal is to not only raise money for homeless people, raise money for the Coast Guard, raise money for the police department, raise money for the fire department. They are in public service, they do it for safety and they help other people, Reza Baluchi told the station.
The suspect wasnt hit by the deputies gunfire and fled to a building about a block away, where deputies found blood. The officers at first thought he had been wounded in the shootout, but later determined he fatally shot himself, DeMario said.
There has been much debate about whether the rent assistance should go directly to the landlord or directly to the tenant. Under the Emergency Rental Assistance Program rules, if a landlord will not agree to accept the assistance in full satisfaction of any claims against the tenant, then the assistance can go directly to the tenant. However, most tenants in Florida do not realize the critical importance of depositing the back rent into the registry of the court, a unique feature of eviction cases. The risk is that the funds are distributed directly to the tenant and the tenant ends up getting evicted anyway due to not following the proper procedure.
There were a lot of people there that had regrets that they wish that they had known more before they votedThere's three of them that voted [for Biden] that feel terrible about it. I said you know what? I said you didn't know about this but you thought you were voting for something. I said you didn't get to vote. I said China did our voteWhen we get through this and the Supreme Court pulls down this election -- like I've been telling everybody -- when they do this, it's going to be a great uniting and that gives me hope[B]y the night of the 12th or the morning of the 13th, if everyone has seen it, including the administration that's in there now that didn't win, maybe, you know, Biden and Harris would say, hey, we're here to protect the country and resign!"

My Pillow guy and former crack addict Mike Lindell on what will happen after he broadcasts his cyber-symposium on the 2020 election  the return of Trump on August 13.
CounterPunch, July 9, 2021

By Mahboob A. Khawaja

We Are Going to Lose the War in Afghanistan and it will Help Bankrupt us. One of our major strategic blunders in Afghanistan was not to have recognized that both Great Britain and the Soviet Union attempted to pacify Afghanistan using the same military methods as ours and failed disastrously. We seem to have learned nothing from Afghanistans modern history  to the extent that we even know what it is. Between 1849 and 1947  Chalmers Johnson. Dismantling the Empire  Americas Last Best Hope

Was George W. Bush and NATO Pathological Liars to Invade Afghanistan?

After the 9/11, America led NATOs invasion of Afghanistan was a revulsion against truth as it was in complete disconnect to the living consciousness of global community. David Corn (Is the President a Pathological Liar? Bushs unhealthy relationship with reality: LAWeekly: 12/11/2003), outlines the compelling facts:

Bush was more likely engaged in the deceit of triumphalism- ignoring facts and saying whatever sounds good to juice up the public. It was hype, extreme rhetoric, utterly divorced from events on the ground.a demonstration to Bushs penchant to embrace and (peddle) self-serving fantasy over the obvious truth.We will not rest until we bring these committed killers to justiceWe must, and we will continue to take the fight to the enemy.

When falsehood goes unchallenged, it attracts shallow and puppets accomplices into the fold. Pakistan military ruler General Musharaf and many puppet Arab dictators were conveniently hired to promote the bogus war on terrorism, and Afghanistan was the first casualty of this wicked cruelty. What General Musharaf and Arab stooges did was shameful and disgrace to the teachings of Islam allowing CIA-FBI to move freely and detain at will innocent people to fill the Guantanamo Bay torture headquarter. From an impregnable truth to a hallow hypothesis carved out by the then US President George W. Bush the War on Terrorism  was in his words a crusade against Islam. Western war history is full of tragic tensions articulated by mentally retarded leaders like George W. Bush and Tony Blair (UK) to avoid accountability for the happening of 9/11 events in 2001. Afghanistan was a well calculated target to be invaded, bombed, terrorized, degenerated and destroyed for all futuristic times in history. To the US and NATO invaders, the war against Afghanistan had several strategic aims:

* To show the American masses that George W. Bush was taking revenge action for the 9/11 attack and killings in NY* To make Afghanistan a scapegoat for the 19 alleged Saudi attackers on the NY Twin Towers* To expand the American military control and to denuclearize Pakistan as a threat to futuristic American national interests

Comforting the major paradoxes of history as Arnold Toynbee (A Study of History) described warrior as dreamers devoid of moral and intellectual imagination when they come close to stagnation they jump to irrational outbursts and conclusions about the facts of life. Twenty years later America and NATO cannot claim any victory but were defeated by Taliban insurgency to hold peace talks in Doha. America under Joe Bidden presidency is moving fast to withdraw its remaining troops from Afghanistan. Taliban excelsior is on rise and nobody could predict the peaceful transition of Afghanistan under American or NATOs occupation after 20 years of deaths and destructions. Afghan Government or Taliban or the occupying foreign forces cannot imagine the future of Pakistan or a peaceful tomorrow for the much deprived people of Afghanistan. All public institutions of peoples participation and political governance are fractured and masses are fearful of their future. The American aim and will to destroy Afghanistan, its people, its culture and history were all converging factors during the USled NATO occupation of that country.

They planned and organized Bagram Prison Airbase like the Al-Ghraib Prison in Iraq, and systematically tortured and hanged thousands and thousands of innocent Afghanis, Pakistanis, Arabs and people of other nations who opposed the US aggression. Dr. Afia Siddiqui (Pakistan female doctor) and Mozamm Begg (British national of Pakistani origin) were no exceptions as victims of insanity and planned cruelty against the civilians. Guantanamo Bay Prison was set-up with hurriedly bought Afghani, Pakistani and other Arab civilians and Bush administration according to the US news media, paid between $5000.00 to $15000.00 per head for the first batch of 262 innocent detainees to Afghan and Pakistani warlords to populate the Guantanamo Bay torturing facility. American-NATO officials were instrumental for wide range of socio-economic and political systematic corruption across Afghanistan and Pakistan. Facts and truth will not differ if there is any legal and moral waking consciousness still intact for accountability, Pakistani and Afghani law and justice authorities should hold all those responsible including General Musharaf for crimes against humanity.

Ironically, President Obama called the American soldiers invincible army who massacred civilians and cold blood murdered innocent children, women, and bombed funeral gatherings, wedding parties and Afghans sleeping in their beds. None of them ever faced any legal accountability for their crimes against the unprotected civilians of Afghanistan. American NATO soldiers experienced trauma of inhuman battlefield and many end up committing suicide- a chronic problem in NATOs cavalry. Cyrus Massounmi reporting in the MRConservatice: 5/23/2013), explains the saga:

22 Soldiers Commit Suicide Every Day, One Veteran Says Many Die For A Profit (See Mahboob A. Khawaja, Why do Soldiers Commit Suicide and Global Warlords: Uncommon Thought Journal:

4/14/2014).

American News Media Never Published the Photos of Massacred Afghan Children and Women

Does hypocrisy and cynicism have another name? To invest in favorite perversion, torture, corruption and massacre of the innocent people happening frequently to portray sadistic political governance, and the world can watch the bloody atrocities with deafening silence and inhuman complacency but what kind of glorification would it produce for the generations to come to understand the norms of humanity? Under Bushs dictum, dead American troops were transported quietly back to America and buried under questionable conditions. Deliberate massacres of the innocents need no explanation or psychological clarification, massacre is massacre. Under NATO, the Western allied nations use media as a weapon to manage innovative battlefield and defeat the perceived enemies in lands far away that the US military minds could not understand  its people, their psychology or cultural identity. To put a pattern to the context, first it was the US marines photos of pissing on the dead Afghani corps, then the unknowing burning of the Muslim Holy Book Quran, and then the added new massacres of the innocent sleeping children and women. The American history narrates that President Thomas Jefferson, the architect of the American Constitution had three volumes of the Holy Al-Quran in his library that he used to devise the legal, moral and ethical stipulations for the American Constitution. Does it mean that the American populace is not aware of its own recent history?

The informed and conscientious global community wonders, when rationality would replace the drudgery, hypocrisy of wars and killings of the innocent people? History will judge the people and leaders by their actions, not by their claims.

America and NATO must be held Accountable for Crimes against Humanity in Afghanistan

We, the People cannot afford a slanted vision of today and the world of tomorrow  the superficial picture evolved by the warmongers. We, the People have lost time and opportunities for a planned change of the global systems of political governance  indeed a loss of time which can never be repaired for the good of mankind. One major factor encouraging the global superpowers to go freely and unchallenged out of their own hemisphere to farfetched lands and commit massacres and destroy human habitats, is the obvious corrupt system of global peace and security operated by the UNO. We, the People must try to invest in becoming a moral being- a morality of seamless international human bonds to ensure protection and security of all human beings on this planet as One Community of Nations.

America and its European allies have executed war plans of willful and meditated destruction of the Muslim world disguised as war on terrorism. America and NATO should be held accountable and not to repeat this tyranny again in human history. The International Criminal Court (The ICC at The Hague) had several experienced-based complaints to be investigated against America-NATO for crimes against humanity in Afghanistan and Iraq, but Obama and Trump threatened retaliatory action against the ICC if it pursued the complaints. The ICC (Rome Statute 1998) signed by 120 nations but the Statute was denied the logic of universal jurisdiction over all states. A UN Commission should be organized to investigate and hold deliberations to make America and NATO pay for the insanity and war reparations to Afghanistan and some 34,000 civilians charcoaled by US drones in tribal belts of Northern Pakistan.

We live in One World and on One Planet  Earth. The planet Earth is not a dead orbiting object but a living entity providing continuous nourishment to human life and existence and to all other living beings. Its governing laws are defined by its Creator. America as it appears is not heeding to warnings from God. When people and nations challenge the sanctity and limits of the Laws of God and violate all known norms and principles of human behavior, they could well become an object of unthinkable natural calamities and disasters. The Holy Bible and Al-Quran are full of such revelations and warnings as reminders to those people who are wise enough to listen and learn and care for accountability and sustainable future.

The Universe and all it encompasses are the products of God-given command; and do not operate in concert with man-made legislatures, constitutions, foreign policies, judgments, hopes and desires. It is beyond doubts that when aggressor nations challenged the sanctity of the Laws of God governing the Earth and the living Universe, and invade small and poor nations in farfetched lands, they ultimately meet their own end by natural causes such as earthquakes, flooding, tornados, exploding lavas, sound blasts, lightning, unthinkable pandemics and lot more. Are there any Thinking people in America and Europe and within the planning nerves of NATO to take heed from the prevalent facts of human history?

Long time ago, Eric Bogle synthesized the poem- The Green Fields of France and many have sung it to remind the mankind of a just cause in waiting at the global table of the contemporary war racketeers and sadistic warmongers:

Did you really believe, when they told you the cause,Did you really believe that this war would end wars?Well, the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame,The killing and dying it was all done in vainOh Willy McBride it all happened again And again, and again, and again, and again.

Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in international affairs-global security, peace and conflict resolution with keen interests in Islamic-Western comparative cultures and civilizations, and author of several publications including the latest: One Humanity and the Remaking of Global Peace, Security and Conflict Resolution. Lambert Academic Publications, Germany, 12/2019.
The New York Times, July 15, 2021

By Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Asad Timory

KABUL, Afghanistan  The Taliban pushed their way into a provincial capital in Afghanistans northwest on Wednesday, freeing prisoners there and threatening to overrun the city itself.

Details were murky from the city, Qala-e-Naw, the capital of Badghis Province, where fighting was widespread. Videos posted on social media showed some residents welcoming Taliban fighters on motorbikes as they entered.

The entire city is under control of the Taliban, said Abdul Rahim Rahin, a member of Parliament from Badghis, though his statement could not be immediately confirmed. Reports from the city in the afternoon said that airstrikes by the Afghan Air Force had helped push back the Taliban fighters.

Despite dire reports from the ground, a statement from the Ministry of Defense on Wednesday afternoon said the Taliban were fleeing and that in the next few hours, all parts of the city will be cleared.The assault on Qala-e-Naw is the latest in the Talibans recent offensive, which began in earnest as U.S. and international forces began withdrawing from the country in May. In the span of just over two months, the Taliban have managed to seize at least 150 of Afghanistans roughly 400 districts.

Other provincial capitals in the countrys north  long known as an anti-Taliban stronghold  are also under siege, with insurgent fighters on the periphery of at least three other important cities.

The Talibans recent victories have put the Afghan government in an increasingly difficult position. Hundreds of Afghan troops have surrendered in past months, forfeiting significant amounts of weapons and equipment to the already well-supplied insurgent group. Last week more than a thousand Afghan troops fled into neighboring Tajikistan to escape the Taliban advance.

What American forces remain in Afghanistan have provided some assistance, with fleeting air support that now originates from outside the country.

Caught in the middle of this brutal new chapter of the war are civilians, dozens of whom have been wounded and killed along with tens of thousands who have been displaced.

The assault on Qala-e-Naw is the latest in the Talibans recent offensive, which began in earnest as U.S. and international forces began withdrawing from the country in May. In the span of just over two months, the Taliban have managed to seize at least 150 of Afghanistans roughly 400 districts.

Other provincial capitals in the countrys north  long known as an anti-Taliban stronghold  are also under siege, with insurgent fighters on the periphery of at least three other important cities.

The Talibans recent victories have put the Afghan government in an increasingly difficult position. Hundreds of Afghan troops have surrendered in past months, forfeiting significant amounts of weapons and equipment to the already well-supplied insurgent group. Last week more than a thousand Afghan troops fled into neighboring Tajikistan to escape the Taliban advance.

What American forces remain in Afghanistan have provided some assistance, with fleeting air support that now originates from outside the country.

Caught in the middle of this brutal new chapter of the war are civilians, dozens of whom have been wounded and killed along with tens of thousands who have been displaced.

On Wednesday, the Taliban broke into the Badghis provincial jail and freed those inside, said Mirwais, a police officer in Qala-e-Naw who like many Afghans goes by one name. Dozens of inmates have escaped.

Taliban attacks on provincial capitals are prohibited under the deal on troop withdrawal that the United States signed with the insurgent group last year. The Taliban seem to have adhered to that during their current offensive, as they have sought to avoid civilian casualties and bad publicity. But in some cases, local Taliban commanders have taken advantage of their gains and attacked some cities.

The battle unfolding in Qala-e-Naw, a city of about 50,000 people, has increasingly looked like a direct assault, with the remaining government forces pinned down. It is unclear, however, if the Taliban will try and hold the city outright.

The city will fall to the Taliban if air support does not arrive, Abdul-Rahim Khan, a police commander in a nearby district, said in an interview as the fighting progressed.

On Tuesday, Taliban fighters ambushed a large convoy of Afghan security forces on their way to Qala-e-Naw, killing dozens. Though the exact number of casualties is unclear, Mr. Khan said more than 60 troops were killed and that more than a dozen others had been taken prisoner.
TOLO News, July 24, 2021

By Massoud Ansar

Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) on Saturday said that 33 people were assassinated in Kandahar over the past two weeks.

Religious scholars, tribal elders, civil society activists, journalists and human rights defenders and female journalists are being sacrificed in targeted attacks, said Zabihullah Farhang, spokesman to AIHRC.

Any group that resorts on harming civilians is conducting a war crime under the rules of war, said Laal Gul Laal, the head of Human Rights Organization.

The Human Rights Watch (HRW), meanwhile, in a report said that hundreds of people in the districts that were fallen to the Taliban in Afghanistans southern Kandahar province have been detained and some were killed by the group over their alleged associated with the Afghan government and the countrys security institutions.

The watchdog said that the Taliban have reportedly killed some detainees, including relatives of provincial government officials and members of Afghanistans National Police (ANP) and the Afghan National army (ANA).

Citing reports by the journalists, the Human Rights Watch said that after Taliban forces took control of Kandahars Spin Boldak border crossing with Pakistan on July 8, and the Spin Boldak district center on July 16, they conducted searches to identify residents who have worked for the local government or security forces.

Taliban forces that control areas around Kandahar city have carried out similar searches and have evicted some residents. Local media have reported that the Taliban have taken more than 300 people into custody and have detained them in unidentified locations, HRW said.

There are grave concerns that Taliban forces in Kandahar may commit further atrocities to retaliate against the government and security forces. said Patricia Gossman, associate Asia director at Human Rights Watch. Taliban leaders have denied responsibility for any abuses, but growing evidence of expulsions, arbitrary detentions, and killings in areas under their control are raising fears among the population.

The Taliban have told members of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), including police who have been the principal security force in Kandahar, to register with them to receive letters guaranteeing their safety, the HRW said, quoting a local activist in Kandahar.

According to the report, Taliban forces also gone to the homes of some ANDSF members who had registered, taken them into custody, and killed an unknown number of them.

Local activists said that in one case, on July 9, the Taliban shot and killed a man named Nangiyali, in front of family members. He was a resident of Sarposa, Kandahar, who had previously worked with the police, said HRW.

The UN, US, and other countries engaged in the peace talks should urgently call on the Taliban leadership to stop these killings and other abuses, Gossman said.

On Thursday sources familiar with the report said that Unidentified gunmen reportedly have killed "over a 100 civilians" in Spin Boldak district of Kandahar province.

The Afghan Ministry of Interior (MoI) confirmed the report, saying these civilians were killed without any reason.

The Afghan government blamed the Taliban for the murder of civilians.

The brutal terrorists on the order of their Punjabi bosses (Pakistan) ambushed the homes of the innocent Afghans in certain areas of Spin Boldak, looted the homes and martyred 100 innocent people, said Mirwais Stanekzai, a spokesman for the Ministry of Interior.

They must respect intentional laws and the law of war on the battlefields, said legal expert Qazi Abdul Rahim.

If revenge continues in this country, they (Taliban) must remember that the nation will retaliate against them, said former governor of Helmand Amir Mohammad Akhundzada.

The US Department of State has also raised concerns over reports of extrajudicial killings by the Taliban.

Recent reports of violence and atrocities against interpreters and other Afghan activist indicate local Taliban forces are showing little regard towards human rights and human rights on the ground. We condemns these targeted attacks, the destruction of infrastructure as well as other attacks against the people of Afghanistan, said Jalina Porter, the deputy State Department spokesperson.

But the Taliban has denied any involvement in human rights violations in areas under their control.
A Place for All Conservatives to Speak Their Mind.
A day after India won its first silver medal, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that the 'Victory Punch Campaign' has already begun on social media.

The Prime Minister urged people to share victory punch along with team and cheer for India. He said, "These sportspersons have reached where they are after overcoming numerous hurdles in life. Today, they possess strength of your love and support. Come let's extend our good wishes to all of them, encourage them."

He said, "at Tokyo Olympics, watching Indian sportspersons' march carrying Tricolour exhilarated not just me but the entire country, as if the whole country unitedly exhorted her warriors saying, 'Vijayi Bhava' (emerge victorious)!"

He also remembered the Kargil war and said that it is one symbol of bravery and patience on the part of India's Armed Forces which the whole world has watched. "I wish you read the enthralling saga of Kargil, let us all bow to the bravehearts of Kargil."

He said a recent study done by MyGov discovered that 75 per cent of those who send their messages and suggestions to Mann Ki Baat are below 35 years of age.

This means that Mann Ki Baat is the view of the youth of India. Mann Ki Baat is a medium where there is positivity and sensitivity, he said.

The Prime Minister also mentioned about T.S. Ringphami, a young aeronautical engineer by profession who is involved in apple cultivation which is gaining significance in Ukhrul, Manipur and the farmers there are now cultivating apples in orchards. These farmers also went to Himachal Pradesh to take proper training.

He said that 32-year-old Bikramjeet Chakma from Unakoti, Tripura is earning good profit after starting 'ber' cultivation and is motivating others for its cultivation.

The name of Isaac Munda also came up in the PM's Mann ki Baat from a village in the Sambalpur district of Odisha who once worked as a daily wage labourer but now has become an internet sensation and earning well through his YouTube channel. In his video, he shares local delicacies, traditional food recipes, his village, lifestyle, family and food habits.

The Prime Minister also appealed to people to use Khadi and handloom products in his monthly radio programme.
Pakistan's mainstream major political party, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), leader and ousted Prime Minister Mian Muhammad Nawaz Sharif's recent meeting with Afghan National Security Advisor Hamdullah Mohib in London has evoked a political storm back home.

The uproar started after the Afghan NSC tweeted a picture of the meeting with Nawaz Sharif in London.

"NSC Afghanistan @NSCAfghan NSA @hmohiband State Minister for Peace Sayed Sadat Naderi called on Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in London to discuss matters of mutual interest," the tweet read.

The Afghan NSA tweet sparked an angry response from various senior officials of the Prime Minister Imran Khan's dispensation as they criticised Nawaz Sharif for meeting the Afghan NSA, who has been hostile towards Pakistan and has been giving statements that have prompted Islamabad to cut off all contacts, over what it called "unacceptable and controversial remarks".

In May, Pakistan cut off all communication with the Afghan NSA after he compared Pakistan with a brothel.

As per details, the meeting in London was held after the Afghan NSA requested to meet Nawaz Sharif on the directions of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, with an aim to discuss the changing regional situation and the ongoing tense situation in Afghanistan.

Former Pakistan Finance Minister Ishaq Dar said that the controversial remarks by the NSA were made after the request of meeting with Nawaz Sharif by the Ashraf Ghani government was accepted.

"The choice was between cancelling and going ahead with it. We decided to do the latter and meet them in the national interest, because we wanted to do damage control on the government's failed foreign policy," he said.

"Obviously we spoke in Pakistan's interest. We do not want Pakistan to go into isolation as a result of foreign policy failures. We do not want to give a message to the international community that we are operating as a hegemony. Why should we not do damage control in Pakistan's interest?" he asked.

In Pakistan, serious criticism was witnessed on Sharif's meeting with Afghan NSA. Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry called the Afghan NSA "RAW's biggest ally in Afghanistan".

"Be it Modi, Mohib or Amrullah Saleh, every enemy of Pakistan is a close friend of Nawaz Sharif," he said.

The pouring criticism on social media was responded to by Nawaz Sharif's daughter, Maryam Nawaz Sharif who said that "it was the very essence of diplomacy to talk to everyone, listen to their point of view and convey one's own message across; something this government doesn't comprehend and hence is a complete failure on the international front".

"Pakistan's peaceful existence with its neighbours is the very foundation of Nawaz Sharif's ideology for which he has worked tirelessly," she tweeted.

Analysts say that the meeting of Nawaz Sharif with the Afghan NSA may have brought discomfort to the Pakistani leadership, but it certainly has established that the main opposition party, PML-N, is still run by Nawaz Sharif, who as per senior leadership of the party, has put Pakistan's strong reaction to the Afghan NSA and has acted as a national leader, even at a time when he is sitting in London and is wanted over corruption charges in Pakistan.

Pakistan and Afghanistan relations are in a sensitive phase, especially after Taliban have started taking control over major areas of Afghanistan and have started to impose their version of rule.
Just before the all-important visit of Secretary of State Antony Blinken to India and other destinations of South Asia and the Middle East, the US has issued a statement, encouraging arch-rivals India and Pakistan to work for a more stable relationship.

Blinken is scheduled to visit India and other countries between July 26-29 in what is being said is an important tour in reference to the developing situation and increasing Afghan Taliban control in Afghanistan.

As per Acting Assistant Secretary for South and Central Asia Affairs Dean Thompson, Blinken would be discussing different options for what he called a "negotiated settlement" in Afghanistan.

Blinken is going to be landing in New Delhi on July 28 and is scheduled to meet External Affairs Minister Dr S. Jaishankar and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

As per details, India's role in Afghanistan and relations with Pakistan is going to be on Blinken's agenda during his visit to India.

"We strongly believe that India and Pakistan's issues are ones for them to work out between themselves. Washington would continue to encourage better ties between South Asia's two nuclear-armed neighbours," said Thompson.

"We are pleased to see that ceasefire that went into place earlier this year has remained intact, and we certainly always encourage them to continue their efforts to find ways to build a more stable relationship going forward," he added.

The US played an important role in engaging both Pakistan and India to come down to an agreement and abide by the 2003 ceasefire after backdoor meeting between top military leadership of both countries in the Middle East.

On the other hand, the US seems to have keen interest in engaging India in seeing its increased role in Afghanistan, especially after the withdrawal of all foreign forces.

"We expect that all the countries in the region have a shared interest in a stable and secure Afghanistan going forward. We will certainly be talking to our Indian partners about how we can work together to realise that goal, to find ways to bring the partners together, and continue to pursue a negotiated settlement to the longstanding war," said Thompson.

Interestingly, Blinken's visit does not include a visit to Islamabad. However, the Biden administration has invited Pakistan's National Security Advisor Moeed Yusuf and Director General of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Lt General Faiz Hameed to Washington during next week for talks with the American counterparts.
By Justin Wong

The Quantum Algorithms Institute, hosted at Simon Fraser Universitys Surrey campus, will benefit from $2,210,000 million in federal funding from Western Economic Diversification Canada (WD) to help it accelerate the innovation and commercialization of quantum technologies.

The institute will also use the funds to renovate its state-of-the-art physical hub to facilitate engagement activities such as hosting collaborative events between industry and academia, organizing quantum technology conferences for local and international players, and promoting collaboration between existing quantum companies and potential new customers.

In addition, this funding will help the institute train and grow a world-leading talent pool for this emerging industry.

The institute is led by its founding members, including:

Academic Partners: SFU, University of British Columbia, University of Victoria

Government of British Columbia

Industry Partners: Amazon Web Services, D-Wave, IBM, Microsoft, Photonic, and 1-QBit.

On behalf of the Institute, SFU and all partners, I would like to thank Western Economic Diversification Canada for their generous support, says Dugan ONeil, SFUs vice-president of research and international. This funding will further contribute to the mission of the Institute in bringing academia, industry and government together, and raise awareness of the provinces flourishing reputation as a leader in quantum computing.

Quantum technology is a new generation of optical and electronic devices that use quantum effects to significantly enhance the performance over that of existing technologies.

For example, quantum computers will be able to solve problems that the largest classical supercomputers would take thousands of years to solve, but in a fraction of the time.

Quantum technology is a key field that will bring opportunities and talent into British Columbia, says the Hon. Melanie Joly, Minister of Economic Development and Official Languages and Minister responsible for Western Economic Diversification Canada. By supporting the Quantum Algorithms Institute, we are demonstrating a commitment to making strategic investments in digital technologies that will ensure strong economic growth and prosperity in the West.

This technology will have significant impacts across many sectors including manufacturing, natural resources, finance, engineering, healthcare, defense, transport, telecommunications and life sciences.

When the new facility opens in spring 2022, the institute will offer a regular schedule of training opportunities, industry workshops and events, and open collaborative research seminars, says Brad Lackey, senior principal researcher from Microsoft, and Chair of the Quantum Algorithms Institutes Board of Directors. In addition to providing a key venue for fostering academic-industry collaboration, it will enable all the cross-disciplinary interaction needed to prepare our students for entering the quantum technology workforce.

Read the official news release from Western Economic Diversification Canada.
Page Content

The Prime Ministers of St. Maarten, Curacao and Aruba have been participating in Four-Country Ministerial Consultations together with Demissionary State Secretary of Interior and Kingdom Relations Knops since July 15th to discuss the remaining items of concern of the countries on the proposed amendments to the Consensus Kingdom Law.





In March of this year, the Council of State confirmed many of the concerns of Sint Maarten and the other countries pertaining to the content of the law. Since then, from March 26th until July 19th, many adjustments have been made and discussions have taken place on a technical level to come to principal agreements on the best way to address these concerns raised and finalized in the proposed further report.





On Thursday, July 22nd, the second Ministerial Consultation took place on the remaining points of concern. Consensus was reached on two of the remaining three points of concern, namely, the appointment procedure of management of the Caribbean Organization for Reform and Development (COHO) and the instruction authority of the Ministry of Interior and Kingdom Relations. The remaining point referred to having sufficient consideration for the basic needs of the country when granting liquidity support and the need to build reserves. This point was raised by St. Maarten and was sent back to be discussed on a technical level, which was finalized in a meeting held on Friday, July 23rd.





Prime Minister Silveria Jacobs stated, St. Maarten is thankful for the hard work put in by the technical teams, and continues to stress the importance for all to come to an agreement. The Netherlands has expressed their willingness to address the remaining point. Once this point of concern is resolved, all major concerns of St. Maarten would have been addressed leading the way to a compromise; one that would give the countries enough confidence to move forward where the law is concerned.





An internal review by the respective governments and their Council of Advice will follow and thereafter, the intention is to send the documents to the Kingdom Council of Ministers (RMR) by September 3rd.





This is a consensus law in which all four countries in the Kingdom must participate, however it will have a direct impact on the three Caribbean countries. As such, government will continue to strive to ensure that we can receive as much as possible, while upholding our laws, in the best interest of the people of St. Maarten, concluded Prime Minister Jacobs.
Page Content

The cabinet of the Ministry of Public Health, Social Development and Labour (Ministry VSA), would like to inform the general public that the scheduled COVID-19 vaccination Pop-Up for Saturday, July 24th has been canceled.





The Ministry VSA Collective Prevention Service (CPS) calls on the community to maintain COVID-19 Public Health Preventive measures such as correctly wearing of face masks, maintaining social distance, and frequently sanitizing your hands.





This appeal is being made due to the Delta COVID-19 variant, which is now circulating in various countries around the world. This variant is more contagious spreading quickly than any other COVID-19 variant.





Your compliance with the prescribed measures can protect your family, friends, and colleagues, leading to less anxiety, and





collectively contributing to a healthier and safer Sint Maarten during this pandemic.





Wear your mask. Keep your Distance. Wash your hands.
Polygamy is the practice where a person is married to more than one woman. Unlike adultery, polygamy is practiced with the acceptance of society.

by Mass L. Usuf

Adultery was a social concern even during the time of the ancient Babylonian king Hammurabi (1792 B.C.). The famous Code of Hammurabi condemned adulterous conduct and prescribed as punishment death by drowning or burning of the unfaithful spouse and the partner.

The Decalogue (Ten Commandments) of Moses also decreed prohibiting adultery You shall not commit adultery. (Bible: Exodus 20:14, Deuteronomy 5:18).

Let marriage be held in honour among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled; for God will judge the immoral and the adulterous. (Bible: Hebrews 13:4).

The Bible also condemns with death the act of adultery.

If a man is found lying with a woman married to a husband, then both of them shall diethe man that lay with the woman, and the woman; so you shall put away the evil from Israel. (Deuteronomy 22:22).

It is argued that a world with above-board polygamy is probably better than one where it is driven underground. This is not about religion but addressing reality. In other words, taking the bull by the horn. The New World Encyclopedia defines Adultery as consensual sexual intercourse by a married person with someone other than his or her lawful spouse. The synonym for adultery is infidelity as well as unfaithfulness or in colloquial speech, "cheating." Generally, marriage is considered an inviolable and a sacred commitment therefore, a violation of this is strictly censured by society. Adultery has an impact on several people - the persons who are involved, the spouses of each person, their families, the future of children and the community at large. Adultery is considered sufficient cause for divorce.

Polygamy is the practice where a person is married to more than one woman. Unlike adultery, polygamy is practiced with the acceptance of society. Polygamous union also affects all those mentioned above in an adulterous relationship. The difference is that a polygamous marriage provides legal protection for everyone. It has to be noted that polygamy is not the rule but the exception to the rule on monogamy. Even within societies which allow polygamy, in actual practice it generally occurs only rarely. To maintain more than one wife requires extra resources: this may put polygyny beyond the means of many people nevertheless, it must be legalised for everyone in general.

In Jail or In Hell

Of the five cardinal Buddhist ethical practices, avoidance of sexual misconduct is the third. Kamesu micchacara veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami (I undertake the precept to refrain from sexual misconduct). Buddha said, Evil adulterers shall suffer in Niraya (hell). Even the brief time with the woman is filled with fear, the punishment is severe. (Dhammapada 309-10.) Therefore, no man should frequent another man's wife nor have illicit affairs.

In Islam, the Quran also states: Approach not adultery: for it is a shameful deed and an evil, (opening the road to other evils). (Chapter 17 Verse 32). What the Quran states is that adultery will lead to other evils for example uttering lies denying the sexual misconduct. It is interesting to see what Buddha said: One who tells lies goes to niraya (hell); one who has done evil and says "I did not do it" also goes to niraya. Both of them being evil-doers, suffer alike (in niraya) in their next existence. (Dhammapada Verse 306).

Buddha speaking about the consequences of adultery states in the Soreyya story that "men who commit adultery suffer hell for hundreds of thousands of years after rebirth, then are reborn a hundred successive times as women on earth. (Saddharmaratnavaliya - Portraits of Buddhist Women by Ranjini Obeyesekere)

In Hinduism Offering presents to a woman, romping with her, touching her ornaments and dress, sitting with her on a bed, all these are considered adulterous acts. (Laws of Manu 8.357). Winking at a woman, smiling at her, sending go-betweens to her, touching her ornaments or clothes,is called Adultery of the first degree. Sending perfumes, garlands, fruits, wine, food or clothes, and conversing with her in secret, are regarded to be adulterous acts of the second degree. Sitting on the same bed, dallying, kissing or embracing each other,is defined as Adultery of the highest degree. (Brhaspati : 23.6-8).

Adultery Criminalised

The military of the United States of America prohibits adultery and names it a crime, as stated in Article 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The maximum punishment for Extramarital Sexual Conduct is a dishonourable discharge, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, and confinement for up to one year.

Some sixteen States in America still criminalize adultery. The law of adultery in Minnesota is as cold as the state itself. If you are caught cheating, you can be fined up to 3000 dollars and even imprisonment for a year. In Taiwan and Philippines, one could face jail terms for adultery. In Taiwan for each adulterous act the person will be jailed for four months. Taiwan's Minister of Culture Lung Ying-tai said she wants to do away with the law, but a 2013 survey conducted by the department found that 82.2% of respondents want the law to remain in place. (www.insider.com/ places-you-can-go-to-jail-fined-infidelity-laws).

The Case For Polygamy

Cheshire Calhoun Professor of Philosophy and Research Professor writes Marriages are supposed to satisfy a plurality of individuals needs, including needs for sexual and emotional intimacy, reproduction, childrearing, and the care of adults material needs. When these expectations are not met, many marriages fail. The expectation that marriages will provide stable contexts for the rearing of children and the economic support of adults and long-term commitment to the marriage are in danger. The door opens for extra-marital relationship.

On the other side, polygamy advocates like the Mormon women, argue that plural marriage promised to solve the social problems created by the failure of monogamous marriage to supply both adequate sexual satisfaction for men and a stable reproductive environment for women and children. Mormon women argued that if only men were allowed to have plural wives, they would not be motivated to use prostitutes (or to divorce). Thus, fewer women would be degraded to work as prostitutes and fewer would suffer the hardships of bearing children out of wedlock or of being left without adequate economic support. (Whos Afraid of Polygamous Marriage? San Diego Law Review).

Evils Of Adultery

The family forms the nucleus of a society. When that unit is damaged by infidelity the family suffers. All the social norms, family traditions, the spiritual foundation of life and the unity of the family are lost. The Bhagavad Gita records, Where there is no sense of unity, the women of the family become corrupt; and with the corruption of its women, society is plunged into chaos. Social chaos is hell for the family and for those who have destroyed the family as well. Those who destroy family traditions dwell in hell for an indefinite period of time. (Chapter 1:40-44)

Extra marital partnering is a complex engagement which impacts on the marriage life. Personal health of the innocent spouse is at great risk by the exposure to sexually transmitted diseases due to the others sexual activity. The adulteress may become pregnant and give birth to an illegitimate baby. Infanticides have been reported in such instances. Imagine the intense psychological and emotional state of the woman and the child from this secret relationship.

It is possible that the woman is carrying her paramours child. Thereby burdening the legal husband to provide for another mans child (without knowledge). By this, the purity of the marriage and offsprings are corrupted and inheritance belonging to the legitimate children is also altered. We have heard of the plots and ploys of the guilty spouse against the innocent spouse sometimes ending in murder. Or, a husband seeing his wife on bed with another, provoked to commit homicide.

In a society where adultery is not a crime, the society as a whole suffers because of the unnatural disruption of the institution of marriage. By marriage the next generation is procreated and that generation must continue the lineage. It has to be a generation with dignity and not one where the paternity of an illegitimate child is not known. The society over a period of time will morally degenerate. The decadence of a society will result in the death of the culture and religion of that nation. All of these can be protected by allowing polygamy for everyone.

Those who imagine wrong in what is not wrong, who do not see wrong in what is wrong, and who hold wrong views go to a lower plane of existence (duggati). (Dhammmapada Verse 318).

Why not do the right thing? Instead of banning a legal polygamous marriage why not criminalise adultery?
Rise up and salute the sun

by Anwar A. Khan

Tajuddin Ahmads 96th birthday falls on 23rd July 2021, whereas he is one the most far-famed politicians to delimitate our glorious past history. In fact, he was an uppercase statesman of international stature. During our glorious Liberation War with the barbarous Pakistans military establishment in 1971 to set up Bangladesh, he was our first Premier. He was born on 23rd July 1925 in a remote hamlet of Bangladeshs soil. Despite his extraordinary human attributes, he always kept a very low profile in his politics and in life time. He still remains an unsung hero in our history which is very sad for a nation like us.

We have forgotten to remember this noble soul with due honour. Noted educationist and diplomat Prof Dr. Khan Sarwar Murshid once said, Disremembering is equivalent to perfidy. I was then a college student, but when I still close my eyes, I can clearly remember his handsome and bright face when I took lunch with him sometime towards the end of 1970 just before the national elections of the-then Pakistan at my maternal grandfathers house at Maison Mia Bari, Kapasia under the Gazipur District, Bangladesh. When I talked to him, I found Tajuddin Ahmad was a man pure in heart and that he owned till his brutal murder in 1975.

Every aspect of his life is a jewel of intellectual prowess, silver-tongued, decent and a politician of perfect refinement with deep patriotism. It is an essential reading on Tajuddin for anyone interested in the struggle for establishing an independent and sovereign state in Bangladesh when Bangabandhu was languishing in Pakistans jail. No one will ever know what went through Tajuddinds mind unless you are familiar with his magnificent character and the very difficult jobs that he did throughout his life, especially during our glorious Liberation War of 1971 to establish Bangladesh, and all the superlatives in the world will never be compensation for his loss in the wee hours of 3rd November 1975.

Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by any symbols called words. Their meaning can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart. Such is the moment; I am presently experiencing because of absence of Tajuddin Ahmad in the realm of Bangladeshs politics. I experience this high and saddest moment not for myself alone but for those people who have moved so courageously against the ramparts of injustice and who in the process have acquired a new estimate of their own human worth.

It is because of leadership like Tajuddin, people were all united, in absence of Bangabandhu in the country during our glorious Liberation War in 1971, in the quiet conviction that it was better to suffer in dignity than to accept lives in humiliation. He is the real hero of our freedom struggle; and a noble-spirited politician for whom we can boast of.

We may recall the sorrow that Tajuddin Ahmad and his colleagues endured watching them only died on the gun bullets and bayonet charges in the Dhaka Central Jail by some hooligan junior army officers of Bangladesh Army. We unite all of our sufferings every day to him and his three other brilliant compatriots, asking for the grace and strength to endure them for the sake of Bangladesh. We ask to pray so that we may look forward to the joy that comes from remaining faithful witnesses to Tajuddin like honest and patriotic politicians.

If we are to survive today, our moral and spiritual lag must be eliminated. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul. When the "without" of man's nature subjugates the "within", dark storm clouds begin to form in the world. So, we strongly feel the absence of Tajuddin Ahmad in Bangladesh.

Any student of history should not be surprised. Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself. The Bible tells the thrilling story of how Moses stood in Pharaoh's court centuries ago and cried, "Let my people go." This is a kind of opening chapter in a continuing story.

The present struggle in Bangladesh is a later chapter in the same unfolding story. Something within has reminded the Bengalis of their birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded them that it can be gained. We had been caught up by the Bengali Nationalist Movement, and with our people, we were moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of justice i.e. Bangladesh in 1971. Fortunately, some significant strides have been made in the struggle to end the long night of injustice by the Pakistans rulers domination on us.

We have seen the magnificent drama of independence unfolded in Bangladesh in 1971 under the able and dynamic leadership of Tajuddin and his pals. It came as a bright interlude in the long and sometimes turbulent struggle for our due rights: and the beginning of an emancipation of proclamation is providing a comprehensive legal basis for equality of opportunity in establishing Bangladesh.

What the main spirits of Bangladeshs Liberation of 1971 are saying is that the demand for dignity, equality, jobs, and citizenship will not be abandoned or diluted or postponed. If that means resistance and conflict, we shall not flinch. We shall not be cowed. We are no longer afraid. The word that symbolises the spirit and the outward form of our encounter is politics, and it is doubtless that factor which made it seem appropriate to award a peace prize to one identified with struggle.

Broadly speaking, our struggle has meant not only relying on arms and weapons of struggle. It has meant noncooperation with customs and laws which are institutional aspects of a regime of discrimination and enslavement. It has meant direct participation of masses in protest, rather than reliance on indirect methods which frequently do not involve masses in action at all. Tajuddin Ahmad has stood like a solid rock to uphold these principles.

Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. As Arnold Toynbee says, "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore, the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word." The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of evils perpetrated by the Pakistans hellish sawyers on the land of Bangladesh for more than two decades.

The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are developing a new sense of "some-bodiness" and carving a tunnel of hope through the dark hill of despair. "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light." Here and there an individual or group dares to love, and rises to the majestic heights of moral maturity. So, in a real sense, this is a great time to be alive.

When we lose someone we love, it seems that time stands stiff. Those we love and lose are together with us in our heart forever in memory. What we shared will never die. It lives in our hearts, bringing strength and comfort while we are apart. With profound grief and sorrow, we regret the sad and brutal murder of our beloved leader, Tajuddin Ahmad. His departure has left a void that can never be filled in Bangladesh. It has been forty-six years, but our tears are seldom gone. Till we meet again

It is now more than four decades, but his memories of strong leadership and hard work will continue to guide us. Memory is the scribe of the soul which was aptly said by Aristotle. Tajuddins life was a blessing; his memory was a treasure, and he is loved beyond words. A strong soldier and an exceptionally exemplary human being, adoring politician, devoted leader, our dearest man of history, he lived a glorious life always putting others before himself. Today, we miss his grand presence deeply and sorrowfully. No one can replace his presence and we will live by the memories and the values that he gave us in his life time. Our hearts still ache with sadness and many tears still flow what it meant to lose him, no one will ever know. We miss him immensely.

A great statesman as he was, Tajuddin Ahmad successfully led his nation to its correct destiny in 1971. The state and its government should have a responsibility to officially remember this majuscule politician-statesman. So, please rise up and salute this bright sun on his 96th Birth Day.

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
IARU Monitoring Co-ordinatior to stand down

Hi all this is Phil VK2CPR, I hope you are all keeping well in these difficult times.

Peter Young VK3MV has been the IARU Monitoring Co-ordinatior for many years. He has given notice to the WIA Board that he wishes to relinquish that position. Peter has offered to assist the incoming coordinator to get established.

In July 2021 the secretary advertised for expressions of interest from WIA members that may be interested in taking on that role.

WIA Representation at IARU Region 3

Peter has also advised that he has stepped down as a Director of IARU Region 3. He will not be renominating as a Director. Any licenced amateur that is a WIA member may nominate in the ballot to be a Director at the forthcoming triannual conference in September with an endorsement from the WIA. Peter is happy to participate as a delegate on behalf of the WIA to assist the WIA in the proceedings. The WIA may delegate others to participate and we would suggest that this should be a minimum of three delegates to cover all the proposed working groups.

The WIA has the option of submitting papers to the conference:

these may include information papers on activities, technical matters; suggested changes to the Region 3 constitution, changes to the Region 3 Band plans, Awards, organisational structure, youth development or other matters relevant to the IARU within Region 3.

The WIA may nominate persons to act as coordinators for its various activities; This is a good way forward for a person to assist the IARU and gain a profile to seek further office in the future.

Cheers and 73 this is Phil VK2CPR

Source: Wireless Institute of Australia
SOTA activator all at sea! Tom Read M1EYP, a prominent SOTA - Summits on the Air activator from Macclesfield, Cheshire, is suddenly experiencing a significant change to his portable operating habits.

Tom, who with 3551 summit activations to his name over 19 years, is the worlds most experienced SOTA activator, has commenced work as a professional musician on board Sagas brand new cruise ship Spirit of Adventure.





Tom has taken his trusty FT-817 and an Alexloop antenna, and has secured the enthusiastic permission of the Master of the Vessel, Captain Kim Tanner. Tom will operate from his cabin balcony, but Captain Tanner has urged him to also operate from the public decks, believing the activity to be something that would be of great interest to the guests.





Toms SOTA activities will now obviously be restricted to chasing, but look out for M1EYP/MM, possibly with the addition of some CEPT prefixes, from this brand new luxury boutique cruise ship.





The itineraries include around Britain and Ireland, the Baltic, Mediterranean, Adriatic and Canaries. Tom will be active from the Saga Spirit of Adventure until mid November 2021 on 40m to 10m, and using CW, SSB and FT4/FT8. There may be some local 2m FM as well
Companies are increasingly unwilling to write new policies with asphalt shingle roofs over 10 or 12 years old, according to a comparison compiled in January by one of the insurers, which asked not to be named as the source of the data. The list, which the insurer said was based on a review of information submitted to state insurance regulators, identified four companies unwilling to insure shingle roofs more than 10 years old, two companies that set the cut-off age at 12 and three others that drew the line at 15 years.
There is no statute of limitations for murder in the U.S., and Jarvis said filing new charges after death is more common than many think. And while filing new charges so long after an event, such as the 37 years in the Dowling case, does seem rare, there have been other cases where more time has elapsed.
It wasnt Baluchis first time trying to set sail in Atlantic waters in a flotation device. In 2014, the Coast Guard rescued him while he tried to reach Bermuda from Florida in a homemade hydro pod. He has also ran from Los Angeles to New York twice, and once circled the U.S. perimeter in an 11,720-mile trek.
In the Trump investigations, the evidence of a crime (whether tax fraud or something more dramatic) needs to be compelling. The evidence must establish with clarity what was illegal and why Trump is responsible. We dont know what information the authorities have gathered so far, but the practical standard to bring a criminal case must be rigorous, given the intense scrutiny that will occur of any attempt to imprison Trump.
We were renters in the Bay Area and we will continue to be here, she said. We have considered buying, but we think that the prices are too high for us right now, perhaps artificially high. I am not sure if it is just something that it is happening as people want bigger homes as they are spending more time there.
Zain Bahrain, a leading telecommunications operator in the kingdom, has introduced a suite of holistic well-being programmes as part of its zWellness initiative. It is focused on four pillars Mental, Physical, Social, and Spiritual well-being of its employees.

The company takes the lead in taking care of the health and safety of its employees and works closely with numerous Bahraini organisations and experts to develop programmes based on the four pillars that drive employee productivity, engagement, and retention.

The well-being programme is a way to give back to its employees and contribute to their overall wellbeing, especially during the pandemic, making Zain Bahrain a safe and happy place to work in.

Zain Bahrain has implemented numerous wellness development programmes under the initiative this year in Quarter 1 in collaboration with technology start-ups and healthcare companies to reward its employees and as a key element of its well-being strategy.

The initiative included a range of programmes aimed at not only protecting employee health but actively boosting performance as well as social, spiritual, and emotional well-being.

Zain Bahrain organised a 3 month programme titled, Health, Happiness Well-being with Dr Majdy Obaid involving 53 participants, tackling topics such as health and happiness and based on the pillars of Mental and Spiritual wellbeing. The company also arranges regular blood check-ups and BMI checks for its employees ensuring that they always maintain good physical health.

Zain Bahrain focuses not only on using the workplace to support well-being but also on developing policies and approaches that embed well-being into its culture. The company also recognises that technology has a vital role to play in keeping employees healthy and hence collaborated with Hayatech application to develop a challenge for its employees to walk 3 million steps in 3 days. Zain Bahrain promised to donate BD1 ($2.66) for every 1,000 Steps to individuals with special needs raised through this initiative. Such programmes not only take care of the physical well-being but is associated with a social and spiritual cause which ignites a passion for them to do more. A similar 16-day challenge in collaboration with Hayatech, introduced Zainers to keeping in mind the Physical and Social pillars of well-being. The employees had 16 days to walk as far as they could to figuratively reach countries and were able to achieve a total of 8.5 million steps.

Apart from the above initiatives, Zain Bahrain also invited Dr Hooreya from the Bahrain Society for Training and Development (BSTD) to deliver a talk for a Womens day event. The company also took care of all its employees families and arranged a socialising event in the parking area to celebrate the family day with competitions and gifts. These key initiatives undertaken by Zain Bahrain not only showcase its commitment and responsibility towards its employees but also highlight the belief that healthy employees are happier, perform better, and are less absent from work.

Commenting on the companys wellness programmes, Rana Al Majed, Acting Director, Human Resources at Zain Bahrain, said: Employees are the main asset of an organisation and we always strive to take care of them. This is our key differentiation in the market and helps us stand out from any other organisation in Bahrain, in the telecom industry or otherwise. As a result of the impact of the pandemic, we grouped our efforts and focused on well-being as an initiative to help employees overcome any challenges or stress during this time while maintaining their mental, physical, spiritual and social health. Well-being is the new bottom line in the organisation and the health of the business relies on the health of our people. -- TradeArabia News Service
Dana Gas, a leading regional natural gas company, has received an award in its favour from the London Court of Arbitration (LCIA) in relation to the Sale and Purchase Agreement (SPA) for the sale of oil and gas assets in Egypt.



The arbitration was initiated on 28 April 2021by IPR Wastani Petroleum, a member of the IPR Energy Group. The Tribunal rejected IPR Wastanis claim in its entirety. The Tribunal ruled in Dana Gas favour on all key points, concluding that Dana Gas termination of the SPA was valid.



Dana Gas terminated its agreement for the sale of its Egyptian assets to IPR Wastani on 22 April 2021 as the parties were unable to complete a number of conditions precedent to the transaction by the long-stop date of 14 April 2021. Dana Gass Board of Directors therefore decided to terminate the SPA and retain and operate the assets in Egypt. IPR Wastani disputed Dana Gas right to terminate the SPA and submitted a request for arbitration. The Award now means the assets will continue to be operated by Dana Gas for the benefit of its shareholders and the people of Egypt.



The company has an outstanding track-record of operating in Egypt over the past 14 years which resulted in Dana Gas becoming the 5th largest gas producer in the country. It is currently producing around 30,000 boepd from 14 development leases.



The company looks forward to maximizing the value of its onshore producing assets whilst also focussing its attention on testing the enormous potential of its offshore Block 6 Concession Area, a statement said.



This is estimated to contain more than 20 Tcf gas resources which it plans to test by drilling an exploration well currently scheduled for Q1 2022 depending upon the availability of long lead items.



Dana Gas Egypt collected $23 million in the first quarter of 2021. This increased to $ 75 million in the second quarter following the termination of the SPA. In total, Dana Gas Egypt has collected $98 million during H1 2021, compared to $43 million received in the same period of 2020, representing a 128% increase.



As a result, the $131 million receivables at the end of Q1 will drop significantly. Dana Gas Egypt will contribute positively to the Companys profitability and cash flow in Quarter 2 2021 and in the coming years. A portion of impairments, which the Company recognised in 2020, will also be reversed in Quarter 2 2021 as a result of retaining these assets.



Dr Patrick Allman-Ward, CEO of Dana Gas, said: We are very pleased with the outcome of this arbitration and with the speed with which this final decision was made. The award confirms that Dana Gas was correct and within its contractual rights to terminate the sales process. The Board has made a decision to continue to hold and operate the assets in the best interests of the Company and its shareholders as well as for our broader stakeholders.



We are committed to continuing to operate our onshore assets to the highest operational and safety standards. We are also excited about the potential of our offshore Block 6 Concession Area and we are working hard to be able to drill an exploration well in the block as soon as practicably possible.  TradeArabia News Service
Happy Travel & Tourism, a luxury b2b global wholesaler, has appointed Brazil Experts Bureau as its Sales and Marketing Representative for trade sales, promotions, as well as marketing and trade public relations activities in the Brazilian market.



Brazil Experts Bureau will promote Happy Travel & Tourism online booking engine happytravel.com and bespoke DMC services to its extensive luxury travel trade network throughout Brazil. Happy Travel & Tourism offers a user-friendly state of the art online system, offering direct connectivity to the leading global hotel chains. Bespoke DMC services are available in UAE, Maldives, and other destinations, which includes a dedicated Guest Services team offering exceptional services and high-end tailor-made programmes.



Dennis Dolmatov, Chief Business Development Officer of Happy Travel & Tourism, said: We are extremely excited to enter the luxury travel market in Brazil, with the help of our local experts at Brazil Experts Bureau, Julienne Gananian and Marcia Galvao. We always knew we would be here sooner or later as Brazil is one of the key markets to many destinations where we have a strong product offering, as well as the bespoke ground services.



We have been learning about the buying habits and travel trends in Brazil and we believe we are sufficiently equipped to support those needs, including operation services to support the time zone, and then moving to a 24/7 operation in September this year. We definitely look forward to this new partnership, this amazing new market and are confident that it will bounce back quickly after Covid.



Julienne Gananian, Director of Brazil Experts Bureau, added: We believe that a local representative is the most effective way to reach the tourism Industry in Brazil. It is especially important to establish local support and relationships, considering the important cultural differences between Brazil and other countries. We are very much looking forward to establishing Happy Travel & Tourism in the Brazil market, and to a long and successful partnership.  TradeArabia News Service
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New Delhi, Jul 25 (UNI) Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday said 'Amrut Mahotsav', 75th year of Independence celebrations, has become more special as the 'Kargil Vijay Diwas' (victory in the Kargil war) will be celebrated in the middle of it.

'Tomorrow, 26th July, our nation will mark Kargil Vijay Diwas.'This time the glorious Kargil day will be celebrated in the middle of Amrit Mahotsav. So, it becomes even more special," Mr Modi said while addressing the 79th edition of his monthly radio broadcast - 'Mann Ki Baat'.

Mr Modi said the 'Amrut Mahotsav' is not about a Government but the sentiments of 130 crore Indians.The programs to celebrate the diamond jubilee of Independent India began from March 12 with an event at Sabarmati Ashram, Mr Modi said and added that Mahatma Gandhi's historic 'Dandi March' also commenced on the same day.

Since then, programs related to 'Amrit Mahotsav' are being held across the country, from Jammu and Kashmir to Puducherry, Gujarat to Northeast,' Mr Modi said.

UNI NY PS
Srinagar, Jul 25 (UN) President Ram Nath Kovind arrived in the summer capital, Srinagar, on Sunday on a four-day visit to the Union Territories (UTs) of J&K and Ladakh.



Official sources said President Kovind arrived here at 1115 hrs at the technical airport, Srinagar. The President was received by J&K Lt Governor Manoj Sinha and senior officials of civil administration and police, they said.



They said the President, who completed four years in the office today, was accorded a guard of honour.



Meanwhile, security has been beefed up across Kashmir valley with multi-layer security arrangements put in place, particularly in and around the venues which would host the President. Roads leading to Raj Bhawan, where Mr Kovind will stay -- Boulevard road along world famous Dal Lake and high profile Gupkar road -- have been closed for general public. Traffic police has already notified that these roads will remain closed from today till July 27 and people are advised to take foreshore and other roads.



During his visit to the UTs, the President will pay homage to the indomitable courage and sacrifice of the Indian armed forces during the Kargil conflict in 1999 at the Kargil War Memorial Drass (Ladakh) on the 22nd anniversary of the Kargil Vijay Diwas on July 26. In 2019, the President was scheduled to visit Drass to pay tributes to Kargil martyrs but his flight could not take off from Srinagar airport due to bad weather. Instead, he paid tributes by laying a wreath at a war memorial at the Army's 15 Corps headquarters in Badamibagh in the city.



On July 27, the President will grace and address the 19th Annual Convocation of the University of Kashmir in Srinagar.



A traffic official said the movement of vehicles will be restricted from Sunday to July 27 on Boulevard Gupkar roads. The motorists are requested to take Ram-MunshiBagh- Dalgate  Rainiwari  Hazratbal  Habak  Foreshore  Nishat route for to and fro movement. The traffic will be diverted at Ram-MunshiBagh crossing, Badyari crossing Dalgate and Nishat/Foreshore crossing, he said.



In view of the visit of the President to J&K, the Jammu and Kashmir Police have already ordered the cancellation of leaves of its personnel. In view of the expected visit of the President of India to UT of J&K, all kinds of leaves are stopped till further orders, read an order issued by the Additional Director General of Police Security Dr S D S Jamwal on July 17.

UNI ABS SY 1352
Ms. Jane Crayton earned an M.A. in Art Education from the University of New Mexico, where she worked at the Center for Advanced Research in Computing in the ARTS Lab. She currently works for University of Wyoming, Coe Student Innovation Center as a Makerspace Coordinator and College of Education as an Adjunct Instructor. She currently directs the 4-H MakeHER Scholar program funded by STEM Next Foundation in collaboration with Wyoming Afterschool Alliance, and the Pokes Making the Future program funded by Cognizant Foundation. Jane is also a collaborator on the Rio Verde Archaeology Project at CU Boulder where she has documented multiple grant funded projects and developed a virtual archaeology field experience focused on game-based learning, educational technology and STEM education through project-based art and design until 2024. She serves on the Diversity and Inclusivity Committee for the Nation of Makers and as STEM Educator for the Wyoming Latina Youth Conference. Jane is also a new media and experimental electronic artist performing live at concerts and festivals and creating visual installations that engage the audience in social justice themes across the country since 2004.
ELIZABETH URBAN is News Editor for The Vidette. Urban can be contacted at emurba1@ilstu.edu. Follow Urban on Twitter at @eliizabethurban.

IF YOU SUPPORT THE VIDETTE MISSION of providing a training laboratory for Illinois State University student journalists to learn and sharpen viable, valuable and marketable skills in all phases of print and digital media, please contribute to this most important cause. Thank you.
Farmington Man Charged in Elkton High Speed Chase

By West Kentucky Star Staff

ELKTON - A Farmington man was charged after leading law enforcement on a high-speed pursuit Friday afternoon.According to WKDZ, Elkton Police said they attempted to stop a vehicle on B White Road after receiving a call about a reckless driver.The vehicle then allegedly fled at speeds of over 100 miles per hour, through parking lots, bean fields, and corn fields, before coming to a stop on US 41.The driver, 34-year-old Chad Duncan, attempted to flee on foot but was tased and taken into custody.Duncan allegedly refused a blood test and is charged with speeding, reckless driving, DUI, criminal mischief, wanton endangerment, and fleeing or evading police.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-24 23:27:36|Editor: huaxia

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Chinese netizens showed big love to a Chinese domestic sportswear brand after its low-profile donation to floods-hit people in central China's Henan Province.

The Chinese domestic sportswear company Erke announced on Wednesday a donation of 50 million yuan (about 7.7 million USD) to the victims in central China's floods-hit Henan Province. The donation was announced via a photo posted on its low-key Weibo account.

The post had collected over 9.3 million likes and 274,000 comments as of Saturday afternoon. Most of the comments were expressing respect for the company's big heart.

As a matter of fact, the "generous" donation came from a company that hasn't run its business very smoothly recently. Its kind deeds have moved millions of Chinese netizens who sent the topic to the top of the trending search list on Sina Weibo, Chinese equivalent of Twitter, on Thursday, one day after the company's low-profile announcement of its donation.

The company's livestream drew nearly 10 million viewers watching at the same time on Saturday, though the figure used to be less than 10,000. The host even had to suggest the audience consume rationally.

As of Saturday afternoon, death toll climbed to 58 in China's rain-ravaged Henan, with five people missing.

Produced by Xinhua Global Service
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-24 23:45:15|Editor: huaxia

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A stone Buddha head that was stolen from a grotto in China's Shanxi Province almost a century ago has been returned home from overseas.

The Buddha head belongs to one of the many stone statues in north China's Tianlongshan Grottoes, in the city of Taiyuan in Shanxi Province.

It was the 100th relic retrieved by China from overseas in 2020 and the first Buddha sculpture from the grottoes to be brought back from Japan in almost a century, according to the National Cultural Heritage Administration (NCHA).

Construction of the Tianlongshan Grottoes began around the Eastern Wei Dynasty (534-550) and continued until the Tang Dynasty (618-907). The site features 25 caves and over 500 Buddha statues, reflecting the sophisticated carving skills and grotto art of the time.

Examinations and evaluations conducted by experts after the Buddha head arrived in Beijing found that the relic was stolen from a statue in Cave 8 of the grottoes in around 1924.

The NCHA first identified the Buddha head in September 2020 when the sculpture resurfaced at a Japanese auction house. The house cancelled the auction after the NCHA contacted it and requested that the sale be halted.

The Buddha head was brought back to China from Japan in December last year.

Produced by Xinhua Global Service
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 00:07:54|Editor: huaxia

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CHENGDU, July 24 (Xinhua) -- Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said here Saturday that if the United States has not learned to treat other countries equally, China and the international community have the obligation to help the United States make up for this lesson.

Wang made the remarks when holding the third strategic dialogue between China and Pakistan with Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi.

In response to U.S. State Department spokesperson's comments made before the visit of U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman to China that the United States will deal with China from "a position of strength," Wang said the United States always wants to use its strength to pressure other countries and thinks it is superior.

However, there has never been a country superior to others in the world, and China will not accept such a claim by any country, Wang said. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 00:08:04|Editor: huaxia

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A medical worker administers a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine to a recipient at a vaccination center in Tunis, Tunisia, on July 24, 2021. Tunisia reported record daily COVID-19 deaths on Saturday with 317 new fatalities, bringing the death toll from the virus to 18,369. (Photo by Adel Ezzine/Xinhua)



TUNIS, July 24 (Xinhua) -- Tunisia reported record daily COVID-19 deaths on Saturday with 317 new fatalities, bringing the death toll from the virus to 18,369.

The tally of infections in the North African country rose by 5,624 to 563,930, while the number of recoveries from the coronavirus reached 457,597, according to its health ministry.

A total of 2,154,063 lab tests have been carried out in Tunisia, said the ministry.

During an emergency meeting held on Friday, Tunisian President Kais Saied expressed his dissatisfaction with the failure of the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic and ordered the review of a series of actions proved ineffective, according to a presidency statement.

More than 1 million doses of vaccines against COVID-19 will arrive in Tunisia, and 5 million Tunisians will be vaccinated in the coming weeks, said Saied. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 00:10:27|Editor: huaxia

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Students attend a class at No. 1 Experimental Middle School in Guiyang, southwest China's Guizhou Province, March 16, 2020. (Xinhua/Yang Wenbin)

BEIJING, July 24 (Xinhua) -- Chinese authorities have introduced a set of guidelines to ease the burden of excessive homework and off-campus tutoring for students undergoing compulsory education.

China's nine-year free compulsory education system covers primary school and junior middle school.

Jointly issued by the General Office of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council, the document specifies guiding principles and targets of the initiative.

It details requirements in areas including reducing homework and improving quality of education and after-class services provided by schools.

It also pledges to adopt a strict approval and supervision system for off-campus tutoring programs featuring curriculum subjects such as math and physics.

Kids learn to make handicrafts at a daycare classroom in a primary school in Xuhui District, east China's Shanghai, July 5, 2021. (Xinhua/Liu Ying)

The following are some highlights of the document:

-- Students who can't finish their written homework after hard work shall go to bed on time.

-- Education authorities shall improve free online learning services.

-- Local governments shall stop approving establishment of new off-campus curriculum subject-tutoring institutions for students in compulsory education, and existing institutions shall be registered as non-profit institutions.

-- Curriculum subject-tutoring institutions are not allowed to go public for financing; listed companies should not invest in the institutions, and foreign capital is barred from such institutions.

-- Off-campus tutoring shall include no overseas education courses and their courses shall not be taught on national festivals and holidays.

-- Online tutoring should pay attention to protecting students' eyesight. Each class hour should not exceed 30 minutes, the course interval should not be less than 10 minutes, and the tutoring shall end no later than 9:00 p.m.

-- Mainstream media, new media, billboards in public places and residential areas and online platforms shall not publish or broadcast off-campus tutoring advertisements.

-- Beijing, Shanghai, Shenyang, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Zhengzhou, Changzhi, Weihai and Nantong are selected as national pilot cities to implement the guidelines. 
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 01:14:55|Editor: huaxia

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Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi (R) and Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi hold the third China-Pakistan strategic dialogue of foreign ministers in Chengdu, capital of southwest China's Sichuan Province, July 24, 2021. (Xinhua/Liu Kun)



CHENGDU, July 24 (Xinhua) -- China stands ready to work with Pakistan to promote the building of a closer community of shared future in the new era, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said here Saturday.

Wang made the remarks when holding the third strategic dialogue between China and Pakistan with Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi.

Noting that this year marks the 70th anniversary of setting up diplomatic ties between China and Pakistan, Wang said the two countries have worked together to overcome many difficulties and obstacles, and established an all-weather strategic partnership of cooperation.

"China is willing to work with Pakistan to take the 70th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations as an opportunity to accelerate the construction of a closer community of shared future in the new era, bring more benefits to the two peoples, and make greater contributions to regional stability and prosperity," Wang added.

Qureshi expressed condolences to China regarding the severe floods in Henan Province. He said Pakistan thanked China for its valuable support for Pakistan's fight against the pandemic, and condemned all smears against China.

On the Dasu attack that happened in Pakistan, Wang said both China and Pakistan are victims of this terrorist attack, and the two sides should work closely to bring the perpetrators to justice at an early date.

Qureshi said Pakistan will spare no effort to safeguard the safety of Chinese personnel and institutions in Pakistan, re-organize the special forces to strengthen related security work, and resolutely prevent similar incidents from happening again.

At a joint press briefing after the dialogue, Wang said the two countries agreed to continue the high-quality construction of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, strengthen coordination in international and regional affairs, jointly oppose hegemonism and unilateralism, and maintain the international system with the United Nations as the core and the international order based on the international law.

On the current situation in Afghanistan, Wang told reporters that as neighboring countries of Afghanistan, both China and Pakistan are most directly affected by the situation in Afghanistan. After in-depth communication, the two sides decided to carry out joint campaigns in the following five areas, Wang said.

He said the two countries agree to strive for peace with all the strength to avoid the spread of war as a top priority, actively promote peace through talks and advance intra-Afghan talks, work together to combat terrorism and push all major forces in Afghanistan away from terrorism, agree to promote coordination and cooperation among neighboring countries of Afghanistan, and urge the United States to earnestly fulfill its responsibilities for the peace and reconstruction of Afghanistan. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 04:41:40|Editor: huaxia

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AMMAN, July 24 (Xinhua) -- Jordan will lower the age bar for getting the COVID-19 vaccine to 12 as of July 25.

Jordan's Health Minister Feras Al Hawari said that the vaccination will be optional to those aged between 12 and 18 based on their parents' approval, the state-owned Al Mamlaka TV reported on Saturday.

Meanwhile, the National Center for Security and Crises Management said the implementation of a new order obliging public sector employees to take the vaccine will start from August 5, Al Mamlaka TV reported. Those who have not been vaccinated against the COVID-19 should bring a negative PCR test to enter the workplace.

Jordan recorded on Saturday 485 new coronavirus cases and 15 deaths, bringing the total number of cases to 763,922 with the death toll rose to 9,948. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 06:01:46|Editor: huaxia

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ROME, July 24 (Xinhua) -- A complex of eight historic clusters of buildings in the northern Italian walled city of Padua was added to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) list of World Heritage sites on Saturday.

The decision was made during the UNESCO World Heritage Committee's 44th session held online and chaired from Fuzhou, China.

The UNESCO recognized a group of eight religious and secular complexes called "Padua Urbs Picta" within the walls of Padua (the city is called "Padova" in Italian).

The buildings are home to what UNESCO called "a selection of fresco cycles painted between 1302 and 1397 by different artists for different types of patrons and within buildings of diverse functions."

The development, highly anticipated in Italy, was a cause for celebration around the country.

"Receiving this recognition brings us great joy, and also great responsibility towards the whole world. These frescoes are part of the identity of the city and the people of Padua are proud of this asset, which will now be shared with the world. For us, this prestigious recognition today marks the start of a new commitment to the world," Sergio Giordani, the city's mayor, told Xinhua in a telephone interview.

Lucia Borgonzoni, Italy's under-secretary for cultural heritage, said "this is a very special day for the community of Padua and I know how important it is to finish this path which was long and articulated."

"Now after this recognition, there are going to be nice moments but also responsibilities not only in front of the citizens of Padua but in front of the whole planet. The world is watching Padua," said Borgonzoni.

Andrea Colasio, council member of Padova, said the city's UNESCO path started 20 years ago when the city started reflecting on its sources and memories. "Padua demonstrated today that in the 14th century it was an important art capital. This recognition from UNESCO will have for sure a deep impact on the tourist flows and also on its international image."

Giorgio Andrian, the city's project manager for its UNESCO candidacy, said that "this is the maximum we could have dreamed...From Monday we will have to start working on how to manage this 'honor'."

An Italian news site, the ArTribune, said: "What we have known ourselves is now recognized by the world: Padua is officially part of the world's cultural heritage." The Italian news agency ANSA reported that "the marvels of Padua are recognized."

Saturday's developments came two days after UNESCO decided not to put the canal city of Venice, which is on the world heritage list since 1987, on its "danger list," one step away from being removed from the list altogether.

The World Heritage Committee session reviews candidates for entry to the list and examines the state of conservation of existing sites. The inscription is scheduled to continue through July 28. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 08:23:42|Editor: huaxia

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ADEN, Yemen -- At least 17 people were killed on Saturday in an armed confrontation between pro-government Yemeni forces and the Houthi militia in the country's northeastern province of Marib, a military official told Xinhua.

The Houthis carried out a number of attacks against the government-controlled military positions, while the Saudi-led coalition launched airstrikes to support the government forces, said the local official on condition of anonymity. (Yemen-Houthis-Deaths)

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BAGHDAD -- Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi announced Saturday the dismantlement of a terrorist cell linked to a recent bomb attack in capital Baghdad, which left dozens of people killed and wounded.

"We have arrested all members of the cowardly terrorist cell that planned and carried out the attack," al-Kadhimi tweeted, adding that they will be publicly tried. (Iraq-Suicide Bombing-Arrest)

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MEXICO CITY -- Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador called on Saturday for "a new coexistence" of all the countries of the Americas after stating that the model imposed more than two centuries ago "is exhausted; it has no future."

The Mexican president proposed that Latin American states do "something similar to the European Union, but attached to our history, our reality and our identities." (Mexico-CELAC)

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MADRID -- The Spanish government confirmed on Saturday that travelers from Argentina, Colombia, Bolivia and Namibia will have to spend 10 days in quarantine following their arrival in Spain.

The decision was published in the Spanish Official State Bulletin (BOE), which said the measure will come into effect from July 27 as a result of the rising number of COVID-19 cases in the four countries. (Spain-Health-Quarantine) Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 10:50:33|Editor: huaxia

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Protesters from environmental activists group Extinction Rebellion hold a banner during a rally against ecological destruction in Vancouver, Canada, July 24, 2021. (Photo by Liang Sen/Xinhua)


Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 12:40:57|Editor: huaxia

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by Xinhua writer Dong Yue

BEIJING, July 25 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman is traveling to China for a two-day visit starting on Sunday, during which she is scheduled to meet with senior Chinese diplomats in the Chinese coastal city of Tianjin.

For a strained relationship that bears extensive global significance, dialogue is absolutely welcomed and expected to bring about tangible progress.

To make the talks between the two sides productive, it is essential for the U.S. side to demonstrate sincerity and work with China to put in place a set of guardrails for the long-term development of what many deem as the world's most important bilateral relationship.

That starts with Washington calling off its aggressive actions that grossly interfere with China's internal affairs and hurt China's interests.

It is sad to see that the current U.S. administration seems to be still taking its cue from the China policy of the wrongheaded previous White House.

Over the past few months, Washington has continued to slander China on such issues as COVID-19 origin tracing, human rights and cyberspace security, and has been seeking to form an anti-China alliance with its treaty allies. As a result, China-U.S. relations are facing an unprecedentedly difficult situation.

Beijing's stance on issues concerning China's sovereignty and territorial integrity has always been clear and consistent: there is no room for compromise.

If Washington continues with these contentious moves against China while expecting meaningful talks with Beijing, it must be daydreaming.

The United States should also abandon its condescending attitude, and learn to treat China and other countries as an equal and with due respect.

Ahead of Sherman's visit, U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said the United States will continue to engage with China from "a position of strength."

Such arrogant and bullying rhetoric reveals just how overbearing Washington is. In fact, Washington's outdated ego also shows that many of the country's political leaders are still thinking in Cold War terms.

However, in today's world, no country, not even the United States, has the right to dominate global affairs, control the destiny of others, or keep advantages in development all to itself.

As always, China welcomes exchanges with the United States, but that does not mean Washington is entitled to lecture China or strong-arm Beijing into giving up its legitimate rights to development.

Most fundamentally, leaders in Washington should be keenly aware that a healthy and stable relationship between the world's top two economies is conducive to the interests of not only China, but the United States, and the wider global community.

Climate cooperation is one example. The future without China and the United States joining forces to mitigate the worsening climate change is unimaginable. Yet if Washington keeps believing that it can have Beijing's cooperation in addressing daunting challenges while at the same time suppressing China, it is hugely wrong.

Given the mounting tensions that are troubling the China-U.S. relations, it is true that it is impossible to solve all problems at once. But it is important for the two sides to keep up with candid and productive communication, like the high-level strategic dialogue in Anchorage, Alaska in March.

If Sherman and her team this time can engage with their Chinese counterparts not from a position of strength as they wish, but with sincerity, respect and good faith, the meeting in Tianjin can be constructive and may lead to further talks between the two sides. Washington should make the right call. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 13:50:21|Editor: huaxia

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Fishing boats dock at Chongzhan Port in the city of Ningbo, east China's Zhejiang Province on July 24, 2021. (Xinhua/Weng Xinyang)

TAIZHOU/NINGBO, July 25 (Xinhua) -- Tian Jiangzhou and his father are two of nearly 500 migrant workers who have been transferred to a temporary shelter in east China's Zhejiang Province in advance of the approaching Typhoon In-Fa, the sixth typhoon of this year.



"We can definitely make it through the rain," said Tian, 20.

The temporary shelter is a school in Zhejiang's Sanmen County, where typhoons are frequent.

"We are lucky enough to have water, food, electricity, internet, and a place to live with air conditioning and its own bathroom in this extreme weather," said Tian.

At another shelter in Zhejiang's Xiangshan County, local volunteers are providing various performances including singing, dancing, drama and folk art to relieve the anxiety of the people there.

As Typhoon In-Fa approaches, officials working at the primary level are making every effort to help people prevent possible damages.

"Apps on my phone show I have walked more than 30,000 steps today," said Wang Pengpeng, a local official in the city of Ningbo, Zhejiang. Wang has been visiting villagers door to door, advising them to relocate before the typhoon.

More than 700 fishing boats have been tethered end to end at Ningbo's Chongzhan Port and docked neatly at the sheltered anchorage. Workers have braved the winds and waves to confirm the berthing statuses of ships.

"Chongzhan Port is a professional sheltered anchorage, with a strong wind resistance ability," said a member of the port's staff, adding that ships have been berthed to avoid typhoons in recent days, and that people have been working overtime to reinforce bollards and other infrastructure.

"I stopped my ship in the port on Thursday and bought vegetables and fruits ashore. When the typhoon comes, I will stay in the cabin to avoid the rain," said Pan Xiaoqian, who owns a fishing boat.

Zhejiang upgraded its Typhoon In-Fa emergency response status to the highest level, Level I, at noon on Saturday. 
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 16:10:01|Editor: huaxia

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GAZA, July 25 (Xinhua) -- The Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) on Saturday slammed the decision to grant Israel an official observer status at the African Union (AU) as "shocking and disgraceful."

"The decision consolidates the legitimacy of this occupier on our land, and gives it more opportunities to continue its plans to keep confiscating the Palestinian people's rights," Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, said in a press statement sent to Xinhua.

Israel announced on Thursday that it joined the AU as an observer state after being kept out for two decades, according to Israeli media.

Israel previously held observer status at the predecessor Organization of African Unity until 2002, when the organization dissolved itself and became the African Union.

During a meeting with Israeli Ambassador to Ethiopia Aleli Admasu on Thursday, Chairperson of the AU Commission Moussa Faki Mahamat reiterated the pan-African bloc's position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying that "a two-state solution is necessary for a peaceful co-existence."

"The path towards long-lasting peace and stability requires that the peace process and the solutions sought must not only be acceptable, but must guarantee the rights of all parties," Mahamat said. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 16:59:14|Editor: huaxia

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WASHINGTON, July 25 (Xinhua) -- White House Chief Medical Advisor Anthony Fauci has repeatedly cited a scientific paper that largely dismissed the possibility that the coronavirus escaped from a lab, U.S. media reported.

The weekly magazine Washington Examiner reported on Friday that in an interview with CNN last weekend, the top U.S. infectious disease expert "repeatedly cited a scientific paper from July that argued in favor of zoonosis and largely dismissed the lab leak hypothesis."

The paper titled "The Origins of SARS-CoV-2: A Critical Review" was also cited by a top scientist from China's Wuhan Institute of Virology when arguing in favor of a natural origin for COVID-19 and against the lab leak hypothesis, the report said.

In the paper, a group of 20 internationally renowned virologists and evolutionary biologists from all over the world have noted that theories about a lab leak are almost all based on coincidence, not hard evidence.

"I mean ... although we keep an open mind that it's possible that it could be, as they say, a lab leak, that the most likely explanation is a natural evolution from an animal reservoir to a human," Fauci said in the interview. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 17:10:59|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, July 25 (Xinhua) -- China has every right to be suspicious of the undue focus the West placed on the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a U.S. journalist has said, noting that biased investigations into and politization of COVID-19 origins would only lead to more questions than answers.

"The lab leak theory is a highly politicized framework for pursuing answers into the origins of COVID-19. That China would exercise caution in supporting an investigation that possesses far-from-impartial motives should come as no surprise," wrote Danny Haiphong, an independent U.S. journalist and researcher, in an opinion article published Friday in the China Global Television Network.

The article came after Vice Director of China's National Health Commission Zeng Yixin on Thursday rejected a second-phase plan proposed by the World Health Organization (WHO) with a focus on the lab-leak theory.

Zeng reiterated that WHO experts agreed after visiting the Wuhan institution that it was "extremely unlikely" that the virus escaped from a lab.

Haiphong noted that the lab-leak hypothesis emerged from far-right political forces in the United States last year, while the current administration still continued the narrative.

U.S. President Joe Biden ordered an intelligence investigation into COVID-19's possible origins in Wuhan, after the Wall Street Journal claimed workers at the Wuhan institute had fallen ill, he said.

Likewise, in 2002, Michael Gordon, a security correspondent with the Wall Street Journal, co-authored a report claiming that Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which was influential in the U.S. decision to invade Iraq. The eight-year war only caused the death of nearly 1 million people and massive instability in the region, according to the writer.

"COVID-19 is an extremely complex phenomenon. It will likely take years for scientific experts to fully understand a virus that has facilitated such a historic public health crisis in every part of the world," he said.

Unlike Washington's and the West's claims that China is not being transparent in the rejection of a lab-leak probe, "China has been a model of transparency throughout the duration of the COVID-19 crisis. Health and government officials in China have worked tirelessly with the World Health Organization and countries around the world in the fight against COVID-19," he wrote.

"The U.S. and West, on the other hand, have latched onto a theory of the virus' origins which relies upon arguably the least transparent institutions in the world: their own intelligence agencies," Haiphong said. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 17:40:07|Editor: huaxia

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A man walks past graffiti about human fighting against the coronavirus in Narayanganj, Bangladesh, May 18, 2020. (Str/Xinhua)

"The lab leak theory is a highly politicized framework for pursuing answers into the origins of COVID-19. That China would exercise caution in supporting an investigation that possesses far-from-impartial motives should come as no surprise," wrote Danny Haiphong, an independent U.S. journalist and researcher.



BEIJING, July 25 (Xinhua) -- China has every right to be suspicious of the undue focus the West placed on the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a U.S. journalist has said, noting that biased investigations into and politization of COVID-19 origins would only lead to more questions than answers.

"The lab leak theory is a highly politicized framework for pursuing answers into the origins of COVID-19. That China would exercise caution in supporting an investigation that possesses far-from-impartial motives should come as no surprise," wrote Danny Haiphong, an independent U.S. journalist and researcher, in an opinion article published Friday in the China Global Television Network.

The article came after Vice Director of China's National Health Commission Zeng Yixin on Thursday rejected a second-phase plan proposed by the World Health Organization (WHO) with a focus on the lab-leak theory.

Zeng reiterated that WHO experts agreed after visiting the Wuhan institution that it was "extremely unlikely" that the virus escaped from a lab.

The video screenshot taken on March 30, 2021 shows Peter K. Ben Embarek, leader of an international team of experts to Wuhan, attending a virtual press conference. (Xinhua)

Haiphong noted that the lab-leak hypothesis emerged from far-right political forces in the United States last year, while the current administration still continued the narrative.

U.S. President Joe Biden ordered an intelligence investigation into COVID-19's possible origins in Wuhan, after the Wall Street Journal claimed workers at the Wuhan institute had fallen ill, he said.

Likewise, in 2002, Michael Gordon, a security correspondent with the Wall Street Journal, co-authored a report claiming that Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which was influential in the U.S. decision to invade Iraq. The eight-year war only caused the death of nearly 1 million people and massive instability in the region, according to the writer.

"COVID-19 is an extremely complex phenomenon. It will likely take years for scientific experts to fully understand a virus that has facilitated such a historic public health crisis in every part of the world," he said.

Chinese-educated Cambodian medical workers and medical students pose for a group photo at a COVID-19 inoculation site in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, April 14, 2021. (Xinhua)

Unlike Washington's and the West's claims that China is not being transparent in the rejection of a lab-leak probe, "China has been a model of transparency throughout the duration of the COVID-19 crisis. Health and government officials in China have worked tirelessly with the World Health Organization and countries around the world in the fight against COVID-19," he wrote.

"The U.S. and West, on the other hand, have latched onto a theory of the virus' origins which relies upon arguably the least transparent institutions in the world: their own intelligence agencies," Haiphong said. 
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 18:41:10|Editor: huaxia

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KIEV, July 25 (Xinhua) -- At least 32 political parties worldwide have signed a petition calling for the closure of those U.S. military biological laboratories all over the world due to biosafety concerns, Ukrainian independent media outlet Politnavigator reported.

The petition against the proliferation of biological weapons was initiated by a coalition of political forces, which includes the Socialist Movement of Kazakhstan, the United Communist Party of Georgia, the Socialist Party of Latvia and the Communist Party of Pakistan.

As international struggle and competition intensifies, "the accumulated biological weapons can be used by the U.S. military to fight with its opponents, which will lead to catastrophic consequences," the petition said.

Statistics show that the United States has set up more than 200 overseas biological laboratories in 25 countries and regions, including Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the former Soviet Union, including 16 in Ukraine alone.

According to Politnavigator, there is evidence showing that biologists in the U.S. military are working in Kazahkstan to develop new methods of spreading infectious and deadly virus strains through livestock raised in Central Asia. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 18:48:30|Editor: huaxia

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ZAGREB -- A bus carrying over 60 passengers crashed in eastern Croatia on Sunday morning, killing at least ten and injuring more than 40 people, local media reported.

According to the national news agency HINA, the accident happened on A3 highway near Croatia's eastern city of Slavonski Brod. The bus was registered in Kosovo and enroute from German city Frankfurt to Kosovo's Pristina. (Croatia-Traffic accident)

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KABUL -- A total of 25 militants were killed as fighting planes targeted Taliban militants' hideouts and positions in southern Helmand province on Saturday, the Defense Ministry said in a statement on Sunday.

The fighting planes, according to the statement, struck Taliban militants' hideouts and positions in parts of Nad Ali and Sangin districts late on Saturday, killing 25 armed militants. (Afghanistan-Airstrikes-Taliban)

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MANILA -- At least three died and five were injured in the northern Philippines after days of intensive monsoon rains, authorities said on Sunday.

Heavy rainfall enhanced by a typhoon hammered down Metro Manila and many parts of the country this week, causing floods and displacing people in low-lying areas. (Philippines-Monsoon-Death)

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NEW DELHI -- At least six people were killed and several others injured in lightning strikes in Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, officials said Sunday.

The deaths were reported Saturday evening in Panna district, about 385 km northeast of Bhopal, the capital city of Madhya Pradesh. (India-Madhya Pradesh-Lightning) Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 18:55:40|Editor: huaxia

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HONG KONG, July 25 (Xinhua) -- More than 3 million people in Hong Kong have taken at least one shot of COVID-19 vaccines, accounting for 44.2 percent of the eligible population.

Hong Kong's vaccine rollout started on Feb. 26 and some 2.21 million people have been fully vaccinated, official data showed.

Secretary for Food and Health of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government Sophia Chan said it is encouraging that residents are actively getting the vaccines and urged more people, in particular the aged, to participate in the vaccination program.

Hong Kong's Center for Health Protection (CHP) on Sunday reported three new imported cases of COVID-19, taking the total tally in Hong Kong to 11,978.

According to the CHP, a total of 25 cases have been reported in the past 14 days, including 24 imported cases and one import-related case. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 19:18:32|Editor: huaxia

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HANGZHOU, July 25 (Xinhua) -- Typhoon In-Fa made landfall in east China's Zhejiang Province at noon on Sunday, packing winds of up to 38 meters per second at its center, according to the provincial flood control headquarters.

The typhoon -- the sixth of this year -- hit land in Putuo District, Zhoushan City, at approximately 12:30 p.m., the headquarters said.

Weather authorities have forecast the typhoon will make a second landfall in coastal areas between Zhejiang's Jiaxing City and Jiangsu Province's Qidong City on Sunday night.

It is expected to linger in east China after its second landfall and bring continued strong rainstorms to the Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Anhui provinces, and Shanghai.

The typhoon started to wreak havoc in Zhejiang on Saturday, bringing heavy downpours, strong gales and floods. More than 6 km of roads in Zhoushan have been inundated by seawater.

The Zhejiang provincial flood control headquarters upgraded its emergency response for Typhoon In-Fa to the highest level, Level I, at Saturday noon. As of Sunday noon, about 17,000 fishing vessels had returned to ports for shelter, and over 1.5 million people across the province had been evacuated to safe places.

Zhejiang has opened more than 12,000 temporary shelter facilities to the public.

In the neighboring megacity of Shanghai, Typhoon In-Fa had felled over 1,000 trees and caused waterlogging in several places as of Sunday noon.

More than 2,000 rescue teams in the city are on stand-by.

The Shanghai metro at Sunday noon announced the suspension of services on several lines. As of 1:30 p.m. Sunday, a total of five metro lines, Line 3, Line 5, Line 16, Line 17, the Pujiang Line, and Shanghai's Maglev Line, suspended operations.

All inbound and outbound flights at Shanghai's Pudong International Airport and Hongqiao International Airport were canceled on Sunday.

All inbound high-speed trains for Shanghai's railway stations will be canceled starting from 7 p.m. Sunday, according to railway authorities.

As of 2 p.m. Sunday, nearly 130 tourists spots in Shanghai, including the Shanghai Disney Resort, the Oriental Pearl Tower, and the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum, had closed over safety concerns.

About 360,000 people in Shanghai have been evacuated, and more than 1,700 vessels have returned to ports, the municipal flood control headquarters said. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 19:33:34|Editor: huaxia

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SANAA, July 25 (Xinhua) -- Fighting between the Yemeni government forces and Houthi militia killed at least 50 in Yemen's central province of Marib in the last 24 hours, a government military source said on Sunday.

"Backed by the Saudi-led coalition warplanes, the army repelled several attacks by the Iran-backed Houthi militia in the frontlines of al-Mashjah, al-Kasarah and Raghwan in Sirwah district west of Marib during the past 24 hours," said the source in Marib.

"More than 44 Houthis were killed on the ground of the desert and seven armored vehicles of the rebels bombed during the clashes, artillery shelling and the coalition airstrikes," he told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

The source added that "six soldiers were also killed and dozens wounded in the battles."

Meanwhile, the Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya TV reported that the Saudi air defenses intercepted and destroyed four bomb-laden drones and a ballistic missile fired by the Houthis towards the Saudi Red Sea port city of Jazan late on Saturday.

The Houthi group has made no comment yet on both attacks, but the Houthi-run al-Masirah TV reported 17 Saudi-led coalition airstrikes on Sirwah district on Saturday night, without providing further details.

The Houthis began in February a major offensive on Marib in a desperate attempt to seize control over the oil-rich province, which hosts nearly one million internally displaced people.

Hundreds of people have been killed since then as the United Nations (UN) warned that the offensive on Marib could lead to a major humanitarian catastrophe.

Yemen's civil war flared in late 2014 when the Houthi group seized control over much of the country's north and forced the internationally recognized government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi out of the capital Sanaa.

The Saudi-led Arab coalition intervened in the Yemeni conflict in March 2015 to support Hadi's government. The UN is trying to end the war that has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced 4 million. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 20:02:59|Editor: huaxia

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An announcement of epidemic prevention and control is seen at Xishanqiao Toll Station on an expressway in Nanjing, east China's Jiangsu Province, July 25, 2021. Starting from 7 a.m. Sunday local time, a total of 68 inspection points were temporarily set up at highways on the city border around Nanjing. The municipal government has urged residents not to leave the city unless necessary. By Saturday, the number of locally transmitted confirmed cases in the latest COVID-19 outbreak in Nanjing had risen to 37, with another 20 asymptomatic cases, according to the Nanjing municipal health commission. (Xinhua/Li Bo)
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 20:53:44|Editor: huaxia

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JERUSALEM, July 25 (Xinhua) -- Two Israeli airliners launched on Sunday their first commercial flights to Morocco following the resumption of diplomatic relations between the two countries in 2020.

Israir Airlines' direct flight departed from the Ben Gurion Airport outside the Israeli city of Tel Aviv to the Moroccan city of Marrakech with about 100 Israeli tourists, the company said in a statement. Hours later, another flight operated by El Al, Israel's national carrier, inaugurated its nonstop flight to the same destination.

The new flights would "help advance fruitful tourism, trade and economic cooperation and diplomatic agreements between the two countries," Israel's Tourism Minister Yoel Razvozov said in a statement.

El Al said in a separate statement that it plans to operate five flights per week to Morocco.

"It is hoped that many Israelis can know and experience Morocco better," El Al CEO Avigal Sorek said in the statement.

Morocco is home to a small community of several thousand Jews. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 20:55:57|Editor: huaxia

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JERUSALEM, July 25 (Xinhua) -- Israel has launched a new plan costing 60 million new shekels (18.4 million U.S. dollars) to support the country's tourism industry, the Israeli Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Tourism announced in a joint statement on Sunday.

The program, initiated by Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Tourism Minister Yoel Razvozov, aims to support tourism businesses affected by the entry ban on tourists to Israel due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to the plan, hotels that have suffered a decline of at least 40 percent in turnover due to the ban will receive special financial support over the coming months.

Financial support will also be given to Israeli travel agents operating inbound tourism in the country.

Besides, the plan will allow more hotel workers from Jordan and the West Bank to enter Israel.

Today, Israel bans the entry of foreign tourists, except for special cases. Plans to reopen inbound tourism have been postponed by the government due to the recent sharp rise in COVID-19 infections in the country. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 21:30:28|Editor: huaxia

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Aerial photo taken on July 7, 2021 shows the remains of Deji Gate and the surrounding city landscape in Quanzhou, east China's Fujian Province. (Xinhua/Jiang Kehong)

FUZHOU, July 25 (Xinhua) -- East China's port city of Quanzhou, once hailed as "the very great and noble city" by the Italian explorer Marco Polo, won UNESCO World Cultural Heritage status Sunday, bringing the total number of the country's UNESCO World Heritage sites to 56.

UNESCO accepted "Quanzhou: Emporium of the World in Song-Yuan China" as a cultural property on its World Heritage List amid the ongoing 44th session of the World Heritage Committee held in Fuzhou, capital of east China's Fujian Province.

Located on narrow plains along the coastline of Fujian, Quanzhou was one of the world's largest ports along the historic Maritime Silk Road, particularly in ancient China's Song Dynasty (960-1279) and Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368).

The serial property includes 22 sites of administrative buildings and structures, religious buildings, and statues. The property witnessed multi-cultural communities, cultural memorial sites and monuments, the production of ceramics and iron, and a transportation network formed of bridges, docks and pagodas that guided voyagers.

"It reflects greatly the spatial structure that combined production, transportation and marketing. It demonstrates the key institutional, social and cultural factors that contributed to the spectacular rise and prosperity of Quanzhou as a maritime hub of the East and Southeast Asia trade network during the 10th to 14th centuries AD," said a report by the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), the committee's official advisory body.

It is the second time the city has applied for the prestigious title. In 2018, China's nomination "Historic Monuments and Sites of Ancient Quanzhou (Zayton)" was referred back for a second chance when the committee met in Bahrain in 2018.

China made significant technical adjustments and resubmitted the application as "Quanzhou: Emporium of the World in Song-Yuan China," with the former 16 sites included in the serial nomination expanded to 22 sites, according to Zhang Lei. Zhang is head of the world cultural heritage department under China's National Cultural Heritage Administration and made the remarks at a press conference held earlier this month.

The session, originally scheduled for 2020 but postponed due to COVID-19, has been extended until July 31 to go over the agendas of both 2020 and 2021. 
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 21:45:41|Editor: huaxia

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CHENGDU, July 25 (Xinhua) -- The novel coronavirus needs origin-tracing, and so does the political virus, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said here Sunday.

Wang made the remarks while meeting the press with Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto when responding to how China views a small number of countries using the origin-tracing of the novel coronavirus as a pretext to attack and smear China.

Wang noted that COVID-19 origin-tracing is a serious scientific matter, which should be studied by scientists so as to better guard against future risks.

Wang said that all the foreign ministers he met agree that the origin-tracing should not be manipulated by politics. It should not be used to blame any one country, let alone splitting the international community, he added.

"Only when we unite can we truly defeat the virus," he said.

"From openly referring to the coronavirus as 'the Wuhan virus' to blatantly pulling out of the WHO, the United States has from the very beginning tried to politicize the epidemic, stigmatize the virus, and use origin-tracing as a tool. It has ignored the hard work of scientists and used intelligence means to carry out the so-called origin-tracing, hyping the 'lab leak theory' which presumes guilt," Wang said.

"The purpose of the United States is clear. It is to shift responsibility for their botched epidemic response and achieve the political purpose of discrediting and suppressing other countries," Wang said. He added it is necessary to record this ugly page in the annals of humanity's fight against the epidemic.

Emphasizing that China has always participated in international origin-tracing cooperation with an open attitude, Wang said China has twice invited WHO experts to carry out joint research on origin-tracing and made great efforts to this end.

Wang added that the experts went to every place they asked to see and met everyone they wanted to meet. They made the scientific conclusion that a laboratory leak is extremely unlikely and made important recommendations such as "searching for early cases in various places and countries around the world" and "studying the possibility of cold-chain transmission of the virus."

"The next phase of tracing should build on this and study early cases in many countries around the world, Wang said. He noted that Chinese medical experts and scientific research experts held a press conference to clarify a series of rumors with facts and data and make clear China's solemn position in a scientific manner a few days ago.

Pointing out that political viruses also need origin-tracing, Wang said the WHO Secretariat notified its member states about a work plan on a second-phase origins study. It has surprised scientists since it is inconsistent with the requirements of the resolution of the 73rd World Health Assembly. It also ignores the conclusions and recommendations of the first-stage joint research report.

It seemed that when the United States returned to the WHO, it was not focused on joining the international fight against the epidemic, but continued to spread political viruses through the platform, Wang added.

He said as an independent and sovereign country, China will not and cannot accept any work plan that is not a real plan to find the virus but a plan to discredit China.

Up until now, nearly 60 countries sent letters to the WHO, agreeing with the results of the first phase of origin-tracing research and opposing the attempt to politicize the study of the origins, Wang noted.

Wang reiterated that origin-tracing needs cooperation rather than discrediting, truth rather than lies, and respecting science rather than political manipulation. Wang added China would continue to support and participate in global origin-tracing cooperation in the spirit of openness, transparency, science and cooperation. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 23:17:32|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, July 25 (Xinhua) -- The following are the updates on the global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

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JAKARTA -- Indonesia's Health Ministry said Sunday that COVID-19 cases in the country rose by 38,679 within the past 24 hours to 3,166,505 with the death toll adding by 1,266 to 83,279.

Another 37,640 recovered patients were discharged from hospitals, raising the total number of recoveries in the Southeast Asian country to 2,509,318, according to the ministry.

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ROME -- A retest by Italian and Dutch researchers of pre-pandemic blood samples was found to have coronavirus-linked antibody IgM, Reuters reported recently.

The retest, carried out by researchers from the VisMederi laboratory at the University of Siena and their Dutch counterparts from the Erasmus University of Rotterdam, founded that the oldest sample with IgM dated back to Sept. 3, 2019, from Italy's northeastern region of Veneto, the media said in a report published Saturday, citing a paper published on July 14 that detailed the results from the retest.

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MANILA -- The Philippines has recorded the fourth death from the highly infectious COVID-19 Delta variant, the Department of Health (DOH) said Sunday.

The DOH said that the country now has 119 Delta variant cases after detecting an additional 55 cases.

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MOSCOW -- Russia recorded 24,072 new COVID-19 cases over the past 24 hours, taking the nationwide tally to 6,126,541, the official monitoring and response center said Sunday.

The nationwide death toll grew by 779 to 153,874, while the number of recoveries increased by 18,678 to 5,490,634.

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KATHMANDU -- Trade between Nepal and China grew by over 28 percent in the 2020-21 fiscal year that ended in mid-July despite the raging COVID-19 pandemic, showed the latest figures released by the Nepali Department of Customs.

The two-way trade increased to 234.93 billion Nepali rupees (1.96 billion U.S. dollars) in the last fiscal year, as against 183.93 billion Nepali rupees (1.54 billion U.S. dollars) over the previous fiscal year. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 23:29:50|Editor: huaxia

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MOSCOW -- Russia held a military parade on the Neva River in St. Petersburg, the country's second largest city, to celebrate its Navy Day on Sunday.

About 4,000 sailors, more than 50 ships, boats and submarines, as well as 48 naval aviation airplanes and helicopters participated. (Russia-Military Parade-Navy Day)

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MAIMANA, Afghanistan -- Five Taliban militants were killed and a key commander, Mufti Ismael, sustained injury as a mine blast struck their car in Afghanistan's northern Faryab province on Sunday, police said.

"Taliban key commander Mufti Ismael after attending a Taliban commanders' meeting in Shirin Tagab district this afternoon were going somewhere when a mine blast targeted his car killing five of his bodyguards and injuring him," a statement of the Faryab police said. (Afghanistan-Taliban-Mine Blast)

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MOSCOW -- Russia recorded 24,072 new COVID-19 cases over the past 24 hours, taking the nationwide tally to 6,126,541, the official monitoring and response center said Sunday.

The nationwide death toll grew by 779 to 153,874, while the number of recoveries increased by 18,678 to 5,490,634. (Russia-Coronavirus)

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AMMAN -- The Jordanian government on Sunday ordered an investigation into a power outage incident that caused at least one death late Saturday at a private hospital rented by the government to treat COVID-19 patients here.

The investigation aims to reveal the causes of the power outage and the death case reported afterward, and the impartiality and integrity of the probe results will be ensured, said Minister of State for Media Affairs Sakher Dudin in a statement. (Jordan-Power Outage-Investigation) Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-26 00:03:30|Editor: huaxia

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MALE, July 25 (Xinhua) -- The 10 suspects arrested in connection to a terrorist attack targeting Maldives Speaker of Parliament and former President Mohamed Nasheed on May 6 have no direct links to ISIS, local media quoted the Maldives Police Service (MPS) as saying on Sunday.

Assistant Commissioner of Police Mohamed Riyaz was quoted in SunOnline as saying that despite having no official connection with ISIS, "the suspects do follow the ideologies maintained by ISIS - and even has actively taken part in spreading this ideology."

Riyaz said that there was no concrete evidence to prove that any of the suspects was part of an ISIS cell or acting on the directions of the international terrorist organization.

The MPS revealed the names of the 10 suspects arrested in connection to the attack.

Nasheed was critically injured by an improvised explosive device (IED) as he was entering his car on May 6. The IED had been planted in a motorcycle parked near his car.

Nasheed was rushed to ADK Hospital in Male where he received multiple life saving surgeries. He was later transferred to Germany for recovery. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-26 00:09:00|Editor: huaxia

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by Xinhua writers Zhang Yizhi, Yao Yulin

FUZHOU, July 25 (Xinhua) -- Historical sites in east China's port city of Quanzhou won UNESCO World Cultural Heritage status on Sunday, bringing the total number of the country's UNESCO World Heritage sites to 56.

UNESCO accepted "Quanzhou: Emporium of the World in Song-Yuan China" as a cultural property on its World Heritage List amid the ongoing 44th session of the World Heritage Committee held in Fuzhou, capital of east China's Fujian Province.

Located on narrow plains along the coastline of Fujian, Quanzhou was one of the world's largest ports along the historic Maritime Silk Road, particularly in ancient China's Song Dynasty (960-1279) and Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368).

The serial property includes 22 sites of administrative buildings and structures, religious buildings, and statues. The property witnessed multi-cultural communities, cultural memorial sites and monuments, the production of ceramics and iron, and a transportation network formed of bridges, docks and pagodas that guided voyagers.

"It reflects greatly the spatial structure that combined production, transportation and marketing. It demonstrates the key institutional, social and cultural factors that contributed to the spectacular rise and prosperity of Quanzhou as a maritime hub of the East and Southeast Asia trade network during the 10th to 14th centuries AD," said a report by the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), the committee's official advisory body.

CONVERGENCE OF COMMERCE AND CULTURE

The newly inscribed cultural property, comprising 22 functionally and spatially connected historical relics, attests to the indispensable contributions China made to the prosperity of global maritime trade and the development of East and Southeast Asia.

In fact, it is the second time the city has applied for the prestigious title. In 2018, China's nomination "Historic Monuments and Sites of Ancient Quanzhou (Zayton)" was referred back for a second chance when the committee met in Bahrain in 2018.

China made significant technical adjustments and resubmitted the application as "Quanzhou: Emporium of the World in Song-Yuan China," with the former 16 sites included in the serial nomination expanded to 22 sites, according to Zhang Lei. Zhang is head of the world cultural heritage department under China's National Cultural Heritage Administration (NCHA) and made the remarks at a press conference held earlier this month.

"It is not only a joyful event for about 8.78 million people of Quanzhou but also a great occasion for all Chinese. It is also a blessing for people of the world who cherish historical and cultural heritage and love maritime civilization," said Wang Yongli, Party chief of Quanzhou City.

"We will shoulder more responsibility and make a stronger commitment to protect, inherit, and make good use of our precious heritage," Wang added.

The historical sites help tell silent tales of Quanzhou's glorious past. Back in the Song and Yuan dynasties, kilns were sprinkled around the city to make exquisite porcelain for export, while bridges and docks saw cartloads of goods come and go.

Quanzhou's buzzing markets and busy docks also featured prominently in the writings of famous medieval explorer Marco Polo.

"And I assure you that for one shipload of pepper that goes to Alexandria or elsewhere, destined for Christendom, there come a hundred such, aye and more too, to this haven of Zayton; for it is one of the two greatest havens in the world for commerce," wrote Marco Polo in his book on travels.

The maritime trade tradition, which cherishes inclusiveness, diversity, and common prosperity, has turned ancient Quanzhou into a focal point for commerce and a melting pot of diverse cultures.

In ancient times, people of different religious beliefs gathered and lived in harmony in Quanzhou, leaving many religious relics and cultural legacies such as mosques and temples.

Dubbed "the museum of the world's religions," Quanzhou City today still boasts venues of at least four different religions and beliefs.

"Quanzhou's serial sites have helped display the splendid history of exchanges and mutual learning between the Chinese civilization and the world," said Li Qun, head of NCHA.

While spreading to the world ancient China's agricultural technologies, literary classics, and philosophical thoughts via maritime commerce and trade, the city also learned from other cultures and provided available space where different cultures and religions can coexist and integrate, Li added.

The spirit of inclusiveness and common prosperity, embodied by the ancient city, runs in a similar vein with the country's current pursuit of a shared future for all, said Li Guohong, a scholar in local folk culture.

HERITAGE FOR ALL HUMANITY

The international community congratulated China on Quanzhou's inscription onto the World Heritage List and applauded the country's efforts to preserve the relics in a city full of cultural vim and economic vibrancy.

"It is a great victory of the Quanzhou people. May Quanzhou be now better known to the world and recognized as Ground Zero of Maritime Silk Roads for Peace and Intercultural Dialogue," said Doudou Diene, former director of the Division of Intercultural Dialogue of UNESCO.

"It reflects great recognition from the World Heritage Committee on Quanzhou's outstanding universal value as a window for economic and cultural exchanges, a major port along the Maritime Silk Road, as well as a global maritime trade center back in the Song and Yuan dynasties," said China's Vice Minister of Education Tian Xuejun.

It also demonstrated that the international community highly affirmed the significance and historical value of Quanzhou in promoting mutual learning, sustainable development, and building a community with a shared future for humanity, said Tian, who is also the director of the Chinese National Commission for UNESCO and chair of the 44th session of the World Heritage Committee.

The Chinese government pledged to ramp up efforts and deepen international cooperation to better protect and manage the World Heritages in China.

"Since the accession of the World Heritage Committee, China has always worked closely with other state parties and relevant international organizations to preserve and inherit the collective treasure of humanity. In the future, China will continuously keep its commitment to and take more responsibility for World Culture Heritage by enhancing the conversation, management, and international cooperation," said NCHA chief Li Qun.

China is committed to working with UNESCO, state parties to the World Heritage Committee, and professional advisory bodies to promote international exchanges and cooperation in World Heritage protection and proper use while making new and greater contributions to the noble cause, said Tian. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-26 00:33:53|Editor: huaxia

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-- East China's port city of Quanzhou, once hailed as "the very great and noble city" by the Italian explorer Marco Polo, won UNESCO World Cultural Heritage status Sunday, bringing the total number of the country's UNESCO World Heritage sites to 56.

-- The serial property includes 22 sites of administrative buildings and structures, religious buildings, and statues.

-- The property witnessed multi-cultural communities, cultural memorial sites and monuments, the production of ceramics and iron, and a transportation network formed of bridges, docks and pagodas that guided voyagers.

by Xinhua writers Zhang Yizhi, Yao Yulin

FUZHOU, July 25 (Xinhua) -- Historical sites in east China's port city of Quanzhou won UNESCO World Cultural Heritage status on Sunday, bringing the total number of the country's UNESCO World Heritage sites to 56.

UNESCO accepted "Quanzhou: Emporium of the World in Song-Yuan China" as a cultural property on its World Heritage List amid the ongoing 44th session of the World Heritage Committee held in Fuzhou, capital of east China's Fujian Province.

Located on narrow plains along the coastline of Fujian, Quanzhou was one of the world's largest ports along the historic Maritime Silk Road, particularly in ancient China's Song Dynasty (960-1279) and Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368).

Aerial photo taken on July 7, 2021 shows the ancient ferry of Shihu Dock in Shishi City, Quanzhou, southeast China's Fujian Province. (Xinhua/Song Weiwei)

The serial property includes 22 sites of administrative buildings and structures, religious buildings, and statues. The property witnessed multi-cultural communities, cultural memorial sites and monuments, the production of ceramics and iron, and a transportation network formed of bridges, docks and pagodas that guided voyagers.

"It reflects greatly the spatial structure that combined production, transportation and marketing. It demonstrates the key institutional, social and cultural factors that contributed to the spectacular rise and prosperity of Quanzhou as a maritime hub of the East and Southeast Asia trade network during the 10th to 14th centuries AD," said a report by the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), the committee's official advisory body.

Aerial photo taken on July 24, 2021 shows Qingjing Mosque in Quanzhou, southeast China's Fujian Province. (Xinhua/Wei Peiquan)

CONVERGENCE OF COMMERCE AND CULTURE

The newly inscribed cultural property, comprising 22 functionally and spatially connected historical relics, attests to the indispensable contributions China made to the prosperity of global maritime trade and the development of East and Southeast Asia.

In fact, it is the second time the city has applied for the prestigious title. In 2018, China's nomination "Historic Monuments and Sites of Ancient Quanzhou (Zayton)" was referred back for a second chance when the committee met in Bahrain in 2018.

China made significant technical adjustments and resubmitted the application as "Quanzhou: Emporium of the World in Song-Yuan China," with the former 16 sites included in the serial nomination expanded to 22 sites, according to Zhang Lei. Zhang is head of the world cultural heritage department under China's National Cultural Heritage Administration (NCHA) and made the remarks at a press conference held earlier this month.

Aerial photo taken on July 8, 2021 shows Tianhou Temple in Licheng District of Quanzhou City, southeast China's Fujian Province. (Xinhua/Lin Shanchuan)

"It is not only a joyful event for about 8.78 million people of Quanzhou but also a great occasion for all Chinese. It is also a blessing for people of the world who cherish historical and cultural heritage and love maritime civilization," said Wang Yongli, Party chief of Quanzhou City.

"We will shoulder more responsibility and make a stronger commitment to protect, inherit, and make good use of our precious heritage," Wang added.

The historical sites help tell silent tales of Quanzhou's glorious past. Back in the Song and Yuan dynasties, kilns were sprinkled around the city to make exquisite porcelain for export, while bridges and docks saw cartloads of goods come and go.

Quanzhou's buzzing markets and busy docks also featured prominently in the writings of famous medieval explorer Marco Polo.

"And I assure you that for one shipload of pepper that goes to Alexandria or elsewhere, destined for Christendom, there come a hundred such, aye and more too, to this haven of Zayton; for it is one of the two greatest havens in the world for commerce," wrote Marco Polo in his book on travels.

The maritime trade tradition, which cherishes inclusiveness, diversity, and common prosperity, has turned ancient Quanzhou into a focal point for commerce and a melting pot of diverse cultures.

In ancient times, people of different religious beliefs gathered and lived in harmony in Quanzhou, leaving many religious relics and cultural legacies such as mosques and temples.

Dubbed "the museum of the world's religions," Quanzhou City today still boasts venues of at least four different religions and beliefs.

"Quanzhou's serial sites have helped display the splendid history of exchanges and mutual learning between the Chinese civilization and the world," said Li Qun, head of NCHA.

While spreading to the world ancient China's agricultural technologies, literary classics, and philosophical thoughts via maritime commerce and trade, the city also learned from other cultures and provided available space where different cultures and religions can coexist and integrate, Li added.

The spirit of inclusiveness and common prosperity, embodied by the ancient city, runs in a similar vein with the country's current pursuit of a shared future for all, said Li Guohong, a scholar in local folk culture.

Aerial photo taken on July 8, 2021 shows Anping Bridge in Anhai Town of Quanzhou, southeast China's Fujian Province. (Xinhua/Jiang Kehong)

HERITAGE FOR ALL HUMANITY

The international community congratulated China on Quanzhou's inscription onto the World Heritage List and applauded the country's efforts to preserve the relics in a city full of cultural vim and economic vibrancy.

"It is a great victory of the Quanzhou people. May Quanzhou be now better known to the world and recognized as Ground Zero of Maritime Silk Roads for Peace and Intercultural Dialogue," said Doudou Diene, former director of the Division of Intercultural Dialogue of UNESCO.

"It reflects great recognition from the World Heritage Committee on Quanzhou's outstanding universal value as a window for economic and cultural exchanges, a major port along the Maritime Silk Road, as well as a global maritime trade center back in the Song and Yuan dynasties," said China's Vice Minister of Education Tian Xuejun.

It also demonstrated that the international community highly affirmed the significance and historical value of Quanzhou in promoting mutual learning, sustainable development, and building a community with a shared future for humanity, said Tian, who is also the director of the Chinese National Commission for UNESCO and chair of the 44th session of the World Heritage Committee.

The Chinese government pledged to ramp up efforts and deepen international cooperation to better protect and manage the World Heritages in China.

"Since the accession of the World Heritage Committee, China has always worked closely with other state parties and relevant international organizations to preserve and inherit the collective treasure of humanity. In the future, China will continuously keep its commitment to and take more responsibility for World Culture Heritage by enhancing the conversation, management, and international cooperation," said NCHA chief Li Qun.

China is committed to working with UNESCO, state parties to the World Heritage Committee, and professional advisory bodies to promote international exchanges and cooperation in World Heritage protection and proper use while making new and greater contributions to the noble cause, said Tian. 

(Video editor: Hong Liang; video reporters: Lin Kai, Fu Yingting and Wu Nian.)
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-26 00:39:42|Editor: huaxia

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KATHMANDU, July 25 (Xinhua) -- The ongoing lockdown in Nepal's Kathmandu Valley was extended for 10 more days on Sunday till Aug. 4, though most of the restrictive measures have been relaxed in past weeks.

"We extended the lockdown by keeping certain activities under the prohibited list," Kali Prasad Parajuli, chief district officer of the Kathmandu district, told Xinhua. "The health protocols should be followed to carry out activities in the sectors where the provisions of lockdown have been relaxed."

Sporting events, swimming pools, theaters, mass meetings, rallies, cultural and religious events are still banned, as decided by the Kathmandu, Lalitpur and Bhaktapur districts in the valley.

Meanwhile, long and medium-distance transportation services have been reopened in a separate notice issued on July 23. On July 4, the authorities in the Kathmandu Valley allowed public and private transportation services within the region.

Under the new rules, schools can take examinations but with no more than 25 persons inside each room, and restaurants can offer takeaway services till 7:00 p.m. local time.

The Kathmandu Valley and many other parts of Nepal have been put under lockdown since April 29 to contain a second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Along with the reduction in new cases since June, the restrictive measures have been eased in the valley while the lockdown was extended time and again.

"We know that health protocols have not been fully followed," said Parajuli. "It is difficult to enforce the health protocols fully because of the large population in Kathmandu."

He insisted that it is the duty of every citizen to follow the health protocols for themselves. "We also cannot allow economic activities to remain suspended forever as the livelihoods of many people are at stake," he said.

Nepal's Health Ministry, citing "a spike in the infection rate" following the relaxed measures, warned on Thursday of an increasing possibility of a third wave of the coronavirus to hit the country.

Nepal has reported a total of 680,556 COVID-19 cases and 9,713 deaths by Sunday, with 1,539 new cases and 18 new fatalities recorded in the last 24 hours. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-26 00:51:24|Editor: huaxia

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JAKARTA, July 25 (Xinhua) -- Indonesia will extend the COVID-19 restrictions for the next eight days to control the transmission of COVID-19, President Joko Widodo said on Sunday.

"By considering the aspects of health, economy and social dynamics, we decided to continue implementing the level 4 PPKM (public activity restrictions) from July 26 to Aug. 2," Widodo said in a virtual press conference.

Widodo asked people to be vigilant against the highly contagious Delta variant and possible emergence of other more dangerous variants.

Meanwhile, Coordinating Minister for Maritime and Investment Affairs Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan said on Sunday that the level 3 restrictions are imposed in 33 districts and cities in Java and Bali, while the level 4, which is the highest level of restrictions, is implemented in 99 areas on the two islands.

"The implementation of level 4 and level 3 PPKM is assessed based on three main factors, namely the indicator of transmission rate and the response of the health system based on the World Health Organization guidelines, and the third indicator is the socio-economic condition of the community," Pandjaitan told a virtual press conference.

Indonesia's Health Ministry said Sunday that COVID-19 cases in the country rose by 38,679 within the past 24 hours to 3,166,505 with the death toll adding by 1,266 to 83,279.

Another 37,640 recovered patients were discharged from hospitals, raising the total number of recoveries in the Southeast Asian country to 2,509,318, according to the ministry.

The virus has spread to all the country's 34 provinces and the more transmissible virus Delta variant has contributed to the surge in COVID-19 cases in some regions.

Indonesia is accelerating its massive vaccination program while maintaining restrictions on public mobility in several regions amid the second wave of outbreak. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-26 04:01:46|Editor: huaxia

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Halilu Ahmed Shaba, director-general of Nigeria's National Space Research and Development Agency, speaks at the opening ceremony of a space technology training course in Cairo, Egypt, on July 25, 2021. The Egyptian Space Agency (EgSA) started on Sunday a space technology training course for 17 engineers and specialists from five African countries to boost their cooperation and exchange of expertise in the space field. (Xinhua/Ahmed Gomaa)

CAIRO, July 25 (Xinhua) -- The Egyptian Space Agency (EgSA) started on Sunday a space technology training course for 17 engineers and specialists from five African countries to boost their cooperation and exchange of expertise in the space field.

Running from July 25 to Aug. 5, the 12-day program provides theoretical and practical training for the trainees who are from Nigeria, Sudan, Ghana, Uganda and Kenya.

During the opening ceremony, EgSA CEO Mohamed El-Koosy told the attendees that developing space technology is not easy, for it needs a longstanding experience and a considerable budget.

"But it is not impossible. It can be achieved by the cooperation of African countries in space projects that have a positive influence on their economy and sustainable development," El-Koosy said.

Following the opening ceremony, the trainees and guests were taken on a tour inside EgSA's unfinished Satellite Assembly, Integration and Test Center (AITC), which is being built with help from China.

The 5,000-square-meter center is expected to be finished in March or April 2022, a year later than scheduled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

El-Koosy praised China's assistance to Egypt in the space field and its grants to establish the AITC as well as MisrSat II remote sensing satellite, noting that Chinese experts will provide training to EgSA staff before they deliver the center to the Egyptian agency.

"The Chinese experts need six months to train our people, on-the-job training. Once our people are trained, the Chinese experts will deliver the center to the Egyptian side," the head of EgSA told Xinhua during the tour.

"Since Egypt and many other African countries participate in China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), we welcome using this center under the umbrella of the BRI to serve African states that participate in the BRI," he added.

Egypt offered in late November 2019 to hold this training course on satellite and space technology, after it signed here in EgSA with Nigeria, Sudan, Ghana, Uganda and Kenya a declaration of the project of the African Development Satellite Initiative.

The opening ceremony of the training course was attended by a number of Egyptian and African officials and diplomats, academics, representatives from the African Union and other African organizations, as well as space agency chiefs of some African countries.

"It is apparent that we have to speak together and work together to take Africa to where we want it to be. It is our responsibility to develop this science and technology. The Egyptian Space Agency has taken the lead and we're glad and excited," said Halilu Ahmed Shaba, director-general of Nigeria's National Space Research and Development Agency (NASRDA).

The NASRDA chief also hoped that this training program will lead to future collaborations between participating African countries in the field.

For his part, Samuel Donkor, president of All Nations University (ANU) in Ghana, expressed his appreciation of what Egypt is doing "for the development of space activities in Africa."

"Egypt is taking a strong leadership, making sure that others in the continent receive the needed training in the space field. It will boost and encourage space cooperation, and provide the know-how and the requisite skills to achieve that goal," Donkor told Xinhua. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-26 04:30:56|Editor: huaxia

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GAZA, July 25 (Xinhua) -- The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) warned on Sunday that Israel's tightening of its blockade on the Gaza Strip will only lead to rising tension.

"More Israeli restrictions and tightening the siege on Gaza will only generate an explosion in the face of the occupant," said Hamas' spokesman in Gaza Abdulatif al-Qanou'a.

"Ending and defying the siege that has been imposed on the Gaza Strip for about 15 years is a natural right for the Palestinian people," he said.

The spokesperson urged Israel to end the blockade of the Palestinian enclave and respect the previous understandings that Egypt brokered between Israel and Palestinian factions, including Hamas.

Hamas and other Palestinian factions complained that Israel has tightened the blockade since the end of the last round of Israeli-Palestinian armed conflict that lasted for 11 days from May 10 to May 21, in which over 250 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed.

On Sunday, the Hamas-run ministry of economy said in a statement that the Israeli authorities banned the entry of 25 fuel-loaded trucks into the Gaza Strip for the operation of its sole power station.

"We are watching the Israeli occupant's reluctance to address the most important issue, which is reconstruction," al-Qanou'a said.

Meanwhile, Khader Habib, a senior leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement in Gaza, also warned that "keeping restrictions on Gaza will lead to an escalation."

"The Israeli occupation bears full responsibility for preventing the necessary supplies for the Gaza Strip," he said. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-26 06:01:27|Editor: huaxia

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TUNIS -- Tunisian President Kais Saied announced on Sunday evening that he has removed Hichem Mechichi from the post of prime minister and suspended all activities of the Assembly of People's Representatives, the parliament.

The announcement was made in a video broadcast on the official page of the Tunisian Presidency on Facebook, after an emergency meeting that Saied held with senior security officials. (Tunisia-PM-Removal)

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GAZA -- Israeli launched airstrikes on some targets of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) in southern and northern Gaza Strip on Sunday night, Palestinian security sources and eyewitnesses said.

The sources told Xinhua that Israeli fighter jets and drones launched missiles at several posts and facilities that belong to Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip, adding that no injuries were reported. (Palestine-Israel-Gaza Airstrikes)

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JERUSALEM -- Israel has appointed its first ambassador to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) following the signing of a normalization deal last year, the Israeli foreign ministry said on Sunday.

Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said in a statement that he has chosen Amir Haik, an economist and former director of the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Employment, to take the job. (Israel-UAE-Ambassador)

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CAIRO, July 25 (Xinhua) -- The Egyptian Space Agency started on Sunday a space technology training course for 17 engineers and specialists from five African countries to boost their cooperation and exchange of expertise in the space field.

Running from July 25 to Aug. 5, the 12-day program provides theoretical and practical training for the trainees who are from Nigeria, Sudan, Ghana, Uganda and Kenya. (Egypt-Africa-Space Cooperation) Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 00:08:24|Editor: huaxia

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LUSAKA, July 24 (Xinhua) -- There is no doubt that any investment a country attracts will result in the transformation of not only the economy but people's lives as well.

There is, therefore, no doubt that Chinese overseas investment has gone a long way in transforming not only economies around the world but in improving people's lives.

Zambia is an example where Chinese-funded projects and investments are transforming lives.

For instance, the construction of a 750 megawatts power project in Zambia funded by the Exim Bank of China as well as other financiers has not only enabled the country to become energy secure but has had an impact on the lives of the people.

Construction works of the Kafue Gorge Lower Hydropower Station situated in Chikankata district, about 90 kilometers from Lusaka, the country's capital, started in 2015 and already both socio and economic benefits are being seen.

Apart from the creation of about 4,000 jobs during the construction period, the project, once fully completed, will provide another 400 permanent jobs.

The project has also seen spillover effects in other industries such as suppliers of steel as well as consultancy services while local people are benefiting through the provision of various small businesses such as selling foodstuffs to construction workers.

Senior Chieftainess Nkhomeshya Mukamambo II, under whose chiefdom the project is located, is grateful that the project will not only enhance power generation but also benefit local people who have been employed.

She commended China for the support, adding that China has been an "all-weather friend" to Zambia even in times of difficulties.

The residents of the districts are happy with the project as it has transformed their lives.

Agnes Bwenvya, a 24-year-old resident of the district is among other residents that are benefiting from the project.

Bwenvya, who is involved in the business of selling foodstuffs, says construction workers have become her major customers resulting in her business improving.

"This project has been good to me as a single mother of one child. I am now able to take care of myself and my child because business is now growing," she said.

Anderson Zulu, a 21-year-old resident is one of the casual workers employed during the construction of the power plant said he is elated that his life has been transformed from the time he started working.

"The salary I am getting here has enabled me to take care of my needs and I am so happy that now I have a regular income," he said.

Zebedia Hampande is one of the residents employed as a driver at the construction site and he is happy that he now has a regular income, which is making him take care of his family.

Liu Kai, a representative of Sinohydro, said his company is committed to improving the living standards of the people within the locality of the project.

He said apart from the creation of jobs, a school has since been built while boreholes have been drilled to ease people's problems of access to clean water.

The company, he said, has also trained 350 local people as technicians at the project while some have been sent to China for training, adding that the company has planned more projects for the community. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 02:50:33|Editor: huaxia

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RABAT, July 24 (Xinhua) -- Morocco reported on Saturday 5,494 new COVID-19 cases, bringing the total infections in the country to 575,162.

The death toll rose to 9,559 with 23 new fatalities added during the last 24 hours, while 616 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 by 1,604 to 542,078, the statement said.

The COVID-19 fatality rate in Morocco stands at 1.7 percent while the recovery rate is 92 percent.

Meanwhile, 11,728,171 people have received so far the first vaccine shots against COVID-19 in the country, and 9,794,265 people have received two doses.

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| 2021-07-25 03:04:59|Editor: huaxia

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People line up outside a temporary vaccination center in Tripoli, Libya, on July 24, 2021. Libya's Health Ministry on Saturday announced launching an "exceptional" vaccination campaign against the COVID-19 pandemic. (Photo by Hamza Turkia/Xinhua)



TRIPOLI, July 24 (Xinhua) -- Libya's Health Ministry on Saturday announced launching an "exceptional" vaccination campaign against the COVID-19 pandemic.

The vaccination campaign is carried out by National Center for Disease Control and under the direct supervision of the ministry, according to a statement by the ministry.

A number of temporary vaccination centers have been set up in the capital Tripoli, the statement said, adding that it has received 500,000 doses of the Russian vaccine Sputnik V a few days ago.

The tally of COVID-19 cases in Libya reached 229,604, including 185,468 recoveries and 3,344 fatalities, according to the National Center for Disease Control. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 10:38:36|Editor: huaxia

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ADDIS ABABA, July 24 (Xinhua) -- Chairperson of the African Union (AU) Commission Moussa Faki Mahamat has again called for peacefully solving the Israel-Palestine issue through the "two-state solution," said an AU statement Saturday.

The chairperson made the remarks Thursday in a meeting with Israeli Ambassador to Ethiopia Aleli Admasu, during which the two sides discussed the long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to the statement.

The issue has been a cause of great concern for over 70 years with various regional and international actors having participated in the search for peace between the two sides, said the chairperson.

"The path towards long-lasting peace and stability requires that the peace process and the solutions sought must not only be acceptable, but must guarantee the rights of all parties," Mahamat said.

He said that the pan-African bloc, in its nearly sixty-year history, has been "very clear on its position that in the issue of Palestine and Israel, a two-state solution is necessary for a peaceful co-existence."

The Israeli ambassador expressed his appreciation of the opportunity to meet with Mahamat, saying it marked the beginning of a new phase in building Israel's relationship with the region at a continental level.

The engagement with African states through the AU is key to building multilateralism required for promoting the continental initiatives on Africa's Agenda 2063, said the ambassador. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-26 01:00:10|Editor: huaxia

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TUNIS, July 25 (Xinhua) -- Several Tunisian provinces on Sunday witnessed demonstrations calling for the departure of the government and the dissolution of the parliament chaired by Rached Ghannouchi, leader of the Ennahdha party.

In the capital Tunis, hundreds of demonstrators gathered near the parliament headquarters in the district of Bardo, chanting slogans denouncing the government and expressing their dissatisfaction with the performance of the parliament.

The demonstrators also demanded the prosecution of those responsible for the deterioration of health, social and economic situation in Tunisia.

Video footage and broadcast of local radio stations on social networks showed the storming of the Ennahda party headquarters in the southwestern province of Tozeur.

In the central province of Kairouan, clashes between demonstrators and Ennahda's supporters were reported by local media. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 10:31:59|Editor: huaxia

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MANILA, July 25 (Xinhua) -- A Philippine columnist urged his government and Filipino netizens to jump on the bandwagon to stop the politicization of the COVID-19 origin study, according to a recent article published online by Sovereign PH.

"It is the height of injustice for the U.S. and some of its allies to continue to politicize the issues and evade their responsibilities, while pestering and conspiring against China," said Herman Tiu Laurel, the columnist, on Friday.

China has provided hundreds of millions of vaccines to the developing world, "championed the lifting of vaccine patent rights, delivered vaccines on the 'global public good' basis and added 3 billion U.S. dollars just recently for anti-COVID-19 relief to developing countries," he said.

He slammed the United States for delaying completion of the COVID-19 virus studies "by its politicking with the issue and paying lip-service to patent waivers for vaccines, while hypocritically promising millions of vaccines that never completely arrive."

The columnist urged the Philippines to launch an official government communication to the World Health Organization (WHO) "supporting the petition of the 55 countries to de-politicize the handling of the virus origin inquiries."

He also proposed an online petition to be signed by netizens for the WHO to open inquiries into the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

"While China has shown it has nothing to hide by opening the city of Wuhan, its suspected market epicenter, and its virology institute to the WHO international team, the U.S. is not only uninviting but is aggressively applying 'weapons of mass distraction' and smoke-screening Fort Detrick from questions by steering attention back to China with the false narrative of a 'Wuhan lab-leak' conspiracy theory," he added. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 13:23:08|Editor: huaxia

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ISLAMABAD, July 25 (Xinhua) -- A total of 2,819 people were tested positive of COVID-19 over the last 24 hours, raising the country's tally of the disease-infected people to 1,004,694, the National Command and Operation Center (NCOC) said on Sunday.

Pakistan's southern Sindh province has been the worst hit with 364,784 cases, followed by eastern Punjab province where the disease was detected in 352,682 people.

A total of 23,016 people died of the disease including 45 patients who died over the last 24 hours, the NCOC said, adding that 2,573 critical patients are currently under treatment in hospitals across the country.

A total of 925,958 have recovered from the disease in the country, the NCOC added.

On Saturday, Asad Umar, head of the NCOC, urged citizens to get vaccinated and follow the standard operating procedures as the risk of the disease is not over yet.

Meanwhile, Pakistan has made COVID-19 vaccination certificates mandatory for domestic air travel. Travelers will be required to carry proof of vaccination when taking domestic flights starting from Aug.1. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 20:10:05|Editor: huaxia

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FAIZABAD, Afghanistan, July 25 (Xinhua) -- Eleven militants were confirmed dead as fighting planes struck a Taliban gathering in Argo district of Afghanistan's northern Badakhshan province on Saturday, said an army statement released here Sunday.

In the sorties conducted Saturday morning, a large number of arms and ammunition including an anti-aircraft gun were also destroyed, the statement said, adding that no security personnel or civilian was harmed during the air raids.

Taliban militants have not made comment.

Airstrikes have killed more than 100 militants in the northern Balkh and southern Helmand provinces on Saturday, according to security officials.

Fighting has increased in Afghanistan since early May when the U.S.-led coalition forces began withdrawal from the war-battered country. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 20:21:51|Editor: huaxia

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MAIMANA, Afghanistan, July 25 (Xinhua) -- Five Taliban militants were killed and a key commander, Mufti Ismael, sustained injury as a mine blast struck their car in Afghanistan's northern Faryab province on Sunday, police said.

"Taliban key commander Mufti Ismael after attending a Taliban commanders' meeting in Shirin Tagab district this afternoon were going to somewhere when a mine blast targeted his car killing five of his bodyguards and injuring him," a statement of the Faryab police said.

Taliban militants have overrun all seven districts of Faryab province and have been mounting pressure on the provincial capital Maimana city, 425 km northwest of Kabul.

The militant group has not commented on Sunday's incident. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-24 23:43:00|Editor: huaxia

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MADRID, July 24 (Xinhua) -- The Spanish government confirmed on Saturday that travelers from Argentina, Colombia, Bolivia and Namibia will have to spend 10 days in quarantine following their arrival in Spain.

The decision was published in the Spanish Official State Bulletin (BOE), which said the measure will come into effect from July 27 as a result of the rising number of COVID-19 cases in the four countries.

The 10-day quarantine may end earlier if the travelers get a negative COVID-19 test result on the seventh day after their arrival.

Argentina, Colombia, Bolivia and Namibia thus join a list of over 25 countries from outside the European Union that are considered to be high risk. Travelers from these countries have to spend time in quarantine after arriving in Spain.

The Spanish Health Ministry said earlier this week that the ban on arrivals from Brazil and South Africa, which was imposed earlier in the year, will remain in place until at least Aug. 3.

On Friday, the ministry recorded 31,171 new COVID-19 cases and 27 deaths, while the country's 14-day COVID-19 incidence rose to 677 cases per 100,000 inhabitants. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-24 23:57:54|Editor: huaxia

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by Patrick Ekstrand

STOCKHOLM, July 24 (Xinhua) -- When gang members opened fire on each other in a housing estate outside the Swedish capital on July 17, it was nothing out of the ordinary. After all, the country has for a decade-and-a-half been plagued by gang violence on a scale not seen elsewhere in the European Union.

This time, however, two young children -- a five-year-old girl and her six-year-old brother -- were rushed to hospital after being hit by stray bullets, and once again the debate on how to tackle the scourge of gang violence in the country was reignited.

TRAGEDIES REPEATED

The victims in the incident on the evening of July 17 got away without life-threatening injuries.

"This reckless violence that frightens entire neighborhoods is terrible. Using violence in an area where children are present shows complete ruthlessness," Prime Minister Stefan Lofven wrote in a Facebook post on July 18.

It was, however, not the first time a child was struck by bullets intended for a gangster in Sweden.

The outcome was fatal when a 12-year-old girl, who was out walking her dog in a Stockholm suburb on Aug. 2 last year, became the unintended victim of gang members settling a score.

More recently, on June 30, 2021, another fatal shooting occurred when a policeman was hit by bullets in a suburb of Sweden's second-largest city Gothenburg. Police wrote off speculations that he was the intended victim. He, too, was just a bystander who ended up a collateral victim, they believed.

The list of hapless victims is long, Swedish Television's popular program "Veckans Brott" (The Week in Crime) found in an episode aired last autumn. According to their research, at least 12 people who were not the intended victims had been killed in the past six years.

The gang situation has become so bad that it affects the daily lives of the inhabitants even when no shots are fired. There have even been instances where gangs have established checkpoints to prevent rivals from entering "their" housing estates.

WORRYING TREND

The level of gang violence is considerably higher in Sweden than in any other country in the EU, and during the first six months of 2021, there were 140 such incidents, according to official statistics.

Up until June 30, 20 were killed and another 39 injured in these shootings. Most of the incidents occurred in what the police and other authorities refer to as socially disadvantaged areas -- suburbs with high unemployment, below-average school results and a large proportion of families relying on social benefits.

Worried about the trend, the government tasked the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention to do a comparative study with other European countries. The results released in May show Sweden is the only European country where fatal shootings have risen significantly since 2000, leaping from one of the lowest rates of gun violence in Europe to one of the highest in less than a decade.

The authority summed up the findings as such: "On the issue of lethal violence with firearms, Sweden is today very high in the European ranking, with about four deaths per million inhabitants. Europe's average corresponds to about 1.6 deaths per million inhabitants."

The level of gun violence in Sweden surprises the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention researcher Klara Hradilova Selin.

"Those risk factors also exist in some other European countries, without these having the same development of lethal gun violence as we have had in Sweden," she said in a press release when the study was published.

GOVERNMENT RESOLVE

Penalty discounts for young offenders have long been an integral part of the Swedish judicial system. Lately, an increasing number of political parties have started saying such leniency should not be applied to serious crimes.

On Wednesday, the government presented legislation to abolish this penalty discount for 18-20-year-olds who have committed serious crimes.

"Today, not even very serious multiple crimes lead to the maximal punishment," Minister of Justice Morgan Johansson said when presenting the proposal, which he hopes will be introduced as from Jan. 1 next year.

Under the current regime, 18-year-olds get roughly half the sentence (as adult offenders) while 20-year-olds get about 25 percent shorter sentences, according to Johansson.

According to the proposal, it will also be possible to sentence these young offenders to life imprisonment.

The government has previously also pledged to increase the number of police employees by 10,000 before 2024.

However, some new employees will only replace the vast number that quit after a reorganization of the force in 2015.

Further, a study published by the trade union on Nov. 23 last year claimed that 42 percent of Sweden's police officers were planning a career switch due to a relatively low salary for their duties. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 21:10:38|Editor: huaxia

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MOSCOW, July 25 (Xinhua) -- Russia held a military parade on the Neva River in St. Petersburg, the country's second largest city, to celebrate its Navy Day on Sunday.

About 4,000 sailors, more than 50 ships, boats and submarines, as well as 48 naval aviation airplanes and helicopters participated.

The Borei A-class strategic nuclear submarine, Prince Vladimir, made its first public appearance.

The Russian Navy has everything it needs to defend the country and its national interests, Russian President Vladimir Putin said when addressing the ceremony.

Putin reviewed the troops and congratulated sailors and veterans on the holiday, marked annually on the last Sunday of July. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-26 06:06:32|Editor: huaxia

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LISBON, July 25 (Xinhua) -- Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa said on Sunday that the country's economic recovery after the pandemic crisis will be done "with an eye to the future."

"For this reason, the two great engines of this recovery are to face two major challenges that lie ahead -- the climate transition and the digital transition," he said in a speech in the city of Coimbra, central Portugal.

What's more, he said, the country has an "ambitious program" to ensure decent housing for the poorest, as well as "affordable housing for the middle class, in particular the new generations and students who need to move to attend university."

The Portuguese head of government referred to an expected investment of 2.75 billion euros (3.24 billion U.S. dollar) foreseen in the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR) for the "immediate revival of the economy," as well as "solving a structural problem in the country," which is housing.

"If we want to keep the new generations among us, we have to ensure conditions so that the new generations can have autonomy in life and live among us. We have to create conditions for the new generations to become autonomous and to be able to build the family they want to build," Costa said.

The prime minister noted that investments will be made to improve energy efficiency and the reindustrialization of Portugal after the COVID-19 crisis.

Portugal has registered 17,292 deaths and 953,059 infections since the beginning of the pandemic.

Over 47 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated, according to the country's health authorities. (1 euro = 1.18 U.S. dollars) Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 09:48:59|Editor: huaxia

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BAGHDAD, July 25 (Xinhua) -- "The Americans have nothing to do with human rights. It is a concept they use to seek interests," said Bedu al-Hamad, a former Iraqi detainee who was jailed by the U.S. army for more than two years.

Al-Hamad, 59, who was head of the reconstruction committee of the Municipal Council of the town of Duluiyah, Salahuddin province, spent 26 months and 20 days in U.S. detention despite not having committed any crimes.

The Sunni-dominated town of Duluiyah is a symbol of resistance to U.S. occupation, where U.S. troops were confronted with countless attacks and ambushed by armed groups in the town along the Tigris, especially in 2008 when the attacks reached their peak.

On August 21, 2008, U.S. troops accused al-Hamad of supporting terrorism and arrested him, weeks after al-Hamad attended a meeting at the Municipal Council in Duluiyah.

"Before the end of the meeting, the Americans came and told us: What right do you have to meet and decide to change the mayor without our knowledge? We've brought you to power and liberated you," al-Hamad said, who had a heated argument with a soldier.

Then the solider threatened al-Hamad with a gun and said, "I would shoot you in the head."

Weeks later, al-Hamad was arrested and his journey began through the U.S. investigation and detention centers. He was transferred between six detention centers that lacked the most basic human rights.

According to a report called "costs of war" by Brown University, over 100,000 prisoners passed through the American-run detention system in Iraq, with most prisoners lacking effective methods to challenge their imprisonment.

Al-Hamad recalled when he was transported from Tikrit to Baghdad with other detainees, he was handcuffed and squatting in the helicopter, which caused damage to his back that lasted for years.

His suffering worsened a year after his arrest when the U.S. troops told al-Hamad that they had conclusive evidence that he had nothing to do with the accusation against him, but they continued to detain him for more than a year.

"One soldier told me that it has been proven to us with conclusive evidence that you are innocent, but you will continue your imprisonment," said al-Hamad.

Al-Hamad, who currently works for a humanitarian organization, described life in the prison as hell, saying that "the food they (U.S. troops) provide is just food that keeps detainee alive," and the visits by detainees' families are very few, as he could not recognize his son during one of the visits due to his difficult psychological condition.

He added that one of the many horrific violations committed by U.S. troops was solitary confinement, when they shut a detainee in for a month, preventing him from seeing anyone, and exposed him to extreme winter cold or summer heat.

"The Americans were making the Iraqis torture each other, as they brought a detained policeman, and put him among the extremists. The militants tortured him, broke his hands and feet and tried to kill him, and this goes beyond violating human rights," he said.

During the period of his detention, al-Hamad was not brought before a judge, nor was he allowed to seek a lawyer to defend him, which are the most basic rights of a detainee.

After being released, a nightmare kept haunting al-Hamad for more than a year due to the negative impact of torture on his psychological state -- he dreamt that U.S. troops were raiding his house, handcuffing him, and putting a black bag on his head, or he dreamt that the troops were arresting him again at a U.S. army checkpoint.

"I am convinced that human rights, freedom, and democracy are false American slogans that they use against anyone who opposes them," he concluded. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-25 16:51:34|Editor: huaxia

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WASHINGTON, July 25 (Xinhua) -- Top U.S. infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci recently defended coronavirus research done by "qualified, highly respected Chinese scientists," saying "those scientists were very well-respected in the scientific community internationally."

Talking about the research Chinese scientists have conducted in an interview on Fox News, Fauci said "it was research that was highly recommended by peer review, our United States peer reviews. It got a very high score in the peer review system."

"The purpose of the research was very, very clear. It was to try to determine what was out there in the bat population that might be ultimately risky for us," said the infectious disease expert, noting that "it was research that was done by qualified people." Enditem
Wang Yi Talks about Terrorist Attack in Dasu: Find out the Truth, Punish Perpetrators and Prevent Similar Incidents from Happening Again

2021/07/25

On July 24, 2021, State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi held the 3rd round of China-Pakistan Foreign Ministers' Strategic Dialogue with Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi in Chengdu, Sichuan Province.

Wang Yi said that the attack on the shuttle bus on its way to the Dasu Hydropower Station is the biggest terrorist attack suffered by Chinese nationals abroad recently. China attaches great importance to it. President Xi Jinping made important instructions immediately after the incident, and put forward clear requests. Premier Li Keqiang also clearly stated China's position on this incident during his phone conversation with Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan at the latter's request. Both China and Pakistan are victims of this terrorist attack. We should strengthen cooperation, bring the perpetrators to justice at an early date, give the people of the two countries an explanation, and prevent similar incidents from happening again.

Wang Yi pointed out that China appreciates Pakistan for rescuing the injured in the first place, strengthening security protection for the project personnel in Pakistan, supporting the work of China's interdepartmental joint working group in Pakistan, and assisting China to properly deal with the aftermath. China hopes Pakistan to resort all strengths and means to find out the truth as soon as possible. China is willing to provide all necessary assistance and cooperation. The perpetrators must be thoroughly investigated and punished without leniency no matter for what intentions, at any place, and protected by what forces. We should further improve security protection for Chinese nationals, institutions and projects in Pakistan, and build a strengthened and upgraded security cooperation mechanism.

Qureshi, on behalf of the Pakistani government and people, deeply mourned the victims and expressed sincere condolences to the injured. Qureshi said that Pakistan strongly condemns the terrorist attack targeting Chinese nationals in Pakistan. Chinese engineers and technicians in Pakistan have made important contribution to Pakistan's social and economic development. China's loss is the loss of Pakistan, and protecting China's interests is protecting Pakistan's own interests. Pakistan will treat Chinese nationals on its land like its own people. The Pakistani government will thoroughly investigate the incident, bring the perpetrators to justice, resolutely frustrate any attempt to sabotage Pakistan-China cooperation, and allow no force to destroy the China-Pakistan all-weather strategic cooperative partnership. Pakistan will spare no effort to safeguard the safety of Chinese personnel and institutions in Pakistan, re-organize special forces to strengthen related work, and resolutely prevent similar incidents from happening again.
Chegutu deputy mayor, Maphius Shumba, who collapsed and died Monday, was been laid to rest at his rural home in Mberengwa Thursday.

The Ward 10 councillor reportedly succumbed to an undisclosed illness just hours after attending the funeral of another MDC-T member, who died in the area.

Chegutu Municipality spokesperson Brian Nkiwane confirmed Shumba's death but did not disclose the cause of his demise.

"We would want to notify you of the untimely death of our deputy mayor, Councillor Maphius Shumba," he said.

In paying his condolences, Chegutu mayor Henry Muchatibaya described the late Shumba as an integral component within the opposition party and council.

"His death was a blow to the whole of the Chegutu community and MDC-T family. We have lost a unifier and a father figure," said Muchatibaya.
A group within the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Ekiti State, the South West Agenda for Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tiinubu 2023 presidential ambition (SWAGA), has vehemently opposed the consensus arrangements being proposed by the National Caretaker Committee of the party in the state.

In a statement signed by the Ekiti State Chairman of SWAGA, Senator Tony Adeniyi, yesterday, the group said the consensus won't work on the strength that the state Governor, Dr. Kayode Fayemi, and his caucus have allegedly handpicked the delegates for the congresses without the inputs of other party stakeholders.

Adeniyi stressed that the APC in the state got its body fractured with the taking over of the party affair by a group within the state chapter under the name 'Tokan-Tokan, populated by loyalists of Fayemi.

He noted that the splinter group had allegedly dominated state affairs and had held down other party members by retaining its grip on their jugular.

Adeniyi, who commended the resolution of the national caretaker committee to ensure a swerve in the constituted state Congresses Electoral Committees, advised that there should be a level playing ground for party members to carry out their aspirations without fear or favour.

"We hereby state categorically that the APC in Ekiti State is fully prepared to go for direct congresses immediately after the registration/revalidation exercise. We are not, and shall not be part of any unilateral 'consensus' arrangement whatsoever.

"The beauty of democracy is by allowing everyone to have their say, even when the majority would have their way. The only civilized way to prove our numerical values is through congresses, not by any proxy," Adeniyi said.

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He added: "We should also be mindful of the fact that this sidelining of party members with its implosive tendencies have continued unabated, causing many prospective members to be shut out and the existing family members deliberately blackened out of party activities. This necessitated a formal complaint lodged by the Integrity Group to the national leadership of the party in 2018."

Meanwhile, dispelling the diatribes by Adeniyi against the party, the APC state Publicity Secretary, Hon. Ade Ajayi, submitted that the aspersion cast on APC and its leadership confirmed that the so-called SWAGA members were outsiders in the party.

Ajayi clarified that the fair composition of the congress committee and directive issued to the party to conduct free and credible congresses at its recent stakeholders' meeting substantiated the fact that the party had been fair and just to all tendencies.

The state APC spokesman also condemned Adeniyi's attempt to drag Governor Fayemi into the fray by accusing him of undue interferences, adding that the leadership has not been under any pressure to subvert the will of the people as being painted.
PRESIDENT Samia Suluhu Hassan has reassured Tanzanians that her government will continue honouring the country's third president, the late Benjamin Mkapa who passed away on July 24, 2020 in Dar es Salaam.

She made the statement through her greetings conveyed by Vice President Dr Philip Mpango at a mass held in Mkapa's village of Lupaso in Masasi district, Mtwara Region.

The mass which was held to mark one-year anniversary after his death was presided over by the Archbishop of Dar es Salaam, Polycarp Cardinal Pengo.

The government was represented by Dr Mpango and attended by various leaders, including Prime Minister Kassim Majaliwa.

"We shall continue honouring the contribution of the late Benjamin Mkapa in the development of our country, he was a great leader who walked the talk, especially on issues of national interest," said President Samia in a message delivered by the VP.

Commenting on the deeds of Mkapa, the VP said the late Mkapa was a God fearing man who will forever remain in the hearts of many, including his family and the nation at large for his good deeds.

"Benjamin Mkapa was a person who loved his family, and the nation at large, as we mark the commemoration of his death, his family members and the nation misses his advice, forethought and care," he said.

Mpango said that the government and the ruling party Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) and the nation at large is also missing Mkapa's wisdom, comments and advice he had on national issues as well as intentional institutions, including the Benjamin Mkapa Foundation.

Dr Mpango said the late Mkapa had contributed in the country achieving economic revolution, the fight against corruption, fight against HIV/ AIDS, ensuring transparency and accountability in public services and resolution of political disputes in DRC, Burundi and Kenya.

The VP said all the achievements by the late Mkapa remain as marks for Tanzania. He said Mkapa's leadership era touched the lives of many, right from his family, national and international level.

"The biography of Benjamin Mkapa is full of praiseworthy deeds and many good things that he did," he said, adding that each and every day that Mkapa lived served as a lesson to everyone who worked with him.

The VP also said Mkapa's life was like a mirror of the community that surrounded him, where through his leadership the former leader raised and nurtured many leaders who are still holding various government positions.

Meanwhile, the VP urged Tanzanians to emulate the late Mkapa by sacrificing to work for the betterment of the nation, saying the late President John Magufuli during his lifetime emulated Mkapa' spirit of working hard.

He insisted on the need for Tanzanians to work professionally in all the sectors they are involved in.

On the other hand, the VP said the country's leaders should emulate Mkapa's determination in making difficult decisions for the benefit of the nation.

Dr Mpango said leaders of the nation should also learn from the late Mkapa the importance of being accountable by ensuring justice and equality in serving the citizens.

Other issues the leaders ought to learn from Mkapa, according to Dr Mpango, is that Tanzania and Africa as a whole has the responsibility to solve problems and disputes, such as family disputes, political and economic issues that encounter the continent.

He said by doing so, Tanzania and the rest of the African countries will be able to promote national equality in Tanzania and Africa.

He said the church, the nation and international bodies will continue to honour the late Mkapa and keep his legacy for remarkable achievements in solving political disputes in Zanzibar that erupted during the general election in 2000 and 2007, and Kenya and Burundi disputes.

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For their part, former cabinet ministers who worked under the third phase government described the former leader as a true patriot who dedicated his efforts and time of service to bring development in the country.

Mr Edger Maokola Majogo who served as the minister for Defence and National Service during the administration of President Makapa, said despite his originality in southern regions, the former president was keen to see equal development for the whole nation.

"When it comes to decision making, he was strong and able to defend whatever he thought was profitable for the nation," he said in a note that was seconded by Mr Andrew Chenge who served as the Attorney General under the third phase government.

"He initiated a number of reforms that are still in use until now," he said, recalling the number of construction projects, such as the Mkapa Bridge that was meant to open up the southern regions.
TANZANIA yesterday received the first batch of over one million Johnson Covid-19 vaccines donated by the United States government through the COVAX arrangement, as the country plans to inoculate around 34 million of the population.

The population represents 60 per cent of Tanzanians who will be vaccinated on voluntary basis, while priority will be given to frontline health care workers, people with chronic diseases as well as adults 50 years and above.

Such a move comes hardly a week after the Minister for Health, Community Development, Gender, Elderly and Children, Dr Dorothy Gwajima reported a staggering increase in the number of Covid-19 cases and deaths, where by Friday there were 858 patients and 29 deaths.

Receiving the consignment, Dr Gwajima said the Covid-19 vaccines, like any other the country has been receiving, have gone through all the necessary reception procedures of health products, extending recognition to the US government for the support which has come at an opportune time.

"I would like to inform the public that the ministry has done its part on the verification process, and today on behalf of the government we have received the first batch of 1,058,400 doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine," said Dr Gwajima.

She went on to reveal that the vaccine is safe after first being verified by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and later the country through its own verification systems, a procedure being employed to other imported vaccines.

According to the Minister, the vaccines will soon start to be administered after all the quality and control checks have been finalised.

Besides, the vaccines will be issued free of charge in different health facilities and other special centres which will be introduced across the country to ease access.

She directed the responsible organs to prepare well for the exercise to give way for people to timely access the vaccines.

High risk regions including Dar es Salaam, Mwanza, Kilimanjaro, Mbeya, Arusha, Kigoma, Singida, Dodoma, Iringa and Mtwara will also be given top priority in issuance of the vaccines.

Dr Gwajima disclosed that the country is expecting to receive other kinds of vaccines in the coming few weeks, pointing out that more information and procedures will be availed as the consignments arrive.

"I call upon the public, particularly the first priority groups to go for the vaccines to reduce the rate of infection, long treatments including piling up of patients in health facilities demanding ventilator machines," stressed the Minister.

She warned against misinformation by so-called health experts, urging the public to refrain from consuming information from unreliable sources.

United States Ambassador to Tanzania, Donald Wright observed that the donated vaccines are part of the US pledge to provide at least 25 million of 80 million doses globally to Africa.

Ambassador Wright said the arrival of the single shot of Johnson & Johnson Covid- 19 vaccine will help protect Tanzanian people from the ravages of the pandemic and begin reducing barriers to building back the economy.

"We are sharing these vaccines to save lives and to lead the world in bringing an end to the pandemic.

Sharing these vaccines also serves as another example of the strength of our 60-year partnership and commitment to Tanzania.

"The US has provided more than 26 million US dollars in direct US government assistance to fight Covid-19 in Tanzania since the pandemic began last year," said Ambassador Wright.

The Minister for Foreign Affairs and East African Cooperation, Ambassador Liberata Mulamula expressed appreciation to the government of United States, saying the vaccine under the COVAX arrangement demonstrates true friendship.

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On her part, WHO Country Representative, Dr Tigest Mengestu was of the view that vaccination offers long lasting immunity against severe and deadly Covid-19.

"With vaccines available in the country, Tanzania's armour of responding to the pandemic has been strengthened further," she noted.

UNICEF Country Representative, Ms Shalini Bahuguna emphasized that no one was safe until all the people are safe, urging people to follow all the experts' advice, including vaccination.

"Partnership is the only way to solve our problems, the Covid-19 has taught us," noted Ms Bahuguna.

She commended Tanzania for having the strongest immunization systems across the world, noting that the country can use the experience to make the Covid-19 situation a success.
The government has a backlog of Sh14 billion for compensation of victims of human-wildlife conflict, Tourism Cabinet Secretary Najib Balala has said.

Mr Balala revealed that the money had accumulated for the last seven years since he got to the office.

"We have only paid Sh2 billion, and have claims amounting to Sh14 billion, which have to be settled as a way of creating good relationships with people. If we lose this, we will lose the goodwill of people and that of conservation," he said.

He was speaking in Watamu on Friday during the launch of the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) strategic plan for 2021-2024 at the Watamu Marine Park, where he reiterated the need for KWS to invest in technology and innovation to curb poaching and other crimes against wildlife.

"We have now made strides in managing conflict but there is still a challenge within us, which is the human-wildlife conflict. This should be addressed in all spheres because it is affecting the relationship between us and the community. Without the funds, we cannot pay or have plans to curb the problem," he said.

Mr Balala said that the Covid-19 pandemic had affected most parks, which would earn Sh4.2 billion in 2019, and now, barely generate Sh800 million, a deficit that is affecting running and operating KWS.

For instance, he said the use of digitization in KWS working environment will ensure they make money over investment.

"We need to establish ways of generating revenue because the government cannot fund us in everything, and this is not sustainable. But we need to be more innovative on how to raise funds as not to be an overpriced tourist destination. We need to make products for the domestic market," he said.

He was accompanied by Wildlife PS Fred Sigor, KWS Director General John Waweru and KWS Strategy Director Edward Wanyonyi.

Mr Waweru said that the cases of human-wildlife conflict will only reduce if Kenyans were enlightened on the importance of conservation and how best to consist with wildlife since only 35 per cent of wild animals live in the park while the rest live with people.

Cases of human-wildlife conflict have been on the rise over the past years across the country, making compensation costs by the government skyrocket.

He said the increased cases are being caused by the increased population of both human beings and wildlife even as the size of land remains the same.

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"Up to 65 per cent of wildlife live not in the park, but with the human population hence Kenyans should help to protect them without conflict. Compensation will go down if we coexist well with wildlife, " Mr Waweru said.

On generating income, Mr Waweru said that the launched strategic plan has 16 strategies and 89 activities that when fully implemented, will be able to generate income.

This comes even as Mr Sigor said that the financial sustainability of the government entity was key for the future of conservancy.

"I am happy that this plan gives us ways to improve enterprise development in the service, by identifying high-end signature parks facilities and niche products," he said.

Earlier, Mr Balala has indicated that there are 17 parks in the country, which do not generate revenue hence the need to look for more sources of revenue for KWS to sustain the park.

The wildlife service has been engaged in conservation efforts, and in May launched the nation wildlife census that will see all wild animals in the land as sea counted.
National Treasury Cabinet Secretary Ukur Yatani has written to the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) to investigate his political rival, Marsabit Governor Mohamud Ali.

In the letter dated July 8, and copied to the National Intelligence Service (NIS) Director General Philip Kameru, Mr Yatani directs EACC boss Twalib Mbarak to expedite investigations against his Marsabit Gubernatorial race opponent.

The directive by the Cabinet secretary to EACC raises questions on the use of State office and investigative agencies against political opponents.

Mr Yatani, who lost the Marsabit gubernatorial race to Mr Ali in 2017 polls, has already expressed interest in contesting for the seat again in 2022.

"In view of the above developments, I urge your office to quickly investigate all bank accounts held by the governor and his family members," states Mr Yatani in the letter.

Travel expenses

The letter, which is marked as confidential, directs the EACC to narrow the investigations on Mr Yatani and examine the travel expenses incurred by the governor and his family members.

The letter states that the governor should be investigated for some Sh1.5 million media advertisement bill and use of road levy funds among others.

Mr Yatani says as a Cabinet Secretary, he is duty bound to highlight the unanswered graft questions raised against the governor.

The letter bears the logo of the office of the National Treasury and Planning, and signed off by Mr Yatani, which means he is giving the directive in his official capacity.

The EACC is an independent institution and creates aspersions, especially coming at a time when the investigative authority like Directorate of Criminal Investigations are being accused of witch-hunt.

This is not the first time Mr Yatani has been in the limelight for allegations of using his office to promote his political interest when the state officers are expected to be apolitical.

Activist Okiya Omtatah sued Mr Yatani for influencing the allocation of Sh4.2 billion projects in his North Horr constituency, Marsabit County.

Mr Omtatah detailed the multimillion-shilling projects being implemented through at least five State agencies, which at the time the activist said shows intense lobbying and use of State resources for political gain.

One of the projects at one time was a subject of the query after the Transport Cabinet Secretary and the Principal Secretary told a parliamentary committee they don't know the source of the fund.

The officials told the committee that they could not understand where the Sh2.1 billion came from, noting that only Sh300 million had been allocated for the Marsabit-Shegel road project.

Mr Yatani comes from the Gabbra community, while Mr Ali is a Borana. The two communities have been fighting for close two decades now, a war at one time in 2006 claimed the lives of all MPs from Marsabit when a military plane heading to Marsabit crashed in foggy weather.

The mantle of leadership of Gabbra and Borana fell on the shoulders of Mr Yatani and Mr Ali respectively.

In 2013, when Mr Yatani was Marsabit governor, clashes broke out in Moyale. Thousands of residents were displaced and property destroyed, leading to Deputy President William Ruto threatening that if the governor will not stop fueling the clashes, the county will be disbanded and the role reverted to national government.

While Gabbra claims Mr Ali is supporting his community, the Borana accuse Mr Yattani of using his position as Treasury CS to skew allocations of resources and compromise the security apparatus to marginalise the Borana community.

Three weeks ago, Isiolo Woman Representative Rehema Jaldesa, speaking on the floor of the House, linked Mr Yatani to tribal violence in Marsabit and Isiolo counties. Mrs Jaldesa claimed that Mr Yatani was pursuing politics of displacing the Borana community.

The two communities clashed early this month. The chaos started when a Borana herder was killed a few kilometers from Marsabit town. Two days later, three people from the Gabbra community were killed in what was seen as a revenge attack.

Heavily armed

And a day later, attackers believed to be from North Horr Constituency attacked and burnt down a Borana village within Saku constituency before they were repulsed by security team when they attempted to attack Manyatta Jillo village, a Borana settlement.

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Saku MP Dido Rasso says that all 'wars' have been fought within his constituency.

"They (militia) overwhelmed the security officials and even with the help of military chopper, they still drove away livestock. They have heavily armed," says Rasso, a retired military colonel.

The intense fighting paralysed business within Marsabit town and it took intervention of General Service Unit officers to normalise the situation.

President Kenyatta summoned the elected leaders to State House to discuss the matter, during which according to those in attendance, the Borana leaders demanded Mr Yatani to be involved in peace talks noting that he was a major player.

The President designated Interior Minister Fred Matiang'i, Marsabit Governor Ali and National Cohesion and Integration Commission to meet and agree on a roadmap to peace in Marsabit.

Mr Yatani's name again featured prominently during the discussion on the cause of the conflict and solutions but he insists it is the governor who is fanning the animosity.
Kenya's tourism sector has received a major boost after a charter flight from Frankfurt, Germany landed at the Moi International Airport (MIA) in Mombasa.

The charter flight arrival is an indication of recovery for the ailing international tourism market source that has slumped since the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Eurowings Discover, a leisure carrier of the Lufthansa Group touched down in Mombasa on Sunday at 5.15am, with 150 tourists on board.

Speaking in Mombasa after receiving the flight, Tourism Principal Secretary Safina Kwekwe said that the resumption of the flight was an indication that Kenya's international tourism was recovering.

"This development also gives us hope and reassures that people are eager to travel and experience the world yet again, as a destination, we are working to ensure we are ready to host tourists," she said.

Ms Kwekwe said that with the new flights, this may see Germany top the charts in terms of traffic as Kenya's tourism source market.

She added; "The government was committed to ensuring a conducive environment for a flawless travel system."

German Ambassador Annette Gunlher said the move by Lufthansa to have a direct flight to Mombasa was not just about tourism but improved economic relations between the two countries.

"It is another testimony of the excellent relationship between Kenya and Germany. German companies that come to Kenya come to stay and I think this will not be a one-time thing, they have chosen to bring an airline to Mombasa and will be happy to operate in Kenya. This is another sign of our excellent relations," she said.

"It does a great favour in terms of promoting our international business not just in Kenya but in the region. We will ensure that that as an air operator, efforts will be made to ensure flawless operations by Eurowings," Kenya Airports Authority Managing Director Alex Gitari said.

Eurowings Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) Helmit Woefel said that the flight would be flying four times a week between Frankfurt and Mombasa.

"We chose Kenya because it was active in ensuring the recovery of tourism," he said adding that currently it will operate twice-a-week frequency on Thursday and Sunday.

Kenya Tourism Board Acting CEO Allan Njoroge said Kenya had put up enough measures in the travel and hotel sector to ensure that all Covid-19 protocols were followed to give confidence to visitors on their health safety.

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"We hope to see the airline prosper and encourage more others to come into the country," Mr Njoroge said.

Hotels at the Coast have recently been hit by a shortage of international guests as the numbers of flights from Europe, a traditional source market had reduced.

The flight arrival comes at a time when the peak of tourism season is beginning after a downturn between April and mid-July.

Local tourism stakeholders led by the Kenya Association of Hotelkeepers and Caterers (KAHC) National Vice Wasike Wasike said that this showed that there was light at the end of the tunnel, they were looking forward to more charter flights landing in Kenya.

"Germany has been an important source market. We have wanted charters to come back to Kenya for a long time. They are starting to come back a bit slowly. There was a time we were receiving 16 charters per week, now we are doing only five to six," said Mr Wasike, who is also the Group Operations Manager Heritage Hotels.

He added that as the world opens, the number of charter flights were going to increase.

The Eurowings charter flights had been scheduled to land in Mombasa in March 2021, but this was postponed due to Covid-19 movement restrictions.

scece@ke.nationmedia.com
PRIME Minister Kassim Majaliwa has reaffirmed the sixth phase government's committed to improve the welfare of workers, including teachers.

The PM therefore called on civil servants to continue working hard for the benefit of the nation.

Mr Majaliwa made the remarks on Friday when addressing Ruangwa residents in separate rallies held at Chinokole Village and Kassim Majaliwa Secondary School.

He said in addition to improving workers' welfare, the government will continue improving various infrastructures, including education sector such as construction of classrooms, laboratories, toilet holes and construction of teachers houses in primary and secondary schools.

He said that the improvement of infrastructure aimed at providing students with proper infrastructure that will enable them to study hard and improve their performance.

"We are also constructing dormitories so that students can stay in schools and get enough time for studies," he said.

The Premier also called on Tanzanians to unite and collaborate with their government by participating in various development activities for their own benefit and the nation in general.

Mr Majaliwa also inspected infrastructure of Kassim Majaliwa Secondary School, including construction of teachers' houses, where the PM expressed his satisfaction with the project pace, calling on supervisors to make sure that it is completed within the agreed time frame.

Meanwhile, the PM said that the government is committed to invest in girl's education with the aim of helping them to realise their dreams in education.

"We want female children to pursue their studies without encountering any difficulties so that they can realise their dreams," he said.

In order to realise the plan, Mr Majaliwa said that the government has embarked on construction of girls secondary schools in various areas in the country in order to provide them with an opportunity of studying in a friendly environment and avoid challenges which made them fail to attain their education objectives.
KCB Bank has sponsored five needy students, four girls and one boy, from Mandera County to pursue their secondary school education.

The five, who topped in the county in the 2020 Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) exams will join national schools in the country.

According to Mandera Branch KCB Manager Abdirashid Yunis, the students received cheques for the whole term.

"We have presented five students with fully paid school fees for the first term for different schools including Alliance, Pangani Girls and Kericho," Mr Yunis said.

The bank also bought enough learning materials for the five students including school uniforms, books, sanitary pads and other requirements.

The bank will also pay for their transport to school and back home.

"We received a total of 17 applications for the sponsorship but only five qualified after our scrutiny of the eligibility," he said.

For a student to be picked by KCB, he or she must have scored above 370 marks in the KCPE exam.

Background check

"Apart from scoring above 370 marks, we do a family background check and get convinced that indeed, the student is needy and from a poor family," the KCB manager said.

Mr Yunis warned that the sponsorship can be withdrawn if a student starts recording poor performance in school.

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"The only way the student enjoys the sponsorship for a period of four years is by maintaining a good performance record," he said.

He cited cases of indiscipline as another vice that can lead to automatic withdrawal of the sponsorship.

The bank only pays fees per term and not for the whole academic year to avoid losses occasioned by student transfers to other schools.

"We decided to be paying fees per term to avoid inconveniencing students who want to transfer from one school to another," Mr Yunis clarified.

Girl child education

On why more girls were picked than boys, Mr Yunis said the bank is keen on promoting girl child education.

"We have more girls because the local society puts little emphasis on them when it comes to matters of education and as a bank, we felt this is the only opportunity where the girls can be supported to achieve the academic dream," he said.

Ms Halima Ali, a resident, applauded the sponsorship, further appealing for other organisations and companies to chip in and support education in Mandera.

"I am happy for what KCB has done but we have more children who need to be supported for them to achieve their academic dreams," she said.

She cited the high poverty index in the border county as the major setback in academic performance.

"Most parents are poor, making it difficult for them to send their children to better schools outside Mandera," she said.
When the dreaded Forkbombo cybergang relocated to Rwanda, their modus operandi was already known by security authorities, and they lay in wait and eventually arrested 12 individuals.

Cybersecurity firm OnNet Africa also had a hand in ending Forkbombo's reign of terror, as it shared crucial information on the hackers with relevant authorities over the years, making the crooks predictable.

The 12 hackers arrested in Rwanda in 2019 were served eight-year jail terms and fined Sh6 million two weeks ago by a Rwandan court.

Forkbombo, formed by ex-Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) cybercrime detective Calvin Otieno Ogalo, terrorised corporates and government institutions until 2017 when they attacked the Kenya Police Sacco.

After intercepting communication between Mr Ogalo's group and two American nationals believed to be part of the hacking syndicate, detectives finally pounced on the cybergang and found evidence that was used to charge 11 individuals with hacking the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA).

Police presented 10 suspected members of the hacking group to court for prosecution on March 28, 2017. Another member, Alex Mutungi Mutuku, was charged a week later for causing the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) to lose Sh3.9 billion.

One of the schemes the hackers ran at KRA was to help unscrupulous businessmen register imported vehicles without paying the required taxes. For a fee, the hackers would doctor the businessmen's accounts with the KRA and clear the vehicles for use locally pending number plate allocation.

Forkbombo had been known to hack into the National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA) system. It is not too far-fetched to imagine that the group may also have manipulated the State agency's website to approve number plate allocations to the same businessmen.

The prosecution of 11 Forkbombo members nearly relegated the hacker group to history books.

Feared team of hackers

Its top boss, Mr Ogalo, was in custody. So was his top lieutenant and likely the most talented hackers, Mr Mutuku.

Mr Mutuku spent 40 days in police custody before he was eventually granted bail by the chief magistrate's court. For the first time since 2013, Forkbombo's operations seemed to have stalled.

The third in command at the syndicate, Mr Reuben Kirogothi Mwangi, saw a power vacuum and decided to fulfil his ambition to lead the feared team of hackers.

Mr Mwangi was one of the early recruits brought in by Mr Ogalo, and was also one of the first Forkbombo hackers to get arrested and charged for theft through manipulation of computer systems.

He was charged with four other Forkbombo members in 2013 for aiding in the theft of Sh80 million from the Judiciary, by making fraudulent payments to firms that had not supplied any goods or services.

Mr Mwangi paid his Meerkats (K) Ltd Sh6.6 million.

Other Forkbombo members who paid themselves from the Judiciary's coffers were Henry Achoka through Bonarza Agencies (Sh12 million), Duncan Bokella through Integrated Real Estate Services (Sh7.5 million) and Martin Murathe through Williams Logistics (Sh3.9 million).

Mr Mwangi and Mr Achoka absconded court two years after being charged.

In filling the vacuum created by the arrest of Mr Ogalo and other members of the gang, Mr Mwangi garnered the support of four surviving senior members of the Forkbombo group, as he looked to pick up the pieces and regroup.

Erick Dickson Njagi, Godfrey Gachiri and Erickson Macharia Kinyua backed Mr Mwangi.

Multimillion shilling heists

They recruited another four individuals - Dedan Muchoki Muriuki, Samuel Wachira Nyuguto, Damaris Njeri Kamau and Steve Maina Wambugu before crossing over to Rwanda via Uganda in 2019.

By this time, the surveillance authorities placed on Forkbombo members was so intense, and security agencies across East Africa were happy to cooperate in sharing any information that would protect corporates from the multimillion shilling heists.

As soon as Mr Mwangi and his rebranded Forkbombo group crossed into Uganda in 2018, Interpol officers in Kenya alerted Ugandan authorities of the hackers' movements, and warned that some corporates could be on the brink of losing millions.

In mid-June 2019, Mr Mwangi and his crew executed a salami attack at the Development Finance Company of Uganda (DFCU) Bank, but it took an entire month before the lender knew what had happened.

Forkbombo got two DFCU workers to plant their infamous software in computers owned by the lender.

For an entire month, the software slowly withdrew Ush700 million (Sh21.4 million) from depositors' accounts.

This time, rather than buy ATM cards from desperate bank customers, Forkbombo went a step further and registered dummy bank accounts at DFCU. The two junior DFCU workers then collected several debit cards handed over by customers for renewal.

As the surrendered ATM cards had been deactivated, Forkbombo used its hackers to reactivate them and make withdrawals in small batches.

Much like any salami attack, the big one was yet to hit.

Siphon customers' funds

In mid-July, DFCU discovered that Ush8 billion (Sh244 million) had been siphoned from several customers at a go.

Just as it was with Kenyan lenders that suffered under Forkbombo, DFCU's internal monitoring system was unable to notice any irregularities between June and July, 2019 when millions was being silently siphoned from its accounts.

The lender reported the matter to police in Kampala, and the two junior DFCU workers were arrested alongside the two mules Forkbombo recruited to help withdraw the money. Forkbombo thought it had made a clean getaway.

Mr Mwangi and his crew lay low for nearly four months, before crossing into Rwanda where they would eventually suffer failure.

Authorities in Uganda may have failed to nab the hackers in Kampala, but were still keeping close tabs on Mr Mwangi and his crew.

No sooner had the hackers crossed into Uganda than police and Interpol officers in Kampala warned the Rwandan authorities of what was about to happen to banks.

The group arrived in Kigali in early October and started scouting for their next victim.

Intelligence operatives informed the Rwanda Investigations Bureau (RIB) that the hackers were targeting a minimum of four banks, including Kenyan-owned Equity Bank.

Towards the end of October, Forkbombo did a trial run by trying to get into Equity's Eazzypay system to siphon customers' funds. The hack failed, and the crooks retreated to reorganise their plans.

Forkbombo's recruitment process

Rwanda's strength in intelligence would prove to be too much for the hacker group, and it eventually led to 20 individuals - eight Kenyans, 11 Rwandans and one Ugandan - finally being locked up for cybercrime.

Equity Bank's Kigali branch was also aware that the hackers were in town, and swiftly volunteered information it had to security authorities.

Mr Mwangi and his crew were approaching vulnerable low income earners like househelps and casual labourers to fill up vacancies in the money mule department.

Some money mules informed various security authorities, including Equity's internal department, of the "job" offers they received.

Equity in turn told the RIB of Forkbombo's ongoing recruitment process.

Equity Rwanda boss, Hannington Namara, told Kigali-based media outlet Taarifa Rwanda that perhaps Mr Mwangi and his crew underestimated the honesty levels in the country.

"In some countries in the region, everyone wants a deal, in this country, never. So, they did not know that the security apparatus and framework here is different. They had been here for days," Mr Namara said.

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The RIB and Equity teamed up and decided to lay in wait.

The lender ensured that the software protecting its finance management system was ready to detect any irregular access of bank accounts.

Detectives at the RIB on their part started monitoring the people Mr Mwangi and his crew would talk to. Some of the recruited mules were also approached, and a few of them became double agents, informing police of any new information from the hackers.

Pounced on Forkbombo crew

Both parties then lay in wait, as the mules eventually gave away the location of the Forkbombo crew.

Equity Bank Kigali's internal monitoring system fired a warning a few minutes past midnight on November 1, 2019.

Security teams responding to the warning of an anomaly knew what was happening. Mr Mwangi and his team were trying to infiltrate the system.

Equity's security informed the RIB of the attack, and detectives quickly pounced on the Forkbombo crew.

In what could mean that Rwanda enjoys the swiftest of justice systems in East Africa, it took less than two years to conduct the trial and get a conviction in a complex case involving several individuals.

The case was largely delayed last year on account of the Covid-19 pandemic and its effects, which saw Rwanda forced to implement lockdowns in some months of 2020, an indication that judges would have concluded the matter in less than a year.

But while Forkbombo is finally history, there are still several hacker groups in Kenya and East Africa that are causing banks and other institutions huge losses.

Cybersecurity firm OnNet Africa has already issued several warnings about Silent Cards, an offshoot of Forkbombo that was formed in 2017.

Forkbombo members who were not on board with a Reuben Mwangi leadership left and formed Silent Cards.

Silent Cards in 2019 executed a heist on a local bank and made away with Sh400 million, one of the single largest amounts ever stolen at a go in Kenya.
Vistors walk past the Merlion at the Marina Bay on 18 July, 2021. (PHOTO: Getty Images)

SINGAPORE  The Ministry of Health (MOH) on Saturday (24 July) reported 130 new cases of COVID-19 infection in Singapore, taking the country's total case count to 64,054.

There are 127 new locally transmitted infections within the community, of which 75 are linked to the Jurong Fishery Port Cluster while five are linked to the KTV cluster, said MOH in a news release. The latest figures take the case counts for the two clusters up to 741 and 232, respectively.

Sixty-nine of the local cases are linked to past cases and have already been placed on quarantine, while 29 are linked to previous cases and were detected via surveillance. Another 29 cases are unlinked.

Among the new cases are six seniors aged above 70, who are unvaccinated or partially vaccinated, and are at risk of serious illness.

There are also three imported cases, who have already been placed on Stay-Home Notice (SHN) or isolated upon their arrival in Singapore. One was detected upon arrival, while the other two developed the illness during SHN or isolation.

A total of 490 cases are currently warded in hospital. Most are well and under observation. There are currently 12 cases of serious illness requiring oxygen supplementation, and one in critical condition in the intensive care unit (ICU). None amongst these 13 cases is fully vaccinated. Nine seniors above 60 years, who are completely unvaccinated or partially vaccinated, have fallen very ill.

An 83-year-old Singaporean woman died of COVID-19 infection on Saturday. The woman, who was unvaccinated and had a history of hypertension and high cholesterol, was linked to the 121 Bukit Merah View cluster, which has 94 cases to date.

Overall, the number of new cases in the community has increased from 238 cases in the week before to 1,027 cases in the past week. A high number of cases in the coming days is expected as the authorities step up efforts to detect them to contain their spread in the community. The number of unlinked cases in the community has also increased from 17 cases in the week before to 120 cases in the past week.

Story continues

The seven-day moving average number of all linked community cases and all unlinked community cases are 129.6 and 17.1 respectively.

There are two new clusters on Saturday including one linked to Samys Curry Restaurant with eight cases and another linked to Case 65791 with four cases so far. In total, there are currently 26 active clusters, ranging between three and 741 infections. As there have been no more cases linked to the Case 64184 and Case 64264 clusters for the past two incubation periods (i.e. 28 days), the clusters have been closed.

MOH is investigating cases of COVID-19 infection involving individuals who visited Samys Curry Restaurant. There is likely ongoing transmission at the restaurant, it said.

Samys Curry Restaurant will be closed to all members of the public from Sunday to 8 August to break the chain of transmission and enable deep cleaning of the premises.

All individuals who work in the restaurant have been placed on quarantine, and will be tested during quarantine. To quickly uncover any community infection cases, the authorities will also extend free COVID-19 testing to members of the public who had visited Samys Curry Restaurant between Monday and Friday. They can refer to https://go.gov.sg/samy-testing for details on the testing operations.

All visitors to the Dempsey area are advised to monitor their health closely, and minimise social interactions for 14 days from their date of visit or interaction. They are encouraged to see a doctor immediately if they feel unwell.

As of Friday, a total of 7.06 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines under the national vaccination programme have been administered. Some 4.22 million individuals have received at least one dose of the vaccine. Of the 2.96 million individuals who have completed the full vaccination regimen, 120,313 of them are recovered persons who received at least one dose and the remaining 2.84 million have received their second dose.

In addition, 81,227 doses of Sinovac vaccines were administered as of Friday, covering 67,373 individuals. Those who have received the Sinovac's CoronaVac vaccine locally are not included in Singapore's national vaccination numbers.

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COVID: Singapore bans dine-in from 22 July, social group limit back to 2
Australia's travel industry is at a tipping point and could see major job losses unless more government support is provided.

About 15,000 travel sector jobs have been lost since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, as some travel agents have seen their revenue plummet by up to 95 per cent.

In the past 18 months, travel agents have handed out $8 billion in credits and refunds to customers from hotels, airlines, cruise liners and tour operators with $2 billion still outstanding.

Australian Federation of Travel Agents chair Tom Manwaring says the industry is at a tipping point and "massive job losses" are looming unless there is more government support.

"Right now every agent is 18 months into near zero income and the lack of cash flow clashes with the ongoing business and payroll costs," he said.

The industry is also joining calls for the reinstatement of JobKeeper.

Bicton Travel managing director Carole Smethurst says she had 29 staff before COVID and is now down to five full-time and three casual workers.

"JobKeeper would allow me to breathe," she said.

Travelonline managing director Glenn Checkley says his weekly turnover has fallen by 80 per cent.

His business does not have the same access to financial support since it is located in Brisbane.

"We need JobKeeper and rent support back, even if it requires strict turnover reduction tests to ensure the waste of Jobkeeper 1.0 isn't repeated. At the moment businesses like ours are the forgotten businesses," he said.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said COVID disaster payments were more flexible than JobKeeper.

"These payments at $600 and $375 are at the level JobKeeper was in the December quarter last year," he told Sky News' Sunday Agenda program.

"It's available to casuals and it's money that is going out the door as quickly as 40 minutes."
As a student and later a colleague of Eliphalet Nott, it is likely that he would have held the same views as Nott, that slavery was an evil, a hinderance to our prosperity, and a blot upon our existence. In absence of a written record, some indication of his opinion on the subject might be gleaned from his associations and his actions. In 1863, at the height of the Civil War, Huntington himself administered the funeral of Morgan Luke Freeman, a local barber and former slave who had documented associations with the Underground Railroad, including harboring freedom seekers.

As an educator, Huntington believed that through educating the future generations of religious leaders, the connections with Scripture could make religion live, and righteous values could be instilled in missionaries. This view is reflected in his eulogy for the influential educator David Perkins Page in 1848, prior to his time at the seminary:

Education is not the enemy, but the handmaid, of religion. He who succeeds in disseminating knowledge among the people stands next to him who succeeds in turning many to righteousness. And he who does both, the greater his elevation as a teacher, the more conspicuous his rank as a servant of Jesus Christ.
Case numbers have decreased over the summer, but most of the recent cases have been among unvaccinated residents. From July 16 through Saturday, the health department has admitted 29 new cases  19 were unvaccinated and 10 were vaccinated.

Ryan acknowledged the threat posed by the Delta variant. In the South, she said because of warmer temperatures more people are spending time indoors. There have been increased cases reported in several states, which is a concern for New York in the fall when school returns to session and more people begin congregating inside.

One goal is to ensure more of the community is protected against COVID-19, Ryan added. That will help keep daycare centers and schools open.

So far, more than half (50.9%) of Cayuga County residents have received at least one vaccine dose. Among adults age 18 and older, the rate is higher (59.9%). About 48% of the county's total population is fully vaccinated.

While the vaccination numbers continue to inch up, they aren't keeping pacing with the national and statewide figures. Nationally, 56.5% of all Americans have received at least one dose, while 49% are fully vaccinated. In New York, 62% of state residents have been given at least one shot and 56.3% are fully vaccinated.
New York AG Letitia James has been holding buyback events in larger cities around the state in recent weeks in response to increased gun violence. Saturday's event, held in partnership with the city of Syracuse, accepted any working and non-working, unloaded firearms with no questions asked. In exchange, participants were paid on-site with the following terms:

Gun violence continues to claim lives and threaten communities throughout our state, James said in a press release after Saturday's event. With the spike in gun violence ravaging neighborhoods in Syracuse, it is more important than ever that we use every tool at our disposal to protect our families and children. Whether it is taking down the violent drug rings fueling this crisis, hosting gun buybacks, or supporting community groups that are addressing this violence  we are vigorously combating this crisis from every angle. Every gun that was turned in today represents a potential tragedy averted and a potential life saved, and we are grateful to our partners for their support.
The Parade of Nations are usually a time for people to test their Geography skills (or lack thereof) and to maybe learn a thing or two about each of the 205 nations participating at the Olympics.

For South Korea broadcaster MBC, they went in a direction where their production was filled with cultural stereotypes and at times relying on a nations most tragic moments as athletes filed into the Japan National Stadium. MBC has since apologized for their actions.

We apologize to the countries concerned and our viewers. It is an inexcusable mistake. Again, we are deeply sorry and regretful for the mistake. July 24, 2021

MBC pic.twitter.com/eLJjrn3pJN  withMBC (@withMBC) July 24, 2021

According to CNN, some bits of info felt out of place for a broadcast of the Parade of Nations while other times, like showing a picture of Dracula to represent Romania, MBC went full stereotype on a nation. The Korea Times noted that MBC also had basic factual errors throughout the broadcast.

Some examples include:

Chile: An image of the Routes of Santiago de Composte, which is actually in Spain.

El Salvador: A picture consisting of Bitcoin because El Salvador recently allowed the cryptocurrency to be a legal tender.

Haiti: An image of rioting and a caption that read, The political situation is fogged by the assassination of the president. President Jovenel Moise was assassinated on July 7.

Italy: An image of pizza.

Marshall Islands: A caption that read, Once a nuclear test site for the US.

Micronesia: An image of the Atlantic Ocean. Micronesia is located in the Pacific Ocean.

Norway: An image of salmon fillet.

Syria: A caption that read, Rich underground resources; a civil war that has been going on for 10 years.

Ukraine: An image of the Chernobyl disaster.

South Korean broadcaster MBC used images to "represent" each country during the #Tokyo2020 Opening Ceremony. Italy: pizza

Norway: salmon

Haiti: upheaval

Ukraine: Chernobyl pic.twitter.com/KpUXATuZld  Raphael Rashid (@koryodynasty) July 23, 2021

As for what MBC did for South Korea, they posted three graphics and it wasnt as bad as the others.

The first picture is that of Gyeongbokgung (aka Gyeongbok Palace)  the main royal palace of the Joseon dynasty. The second picture is that of BTS. The third picture is that of Admiral Yi Sun-shin.  John Lee (@koreanforeigner) July 25, 2021

Along with a potential worry about this hurting South Koreas reputation throughout the world, some from the country made note that it wouldnt have been nice if a foreign broadcaster did that toward them. Hopefully, those around the world realize that MBC doesnt represent everyone in South Korea just like how (insert news outlet) doesnt represent everyone in the United States.

Every country has a tired stereotype or something from their past (or present in some cases) that theyre not proud of. With the appropriate nuance, a tidbit about how El Salvador now has Bitcoin as legal tender or how Ukraine got through the Chernobyl disaster might be the dash of salt that completes a broadcast. Overly relying on Google to come up with the most basic things about each country and acting like a certain food or a tragedy is all that a country is known for doesnt really teach anybody anything.

[CNN/The Korea Times]
Was it difficult to maintain impartiality, given ISIS hold on Mosul and the deluge of destruction witnessed daily?

Oh, Reed said, you mean, like, 20 minutes later, you may have to treat the same ISIS fighter who shot the kid you just finished treating? Yeah, it was an incredibly solid line for us. Our job was to treat people. You know what a 17-year-old Isis fighter with his guts hanging out looks like? Looks like a 17-year-old with his guts out. You treat the person whos in front of you.

Reeds war experience could only help his humanitarian efforts so much. There are, obviously, different objectives.

Helping is way harder than hurting, he said, comparing life as a soldier to an aid worker. Hurting is pretty easy. The actual job of doing it, helping people, especially if youre without the right equipment and staff, which we were at times, is much harder.

Reed is an imposing figure, over 6-foot tall and barrel-chested with wavy russet hair and, back then, a full beard. Through sheer force of will, along with Potters placating acts of diplomacy, he was able to forge an alliance between the sides, ensuring that the Iraqi military would bring civilians, as well as injured troops, to the medic tents and that injured ISIS fighter also would receive care.
Firefighters also reported progress against the nations largest wildfire, the Bootleg Fire in southern Oregon, containing 46% of the blaze that had consumed nearly 640 square miles (1,657 square kilometers).

More than 2,200 firefighters battled the blaze, focusing Sunday on constructing containment lines at the north and eastern edges in dense timber. Crews could get a break from rain and higher humidity predicted for this week, said Marcus Kauffman, spokesman for the Oregon Department of Forestry.

The lightning-caused fire has burned 67 homes, mainly cabins, and at least 2,000 houses were under evacuation orders.

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown told CNNs State of the Union that its imperative federal and state authorities invest in mitigation such as tree thinning and preventive burns to limit the number of similar massive blazes. But she conceded that the harsh reality is that were going to see more of these wildfires.

Theyre hotter, theyre more fierce, and obviously much more challenging to tackle. And they are a sign of the changing climate impacts, Brown said Sunday.
Party chairwoman Jessica Millan Patterson had earlier advocated for an endorsement but now says she wants the delegates to decide.

I have consistently called for a fair, transparent process that would allow our party to go into the recall election united and strong with a decision to endorse a candidate or a decision not to endorse, Patterson said in a statement after the vote.

The dispute over whether the party should endorse underscores Republicans' challenges heading into the election. Though they successfully built on pandemic frustrations to get the recall on the ballot, they have an uphill climb to oust Newsom. Democrats in the state outnumber Republicans almost 2-to-1, and Newsom has far more campaign money to spend.

Cox, who ran against Newsom in the 2018 general election and lost badly, decried the endorsement process and said he won't participate. He says the party is trying to rig the vote in favor of Faulconer, who has a more moderate record than Cox and the other prominent Republicans.

Faulconer's campaign said this week an endorsement process would be divisive after earlier arguing for one. But his campaign manager Stephen Puetz said Faulconer would still seek the party's nod if the process went forward.

Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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BLY, Ore. (AP)  Out-of-state crews headed to Montana Saturday to battle a blaze that injured five firefighters as the U.S. West struggled with a series of fires that have ravaged rural lands and destroyed homes.

Progress was being made on the nation's largest blaze, the Bootleg Fire in Oregon, but less than half of it was contained, fire officials said. The growth of the sprawling fire had slowed, but increased fire activity was expected Saturday, and thousands of homes remained threatened on its eastern side, authorities said.

This fire is resistant to stopping at dozer lines," Jim Hanson, fire behavior analyst, said Saturday in a news release from the Oregon Department of Forestry. With the critically dry weather and fuels we are experiencing, firefighters are having to constantly reevaluate their control lines and look for contingency options."

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday declared a state of emergency for four northern counties because of wildfires that he said were causing conditions of extreme peril to the safety of persons and property. The proclamation opens the way for more state support.
The summer isnt even halfway through and its already proved to be a season of deadly extremes.

In a little over a month, four major heat waves have broiled the Western United States, including record-shattering triple-digit temperatures in Oregon and Washington that caused hundreds of heat-related deaths.

Wildfires are again tearing through the West, burning hundreds of thousands of acres in California, Oregon and British Columbia in Canada. The fires are so massive that smoke has traveled all the way to the East Coast, prompting health warnings in Connecticut and Maryland and turning the skies above New York City hazy and red.

And from Germany to China, extreme flooding has caused death and destruction. At least 180 people in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands were killed last week when two months worth of rain fell in two days, causing floods and mudslides. In the central Chinese province of Henan, at least 33 people died after riders were trapped on a subway amid catastrophic flooding after torrential rains.
That's not to say the federal government ought to be excluded from environmental policy altogether. We must create a system in which the federal government builds incentive structures that allow states and localities to make informed decisions.

This idea has begun to catch on. The global organization Local Governments for Sustainability has enabled partnerships between over 2,500 local and regional governments across more than 125 countries, working to implement smart regulations. In the United States, the landmark Conservative Climate Caucus, started by Republican Rep. John Curtis of Utah, will encourage partnerships with state and local governments, returning to the party's conservation roots. This opens the door for bipartisan environmental solutions that recognize policies work best when designed close to home.

These principles are at play in my own backyard too. The recent Lowcountry Lowline project, a green infrastructure initiative in Charleston, South Carolina, to manage stormwater, has gathered federal interest and opened the possibility of a $25 million stimulus from Washington.

So don't allow the Biden administration to wipe away state and local input on our zoning laws and environmental policy. Notify your congressional representatives about the consequences of erasing local self-determination. Help strengthen the underappreciated power that our communities have by joining local green initiatives too. Everyone can and should play a part in their own community.

Evan Patrohay, a graduate of Clemson University, has been awarded a Fulbright scholarship to research the effects of climate change on Arctic ecosystems in Troms, Norway. He worked with the American Conservation Coalition on this piece.

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Arizona legislators came into the 2021 session with a revenue surplus of more than a billion dollars. They had the means to dramatically improve Arizona public schools, which rank at the very bottom for funding, teacher salaries, and class size. But they chose the opposite route.

Instead of improving schools, Republicans chose to give more money to the rich. Our LD6 representatives  Wendy Rogers, Walt Blackman and Brenda Barton  consistently voted for bills that reward the wealthy and punish public schools.

Last November, Arizona voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 208, which levied a 3.5% tax on individuals earning over $250,000 and married couples earning more than $500,000. Arizonans sent a clear message that they wanted more funding for public schools. Republican lawmakers chose to defy the will of the people though. They tossed out Arizonas progressive income tax and replaced it with a flat tax. People earning $30,000 to $40,000 annually will get a $17 tax cut, while those earning over $5 million will get an extra $350,303. This amounts to a $1.9 billion tax cut for the wealthy.

There is some good news, though. The massive voucher expansion bill, which would have taken even more money away from public schools and handed it over to private schools, failed to pass. Three House Republicans voted against it.

Republicans control the Senate by a very narrow margin, 16-14, and the House by only 31-29. In 2022, we must replace Rogers, Blackman and Barton with people who care about our childrens education.

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COVID-19 is an extremely complex phenomenon. It will likely take years for scientific experts to fully understand a virus that has facilitated such a historic public health crisis in every part of the world. China has been targeted unfairly by U.S. and Western governments for the virus' origins without any evidence. Without full and equal cooperation among all governments and countries, more questions than answers are likely to arise from investigations into COVID-19's roots.

China is not turning its back to the international effort to understand the development of COVID-19, but is simply asking that fairness be exercised in the process. The undue focus on WIV ignores several additional indications that the virus may not have emerged from the first known outbreak in Wuhan. Traces of COVID-19 were found in Spain's sewage system as early as March 2019. Research further suggests that COVID-19 was spreading in Italy as early as September 2019.
If Germany's vaccination rates remain too low this fall, other options could be considered, Laschet said, adding but not now.

With the highly transmissible delta variant spreading in Germany, politicians have debated the possibility of compulsory vaccinations for specific professions, including medical workers. No such requirements have been implemented yet.

Germanys vaccine efforts have slowed in recent weeks and that has led to discussions about how to encourage those who havent yet received a vaccine to do so. More than 60% of the German population has received at least one dose while over 49% are fully vaccinated.

During a recent visit to the Robert Koch Institute, the government run disease control agency, Merkel ruled out new vaccine requirements at the moment," but added, Im not ruling out that this might be talked about differently in a few months either."

Other elected officials have struck a similar tone. Baden-Wurttemberg governor Winfried Kretschmann, a member of the Greens, noted Sunday that the delta variant and others that may emerge could make vaccine requirements more attractive down the line.
The highly contagious Delta variant of the novel coronavirus is now the dominant strain in Wyoming, according to the state health department.

The variant is estimated to be 60% more transmissible than its mutated predecessor the Alpha variant, or B.1.1.7, which in turn is roughly 50% more contagious than the initial virus strain. And its overtaken the state as our rate of new vaccinations stalls.

The reality that the pandemic is not over in Wyoming is growing clearer each day, with the metrics that guide public health decisions ticking back toward concerning levels. Heres a look at some of the numbers.

Hospitalizations

Nearly 80 people across Wyoming were hospitalized with COVID-19 on Friday, the most since late January when vaccines were still limited to priority populations.

The situation in Cheyenne, where the Delta variant is rapidly spreading, is already reminiscent of the earlier surge. Forty patients in the roughly 200-bed facility are being treated for the virus as of Friday.

The majority of the patients are not vaccinated. Roughly 93% of the states hospitalized virus patients between May 1 and July 19 were unvaccinated, according to the department of health, a trend in line with national statistics.

Laramie County COVID hospitalizations reach 'concerning' level before CFD Already, the effects of the variant and its spread are being felt by medical professionals, with 24 patients being treated for COVID-19 at Cheyenne Regional Medical Center and four at the VA Medical Center.
The Federal Trade Commission voted unanimously on Wednesday to approve a policy statement about its intention to pursue enforcement action against illegal restrictions on repair. Thats great news for Sarah Rachor and the owners of 2 million other farms across the United States.

Fifteen years after moving away from Sidney, Montana, Rachor returned home to take the reins from her father and keep the family farm in the family. She and her father grow soybeans, sugarbeets, spring wheat and corn on 600 acres. Other than hiring a few truck drivers during beet harvest, they do all of the work themselves. They rely on a new John Deere tractor and combine, which both have computerized precision agriculture tools designed to give farmers more control of everything from soil moisture to fertilizer levels, increasing their yields.

But if either machine goes down, Rachor and her dad have to stop everything and wait for a manufacturer-branded technician, who may take days, weeks, or even a month to fix the problem. Such delays can impact a harvest. Soybeans, for example, can dry out, causing the shells to crack and the beans to drop on the ground, where they become scrap.
Tracy Stone-Manning and I both worked in the United States Senate in 2008. As part of being Senate staffers we were given frequent and detailed instructions on the ethics rules that govern Senate staffers. These rules  and associated training  are in place to ensure that we as Senate staffers serve the nation first instead of our personal interests.

Not only did Tracy Stone-Manning violate ethics rules while a Senate staffer, she also withheld this information until questioned by senators. Last week, Stone-Manning, the Biden Administrations nominee to head the Bureau of Land Management, admitted in a filing to the U.S. Senate that she violated congressional ethics rules and likely committed mortgage fraud with the undisclosed gift in the form of a loan from a political donor.

Let me be clear. Tracy Stone-Manning not only directly violated Senate ethics rules governing gifts, but may also be guilty of breaking the law related to Federal mortgage disclosures and lying under oath to Congress. Couple this with her shady past of eco-terrorism and we have an individual unfit for federal office.
The state has already paid out more than $50 million in costs. Zortman alone has cost state and federal agencies combined more than $70 million to date.

Over 17 years of mining there, Pegasus extracted more than 2.5 million ounces of gold.

Buttes own Judy Martz, then the governor, signed the 2001 Montana Metals Mine Reclamation Act, containing the bad actor provision, which requires mining companies and their executives to complete past cleanup operations or reimburse the state for cleanup costs before they can get permits for new mines.

The twist in this case is that Baker is now CEO of Hecla Mining Co., which is seeking permits for two mines on the edge of the Cabinet Wilderness near Noxon.

We have nothing against those projects. Hecla itself has a good record  but the company knew both the bad actor law and the contents of Bakers resume when Baker was chosen as its leader.

Obviously, the state DEQ made the decision to apply the bad actor law to Baker, and therefore to Hecla, when Gov. Steve Bullock was in charge.

And in May of this year, District Judge Mike Menahan rejected Bakers attempt to evade the law, ruling that the bad actor law did indeed apply to Baker and Hecla.
Professor Mark Stoler of the University of Vermont, stated that, "The voters made the Nazis the largest [Political] party in Germany in the early 1930s. [later,] It was easier for the German people to say that Hitler seized power than to admit that they endorsed the Fascism of Hitler." That scared the bejesus out of me. Religious nationalists have bastardized the word "patriot" to cover up their sins. They preferred the "tin god" that made the USA the laughingstock of the world for four years.

The Democratic two-party system has worked quite well in spite of the peaks and valleys of the last 250 years. White religious nationalists, however, want to replace democracy and install a theocracy. I'm really not that impressed with the theocracies of Afghanistan and Iran. Hating people of color appeals to the psyche of ignorant white people because being white is all they have going for them.

We owe the African, Asian, Latino and Native Americans a tremendous debt of gratitude for their massive turnout to vote in the last election. Half of the Republican Party still have delusions of grandeur for the failed Trump regime, which is frightening. This cult was so possessed with hate for everyone but themselves, that they stormed the United States Capitol, our sacred seat of government.
An effort to recall a Republican legislator largely over his vote to expel a fellow GOP lawmaker accused of sexually harassing women at the state Capitol is being viewed as a litmus test for party loyalty, the state GOP's new chairman said.

The move to recall Rep. Dwight Kiefert over his vote to oust former Rep. Luke Simons has fanned the flames of an intraparty fight that has a far-right faction seeking to control the party apparatus and replace Republicans they see as too moderate.

Perrie Schafer, who was elected chairman of the state GOP last month, has the task of repairing damage to the partys image.

I don't like this infighting," he said. "My goal is to get people rolling in the same direction.

North Dakota Republicans wield supermajority control in the Legislature and hold every statewide office. The party, however, began splintering in the past decade with the emergence of the loosely organized Bastiat Caucus, fervent supporters of limited government and spending and privacy and gun rights.

Simons, who was expelled by the House in March, was one. The caucus has said 30 legislators paid dues in 2019, though the membership has not been publicly disclosed.

The criminal case against the Buffalo man accused of throwing a burning laundry basket into Buffalo City Hall following a protest last year could be resolved soon, his defense lawyer says.

With negotiations with federal prosecutors ongoing, a resolution of the federal and state cases against Courtland M. Renford is "close," said attorney Samuel P. Davis.

Renford, who remains in federal custody, was scheduled to appear in federal court on Friday, but he refused to be transported from the Niagara County Jail to court in downtown Buffalo, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Arcara said in court.

Renford, 22, faces charges he started a fire in City Hall at about 11:25 p.m. May 30, 2020, when a protest in Niagara Square spurred by the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police turned destructive and violent.

Renford was taken into custody by Buffalo police two days later. Police found him in his home hiding behind clothes.

He was about to be released from custody after being charged with felony arson and criminal mischief counts in state court, but then federal agents arrested him.
Many of the properties written up are in and out of court for years, he said.

"We bring them to Housing Court, and then the judge dispenses justice and it's out of our hands at that point," Comerford said. "I'm not blaming the judge. I'm in the code enforcement business and the business of protecting the public. I'm not in the real estate business, but we're trying to save buildings and we're not trying to knock them down. We want to save them.

+3 Bakery owner 'devastated' by demolition, says city must police absentee landlords As Susan Adamucci drove her 12-year-old son to school last Wednesday, she heard on the radio that a building was in peril in downtown Buffalo. A short time later she learned the property being torn down included Two Wheels Bakery & Cafe, which she opened in April 2018 as the citys lone fully gluten-free bakery. Adamucci estimated the overall

"I'm really convinced the drone will be a great tool for the city to save big, older buildings," he said.

Preservation Buffalo Niagara, along with Common Council members David Rivera and Mitch Nowakowski and State Sen. Sean Ryan, released a report earlier this month calling for the city to take several steps to better preserve buildings. They include a moratorium on demolitions, called for in the city's Comprehensive Plan in 2006, and the adoption of a citywide preservation plan that would make better use of legal and financial pressures to protect the city's historic housing stock.

The drones will be useful, Fisher said, but will fall far short without a more comprehensive plan.

"This feels like a Band-Aid on a gaping wound," she said.

Mark Sommer covers preservation, development, the waterfront, culture and more. He's also a former arts editor at The News.
The commission's report did not immediately change the military justice system. Congress will have to do that, and there's still debate there about whether to follow Gillibrand's plan  which would remove commanding officers from prosecutorial decisions on all major crimes  or to pursue a narrower approach which would set up special units of trained prosecutors who only handle sexual assaults and other such cases.

The commission didn't address that issue: to do that, Tokash said, the commission would have needed another 90 days. But it did produce a report that satisfied those who think the military must reform its justice system.

"We felt like it was a very good report," said Natalie Khawam, an attorney for the family of Spc. Vanessa Guillen, a Fort Hood soldier who was murdered last year after complaining of sexual harassment. "It addressed so many issues that not only we were focused on, but also issues we were not aware of."

The report also was something of a career highlight for Tokash, who hopes it will finally lead to the kind of change that Gillibrand and some other lawmakers have been pushing for years.

"This may be uncomfortable, but this is not hard  and this will actually save lives," said Tokash, who testified before a House Armed Services subcommittee on the issue last week. "And I hope it will change the minds of Americans who are sitting down with their sons and daughters who are having conversations about wanting to join the military. It breaks my heart to know that there are parents who don't want their children to join the military because of the sexual assault problem. That should not be a conversation that anybody in America should be having."

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Police and Buffalo Bisons officials are trying to figure out how someone caused roughly $20,000 in damage early Saturday to the turf at Sahlen Field in downtown Buffalo.

Someone apparently drove a forklift onto the infield area and ended up leaving behind ruts and other damage to a section of dirt and grass, Buffalo Police Capt. Jeff Rinaldo, a department spokesman, said Saturday afternoon.

The damage likely happened sometime between 11 p.m. Friday and 8 a.m. Saturday, Bisons employees told police. It is not clear whether the damage was caused intentionally, but there was no sign of a break-in at the ballpark, Rinaldo said.

"Buffalo police are working with the Bisons staff to determine how the damage occurred," he said, and no charges have been brought.

The incident came to light early Saturday afternoon, when WKBW-TV reported a Bisons groundskeeper posted photos to Twitter that seemed to show damage to a section of grass and dirt caused by a vehicle of some kind. The Twitter posts were later deleted, according to the station.

Bisons spokesman Brad Bisbing confirmed that the team is trying to learn more about an apparent act of vandalism on the field, but wouldn't provide details.
Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz plans to spend $300,000 in federal stimulus money to attack the racial disparity in health outcomes. Its a good start. The challenge for Poloncarz: Ensure the spending actually narrows the gap.

In Erie County, African American children are more than twice as likely to die within a year after birth, according to the County Health Rankings report, and twice as likely to die before they turn 18. African American girls are 2 1/2 times more likely than whites to give birth in their late teens.

Underlying all of that is poverty. Nearly half of African American children in Erie County are living in poverty  five times the rate among white children.
The government has been criticised for its failure to tackle the country's kidnapping crisis

Kidnappers in Nigeria have seized a man who was sent to deliver a ransom payment to secure the release of dozens of abducted school children.

The elderly man was sent by the children's parents after they managed to raise 30m naira ($73,000; 53,000) by selling land and other possessions.

But they have been left feeling hopeless following his kidnapping.

The north of the country is in the midst of a wave of school abductions carried out by criminals for profit.

Ransoms are frequently paid, but this is a rare case where the person carrying the cash has been taken.

The kidnappers called up the school's headteacher to say that the money delivered was not the agreed sum.

The 136 students were taken from an Islamic school in Tegina, Niger state, in late May.

Gunmen riding on motorcycles stormed the town and opened fire indiscriminately killing one person and injuring another.

As people fled, the attackers went to the school and seized the children.

The parents and school administrators negotiated with the criminals and agreed to pay the ransom. They sold part of the school's land as well as other possessions.

Headteacher Malam Abubakar Alhassan told the BBC that six people were sent with the correct amount to meet the kidnappers near the forest where the children were being held.

When they arrived, the gunmen demanded that one of the group, an elderly man, follow them into the forest so that the cash could be counted.

But they later called to say the money was not sufficient.

"Parents are now resigned to fate. They say they can't raise any more money. They are now relying on God," Mr Alhassan told the BBC.

More than 1,000 students have been abducted from schools across northern Nigeria since December last year.

Hundreds of them are still in captivity, but 28 of the 121 children taken from the Bethel Baptist High School in Kaduna state earlier this month were freed on Saturday night.

The authorities are being severely criticised for their failure to tackle the country's widespread insecurity including the deepening kidnapping crisis.

Click here to see the BBC interactive
This report cries out for this kind of language: Your building contains some minor damage but the concrete deterioration needs to be repaired at once. The structural integrity of your building is failing. If you dont repair it, the building has an excellent chance of falling down, risking your substantial investment and putting your life in severe danger.

I once wrote a set of orders on a building that basically said, your building is a fire trap. You have allowed it to deteriorate to the point of if a fire starts the building will quickly be fully involved in flames and your local fire department will not be able to stop the fire. My orders went through several revisions by my bosses.

The end report read something like this, Your building has several fire safety concerns. You as the building owner should address these issues in a timely manner. The consequences of inaction may not reflect favorably on you, the building owner. Shortly before my retirement the building burned to the ground. Firefighting efforts were beyond the local fire department. I underwent several hours of depositions.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 25) -- The country tallied 5,479 new COVID-19 infections, pushing the nationwide count to 1,548,755, the Department of Healths latest bulletin showed.

Of the total, 54,262 are active cases or currently ill patients. At least 93.4% are experiencing mild symptoms, 1.2% are asymptomatic, 1.4% are critical, 2.3% are in severe condition, and 1.63% have moderate symptoms.

Meanwhile, the death toll reached 27,224 after 93 more patients succumbed to the disease. The recovery count also jumped to 1,467,269 with 5,573 new survivors.

The DOH said five duplicates were removed from the total case count, of which three were recoveries.

It added that 50 cases previously tagged as recoveries were reclassified as deaths after final validation.

All laboratories were operational on July 23 while three laboratories failed to submit their data to the COVID-19 Document Repository System, the DOH said. Based on data in the last 14 days, the non-reporting laboratories contribute on average 0.1% samples tested and 0.2% positive cases.

The daily positivity rate, or percentage of people who tested positive, stood at 13.1% based on 47,000 tests done on July 23. The World Health Organization recommends positivity rates of below 5%, as bigger numbers may indicate high transmission.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 25)  The country has detected 337 new COVID-19 variant cases, the Department of Health reported on Sunday.

The new infections came from four COVID-19 variants, based on the genome sequencing of the DOH, the Philippine Genome Center, and the University of the Philippines-National Institutes of Health.

Over half of the new variant infections, or 179 cases, are from the Beta variant, raising the total national case tally of the Beta variant, also known as B.1.351, to 2,019.

The DOH said 168 of the new Beta variant infections in the country are local transmissions while four are from returning overseas Filipinos. The remaining seven new Beta variant cases are yet to be identified as local cases or from ROFs.

The DOH added that of the new B.1.351 cases, two are still active, one has died, and 175 have recovered.

Meanwhile, 55 additional cases of the more infectious Delta variant were detected, bringing the total to 119.

The DOH said 37 of the new Delta variant infections are local cases, 17 are from ROFs, while one case is still for verification.

Of the 37 new local Delta cases, 14 are from Calabarzon, eight from Northern Mindanao, six have indicated addresses in the National Capital Region, six from Central Luzon, two from the Davao Region, and one from the Ilocos Region.

One patient from the 55 new Delta variant cases in the country has died, while the 54 other cases have been tagged as recoveries.

"With the establishment of the local transmission of the Delta variant, we need a swifter implementation of our response strategies," the agency said.

On the other hand, the DOH detected 94 new local infections of the Alpha variant, bringing the total to 1,775.

Eighty-seven of the new Alpha variant cases in the country are from local transmissions, one case is from an ROF, while six are still for verification.

Of the new Alpha variant cases, 91 have already recovered while two patients have died. There is one lone active case.

The DOH also reported nine additional P.3 variant cases, adding that all are local cases and that they have all recovered.
(CNN) -- Some 30,000 people have joined the annual Pride celebrations in Budapest on Saturday, organizers say, with attendees marching in colorful outfits across the Hungarian capital in support of inclusion and freedom.

But this year, Pride is also a protest, as LGBTQ people and their allies rally against the country's increasingly hostile policy towards their communities -- punctuated by a new, homophobic law recently passed by Hungary's hardline government.

Andras Szolnoki, 55, an anthropologist from the eastern city of Debrecen, said he joined the march in rebuke to "Orban's regime and for the rights of LGBTQI people who have been targeted by the government for the last four years."

For Szolnoki, only a "revolutionary approach" would change the status quo in Hungary, where last month, right-wing populist ministers passed a law essentially banning LGBTQ issues from being discussed in school.

"It's more than just a march," Szolnoki told CNN. "It's about Hungary joining the Europeans and showing equality."

The new law, supported by Prime Minister Viktor Orban, bans all educational materials and programs for children that are considered to promote homosexuality and gender reassignment.

Off the back of fierce international criticism, including a scolding assessment (and a push for its repeal) by the European Union, of which Hungary is a member, Orban has proposed to hold a referendum that will ask the public if they support the "promotion" of content related to sexual orientation to children.

The Prime Minister is urging a "no" vote. But for the people gathered for Pride on Saturday, the answer is a resounding yes.

Critics of the law argue that holding the referendum -- a five-question vote -- is problematic in itself.

LGBTQ activist Akos Modolo, 26, told CNN that the issue with the referendum is that it presents very "leading questions" to the public, noting similarities to a 2016 referendum on the EU's refugee resettlement plan. Hungary rejected that proposal but failed to reach a voter turnout threshold, making the referendum not legally binding.

"Even if you support LGBT rights, you wouldn't automatically say yes to these questions," Modolo said. "The government is using this as a political tool," he said, explaining that the government's strategy is to "always look for an enemy to blame" in order to "appeal to the anger of the voters."

"It's important to have a discussion," Modolo added. "But this is not a discussion -- it's a hate campaign."

Saturday's showing was one way that LGBTQ activists are pushing back against that discrimination.

Balint Rigo, 27, one of the Pride organizers, told CNN that "a lot has happened over the last few years, and it's time to show that we're not okay with it."

"Minorities have been systematically attacked, and we're here to say enough," Rigo said, adding that this year's event is expected to see far more attendees than previous years, which have drawn crowds of up to 20,000 people.

That's because "people aren't just coming out for LGBTQ groups," Rigo said, "they're coming out for minorities in general."

"There's power in numbers and we may not be able to change anything in the short term, but together we're a symbol of solidarity," he added.

A 2020 report from the Bratislava-based global think-tank Globsec found that the majority of Hungarians disagree with the demonization of the LGBTQ community, with 55% disagreeing with the statement that LGBTQ rights represent a decadent ideology, despite the anti-gay rhetoric whipped up by the current government.

Nearly half of Hungarians agree with guaranteeing rights for LGBTQ people, according to the report.

Yet some believe that years of state-sponsored homophobia is finally taking its toll.

In the southern city of Szeged, partners Reka Spohn and Monika Rapi say that they and their two daughters have always felt accepted in their community. But the government's latest move has changed all of that for them.

"They (the government) are acting like we are a hazard for children, that we are dangerous to children," Sphon said.

"If they say it enough times, people will start to believe it," she added.

She notes the visibility of anti-LGBTQ billboards across the country.

The government campaign, billed as a public consultation ahead of the referendum, asks leading questions, with emojis attached to them. In the capital, the propaganda is visible on almost on every street corner, with signs asking the questions: "Are you angry with Brussels?" and, "Are you worried that your child will face sexual propaganda?"

The new law says that school sex education classes be taught only by groups registered by the government, with teachers prohibited from teaching books with LGBTQ characters or themes.

It also prohibits the representation of LGBTQ people on television during daylight or early evening hours.

While Orban says that the law is not about violating LGBTQ rights, but about preserving parents' rights to choose how to educate their children, Spohn says that the message is clear.

"They act like we don't exist," she said.

The couple are prepared to flee the country if things get worse -- an idea that is being considered by many across Hungary's LGBTQ communities.

But others still feel the battle is worth fighting for at home.

In November, Hubert Hlatky-Schlichter and his father, who is gay, launched a campaign to raise awareness about rainbow families -- defined as a family with one parent who identifies as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex or queer.

"This is just the beginning, because we are everywhere," Hlatky-Schlichter said.

"Our existence is not propaganda. The very existence of rainbow families is not propaganda," said Balazs Redli, a father. Redli, a journalist who's worried about the future his son will face, says there's space for everyone in Hungary.

"We just want to live in this country like everyone one else does."

This story was first published on CNN.com, "Thousands join Pride event in Hungary as LGBTQ people face growing hostility"
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 25) -- After its coronation night was postponed anew, the Miss World Philippines organization named Dindi Pajares, one of this years candidates, to represent the country in the Miss Supranational pageant in Poland on Aug. 21.

National director Arnold Vegafria said Pajares was chosen by her fellow candidates in a small ceremony on Saturday.

Pajares is expected to leave the country on Aug. 3.

Other candidates considered for the title were Ruffa Nava, Kathleen Paton, and Megan Campbell.

Miss World Philippines 2021 was originally scheduled on July 11 but was moved to July 25. It was postponed again to Aug. 8 after the national government placed Metro Manila under general enhanced community quarantine with heightened restrictions.

The country had its first and only Miss Supranational winner through Mutya Datul in 2013, under the management of Binibining Pilipinas Charities, Inc. The MWP organization acquired the local franchise of the pageant last year.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 24)  The Film Development Council of the Philippines (FDCP) on Friday appealed to the President for more funds to help local production workers as they continue to face income loss amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

"We have a lot of programs in place para matulungan ang mga sektor within the film industry pero kailangan namin ng funding," FDCP Chairperson Liza Dino told CNN Philippines' Newsroom Weekend. "Kailangan mag-invest sa ating productions para matulungan mabuo ang mga pelikula."

[Translation: We have a lot of programs in place to help the sectors within the film industry but we need funding. We need to invest in our productions to help create more films.]

Last year, the FDCP launched the DEAR Program, which provided relief aid to film production workers. Dino said the group also coordinated with the Department of Labor and Employment to release a second round of financial aid.

The budget for each film shoot increased by 30% due to the imposition of additional health measures, according to Dino.

"Imagine 10 million ang production, nagiging 13 million to comply with protocols," she said.

[Translation: Production usually costs 10 million but it rises to 13 million to comply with protocols.]

The industry is also in immediate need of vaccines. Dino said she reached out to local government units such as Quezon City and Manila and was able to secure some 3,500 doses for film workers.

Despite these challenges, Dino noted that the industry continues to move forward, venturing into international screening platforms, as well as producing more filmmakers.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 25)  President Rodrigo Duterte asked local governments to implement an orderly vaccination process for their constituents amid rainy weather and the threat of the highly contagious Delta coronavirus variant.

The President made the remark after people scheduled for vaccination, especially in Metro Manila, braved the monsoon rains and floods just to get inoculated.

"The LGUs should immediately look for a place which is dry and which can house so many, dividing them into groups. It's a question of common sense," Duterte said in a national address aired late Saturday night.

Duterte emphasized there is no problem with the country's vaccine supply, pointing out that local governments' management of vaccination sites contributes to the slow administration of coronavirus shots.

"The problem is crowding. People would respond to the announcement that inoculations will be given to those who are there on the site," the President said.

Duterte added that barangay officials must be proactive in controlling their constituents lining up to get vaccinated. He also ordered Department of the Interior and Local Government Secretary Eduardo Ano to craft solutions to address these problems in vaccination sites.

Meanwhile, Vaccine czar Carlito Galvez Jr. assured the President the country has a stable vaccine supply.

"Rain or shine, day or night, there is really no let-up in our delivery and administration of vaccines," Galvez said.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 25)  Senator Panfilo "Ping" Lacson denied that he made any comments regarding alleged underspending of Bayanihan funds.

In a statement on Sunday, the lawmaker  who is teaming up with Senate President Vicente "Tito" Sotto III in the 2022 elections  said his comments on underspending were not about the Bayanihan ones.

"The President got his information all mixed up. I am not the Senator who claimed there was underspending under the Bayanihan fund. Im quite sure because I dont have the data on the matter, and I dont speak without basis. Some other legislators did," he said.

In an address on Saturday, President Rodrigo Duterte said, " I keep hearing Senators, Lacson, if Im not mistaken, I forgot the others, Sotto, that we are underspending sa Bayanihan. Totoo ba ito? Is this true?"

To which Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III said, "Mr. President, according to the DBM, we have already released 660 billion. Okay, 660 billion. What they are referring to as 'underspending' is 6 billion or one percent of the total."

Lacson said the underspent funds he was referring to were the ones from 2017 to 2019.

"On the annual average of 331 billion against our yearly gross borrowings of almost 1 trillion during the same period. Nothing to do with Bayanihan," he clarified.

However, the senator said there is a pressing need to spend resources wisely, regardless of where these are from.

"And at the risk of sounding like a broken record, there is no room to mix business and health, especially during a time of extreme emergency like the pandemic," said Lacson.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 25) -- At least one person has been confirmed dead amid incessant rains caused by the southwest monsoon or habagat, which has also displaced thousands of families across six regions nationwide, the country's disaster management agency reported on Sunday.

The National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council said a 39-year-old woman from Baguio City died from a vehicular accident caused by a fallen tree on Friday.

Two others were said to have been injured in the incident, but NDRRMC spokesperson Mark Timbal clarified the information still needs validation.

The agency is also verifying at least two other reported deaths and three injuries from a lightning strike in Barangay Tartarabang in Pinili, Ilocos Norte.

According to the agency, 87,493 people or 19,521 families have been affected by the monsoon rains, which were enhanced by typhoon Fabian (international name: In-Fa) even after it exited the Philippine Area of Responsibility on Friday night.

The affected areas are Central Luzon, Calabarzon, Mimaropa, Western Visayas, the Cordillera Administrative Region, and National Capital Region. The agency added 178 barangays have been flooded, of which 124 are in Central Luzon alone.

Nearly 25,000 people have been displaced, with 22,693 individuals or 5,554 families having sought shelter in evacuation centers.

The estimated cost of damage to agriculture so far stood at 14.5 million, according to NDRRMC. The rains also caused infrastructure damage of around 2.4 million. A total of 374 houses have been reported either partially or totally destroyed.

Authorities recorded power interruption or outage in 12 cities or municipalities, although seven of these areas now have their electricity restored.

Meanwhile, Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration weather forecaster Meno Mendoza told CNN Philippines that a large portion of Luzon will continue to experience rains in the next five days.

He added that rains caused by habagat are expected to persist until tomorrow over Metro Manila, Ilocos region, Abra, Benguet, Zambales, Bataan, Pampanga, Bulacan, Cavite, Batangas and Occidental Mindoro.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 25)  The camp of Vice President Leni Robredo said Sunday it is not enough to reimpose strict coronavirus restrictions without providing better support for the battered healthcare sector.

During Robredo's Sunday radio show, her spokesperson Lawyer Barry Gutierrez said medical workers, who have been on the frontline since the COVID-19 pandemic reached the Philippines in March 2020, must secure more support and assistance they need amid the threat of the highly transmissible Delta variant.

"Mukhang ang pamahalaan, IATF ay may pagkilala na ito ay magiging problem kaya nag-impose nang mahigpit na restrictions. Pero ang inaasahan natin ay bukod dyan, sana pinapalakas ang kapasidad ng mga ospital, clinic na tumanggap ng mga pasyente," he said.

"Ayaw nating maulit ang ganyang problema. Ayaw nating mangyari ang nangyayari sa India, Indonesia," the spokesperson added.

[Translation: It seems the government, IATF have recognized that this will be a problem so they impose strict restrictions. But what we hope is that apart from that, the capacity of hospitals, clinics to receive patients should be strengthened. We do not want to deal with the same problem. We dont want to experience the situation in India, Indonesia.]

After India, Indonesia has become Asia's COVID epicenter amid the spread of the Delta variant, recording tens of thousands of new infections per day.

Late last week, the Department of Health confirmed the local transmission of the coronavirus variant. The number of Delta variant cases in the Philippines climbed to 64, it said Saturday.

READ: PH confirms local transmission of Delta variant

Gutierrez said that aside from boosting healthcare capacity, and adding more beds for COVID patients, the country's medical workforce must be increased with the looming surge of cases.

"Bukod sa mga kama, dapat may personnel, doctor, nurses, na titingin sayo... Bugbog na bugbog na ang mga healthcare professionals," he said.

[Translation: Apart from beds, there should be personnel, doctors, nurses, who will look after you ... Healthcare professionals are already exhausted.]

He stressed the hazard pay and special allowances that the current administration promised to healthcare workers must be released.

State-run Philippine Health Insurance Corporation should also immediately settle its unpaid reimbursements to private and government hospitals, Gutierrez added.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 25)  Vice President Leni Robredo will attend the last State of the Nation Address (SONA) of President Rodrigo Duterte virtuallyfor the second time, her spokesperson said Sunday.

After reports that Robredo was only invited to be present in Duterte's final SONA via video teleconference platform Zoom, Lawyer Barry Gutierrez said the House clarified that there was a new list of attendees approved by the pandemic task force.

However, given the health protocols in place, Robredo will be forced to hear Duterte's SONA virtually. The President will deliver his last SONA on Monday, July 26, at the Batasang Pambansa in Quezon City.

Kung ikaw ay a-attend personally, dapat naka-second dose na. Ang problema August 11 ang second dose ni VP Leni," Gutierrez said during Robredo's Sunday radio show.

"Ayaw niya ipagpilitan, ayaw niya lumabag sa protocol, dahil baka malagay sa panganib ang mga makakasalamuha niya, kasama na si Pangulo," he added.

[Translation: If you are going to attend personally, you should already have received your second dose. The problem is VP Leni's schedule for her second dose is on August 11. She does not want to insist, violate the protocol, because she may put others, including the President, at risk.]

Last May 19, Robredo got her first coronavirus vaccine shot developed by British-Swedish company AstraZeneca.

If only the Vice President was already fully vaccinated, Robredo will physically attend the event, Gutierrez said.

Robredo was also invited to hear the President's address via Zoom teleconferencing in 2020.
(CNN) -- Poll of the week: A new Angus Reid poll from Canada finds that 86% of Canadians 18 and older have gotten or want a Covid-19 vaccine as soon as possible. The same poll shows that just 8% of Canadian adults do not want a Covid-19 vaccination.

This matches what the real-world data is showing us: Canadians are far more driven to get vaccinated than Americans.

What's the point: Just two months ago, less than 5% of Canadians were fully vaccinated against Covid-19. At the same time, about 40% of Americans were. Today, a little less than 50% of Americans are fully vaccinated, while a little more than 50% of Canadians are.

Among adults, more than 80% of the Canadian population is at least partially vaccinated, while the US has still not reached 70%.

A big reason (though not the only one) why Canada has overtaken the US is pretty clear: Political polarization is playing a smaller role in who is and is not getting vaccinated there. We see a similar phenomenon in the United Kingdom, where more than 50% of the population is also fully vaccinated.

(Note that those ages 12 and above are eligible for a Covid-19 vaccine in Canada and the United States, while, for most, the vaccine-eligible age in the UK is 18.)

In the Angus Reid poll in Canada, 85% of adults who voted for the center-left Liberal Party in 2019 have been at least partially vaccinated. It's a similar 84% for the progressive New Democratic Party.

Those percentages look similar to what we're seeing in the US for progressives. In a late June NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, 88% of those who voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 election said they had been vaccinated. A July CBS News/YouGov poll showed that 84% of Biden backers were at least partially vaccinated. A June Fox News poll put it at 81%.

But the difference between the two countries becomes clear when you examine conservatives. Among those adults who backed the Conservative Party in Canada's 2019 election, a lower 69% had received at least one dose.

Still, that's far greater than the 52% of Donald Trump supporters who have gotten a dose in an average of the Fox News, Marist and YouGov surveys.

It's worth noting that the US' vaccination patterns don't just differ from Canada's. They also differ significantly from those of another key ally: the United Kingdom.

When we examine the UK, we see that areas that were more likely to back the Conservative Party in the 2019 general election actually have a higher vaccination rate than areas where that support was weaker.

Specifically, let's examine the 533 constituencies in England (the most populated part of the United Kingdom) where we have vaccination data through July 18.

In the constituencies where the Conservatives did better than they did in the median constituency, about 90% of all adults on average have had at least one dose. In the constituencies where they did worse than the median, about 83% of all adults on average have had at least one dose.

(This gap holds even when you control for age, even as voting patterns are highly dependent on age in the UK.)

In the United States, the pattern, of course, is reversed and exacerbated. About 74% of the adult population has received at least one Covid-19 dose in the states Biden won and the District of Columbia, which Biden won too. It's only 59% in the states he lost.

It's not entirely clear why there is a partisan gap in the US and not in Canada or the UK.

It's possible that what we're seeing in the UK is an incumbent effect. That is, the leader in the UK is Conservative Party member Boris Johnson, and therefore Conservatives are more likely to line up behind the leader.

I would point out, though, that Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is a Liberal Party member, and the vaccination gap by party isn't as wide up there as it is in the States.

Further, the gap in vaccine acceptance in the US was evident even when Trump was president and promoting the idea of a vaccine, so this isn't just recent anti-vaccine rhetoric from some on the right. With the exception of a period around the 2020 election (when then-Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris and others raised questions about the vaccine approval process), Democrats always said they were more likely to get vaccinated than Republicans in Gallup polling.

To be clear, the partisan gap is not the only reason why the US is lagging. For example, the vaccination rate of those under age 30 is far higher in Canada and the UK than in the US. There are also fewer Black and Hispanic residents in Canada and the UK, who are less likely to get vaccinated in the US.

If the US were similar to these two other countries with regard to vaccination rates by age and race and ethnicity, the partisan gap in vaccines could be larger, because younger and minority groups are more likely to be Democrats.

Either way, the partisan gap is huge in the US compared with two of its closest allies with similar access to vaccines. If it didn't exist, we'd be in far better shape when fighting the pandemic.

This story was first published on CNN.com "Trump supporters are a big reason why Canada and the UK are beating the US on vaccinations."
(CNN) -- While the need for mask wearing never fully dissipated during the pandemic, guidance from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in May that removed restrictions for vaccinated individuals was a welcome harbinger of a possible return to normalcy.

Now, with Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations increasing throughout the nation, safety precautions such as mask mandates are once again under consideration.

Former US Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams said on Friday that the CDC needs to clarify its messaging to get Americans back on board with stemming the rising tide of infections.

The CDC's decision "was putting trust in the American people to really do the right thing, but unfortunately people chose to go out and pull their mask off, whether they were vaccinated or not," Adams told CNN's Anderson Cooper.

"We've got to trust our health officials to give the best advice they can at the time, and the CDC gave the best advice they could at the time," he added. "But guess what? That was pre-Delta surge. The Delta variant is changing things."

The Delta variant, believed to be more transmittable and dangerous, accounted for an estimated 83% of coronavirus cases in the US for the two weeks ending July 17, according to data from the CDC -- a substantial rise from negligible numbers in early May.

Cases are rising sharply. The US averaged more than 49,300 new Covid-19 cases a day over the week ending Friday -- a nearly 60% jump from the week prior, and more than four times the lowest average of 2021 (11,299 on June 22), according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

Every state reported more cases in the week ending Friday than they did the week before, Johns Hopkins figures show.

Health experts have repeatedly pointed to preemptive vaccination as the best way to get ahead of surges due to their proven efficacy, but CDC data Friday showed that the rate of vaccinations continues to slow. The daily average of people becoming fully vaccinated is the lowest it's been since the end of January, when the US was just beginning to ramp up its vaccination drive.

Thirty states have yet to fully vaccinate at least half of their residents, with Alabama and Mississippi at less than 35% fully vaccinated, according to the CDC.

In Alabama, Gov. Kay Ivey on Thursday called out "the unvaccinated folks" for the rise in Covid-19 cases. "Folks are supposed to have common sense. But it's time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks, not the regular folks. It's the unvaccinated folks that are letting us down," she told reporters in Birmingham.

With vaccination numbers lagging, officials say more countermeasures against Covid-19 are likely needed.

Guidance on mask wearing from the CDC has not changed, but CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said Thursday localities may want to make their own call.

"Communities and individuals need to make the decisions that are right for them based on what's going on in their local areas," she said. "So if you're an area that has a high case rate and low rates of vaccination where Delta cases are rising, you should certainly be wearing a mask if you are unvaccinated."

Mask mandates are met with opposition

Amid the rising numbers of infections, some state and local leaders are now recommending that masks to be worn indoors even by those who are vaccinated.

Health officials in Seattle and King County in Washington noted Friday that the Delta variant's prevalence in the US was 1.4% on May 13 when the CDC lifted mask requirements for vaccinated people. Right now, Delta makes up 56% of King County's known infections and the figure is expected to rise.

"I know this is frustrating and maybe disappointing to many, it certainly is to me," Dr. Jeffrey Duchin, health officer for the Seattle and King County public health department said Friday.

"And I acknowledged that the change in communication," he said, "has been a real problem nationally, but we in public health have an obligation to be realistic about the changing situation and provide the best guidance possible."

Officials in St. Louis, Missouri, have gone one step further by instituting an indoor mask mandate at public settings beginning on Monday, joining Los Angeles County as one of the first areas in the country to reinstate such measures.

Missouri has one of the highest rates of average new daily cases per capita, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

"The new rule will require everyone age five and over, including those who are vaccinated, to wear a mask. Wearing masks outdoors, especially in group settings, will be strongly encouraged," according to a statement from the mayor's office. Exceptions are included for those seated and eating at bars and restaurants.

"We've lost more than 500 St. Louisans to Covid-19, and if our region doesn't work together to protect one another, we could see spikes that overwhelm our hospital and public health systems," said Dr. Fredrick Echols, acting director of health for the City of St. Louis.

However, Missouri State Attorney General Eric Schmitt said on Friday that he will be going to court to stop the requirement.

"The citizens of St. Louis and St. Louis County are not subjects  they are free people. As their Attorney General I'll be filing suit Monday to stop this insanity," Schmitt said in a statement on Twitter.

Officials elsewhere are also pushing back against proposed indoor mandates. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey encouraged people in his state to get the vaccine, thanking "the miracle of modern science" but reiterated that he will not allow vaccine or mask mandates.

In Texas, Austin Mayor Steve Adler says if he could "order all children and teachers to mask without ending up in court" he "would do it in a heartbeat," as Austin Public Health reported the daily average number of Covid-19 hospitalizations has more than tripled since July 4.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, however, issued an executive order in May prohibiting state governmental entities such as counties from requiring mask-wearing.

Safety restrictions are instituted for new school year

With the new school year around the corner -- and vaccine access only available to those over the age of 12 -- some districts are preparing for a return to classes with mask mandates.

Washington DC Public Schools, Boston Public Schools, and Wisconsin's Madison Metropolitan School District are among those that recently announced the requiring of masks worn by students and staff inside school buildings.

Yet other locales, such as Texas and Iowa, have prevented officials from exercising local control by requiring masks.

Last week, California had announced strict statewide measures for masks in classrooms, yet changed its stance hours later and allowed for local decision-making.

"California's school guidance will be clarified regarding masking enforcement, recognizing local schools' experience in keeping students and educators safe while ensuring schools fully reopen for in-person instruction," read the update, which was released via a California Department of Public Health tweet.

This story was first published on CNN.com "Mask mandates are back on the table as Covid-19 surges nationwide".
(CNN) -- A man and woman were arrested in Maine following the discovery of cocaine disguised as a cake in their vehicle, according to the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency.

Acting on information received from anonymous sources, agents stopped a vehicle on Tuesday along I-295 as it entered Gardiner. A drug-sniffing K9 alerted them to the presence of illegal drugs in the vehicle, the MDEA said in a news release. Inside the trunk, they found four pounds of cocaine and about $1,900 in cash, believed to be proceeds from illegal drug sales, the agency added.

Some of the cocaine found in the vehicle was pressed into a block and wrapped in cake packaging, MDEA Commander Peter Arno told CNN. Coffee grounds were spread on top of the cocaine in an attempt to throw off the scent.

Arno said the cocaine likely entered the country wrapped in cake packaging, and that agents will check with other departments to see if similar seizures have been made in order to determine its source.

Agents believe the drugs were being transported to Main for distribution in Kennebec and Somerset Counties. It's total street value is estimated at $200,000.

The suspects were taken to Kennebec County Jail and charged with aggravated trafficking in a schedule W Drug, a Class "A" offense, the MDEA said. If convicted, they could face up to 20 years in prison, Arno said.

The Winslow Police Department, Maine State Police and Homeland Security Investigations assisted in the investigation, which the MDEA said is ongoing.

This story was first published on CNN.com "DEA agents seize cocaine disguised as a cake".
Information is from police reports and may be incomplete depending on the status of an investigation. Phone numbers are nonemergency.
It got so they didnt trust anything but their own homes, and their children being with them, she said. Now theyre seeing the future, seeing what their children can do.

For some families, the switch to home schooling was influenced by their childrens special needs. Thats the case for Jennifer Osgood of Fairfax, Vermont, whose 7-year-old daughter Lily has Down syndrome.

Having observed Lilys progress with reading and arithmetic while at home during the pandemic, Osgood is convinced home schooling is the best option for her.

She has made the same decision for her 12-year-old son Noah, who didnt like the remote classes offered by his public school in the spring of 2020, and did home schooling throughout the 2020-21 school year. It went so well that they want to continue for at least a few more years.

He told me he was learning so much more at home than he ever did in school, Osgood said. He said, School is just so chaotic, we dont get very much done in any particular class. Here, I sit down, you tell me what to do, and minutes later Im done.
Usually when a security issue happens, it comes in through software. Its like they see your secrets through the window or sneak a peek while walking through the gate, Ren said. Spectre is like walking in the front door and before you get to the security desk, you go down to the basement and listen in on all of the secrets.

The flaw is not a serious threat to the average laptop, desktop or tablet, the researchers say.

Information thats important, like military information, is something hackers will be willing to go to greater lengths to target and use a process like Spectre. But theyre not going to be targeting your grandma, said Moody. Well, at least not now, maybe in 10 years or so. These kinds of attacks are more difficult to execute.

11-year-old me is not likely to pull this off, but 23-year-old me would be able to take more time to pull this off, Ren said. I wouldnt use this to get into someones bank account, but I could use it to get into a banks system and access multiple accounts. Thats where this would be a threat. Its not a threat to your personal computer, but it is a threat to the business world.
Conservatorships are legal arrangements that give a third party control over someone else. They can be imposed only by a court, and only a court can terminate them. The person put in charge of the persons affairs is called the conservator, or the guardian in some states.

Conservatorships have been around for centuries and are critical legal mechanisms to help people  often older persons with dementia or other neurocognitive disorders  who are considered unable to care for themselves or their finances.

Conservators are subject to court oversight and are typically required to submit annual reports to the court. And California law  which is similar to the rules in most states  requires the court to monitor each conservatorship to protect against abuse and ensure that the conservator is acting in the best interests of the subject.

Often broad powers

Jamie Spears has been a conservator for his daughter since he was appointed to this role by a California court in 2008 and has reportedly received at least $5 million in fees.
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So how do I get a school named after me?

Jeff Woo/DRC Crews work on completing construction of Nette Shultz Elementary School on Friday.

It isnt always easy, but a person with enough devotion, hard work, land or money could secure naming rights for a school or building in Denton.

The processes vary depending on which building or school youre gunning for, but the criteria for selection can be similarly vague across several entities.

A monied community member might have an easier time getting their name in big letters at either the University of North Texas or Texas Womans University, and an average Joe might have a better shot at Denton ISD or other area school districts.

Both Denton universities have formal policies that leave plenty of wiggle room, but the process is fairly straightforward.

Major facilities, such as stadiums and prominent buildings, require approval by the campus leader before heading to the respective board of regents for final approval.

Buildings, facilities, classrooms, programs and more can be named to honor a person without an accompanying financial gift, but most sections of each universitys naming policy deal with how to award naming rights to donors both corporate and private.

The University of North Texas is clear that naming rights for prominent buildings could be considered for a donor who gives at least a third of the money needed for construction, renovation or the buildings current value.

David Wolf, UNTs vice president for university advancement, said most buildings and spaces are named on an honorific basis, meaning a donation was not required.

The names are decided on a case-by-case basis in concert with the [Board of Regents] policies, Wolf wrote in an emailed statement via a spokesperson.

Texas Womans University is less concrete about prices, stating instead that a negotiated gift agreement could be approved by regents.

Kimberly Russell, TWUs vice president for university advancement, said donors will sometimes approach the university with a potential donation in exchange for naming rights over a particular structure or area, but its probably more common for the university to test the waters with prospective donors when a new building will be coming along in the next two to five years.

An example of the former would be the recent naming of TWUs Houston occupational therapy school after late professor Sophie Lin Rydin.

Rydins family donated $2 million to establish an endowment in her name after her death, and TWU officials later decided to mark the donation by naming the facility in her honor.

Building names at UNT and TWU are only as long-lived as the facility to which theyre attached, meaning demolition of a named building doesnt necessarily mean the replacement building will bear the same name.

In Denton ISD, on the other hand, its more common for a replacement building to retain its name. A notable exception would be the yet-to-open Nette Shultz Elementary, which is the replacement campus for Woodrow Wilson Elementary.

Denton ISD has a preference for naming schools after people who had a local impact on education and the community, such as Shultz, who was a county home demonstration agent in Cooke County and an instructor at Texas State College for Women  now known as TWU.

The suggestion to rename the school in her honor was submitted by Denton ISD Superintendent Jamie Wilson.

Although Ms. Shultz initially requested the school not be named in her name, she was a very humble person who did not [want] a big hoopla over the donation, nor was she vain enough for the school to be named after herself, Wilson wrote.

Wilson has a stock response he sometimes pulls out when people ask how they can get a high school named in their honor: We need the 150 acres, and we can surely consider a name.

The Denton ISD school board ultimately makes all naming decisions, but those who donate land for a school will get to suggest a name in a more impactful way.

Most of those suggestions, such as E.P. Rayzor, Newton Rayzor and Woodrow Wilson elementaries, are accepted by board members. The two former schools were named after land donations from the Rayzor family.

Similar arrangements were made with companies who donate land for campuses. Paloma Creek, Union Park and the upcoming Sandbrock Ranch elementaries are all named after the housing developments in their respective areas.

Other schools have been named for previous district employees, such as Braswell High, which bears the name of former Superintendent Ray Braswell.

Others are named in honor of those who gave a great deal to their community, such as former teacher and civil rights activist Dorothy Adkins.

Both people were selected for the honor in part because of the values they represent to others.

Thats what its about, right? Wilson asked via phone Wednesday afternoon. Its about telling your story as a district through the people who made a difference in the district.

Both Braswell and Adkins were honored not because they donated land but because of their contributions to Denton ISD.

Their names were submitted through the districts formal name suggestion form.

The Denton Record-Chronicle filed a request under the Texas Public Information Act on June 24 seeking all submitted Denton ISD Faculty/Building Name Proposal Forms.

Denton ISD responded on July 12 with a link to a webpage that listed some outstanding name suggestions, but not all submissions filed with the district.

The majority of those submissions were filed by family members, students or co-workers of somebody with some local connection.

An example would be Chris Cullen, a longtime Denton ISD swim coach whose name was submitted by George Deines.

Deines wrote he was a Class of 1996 swimmer at Ryan High. He submitted Cullens name in February 2021 to be considered for the Denton ISD Natatorium.

Roughly 45% of names submitted to the portal belong or belonged to district employees or former school board members.

Only nine submitted names belonged to people without a local connection:

Ann Richards  Texas governor

Barbara Morgan  Teacher and astronaut

Bernardo de Galvez  Spanish general and namesake of Corpus Christi

Christa McAuliffe  Teacher and Challenger astronaut

David Davy Crockett  Folk hero killed during the siege of the Alamo

Sally Ride  Astronaut

Colin Powell  American general

John Chisum  Cattleman and businessman

Lady Bird Johnson  First lady

Suggestions find their way to Denton ISD in clumps when a new prominent campus is announced. For example, nearly half of all names in the districts online database were submitted in or around 2014 ahead of the opening of the now-named Braswell High and Adkins Elementary schools.

The most prolific submitter of names to Denton ISD was John Michael Mikey McDougal, who offered four names in 2006 for what is now known as Nelson Elementary.

Denton ISD board members selected the name to honor Denton attorney and former Mayor L.A. Nelson.

McDougal, who had a parent sign onto all four submissions, thought Nelson Elementary, then known only as Elementary #17, would be better named:

Wheeler Elementary for the Wheeler family and Wheeler Ridge area

Denton Elementary in honor of town namesake John B. Denton

Chisum Elementary in honor of cattleman John Chisum

Crockett Elementary in honor of Davy Crockett

The names live on as submissions in the districts name bank, so it would be hasty to entirely rule out the possibility that a McDougal-submitted name, or any of the other dozens of submitters, wont have their hopes filled down the line.
Denver Mayor Michael Hancock is leading a national effort to establish pilot projects that will provide reparations to African American citizens in several cities around the country.

The group behind this effort, Mayors Organized for Reparations and Equity (MORE), is headed by Hancock and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. It includes over a dozen other mayors from California, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island and Texas.

Last month, the group pledged its commitment to developing reparation pilot projects in its members' cities to set an example for the federal government on how national reparations could work.

Were 400, 500 years late with this conversation around reparations, Hancock said. Weve got to be committed to moving towards action at this point in time.

Reparations for African Americans have been debated in a national conversation since the end of the Civil War.

The idea is that African Americans would be given some kind of payments to help address inequalities created by over 300 years of slavery, followed by segregation, redlining and other forms of racial discrimination.

In the wake of the George Floyd killing, the conversation has picked up again, and this year a U.S. House committee for the first time advanced legislation to study reparations. The legislation has been introduced in Congress every year for 30 years, but it has yet to reach a floor vote as Congressional critics question a causal link between slavery, discrimination and today's racial inequities, saying it's unfair to make current citizens pay for decades-old grievances.

In the United State in 2019, the median income of non-Hispanic white households was $76,057. For Black households, it was $45,438, according to Census data. That same year, white households had a median accumulated wealth of $188,200, while Black households had $24,100  7.8 times less, according to the Brookings Institution.

Many experts say these racial wealth gaps originated from African Americans long history of oppression and persist due to discrimination and disparities in inherited wealth.

Its amazing to me that people expect that African Americans would just be there and be more competitive when, in essence, a lot of the current situation that were dealing with was set without the proper protocols, rules and mechanisms to help African Americans assimilate 400 years ago, Hancock said.

However, not everyone agrees that reparations are the answer. Though support has increased in recent years, a national 2021 poll found that 62% of respondents still disapproved of providing reparations to descendants of slaves, according to a survey by the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Of those opposed, 38% said descendants do not deserve reparations for their ancestors struggles and 18% said reparations should not be paid because African Americans are treated equally in society today.

Douglas Groothuis, professor of philosophy at Denver Seminary, aligns with the former, saying current reparations efforts are unjust.

In this case, reparations would fail to be made by the offending parties, who are long dead. Nor would reparations be received by the offended parties, who are several generations removed from slavery and a generation removed from Jim Crow, Groothuis said.

There are far better means to help the Black community than reparations, such as school choice (charter schools), religious faith, and the restoration of the nuclear family, he said. Other arguments against reparations include that it would be too expensive or unfair to other racial groups.

However, Harold Fields, leader of the Denver Black Reparations Council, disagrees.

Fields grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the '50s and '60s with the survivors of the 1921 race massacre, in which white mobs attacked Black residents and destroyed homes and businesses in the Greenwood District of Tulsa, also known as Black Wall Street.

Exact numbers are unknown, but many experts estimate hundreds of people were killed and around 35 square blocks of the neighborhood were burnt and destroyed during the massacre. No one was ever prosecuted for the deaths and very few insurance claims were paid because they didn't cover "riot damage."

Though his community rebuilt, Fields said he watched first-hand the effects of people being left to struggle, rather than being compensated for the wrongs theyve suffered.

"The country cannot go forward if its going to take a large part of the population and try to keep them at a disadvantage, Fields said. If we want to move forward as a country, we have got to value everybody and do whats necessary to bring everybody along.

In addition, Fields said reparations would be a step towards creating a community of interconnection and interdependence, rather than hierarchy and control, which would open the door for providing support to other groups or society at large.

Hancock said he has been involved in Denvers reparations conversation since 1998 and now, during his last term as mayor, his efforts are finally coming to fruition.

There arent yet many details about what these reparation pilot projects would look like. The MORE group has not released any information about how much it would cost, who would pay for it or how recipients would be chosen.

In Denver, though, Hancock said it would be more than just handing people a check.

Hancock said he wants his reparation project to address the barriers of the economic systems that have held African Americans and other people of color back, though it could possibly include a form of direct payments to Black residents.

Whatever we do about reparations, we ought to be system impacting, Hancock said. I dont want to miss this moment, we have the collective attention of America and people are willing to lean in and have these conversations. Lets not miss this opportunity.

Hancock said helping Black residents own a home, own a business, pay for education and access quality healthcare are some of his goals to give not only a lift, but a sustainable rise to a more level playing field for decades to come.

But at the end of the day, the real goal of the MORE group is to inspire national action and demonstrate efforts that could be replicated on a larger scale.

Hancock also said his system-based approach to reparations could be opened to other groups like Native Americans.

Fields said he has been fighting for reparations in Denver for 23 years. Last year, he founded the Black Reparations Fund at the Denver Foundation, which collects reparation donations to be distributed to Black residents.

Fields and the rest of the Denver Black Reparations Council manage applications and make decisions about how to distribute donations. So far, the fund has raised over $200,000, he said.

We want to help rebuild institutions, languages, religions and traditions in the Black community in Denver that were destroyed, Fields said. And we want to help facilitate the development of Black institutions that were prevented from coming into existence in the first place.

Fields said he supports government reparations efforts, but believes reparations cannot only come from the top down because politicians are term limited and rarely driven by the generational perspective that communities are.

Regarding Hancocks reparation pilot project, Fields said its too soon to tell if itll work, but he is most concerned that city leaders wont involve the community in the decision-making process.

The details of Denvers reparation pilot project will begin to be worked out by a local commission comprised of representatives from Black-led organizations. Hancock said the group will engage the community on a large scale during its work.

There isn't any timeline for rolling out the project but even when it begins, Hancock emphasized it will take time to see results.

It took us 450 years to create this disparity that we see today. Its not going to take a year or two to correct it, Hancock said. What we can do as mayors is have deep, honest, candid conversations and build models for national-level leaders to see that we not only must do this, but how we should do it.

And to the 62% who dont support reparations, Hancock had this to say:

"I want to take you to a racetrack. Were going to run a 100-meter sprint, but Im going to give you 10 seconds late start. Every second represents 50 years of being held back in this society. The reality is, its not very possible for you to catch up. Thats whats happened here to African Americans. We were held back from fully participating in the economic mainstream of this nation for hundreds of years. Yet, people ask why arent you doing better? Its just an unfair situation and expectation. The systems are not designed for you to catch up.
Just about the time you think youre out of the woods with the COVID-19 pandemic, and were finally rid of all the useless nonpharmaceutical interventions, like masking and social distancing, the main shrieker at the CDC, Rochelle Walensky, shows up and punts one to the teachers unions on t
It came from behind them, and they ran back to try and help. They rounded a corner and came upon a woman, who was lying on the ground. There was blood covering her leg and both hands.

I was attacked by a bear, she told them.

The guys began wrapping her wounded leg and her hands, and she said had been picking huckleberries and never knew the bear was near, until it was biting down on her leg. She said she spun around and put up her hands in front of her, reflexively and defensively, which caused both her hands to be mauled. Finally, she told them she yelled as loud as she could. The bear made one last false charge before turning back to find its cubs.

As it turned out, the woman was also a NPS employee, and the fisherman they had run into earlier was her boyfriend. The guys decided that one of them would go back and try to find him while one would run ahead for help. Matt stayed with the woman and began helping her walk back toward Many Glacier Hotel.

They had not gone far when she voiced concern about leaving Matts friend behind and said she wanted to go back to him. She was probably thinking that sometimes grizzlys have been known to attack, then leave, but then return. Matt agreed they should go back, or at least said he did.
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (AP)  An Alabama police officer who remained on his city's payroll for two months after being convicted of murder has resigned from the Huntsville Police Department.

Officer William Darby left of his own accord, the city told WAAY-TV on Friday.

Darby has been on paid leave since his May 7 conviction for shooting a suicidal man who was holding a gun to his own head.

The city said placing Darby on paid leave was normal until its personnel policies and procedures could be completed. Huntsville's Republican mayor and police chief publicly disagreed with the jury's murder verdict.

A lawyer for the family of victim Jeffery Parker said allowing Darby to resign instead of being terminated either immediately after the 2018 killing or after his murder conviction was unacceptable and a bizarre and unnecessary distraction.
Its not like I want to be here, he said. But my money situation doesnt fit in the category of $1,800 rent ... it got me in a situation where I cant afford to get it. You have to have a certain amount of money.

Smith said between his Social Security and the money he gets for disability, he brings in under $800 a month. He said a new facility could help him and others who have been homeless for years as housing has become more unaffordable.

He said he also hopes any new facility in town would have kind and respectful people who looked to help those in need.

They need to have somewhere for disabled people, Smith said. For people with Social Security who cant get a place because were not making enough money.

In interviews with the Banner-Herald, several people experiencing homelessness listed programs and resources such as job training during the day as important. Many said there are few places for the homeless to be during the day, leaving them out on the streets.
Like many Black families, the Moses family moved north from the South during the Great Migration. Once in Harlem, his family sold milk from a Black-owned cooperative to help supplement the household income, according to Robert Parris Moses: A Life in Civil Rights and Leadership at the Grassroots, by Laura Visser-Maessen.

Moses didnt spend much time in the Deep South until he went on a recruiting trip in 1960 to see the movement for myself. He sought out the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.s Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta but found little activity in the office and soon turned his attention to SNCC.

I was taught about the denial of the right to vote behind the Iron Curtain in Europe, Moses later said. I never knew that there was (the) denial of the right to vote behind a Cotton Curtain here in the United States.

The young civil rights advocate tried to register Black people to vote in Mississippis rural Amite County where he was beaten and arrested. When he tried to file charges against a white assailant, an all-white jury acquitted the man and a judge provided protection to Moses to the county line so he could leave.
Accelerating digital transformation and improving technology infrastructure capacity are key to MB Groups strategic goals for the new period.

Military Commercial Joint Stock Bank (MB) held the online analyst meeting on June 22 to provide an update on its positive operation and business results.

By the end of Q2, MB achieved total consolidated assets of more than VND523 trillion, increasing by 5.65 percent compared to the end of 2020. Total operating income in the first half of the year was VND18,117 million, increasing by 40 percent compared to the same period last year.

Total consolidated profit before tax in the first six months of 2021 reached VND7,968 million, a remarkable increase of 56 percent compared to the same period last year.

MB also enjoyed top business performance in the period with a return on asset (ROA) ratio of 2.48 percent and a return on equity (ROE) ratio of 23.28 percent.

"These outstanding results are a testament to MBs effective business strategy with a focus on digital transformation," a spokesperson stated.

Within the first six months of the year, MB has implemented a series of innovative products, including payments with a VietQR code, personalized bank account number, account number as well as phone number.

MB has also attracted around 2.5 million new customers.

Accelerating digital transformation is key to MB Groups strategic goals. Photo by MB Group.

The number of digital transactions nearly tripled that of the same period last year. Transaction value reached VND1,700 trillion, an increase of more than five times compared to the same period in 2020.

The bank committed to making an annual investment of $50 million in technology infrastructure over the past three years and at least in the next five years.

At the online event, Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors cum CEO Luu Trung Thai emphasized that MB is determined to become the most convenient bank in Vietnam.

"MB will continue to affirm its solid position in the top five, while striving to fulfill more ambitious targets in the new strategic period, consolidating the financial group model on a digital basis in order to strengthen the connection among customers, services and products of MB and its subsidiaries," he said.

In addition to MB's solid performance, in the first six months of the year, its six subsidiaries also achieved outstanding growth in business scale. Military Insurance Joint Stock Corporation (MIC) jumped up one rank to enter the industry Top 5, while MB Ageas Life Insurance Company Limited rose one rank to enter the Top 11 agency channel APE (with 2.5 percent of the market share), accompanied by a growth rate of 266 percent - the highest in the market.

"The subsidiaries contribution to MB Groups total profit accounted for 13.2 percent, which is a strong improvement compared to five years ago," said Thai.

Director of Research and Corporate Development Dam Nhan Duc stressed: "In the 2017-2021 phase, MB has consistently achieved a faster growth rate compared to the average of the seven largest Vietnamese commercial banks and the top three banks of each country in the region and the world."

The revenue and profit of MB Group by the end of 2021 are forecast to triple compared to 2016.
Of the doses, 1,499,960 arrived in Ho Chi Minh City on Saturday night and the rest will arrive in Hanoi on Sunday.

U.S. Consul General in HCMC Marie Damour said: "We are proud to be able to assist Vietnam with more U.S. vaccines, especially with the delivery of nearly 1.5 million of the total doses directly to Ho Chi Minh City, the current epicenter of Vietnams fast-growing outbreak," according to a statement by the consulate.

This is the second batch of the vaccines to arrive in Vietnam this month, taking total donations from the U.S. to more than five million doses.

These are part of 80 million doses that U.S. President Joe Biden has pledged to donate to various countries, more than half of it under Covax.

Vietnam is a beneficiary of U.S. donations being made under Covax as well as under "regional priorities and other recipients."

As of Sunday, Vietnam has received 7.49 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines through the Covax program - 5 million doses of Moderna and 2.49 million doses of AstraZeneca.

Moderna vaccines donated by the U.S. arrive in Noi Bai Airport in Hanoi on July 10, 2021. Photo courtesy of UNICEF.

Vietnam approved emergency use of the Moderna vaccine last month.

Five other vaccines approved for emergency are: Russia's Sputnik V, the U.S. and Germany's Pfizer/BioNTech, China's Sinopharm, and British-Swedish firm AstraZeneca's vaccine and the U.S.'s Johnson & Johnson.

Moderna is developed from messenger RNA, or mRNA, which contains instructions for human cells to construct a harmless piece of the coronavirus called the spike protein that triggers an immune response in humans.

The Moderna vaccine is being used by some 53 countries and territories including the U.S., Canada, the European Union, the U.K., Israel and Singapore.

According to the Ministry of Health, about 105 million vaccine doses have been committed to Vietnam from various sources so far.

Vietnam launched a mass vaccination program in March, using the AstraZeneca vaccine.

More than 4.1 million have received their first Covid-19 vaccine shots and 372,353 have received two shots.

Vietnam plans to inoculate 70 percent of its population of 96 million by April next year.
A vial of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine is seen ahead of being administered in Belfast, Northern Ireland, December 8, 2020. Photo by Reuters.

Health Minister Nguyen Thanh Long said Sunday that Vietnam has reached an agreement on technology transfer for coronavirus vaccine with the U.S. and will start production next year.

While he did not divulge specific details of the agreement, the minister said at the first session of the 15th National Assembly that a factory with the capacity to produce 200 million doses is under construction and will commence operations in the first half of 2022.

He said Vietnam has also reached agreements on technology transfers for the coronavirus vaccine with Russia and Japan.

The Hanoi-based Vabiotech company had packaged its first batch of Sputnik V Covid-19 vaccines last week. The batch will be evaluated in Russia before mass production begins in Vietnam. The tech transfer for the vaccine will be completed by the end of this year, Long said.

Up to now, Vietnam has secured deals for 130 million doses of vaccines and is in talks with other manufacturers on deals for a further 40 million shots, he said, adding that the shots are expected to arrive in 2021 and early 2022.

To date around 4.5 million doses have been administered, but only about 372,353 people have been fully vaccinated.

Vietnams ongoing vaccination campaign targets 70 percent of its 96 million population.
Vietnamese in US remain wary despite vaccination as Delta variant surges

Vietnamese-Americans living in various U.S. states are taking strict preventive measures to protect themselves and others amid a resurgence in Covid-19 caused by a new variant.

Thu Maulden, an ethnic Vietnamese living in Arkansas, said the state had the highest number of new cases caused by the Delta variant in the country.

Maulden said local authorities underline the importance of mask wearing and social distancing but have not made them mandatory. Some restaurants ask customers to follow the rules but cannot enforce them.

The requirement to wear masks in many U.S. states was removed in April and there are no strict rules amid a raging culture war in which conservatives continue to act as if Covid is some kind of a liberal plot and shun all precautions, egged on by a partisan and polarized media.

As a result, a majority of public activities are perforce normal despite the surge caused by the highly transmissible Delta variant.

But Maulden continues to wear a mask when going out, use hand sanitizers and avoid crowded places. She felt more secure as her husband and some friends also follow those preventative measures.

"I do worry about our safety, therefore I should not be negligent," Maulden said. She has had two shots of the Pfizer vaccine.

She fears the new variant could further delay plans to visit her family in Vietnam. She had to cancel a flight that she booked in March.

As of July 21 the Delta variant accounted for 83 percent of U.S. cases, AP reported.

According to CNN, the rise of the Delta variant comes amid a new uptick in cases and an increase in hospitalizations and deaths, especially in pockets of the country where vaccination rates remain relatively low.

Ninh Pham, who works at a hospital in Missouri, said the state's southwestern part is a Delta variant "hotspot." Central hospitals are "full of Covid patients," 80 percent of them from the southwest, she said.

The state has the lowest ratio in the country of people who had one dose, around 40 percent.

Ninh Pham is in her house in Columbia, Missouri, July, 2021. Photo courtesy of Ninh Pham.

Her hospital has tightened regulations on mask wearing and patient screening, and reduced the number of people visiting patients to levels seen during the peak Covid time last year.

Pham has not seen public regulations made stricter since local authorities had eased the rule on mask wearing a month ago. She said with people not supporting them it is not "easy" to lock down again or adopt restrictive measures.

She does not worry too much about her safety since she has had two shots. She is ready to take a third if needed. Yet she wears a mask whenever she goes out, limits contact with others and avoids rush hour at supermarkets.

"Those still are important measures."

In New York, Chung Le said the new variant has caused the number of new cases to rise while it should have decreased thanks to the high vaccination rate.

Fortunately, the situation is not bad in the city though public activities have returned to normal, she said.

Le and her family remain cautious though they had two shots. They not only wear masks when they step out, but also keep a distance from family members who recovered from Covid.

Le feels secure since her neighbors are cautious like hers. They now have a new way to greet each other: "I am fully vaccinated."

Her son in-laws family has told friends they need to have vaccines to join their party at the end of July.

"We should assume that the other person is infected, that is the point of keeping a distance."

In Seattle, Washington State, Gary Thang Nguyen said the new variant caused an increase of new cases but it has not been serious.

The local government has not yet issued any recommendations for residents, though the media has encouraged people to wear masks and get vaccines. He considers them critical requirements.

Though Washington has a high vaccination rate (around 70 percent), Nguyen remains concerned and hopes people do not overestimate the effectiveness of vaccination and maintain other preventive measures.

"We do not know if the coronavirus will have other variants after Delta."

Derek Pham in California said in mid-July local authorities announced that the number of new cases was over 23,000, a 90 percent increase during the month.

As a result, health officials in Los Angeles State have required people to wear masks even indoors in public places such as offices, restaurants and supermarkets regardless of their vaccination status.

Pham is not worried about his safety thanks to vaccination and a large number of Asian and African people wearing masks in public. He trusts the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's assessment that two doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines keep people safe from the Delta variant.

"I still take preventative measures though I am not anxious like before."

Derek Pham is on a plane in Los Angeles, California, July, 2021. Photo courtesy of Derek Pham.

Not much optimistic about higher vaccination

Ninh Pham in Missouri is not optimistic the vaccination rate in her state will increase in the near future because the extremists are "persistent."

Some of her acquaintances also question the efficacy of vaccines.

The local government is trying hard to encourage people to get vaccinated with various inducements like houses, laptops, tuition waivers, and lotteries, and Pham hopes this would persuade reluctant people.

Le does not think the rate of vaccination will increase in New York or across the country since people are "determined" to reject vaccines.

She said people support former President Trump consider vaccination as "treachery". At the same time, the Biden administration does not want to "push too hard" to gain voters' backing before mid-term election in 2022.

But tougher measures are in the offing by some states and private companies and they could promote vaccination, she said. For instance, Massachusetts State has demanded health workers test once a week if they are not vaccinated by the beginning of August.

In other states, Nguyen, Pham and Maulden hope for the same and said the vaccination rate would soon increase since the increase in Covid incidence would change peoples minds.

"I hope people will be more serious with vaccination as we are seeing the Delta and Lambda variants in the U.S.," Nguyen said.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger will be on the House select committee investigating the 6 January attack on the Capitol after accepting an invitation from Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The vocal Republican will join eight Democrats and GOP Rep. Liz Cheney on the panel.

On Sunday Pelosi announced her intention to appoint Kinzinger to the committee in an interview with ABCs George Stephanopoulos, after it had previously been reported that the critic of former President Donald Trump was being considered for the role.

He is just the second Republican to be named on the panel after House Minority Speaker Kevin McCarthy withdrew his other five nominees earlier this week.

Pelosi picks Kinzinger to replace withdrawn Republicans

The Democrats had hoped to implement a bipartisan investigation into the events leading up to the 6 January insurrection but after Senate Republicans blocked that attempt, they moved forward with a select committee. The rules of the committee stated that the Democrats could name eight members and the Republicans five; although the final decision on nominees would be left to Pelosi.

Earlier this week she decided to reject the nominations of Reps. Jim Banks of Indiana and Jim Jordan of Ohio due to their persistent attempts to overturn the election results, something considered crucial in the event of 6 January. In announcing the decision, Pelosi said: We have to again ignore the antics of those who do not want to find the truth.

After informing McCarthy of her decision, the Republican leader opted to withdraw his other three selections: Reps. Rodney Davis of Illinois, Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota and freshman Troy Nehls of Texas. Kinzinger will bring the total number on the panel up to nine, but it appears unlikely that the remaining four spaces will be filled.

Kinzinger says he is happy to answer his duty

After accepting the offer from Pelosi to sit on the select committee he released a short statement on his Twitter account saying that he felt it was his duty to take part in proceedings: Im a Republican dedicated to conservative values, but I swore an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution  and while this is not the position I expected to be in or sought out, when duty calls, I will always answer.

A long-time critic of Trump, Kinzinger has been at odds with the bulk of the Republican Party for his condemnation of the former Presidents role in the insurrection. He was one of just ten GOP representatives who voted to impeach Trump earlier this year and has maintained that he is to blame for the violence.

Confirming his intentions the day before the impeachment vote, Kinzinger issued a statement reading: "There is no doubt in my mind that the President of the United States broke his oath of office and incited this insurrection. He used his position in the Executive to attack the Legislative."
To help boost the states pandemic-hit economy in 2021, Florida has revamped its annual tax-free holidays to stimulate greater spending. Earlier this year the Freedom Week initiative attempted to encourage spending as the states stores were able to reopen, and another is on the way later this month.

For parents worrying about the cost of back-to-school shopping, a new 10-day shopping holiday will run from 31 July  9 August with considerable reductions on a variety of products needed to prepare for the new school year. Shoppers will save Floridas 6% state sales tax, as well as any applicable local tax.

Florida tax-free back-to-school initiative

Usually the state provides a back-to-school tax weekend, giving parents the chance to grab a deal over the course of three days. However for 2021 that is being extending to 10 days; from 12:01 am on 31 July, through 11:59 p.m. on 9 August.

The tax-break only applies to items that the state considers children will need to go school. As a general rule that includes the following items, although there are some exceptions which can be found on the Florida Department of Revenue website:

- Clothing and apparel, up to a maximum value of $60 per item

- School supplies, up to a maximum value of $15 per item

- Personal computers and related accessories, although only the first $1,000 is eligible for the tax exemption

Bear in mind that the value limits only relate to each individual item, so you can claim multiple children's jackets worth $50 as tax-free.

Consumer confidence grows in Florida

Despite these efforts to encourage further spending from Floridians it appears that state residents are already growing in confidence as the economic recovery continues. The states consumer sentiment index grew in June with a 1.5 point increase.

Then index takes five separate signifiers of consumer confidence to judge economic activity in the state. The research shows that residents are even more likely to decide to buy what is considered a big-ticket item, such as a car or piece of furniture. However it also suggests that this sentiment was divided across different demographics, with those older than 60 reporting less favourable views.

Hector H. Sandoval, director of the Economic Analysis Program at UFs Bureau of Economic and Business Research, said of the findings: Overall, Floridians are more optimistic in June. Nonetheless, consumer confidence has remained mostly unchanged over the past months. Looking ahead, we expect consumer sentiment to keep recovering slowly in the months ahead.
The global significance of China's poverty alleviation lies in the fact that the country has provided the world with practical and feasible poverty reduction strategies and solutions, said an Indian sinologist.

BEIJING, July 24 (Xinhua) -- China has brought about a historic resolution of the problem of absolute poverty and realized its first centenary goal -- building a moderately prosperous society in all respects.

The achievements mark a key milestone for the world's most populous country on its journey toward national rejuvenation.

Observers say the elimination of absolute poverty under the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC) is not only of great significance for China's own development, but also a powerful boost to inclusive development across the globe.

In many parts of the world, the development gap is increasing. Global extreme poverty grew in 2020 for the first time in over 20 years as the disruption by the COVID-19 pandemic compounds the forces of conflicts and climate change, which were already slowing poverty reduction progress. Reducing poverty and promoting inclusive development have become an increasingly urgent task for all countries.

The CPC stressed that no one should be left behind on the path to a moderately prosperous society. In the past eight years, China focused on areas of extreme poverty, and lifted the final 98.99 million impoverished rural residents out of poverty by the end of 2020.

Christine Bierre, an expert at the Schiller France Institute, said China's achievement of eradicating absolute poverty is a "real miracle."

"Now the achievement of China's poverty alleviation is vast, and it's something that the outside world needs to give China credit for," said Kerry Brown, a professor of Chinese studies at King's College, London.

China has been a key contributor to the global improvement in literacy levels, fall in malnutrition and poverty levels, improvement in access to clean water, and the general elevation of basic human wellbeing, he added.

China is home to nearly one fifth of the world's population. Its complete eradication of extreme poverty -- the first target of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development -- 10 years ahead of schedule is a milestone in the history of the Chinese nation and the history of humankind, making an important contribution to the cause of global poverty alleviation.

As China fights poverty at home, its experience in poverty alleviation and inclusive development has become a source of inspirations for developing countries worldwide.

In recent years, the "China-style" poverty reduction experience has grabbed global attention, such as targeted poverty alleviation and rural e-commerce, which, according to the World Bank, shows the power of digital technology in helping with poverty reduction and inclusive development.

"In the poverty alleviation front, China set up special poverty alleviation agencies, poverty standards identified and implementation targets codified," said Cavince Adhere, a Kenya-based international relations scholar.

"This facilitated effective monitoring and evaluation of progress made leading to the defeat of extreme poverty on target, even when China was battling the COVID-19 pandemic," he said.

The global significance of China's poverty alleviation lies in the fact that the country has provided the world with practical and feasible poverty reduction strategies and solutions, said B. R. Deepak, Indian sinologist and professor of New Delhi-based Jawaharlal Nehru University.

"China has been instrumental in building capacities in developing and least developed countries by sharing its experience, providing funding and contributing to growth and sustainable development," Deepak told Xinhua.

The eradication of absolute poverty in China also demonstrates the concept of inclusive development.

According to Romina Sudak, a researcher with the China-Argentina Research Group at the National University of Rosario in Argentina, China's building of a moderately prosperous society in all respects reflects the idea that no one will be left behind in the fight against poverty.

Francis Semwaza, a social affairs analyst based in Tanzania's commercial capital Dar es Salaam, said China's achievements in ending absolute poverty and establishing a moderately prosperous society in all respects reflect the CPC's purpose of serving the people wholeheartedly and that the goal of China's poverty alleviation has always been serving the people.

"China's building of a moderately prosperous society in all respects fully demonstrates that the nation is composed of people, and people are all that matter to the nation," said Bambang Suryonochairman of Indonesia's Asia Innovation Study Center. "The world can clearly see that China is pursuing inclusive development."
Egypts President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi issued a presidential decree appointing two new members to Al-Azhar Council for Senior Scholars.

The two members are Mohamed Abdel Rahman El-Duwaini, Al-Azhar Undersecretary, and Fathi Othman El-Feqi, professor at the Sharia and Law Faculty in Cairo.



The pair got the highest votes at the council's elections.



The decree was published in the Official Gazette on Sunday.

Chaired by the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, the council was founded in 1911. It was replaced in 1961 by the Centre for Islamic Research.

In 2012, it was restructured to carry out several specializations, most prominently nominating the Grand Mufti of Egypt (subject to presidential approval) and electing the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar.

It is also regarded as the final authority in determining if new legislation is compliant with Islamic Sharia law.

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Suez Canal Economic Zone (SCZone) signed on Sunday an initial contract with Mercedes-Benz to establish a logistics park at the canals Ain Sokhna industrial zone, a statement by the SCZone said.

Yehia Zaki, Chairman of SCZone, and Raool Rohan, Chief Executive Officer of Mercedes-Benz Egypt, signed the agreement in the presence of Chairman of the Board of Directors Peter Ernst Ross, Vice President of SCZone General Mohamed Shaaban, and CEO Walid Gamal El-Din.

This is an important step for us to have a logistics park by Mercedes which facilitates and supports the auto industry in the Economic Zone, Zaki said.

The logistics centre of Mercedes will feature a storage yard for cars, a centre for auto spare parts and a maintenance workshop, the SCZone chairman said.

Such projects and contracts with the international companies would enhance the investment in the zone, Zaki noted.

Egypt has been pushing forward with efforts to attract investors to the SCZone in recent years, highlighting the available opportunities for foreign corporations.

The country ranked first in Africa and second in the Arab world in attracting foreign investments in 2020, according to a previous statement by the Egyptian presidency.

Under presidential directives, the strategy of the SCZone has focused on doubling investment opportunities and localizing technology in line with Egypt's plan to develop ports and navigational services nationwide.

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Rainfall rates are around average at the Nile Rivers headwaters, but it is still too early to judge the volume of the flood this year, said Egypts Irrigation and Water Resources Minister Mohamed Abdel-Ati on Sunday.

During a meeting of the Permanent Committee for Regulating the Nile River Revenue, Abdel-Ati indicated that the committee is in a permanent session to follow up the rainfall rates over the headwaters of the Nile so as to determine the quantities of water reaching the High Dam lake, a statement by the ministry said.

The permanent session, he adds, will enable the ministrys agencies to dynamically manage the water system with the highest degree of efficiency.

Egypt relies on the Blue Nile  originating in Ethiopia  which is one of two main tributaries of the Nile River that, along with the White Nile, converge in Khartoum before flowing north through Egypt and into the Mediterranean Sea.

Egypt, which is considered one of the most water-scarce countries in the world, receives around 60 billion cubic metres annually, mainly from the Nile. However, its needs stand at around 114 bcm, placing the 100-million-plus country well below the international threshold for water scarcity, at 560 cubic metres per person annually.

In the presence of the executive officials from the ministry and the National Centre for Water Research, the committee, which is headed by Abdel-Ati, held its meeting on Sunday to follow up on the water situation for the current water year and on the measures taken by the ministry to achieve the optimal management of water resources.

The large gap in water resources in Egypt is overcome by importing 54 percent of its virtual water and reusing 42 percent of its renewable, Abdel-Ati said in an earlier statement.

Virtual water  which is the embedded water required to produce commodities  is measured as a percentage of the already existing water resources and is increasingly recommended as a good policy for water-scarce areas.

During Sundays meeting, Abdel-Ati also directed the ministrys agencies to continue improving their readiness to meet the countrys water demands, and to continue measures across all governorates to monitor water levels and the condition of canals and drains.

Egypt is currently building 14 seawater desalination plants that are expected to be completed by June 2022, with a total capacity of 476,000 cubic metres of water per day, at a cost of EGP 9.71 billion (about $620 million). When completed, these plants will bring Egypts total number of desalination stations to 90, with a capacity of 1,307,69 million cubic metres per day.

According to the Minister of Housing, Utilities, and Urban Communities Assem El-Gazzar, Egypt is also constructing 151 dual and triple sewage treatment plants across the country, with a total capacity of five million cubic metres of water per day, at a cost of EGP 31.59 billion (about $2.01 billion).

In parallel, the irrigation ministry is also working on a national project of lining canals  meant to improve the management and distribution of water  which is set to be completed in 2022 at the cost of EGP 18 billion (about $1.14 billion). Out of the 7,000 kilometres planned, the ministry has successfully rehabilitated more than 1,248 kilometres of canals so far.

The ministry is also encouraging farmers to adopt modern irrigation techniques, instead of surface irrigation, to reduce water consumption. Some 237,000 feddans are currently being irrigated with modern techniques.

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A number of Egyptian media outlets claimed on Sunday that a cabinet reshuffle is on the cards in Egypt.

Some outlets claimed that as many as 11 cabinet ministers will be replaced.

The 24 Cairo news outlet also asserted that young new faces will be appointed assistant ministers as well as deputy governors.

Speculation was also fueled, in part, by a tweet on Saturday by MP Mostafa Bakri who said a cabinet reshuffle is expected and that he received information that many cabinet ministers and provincial governors could soon be on their way out. "Semi-official information show that a major cabinet reshuffle is expected soon, and that it could herald several surprises," said Bakri, indicating that "if true and correct, the cabinet reshuffle could be endorsed by parliament on Monday or Tuesday."

Bakri also said he is not sure whether Minister of Foreign Affairs Sameh Shoukri will retain his post or depart for health reasons. "We are also unsure whether Minister of Electricity Mohamed Shaker will stay or leave," said Bakri.

It also claimed that a new information minister is expected to be named to replace Osamal Heikal, who resigned from office last April.

Bakri said he received news that Minister of Telecommunication Amr Talaat might leave post for health reasons.

All sources, however, agree that Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouli will retain post.

The rumours of a major cabinet reshuffle are believed to be linked to developments regarding the GERD (Grand Ethiopia Renaissance Dam), whose second filling was recently completed by Ethiopia in the absence of a legally binding agreement with Egypt and Sudan.

Bakri said parliament is expected to adjourn its session this week for summer recess, and if a cabinet reshuffle is possible it should be endorsed by parliament this week before MPs take the summer holiday.

The Senate  Egypt's consultative upper house parliament  adjourned its session on 6 of July.

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A cabinet committee tasked with legalising the status of unlicensed Christian places of worship approved on Sunday the legalisation of 76 churches and service buildings that had been operating without a permit, the cabinet said in a statement.

This brings the total number of Christian places of worship and service buildings that have been granted legal status so far to 1,985, cabinet spokesman Nader Saad said.

In 2016, Egypts parliament approved a long-awaited law regulating the building and renovation of churches.

The committee to legalise the status of unlicensed churches was established in 2017 by the prime minister.

The 10-member committee comprises a representative of Christian sects , six government officials from several ministries, representatives from the national security apparatus, the intelligence apparatus, and the administrative control body.



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Kidnappers who raided a boarding school in northern Nigeria earlier this month released 28 children on Sunday but another 81 remain in captivity, according to a pastor involved in the negotiations for their release.

The attack on the Bethel Baptist High School in the state of Kaduna was the 10th mass school kidnapping since December in northwest Nigeria carried out by Islamist militants and more recently, criminal gangs.

A first batch of 28 children was released two days after the raid. Parents told Reuters that 180 students typically attend the school, and that pupils were in the process of sitting exams.

"Twenty-eight students were freed this morning," Reverend Ite Joseph Hayab told Reuters on phone. "Quite a number of the students before now escaped ... but 81 are still in captivity."

Nigerian authorities have attributed the kidnappings to what they call armed bandits seeking ransom payments.

The police and Kaduna state commissioner for internal security and home affairs were not immediately available for comment.

Radika Bivan, a parent whose daughter is among those kidnapped confirmed that 28 of them were released but said she did not see her child among them.

Kaduna authorities had ordered the closure of the school and 12 others in the area following the kidnap, without saying when they may reopen.

Schools have become targets for mass kidnappings for ransom in northern Nigeria by armed groups. Such kidnappings in Nigeria were first carried out by jihadist group Boko Haram, and later its offshoot Islamic State West Africa Province, but the tactic has now been adopted by other criminal gangs.

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sraeli carriers on Sunday launched the first direct commercial flights between the Jewish state and Morocco since the countries normalised diplomatic relations in a US-brokered deal last year.

About 100 passengers were on an Israir flight that departed from Tel Aviv to Marrakesh, airline spokeswoman Tali Leibovitz told AFP, adding that two to three flights per week were planned on the route.

National airline El Al later announced it too had launched its a service to Marrakesh on Sunday, and planned five flights per week there and to Casablanca.

At a ceremony sending off the El Al flight attended by Moroccan envoy Abderrahim Beyyoudh, Israel's Tourism Minister Yoel Razvozov said the service would boost "trade, tourism and economic cooperation between the countries", according to an El Al statement.

Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said last week that he would visit Morocco shortly after direct flights commenced.

Morocco was one of four regional states to normalise ties with Israel in 2020, along with Bahrain, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates.

The move came as the administration of former US president Donald Trump recognised Morocco's sovereignty over Western Sahara, a disputed and divided former Spanish colony.

Morocco is home to North Africa's largest Jewish community, which numbers around 3,000. Some 700,000 Jews of Moroccan origin live in Israel.

Rabat had a liaison office in Tel Aviv but relations came to a halt during the 2000-2005 second Palestinian intifada, or uprising.

The normalisation deals between Arab states and Israel have been deemed a "betrayal" by the Palestinians, who believe the process should only follow a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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The Islamist militants believed to be behind last week's deadly suicide bombing of a Baghdad market had planned more attacks during the Eid-al Adha festival, Iraq's interior ministry said Sunday.

The ministry released photos of five suspects arrested, including three brothers, after last Monday's attack that, according to the official toll, killed 30 people and was claimed by the Islamic State group.

Iraqi security forces have dismantled "two terrorist networks in the provinces of Anbar and Kirkuk responsible for the July 19 attack in Sadr City", a poor Shiite district of Baghdad.

"They were planning other attacks in other parts of Baghdad and other provinces during Eid," a ministry statement said.

Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhemi announced Saturday the arrest of the "terror cell" behind the Baghdad market bombing.

Iraqi television broadcast overnight the "confessions" of the five, who were dressed in yellow prison suits, a common practice in major criminal cases in Iraq.

The attack sparked revulsion and renewed fears about the reach of IS, which lost its last territory in Iraq after a gruelling campaign that ended in late 2017, but retains sleeper cells in remote desert and mountain areas.

The bombing hit the Al-Woheilat market in Sadr City, where many families were crowded on the eve of the Eid al-Adha, the most important Muslim holiday.

The announcement of the dismantling of the cell came on the eve of Kadhemi's departure for Washington, where he was to meet US President Joe Biden on Monday.

The Iraqi prime minister, under heavy pressure from powerful pro-Iranian factions in his country, is hoping for a substantial announcement on the withdrawal of US troops in Iraq.

Some 2,500 US troops are deployed to assist Iraqi forces in the fight against IS, which controlled large parts of Iraqi territory between 2014 and 2017.

It has been officially defeated, but its sleeper cells still carry out occasional attacks.

Already in January, a suicide bombing claimed by the IS killed 32 people in a Baghdad market.

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Related Tunisia's president orders military to manage virus crisis Covid-19 crisis in Tunisia Tunisian President Kais Saied decided late on Sunday to freeze all the parliament's powers and relieve premier Hichem Mechichi of his post, in the wake of violent protests that had broken out earlier in the day. In a televised speech, Saied said that he ended the parliamentarians' state of immunity.

Violent demonstrations broke out on Sunday in several Tunisian cities as protesters expressed anger at the deterioration of the North African nation's health, economic and social situation.

Thousands of people defied virus restrictions and scorching heat to demonstrate in the capital of Tunis and other cities. The largely young crowds shouted ``Get out!'' and slogans calling for the dissolution of parliament and early elections.

The protests were called on the 64th anniversary of Tunisia's independence by a new group called the July 25 Movement.

Security forces deployed in force, especially in Tunis where police blockades blocked all streets leading to the main artery of the capital, Avenue Bourguiba. The avenue was a key site for the Tunisian revolution a decade ago that brought down a dictatorial regime and unleashed the Arab Spring uprisings.

Police also deployed around the parliament, preventing demonstrators from accessing it.

Police used tear gas to disperse some demonstrators throwing projectiles at officers and made several arrests. Clashes also took place in several other towns, notably in Nabeul, Sousse, Kairouan, Sfax and Tozeur.

Protesters also stormed the offices of the Islamist movement Ennahda, the dominant force in parliament. Videos circulating online showed smoke pouring out of the Ennahda building. The attackers damaged computers and other equipment inside and threw documents onto the streets.

The party denounced the attack, saying that ``criminal gangs'' from inside and outside Tunisia are trying to ``seed chaos and destruction in the service of an agenda aimed at harming the Tunisian democratic process.''

On the coronavirus front, Tunisia has reimposed lockdowns and other virus restrictions because it's facing one of Africa's worst virus outbreaks.

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Qatar's foreign minister Sheikh Mohammad bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani arrived in Tehran Sunday in an unannounced visit and met top officials, days after visiting Washington, the state news agency reported.

IRNA said that Al-Thani, who is also Qatar's Deputy Prime Minister, met president-elect Ebrahim Raisi and the two discussed bilateral relations.

"Tehran puts special emphasis on relations with Doha," Raisi said, noting that his administration's priority in foreign policy will be relations with neighbours.

"Be certain that Iran wishes well for its neighbours," he added.

Qatar's top diplomat earlier met Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif for talks focusing on the "latest bilateral developments and important regional and international issues", Iran's foreign ministry said in a statement.

Al-Thani's visit comes after he met US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Washington on Thursday.

During that meeting, the two reviewed "bilateral cooperation and regional developments, particularly in Afghanistan, Iran, Syria and Palestine", according to the foreign ministry in Doha.

The Qatari diplomat also emphasised the "need for an open and transparent dialogue between GCC countries and Iran, to achieve stability in the region".

Since April, Tehran has been engaged in talks with world powers in Vienna over reviving a 2015 nuclear accord, with Washington taking part indirectly in the negotiations.

The talks aim to return the US to the deal it withdrew from in 2018 under former president Donald Trump by lifting the sanctions reimposed on Tehran, and to have Tehran return to full compliance with nuclear commitments it has gradually retreated from in retaliation for sanctions.

Iran has confirmed that the talks will not resume until the ultraconservative Raisi takes office in August.

Al-Thani had also previously expressed Qatar's readiness to broker talks between Iran and its Arab neighbours in the Gulf, including Saudi Arabia.

Raisi has said there are "no obstacles" to restoring ties with Saudi Arabia, a US ally.

Tehran and Riyadh have been engaged in talks hosted by Baghdad since April with the aim of improving relations.

Ties between the regional rivals were cut in 2016 after Iranian protesters attacked Saudi diplomatic missions after a revered Shia cleric was executed in the kingdom.

*This story was edited by Ahram Online.

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Afghan forces have captured four Taliban fighters including a militant commander for carrying out this week's rocket attack targeting the presidential palace in Kabul during the Muslim Eid al-Adha prayers, officials said Sunday.

At least three rockets landed near the palace on Tuesday as President Ashraf Ghani and his top officials performed outdoor prayers to mark the start of the Muslim holiday.

The interior ministry said police had arrested four Taliban fighters in an operation in Kabul who were behind the attack, which was claimed by the jihadist Islamic State group.

"A Taliban commander, Momin, along with his three other men, have been arrested. They all belong to the Taliban group," ministry spokesman Mirwais Stanikzai told reporters in a video message.

He said Momin was a key organiser of the rocket attack, and the group was also involved in other attacks.

The palace was also attacked last year as hundreds gathered for Ghani's inauguration for a second term as president. That attack was also claimed by IS.

The Taliban have announced ceasefires during past Islamic holidays in recent years, offering respite to Afghans who can visit family in relative safety, but no such offer was made on this occasion.

The rocket attack on Tuesday came as the Taliban capitalise on the last stages of the withdrawal of US-led foreign forces from Afghanistan, capturing scores of districts, border crossings and encircling several provincial capitals.

The fighting continues across the rugged countryside as peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban have so far failed to reach a deal to end the war.

In a bid to curb the surging violence, Afghan authorities on Saturday imposed a night-time curfew in 31 of the country's 34 provinces except Kabul, Panjshir and Nangarhar.

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German Development Bank (KfW) has provided financing worth 41 million for Egypt to support the country's techincal education sector, Egypt's Minister of International Cooperation Rania Al-Mashat announced on Sunday.

The financing, which comes as part of the debt swap program between the two countries, was allocated to Egypts Ministry of Education and Technical Education to implement the Comprehensive Technical Education Reform Initiative (TCTI) in the country.

This comes in light of the joint economic relations with Germany, and the Ministry of International Cooperations endeavor to support Egypts development agenda through international partnerships, according to Al-Mashat.

The comprehensive technical education agreement in Egypt is the last one to receive financing within the second tranche of the second phase of the debt swap program between Egypt and Germany.

The total value of the second phase amounts to 80 million, through which three development projects will be executed in several sectors, mainly in technical and vocational education sectors.



Al-Mashat explained that the new agreement supports national efforts to develop technical education, prepare students for the labor market, and boost employment opportunities, which comes in line with the sustainable development goals (SDGs), especially the SDG 4 on quality of education; SDG 8 on decent work and economic growth; and SDG 17 on partnerships for the goals.



She added that the cooperation with Germany targets securing grants and funds through contracts concluded between the Ministry of International Cooperation, state ministries, and the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ); as well as the projects funded by the Egyptian-German debt swap program and implemented in cooperation between Egyptian ministries and the KfW.

The coordination is underway with Germany to make the third tranche of the second phase available during 2022, after coordinating with stakeholders in Egypt and receiving proposals on priority projects, according to Al-Mashat.



The ongoing cooperation portfolio with Germany amounts to 1.7 billion financing 30 projects through funds and technical assistance grants, covering renewable energy, sanitation, water resource and solid waste management, migration, labor market, innovation in the private sector, technical education, vocational training, urban development, administrative reform, women, youth, and local development areas.



The first phase of the debt swap program with Germany was completed, with total development financing worth 70 million, serving several projects, including school development through feeding programs and improving the quality of education, rehabilitating hydropower plants, developing Assiut Barrages, and improving drinking water and sanitation.



The first tranche of the second phase, worth 10 million, was made available for the Ministry of Education and Technical Education for the Education Quality Support Project (Phase II), in addition to the second tranche of the second phase of the program, which was worth 80 million.

This fund was directed for several projects across various sectors: the development of the Human Capital in Rural Upper Egypt in collaboration with the World Food Program in cooperation with the Ministry of Education and Technical Education; the Improved water & wastewater services programme (IWSP) in the governorates of Qena, Assiut, Minya and Sohag; and the new the Comprehensive Technical Education Reform Initiative (TCTI).

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Arab Banking Corporation (B.S.C.) (Bank ABC) has submitted a mandatory tender offer (MTO) approval request to Egypts Financial Regulatory Authority (FRA) aiming to purchase up to 100 percent of the issued capital of Blom Bank Egypt S.A.E. (Blom Egypt), ABC said in a statement sent to the Bahraini bourse on Sunday.

The document, seen by Ahram Online, also included Bank ABCs confirmation that the FRA approval on the MTO was received on 18 July, and the bank has received all other relevant regulatory approvals required to complete the acquisition of Blom Egypt.

It noted that the MTO validity period commences as of 25 July through 5 August, adding that the completion of the acquisition will take place after the MTO validity period has expired and a number of other pre-closing actions have taken place.

The Bank stated that further announcement will be made at that time.

Bank ABC said that Egypt is a key strategic market for the bank, having established its presence through the acquisition of Egypt Arab African Bank in 1999.

It currently operates through Bank ABC in Egypt, which has 27 branches in the country.

Blom Bank Egypt will contribute to upscale Bank ABCs Egyptian footprint, which is fully aligned with Bank ABCs strategy to be MENAs leading international bank, according to the statement.

It elaborated that the acquisition is expected to reposition Bank ABC's Egyptian franchise amongst the top 20 banks in Egypt, delivering significantly greater scale and a more efficient platform and to provide the Bank ABC Group with a highly profitable franchise in Egypt.

The bank said that it considers Egypt as one of the most fundamentally attractive markets in MENA region.

HSBC Bank Middle East is acting as the sole financial advisor to Bank ABC, with Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and Zulficar & Partners acting as legal advisors.

Blom Bank Lebanon was advised by CI Capital, while Baker McKenzie acted as legal counsel.

The acquisition of Blom Bank Egypt is a unique opportunity for Bank ABC to fulfill its longstanding strategic commitment to inorganically expand its core business, giving us a significantly enhanced platform for future growth, in one of the most attractive markets in the region. We have an active relationship with our regulators and will be working to secure their approvals to complete the deal as swiftly as possible," said Khaled Kawan, the Group CEO of Bank ABC.

"We will then look forward to working with our new Blom Bank Egypt team to combine Bank ABC Egypt and Blom Bank Egypt thereby creating a new powerhouse in the Egyptian banking sector. We also thank the management teams of Blom Bank Lebanon, Blom Bank Egypt and their advisors for the seamless execution process that has led to this agreement."

Meanwhile, Saad Azhari, Chairman and General Manager of Blom Bank Lebanon, said that the transaction will allow Blom Bank Lebanon to comply with the latest regulations issued by the Central Bank of Lebanon, which stipulate that all Lebanese banks must increase their equity by 20 percent.

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Egypt placed third in Forbes Middle Easts list of largest economies in the Arab region with a total GDP value that is expected to jump to $394.3 billion in 2021, up from the $361.8 billion recorded in 2020.

Egypt retreated to third place behind the UAE, which advanced to second place with a projected total GDP of $401.5 billion in 2021, up from a $354.3 billion posted in 2020.

Saudi Arabia maintained its position as the biggest economy in the Arab region with its total GDP value expected to hit $804.9 billion in 2021, up from $701.5 billion attained in 2020.

Iraq kept its spot in fourth place, with an expected $190.7 billion GDP in 2021, up from $172.12 billion reached in 2020.

On Thursday, Egypts Ministry of International Cooperation announced that the country ranked fourth with an index of 88.7 in the Economists normalcy index, tracking behavioural changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic that impacted world economies owing to the socioeconomic challenges the world witnessed in 2020.

Egypts Minister of International Cooperation Rania Al-Mashat explained that the index included 50 of the worlds largest economies that represent 90 percent of global GDP and 76 percent of the world's population, adding that Egypts ranking reflects the countrys resilience against the COVID-19 pandemic and its related severe impacts.

Egypts real GDP growth is expected to rebound significantly in the current FY2021/2022 to 5.2 percent, up from the projected 2.8 percent for the FY2020/2021, according to Celin Allard, the chief of the International Monetary Funds mission for Egypt on the stand-by agreement (SBA) programme.

Allard made her comments during a press briefing held in June on the occasion of the completion of Egypts 12-month SBA loan programme.

Under the programme, Egypt secured a loan amounting to $5.4 billion dedicated to help the country cope with the challenges posed by the coronavirus by meeting its balance of payment needs, reducing the budget deficit, maintaining the achievements made over the past four years under the countrys economic reform programme, and providing finances for implementing Egypts second wave of economic reforms.

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Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi directed the government to keep up economic performance rates in order to ensure stable monetary and financial conditions in the country.

El-Sisis directives came during his meeting with Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouli, Finance Minister Mohamed Maait, Deputy Finance Minister for Fiscal Policies Ahmed Kouchouk, and others, presidential spokesman Bassam Radi said.

El-Sisi stressed the importance of regularly updating and upgrading the management of GDP data to accurately monitor different aspects of economic development in Egypt.

The president also highlighted the significance of increasing funds earmarked for public investments to meet the development targets listed in Egypts Vision 2023.

The meeting reviewed the economic performance and fundamentals for the fiscal year 2020/2021, which showed that the government had managed to increase its revenues by 12.2 percent to EGP 119 billion (about $7.6 billion), in addition to increasing its primary surplus by 1.4 percent to EGP 93.1 billion (about $5.9 billion).

The budget deficit was also narrowed to 7.4 percent, down from 8 percent.

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Browsing through the heaps of books for sale on the open-air bookstalls of the Ezbekiyya Book Market in Cairo, Egyptian writer Iman Mersal came across a novel by an unknown author. Entitled Al-hubb wa-al-samt (Love and Silence) and published in 1967 by the state-owned Dar al-katib al-arabi publishers, the novel and its otherwise unknown author Enayat al-Zayyat piqued her interest enough for her to buy the book and to take it home to read it.



When she came across al-Zayyats novel in 1993, Mersal had only recently moved to Cairo from her native Mansoura and was working towards a MA and then a PhD in Arabic Literature at Cairo University. However, despite the many changes in her life that subsequently took place, including her relocation to Canada in 1998 where she is now a professor of Arabic literature, she did not forget al-Zayyats novel.



Returning to it some ten years later, she took the best part of a decade to find out more about the novel and its author, eventually publishing an account of her research as Fi athar Enayat al-Zayyat (In the Footsteps of Enayat al-Zayyat) with the independent Cairo publisher Kotob Khan in 2019. Immediately recognised as a major contribution to life-writing in Arabic, the book went through several editions, striking a chord with readers who may have been ignorant about al-Zayyat and her novel and would have known of Mersals work from her earlier poetry collections as well as from her well-received earlier non-fiction book Kayfa taltaem: an al-omoma wa askhbahuha (How to Mend: Motherhood and Its Ghosts).



Today, Mersals achievement in In the Footsteps of Enayat al-Zayyat is being more and more widely recognised. A French translation by veteran translator Richard Jacquemond, also the translator of a selection of Mersals poetry, appeared earlier this year from the French publishers Actes Sud (as Sur les traces dEnayat Zayyat). In May, Mersal was awarded the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for Literature for In the Footsteps of Enayat al-Zayyat at a ceremony in Abu Dhabi, which she attended via Zoom. An English translation, already underway, is planned for as early as next year.



Taking time out from her regular job at the University of Alberta in Canada, Mersal is now working on a new book, tentatively entitled Al-Lakna: al-sawt fi ghair makana (Accent: the Displaced Voice), as a guest of the Institute for Advanced Study at Aix-Marseille University in France. She has also been caught up in a whirlwind of publicity for her book in both its Arabic and French editions, speaking at the Institut du Monde arabe in Paris in early June as part of a book tour and at other venues in France.



Fortunately, Mersal can still find time to discuss her book with ordinary readers, and sitting down with the Weekly after her Paris event in June she explained what had first attracted her to al-Zayyats book when she had come across it in Ezbekiyya all those years ago, scarcely knowing then the significance that it would have for her own subsequent writing.

Everyone will have had the experience of coming across a book at one period in their lives that at another might appear uninteresting, she said, and something along these lines had happened to her when she had found a secondhand copy of Al-hubb wa-al-samt in Ezbekiyya. She would often go there when she was living in Cairo, she said, in search of books by Sufis and religious mystics that could help her to write her thesis on the Syrian poet Adonis.You would go there, pick up five or six books, and then end up not reading three of them. But this book came to me at the right moment. I was shaping my own intellectual trajectory and my voice as a poet, and this book by a young woman 30 years before me who had tried to describe internal struggle and feelings of isolation really touched me, Mersal said. It was a book that seemed to speak across the decades to a new generation of readers.But not every book, however interesting, triggers the kind of extensive search that Mersal then carried out on the book and its author. Al-Zayyats only novel, published posthumously four years after her suicide at the age of only 27 in 1963, became for Mersal something of an obsession.In trying to explain why, she points to the novels stubbornness, its refusal to fit in with conventional expectations. I thought the book would be about the protagonist, a young woman called Naglaa, perhaps an experiment at self-projection on the part of al-Zayyat herself, mourning the early death of her brother, she said, referring to the then conventional representations of women in even literary fiction.But Naglaa describes her brother as selfish and resents the investment made in him by her family just because he is a boy. This drew my attention, along with the fact that the author was completely unknown and invisible in standard accounts of the canon of Arabic literature by women.On the other hand, in order to write a whole book 20 years later, you have to have other reasons, even if the desire to know more about a forgotten writer with an unusual talent can serve as an important stimulus. I have known many talented women writers who have vanished. I have always been fascinated by the kind of talent that cannot survive in our environment, she said.There was also the question of the relationship between al-Zayyats circumstances in the early 1960s and Mersals in the early 1990s. Al-Zayyats attempts at finding an authentic voice for herself in her single novel could perhaps illuminate the challenges faced by Mersals generation 30 years later in fashioning literary identities that would allow them to express their individuality and differences from the past.Following footsteps: Thus began a search for al-Zayyat that involved the examination of public and private archives, a review of the Cairo press in the 1960s and afterwards for any snippets about her, and multiple interviews with surviving friends and family, including the actress Nadia Lutfi, a friend from childhood, and al-Zayyats sister Azima al-Zayyat, among others.

Slowly al-Zayyat began to come into focus, her image filling out as new information emerged from interviews or dark corners of the archives. An official version emerged  there was the well-educated father who held an important post at Cairo University, the mother, the granddaughter of a pasha, the three daughters who went to the German School in Cairo and married one after the other, among them Enayat, the one who was unlucky.However, there were still so many details missing, concealed by the mask the Egyptian bourgeoise likes to use to conceal what it does not want to make known, that it was hard to square this image of al-Zayyat, one also found in some of the photographs in Mersals book, with the voice that spoke so powerfully in the novel.In reconstructing al-Zayyats circumstances in the early 1960s and the background to her novel, Mersal pays attention to the encouragement that she received, or did not receive, from the literary gatekeepers of the time, the high priests of literature, those who decided what was and what was not considered publishable. She notes that when Al-hubb wa-al-samt was finally published in early 1967, only months before defeat in the 1967 War, it contained an introduction by the critic Mustafa Mahmoud that for her could not have been more misleading.Mahmoud suggests that the way al-Zayyats novel should be read, and perhaps also the authors own story, is that of a young woman who could not find herself because she could not identify with the collective causes then giving shape to individual aspirations. In so doing, he was reiterating the ideas of prominent critics of the time such as Mahmoud Amin al-Alem, also cited in Mersals book, who had paradoxically spent time in prison for his political views but had been incorporated into the ideological apparatus on his release.That was the dominant formula, Mersal explained to the Weekly. It said that a womans path to emancipation coincided with national emancipation and the struggle against colonialism and that her identification with these things lent meaning to her personal aspirations and was a way of validating the way she presented herself in her life-writing.Literary work that did not conform to this kind of story-telling, or that presented individual lives in other ways, could risk being blackballed by the literary establishment. Either out of youthful naiveite, or, in a less charitable view, because of the authors relatively privileged social position  a lot of Marxist criticism was being produced at the time  al-Zayyats writing could not conform to the standard exemplified by, for example, the Egyptian writer Latifa al-Zayyats (no relation) novel The Open Door.This was published in 1960 at around the same time that Enayet al-Zayyat was writing, and it frankly identifies individual fulfilment with the struggle for national self-determination. One way of seeing the relative success of the two novels  Latifa al-Zayyats celebrated as a major work of literature, Enayat al-Zayyats rejected and forgotten  is to focus on such ideological differences and the way they frame the relationship between the individual and the collective.In her comments to the Weekly, Mersal said that it was important to revisit al-Zayyats experience as a young woman writing in Cairo in the 1960s. Her novel is not a great novel, but it has a genuine voice In the 1990s, there were lots of attacks on the poetry we were writing, most of them based on nationalist viewpoints and saying that our poetry [the poetry of her generation] lacked big ideas. Revisiting her story gave me the chance to understand what we faced in focusing on individual experience that did not necessarily fit the needs of grand-scale ideological systems, leftist or nationalist, inherited from the past.Could this scepticism about the authority of collective story-telling and emphasis on the validity of individual experience be related to a desire to take up a different relationship to the past? Was it a response by present generations to the ways in which that past is sometimes represented? Mersal protests against the idea that in her book she wanted to rehabilitate a forgotten writer or insert her into the academic canon. Had she wanted to do the latter, she would have written an academic article, she said. Had she wanted to do the former, she could have written a biography.Instead, her book was about reading the past, she said, in the sense of following up what remains, some of it written, some in the form of oral testimony, some in the shape of physical objects. What I was doing was presenting somebody who was a nobody in the wider cultural consciousness and trying to read her story, or read the past through her story, while keeping her as an individual and not speaking in her name, Mersal explained.The conversation turns to the Sheikh Zayed Prize and the recognition of her book abroad. Mersal comments that I never expected to get an award, since I am a poet, and poetry is invisible when it comes to recognition. But I was happy that my creative non-fiction book about a forgotten women writer should have received the Prize. Awards allow books to travel. The received map of writing and reading in the Arab world has changed, and there is a new readership outside the established centres of Cairo and Beirut. There is a growing youthful public for fiction and non-fiction in Arabic, and this should be encouraged.Was she happy to see the success that In the Footsteps of Enayat al-Zayyat has had in translation? One great value in writing the book for me was that it helped me to recover the Cairo I left in 1998, seeing it in a new light. Wandering the streets of the city looking for the house and tomb of Enayat al-Zayyat helped me to remember the city and to get to know it again.Translation wasnt a source of motivation for me when writing the book, but if it is a success abroad, why not? You offer something to your own culture first, but if it also means something to others, then this is also great, she commented.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 15 July, 2021 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.

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Ethiopia's Amhara boss urges residents to fight Tigray rebels



AFP, Sunday 25 Jul 2021



At least 20 civilians were killed and tens of thousands displaced in fighting in Afar last week, an official said



Ethiopia's Amhara region on Sunday called on all armed residents to mobilise for battle against rebels from conflict-hit Tigray, calling it a "survival campaign", state media reported.



Amhara borders Tigray to the south, and the two regions are embroiled in a decades-old land dispute that has become central to the eight-month-old war in Tigray.



Sunday's statement from Amhara regional president Agegnehu Teshager echoes a call made Friday by the president of Ethiopia's Afar region just east of Tigray.



Together the two statements highlight the potential for the Tigray war, which Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed declared all but over in late November, to draw in the rest of the country.



"Starting from tomorrow (Monday), I call on all people of age who are armed either at governmental or private level to mobilise for a survival campaign," Agegnehu said.



"We have called on the general public to stand on our side. Now, the public is on our side in every aspect," he added.



"The support we are receiving from civil servants in the region is overwhelming. We are proud of that."



Abiy, winner of the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, sent troops into Tigray last November to oust the region's ruling party, the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), a move he said was in response to TPLF attacks on federal army camps.



Fighting dragged on for months before the war took a stunning turn in late June, with pro-TPLF fighters reclaiming the Tigray capital Mekele and Abiy declaring a unilateral ceasefire.



Yet clashes have continued and officials from six regions and the city of Dire Dawa have since said they would send troops to back up government forces.



At least 20 civilians were killed and tens of thousands displaced in fighting in Afar last week, an official said.



Rebel spokesman Getachew Reda has vowed to "liberate every square inch of Tigray", including its western and southern portions, disputed territories that have been occupied by Amhara forces since the beginning of the war.



A communications blackout in Tigray makes it difficult to confirm who holds which territory.



The war has already killed thousands and, according to the United Nations, pushed hundreds of thousands into famine.



https://english.ahram.org.eg/News/417661.aspx
Egypt places 3rd in Forbess list for largest economies in Arab world



Doaa A.Moneim, , Sunday 25 Jul 2021



Egypt followed Saudi Arabia and the UAE with an expected GDP value of $394.3 billion in 2021



Egypt placed third in Forbes Middle Easts list of largest economies in the Arab region with a total GDP value that is expected to jump to $394.3 billion in 2021, up from the $361.8 billion recorded in 2020.



Egypt retreated to third place behind the UAE, which advanced to second place with a projected total GDP of $401.5 billion in 2021, up from a $354.3 billion posted in 2020.



Saudi Arabia maintained its position as the biggest economy in the Arab region with its total GDP value expected to hit $804.9 billion in 2021, up from $701.5 billion attained in 2020.



Iraq kept its spot in fourth place, with an expected $190.7 billion GDP in 2021, up from $172.12 billion reached in 2020.



On Thursday, Egypts Ministry of International Cooperation announced that the country ranked fourth with an index of 88.7 in the Economists normalcy index, tracking behavioural changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic that impacted world economies owing to the socioeconomic challenges the world witnessed in 2020.



Egypts Minister of International Cooperation Rania Al-Mashat explained that the index included 50 of the worlds largest economies that represent 90 percent of global GDP and 76 percent of the world's population, adding that Egypts ranking reflects the countrys resilience against the COVID-19 pandemic and its related severe impacts.



Egypts real GDP growth is expected to rebound significantly in the current FY2021/2022 to 5.2 percent, up from the projected 2.8 percent for the FY2020/2021, according to Celin Allard, the chief of the International Monetary Funds mission for Egypt on the stand-by agreement (SBA) programme.



Allard made her comments during a press briefing held in June on the occasion of the completion of Egypts 12-month SBA loan programme.



Under the programme, Egypt secured a loan amounting to $5.4 billion dedicated to help the country cope with the challenges posed by the coronavirus by meeting its balance of payment needs, reducing the budget deficit, maintaining the achievements made over the past four years under the countrys economic reform programme, and providing finances for implementing Egypts second wave of economic reforms.



https://english.ahram.org.eg/News/417676.aspx
By Sean Miyaguchi, KYODO NEWS - Jul 25, 2021 - 22:20 | All, Sports, News

Japan's Abe siblings completed a golden judo double at the Tokyo Olympics on Sunday, with younger sister Uta winning the women's 52-kilogram division shortly before older brother Hifumi snared the men's 66-kg crown.

Having beaten France's Amandine Buchard for gold, 21-year-old Uta cheered for 23-year-old Hifumi from the edge of the mats, leaping jubilantly as he prevailed over Georgia's Vazha Margvelashvili in the final.

Their victories at Tokyo's historic Nippon Budokan took Japan's gold medal tally to five, including three from judo, and made them the first Japanese brother and sister to capture gold on the same day of Olympic competition.

Uta became the first Japanese gold medalist in her division, as well as its youngest-ever champion, while Hifumi is the first Japanese judoka to win his class since Masato Uchishiba at the 2008 Beijing Games.

"I think we put our names in history, and we were able to change history," Hifumi said.

The elder Abe defeated Margvelashvili in the final after deploying an outer leg sweep late in the second minute of regulation to earn a waza-ari point.

The newly crowned champion appeared stoic immediately after his win, but said he became overcome with emotion upon stepping off the mats.

"The Olympic Games were held in such a situation (of the coronavirus pandemic), and thanks to a lot of people...I thought I should pump my fist or smile at first, but thinking about everything, many things welled up inside me," he said.

Competing in her first Olympics, Uta fought her toughest battle of the tournament in the final against reigning European champion Buchard.

With the pair deadlocked through regulation, Abe pinned Buchard for a golden-score ippon victory after 4 minutes, 27 seconds of extra time. Uta struck the mat with both hands and exploded with joy.

"In the past four years, I was really working hard for these games, so I am very glad that my efforts paid off," Uta said. "When my brother won the gold medal, I was relieved, and was very happy as well. We congratulated each other before the victory ceremony."

The only non-Japanese judoka to beat her in recent competition, Buchard had prevented Abe from sewing up Olympic selection by winning their bout at the 2019 Osaka Grand Slam.

"(Buchard) is a rival and someone I really respect...I am very happy I beat her at the end," Uta said.

A two-time world champion, the younger Abe had powered her way to the gold medal match, starting with an ippon win over Brazilian Larissa Pimenta in the opening round.

In her quarterfinal against Briton Chelsie Giles, she scored the decisive point with a waza-ari in the last 30 seconds of regulation.

Her semifinal against Rio de Janeiro Olympic silver medalist, Italy's Odette Giuffrida, lasted just over three minutes into golden-score extra time before the Japanese threw her opponent to the mat for victory by waza-ari.

Hifumi booked his final berth with an ippon against Brazilian Daniel Cargnin, toppling him with a seoi-nage shoulder throw after 2:25 of the semifinal.

He opened his campaign with a golden-score ippon win against France's Kilian Le Blouch before outpointing Mongolian Baskhuu Yondonperenlei in the quarterfinals.

Cargnin took bronze after beating Israel's Baruch Shmailov, while Rio de Janeiro Olympic silver medalist An Baul of South Korea defeated Italian Manuel Lombardo in the other men's 66-kg bronze medal match.

Giuffrida and Giles were women's 52-kg bronze medal winners after beating Hungary's Reka Pupp and Switzerland's Fabienne Kocher, respectively.
New Delhi:

In yet another IED explosion, an Army vehicle was damaged by a group of militants on Tuesday in Sopore area of Baramulla district of Jammu and Kashmir.

An army vehicle damaged in an IED blast in Yemberzalwai in outskirts of Sopore in north Kashmir's Baramulla district, the news agency ANI reported.

However, no injuries have been reported in the incident so far. Following the IED blast, the area has been cordoned off. The army has also launched a search operation to capture the hiding militants in and around Baramulla.

In a separate incident, an army post and a police station in Bandipora's Hajin were attacked by terrorists.

Around four to six terrorists came from 2 sides of army camp of 13 Rashtriya Rifles and Hajin police station and fired around 8 rounds of Under-barrel Grenade Launcher towards the Army and the police.

"Army retaliated the terrorists' fire and heavy exchanges are now going on in the area," a police official said.

However, the army post and the police station are claimed to be safe. The area has been cordoned off and the army has started combing operations.

Another group of militants tried to snatch weapons from a police post in downtown Srinagar. The police personnel, however, thwarted the attempt by terrorists, who have managed to escape the spot.

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Beijing:

A Chinese university suspended an Islamic culture class taught by a Pakistani student following criticism that it is spreading religious beliefs to students, a state-run media report said on Thursday.

Nanjing Agricultural University in East China's Jiangsu Province denied that the course had spread religious beliefs to students, amid online criticism that the university failed to separate education from religion, state-run Global Times daily reported.

The university said the course "Islamic culture," which was opened to undergraduates in the College of Engineering, was suspended half a year ago.

"It was suspended after the school discovered in late 2017 that the course instructor, a Pakistani student who is seeking a PhD degree in our university, was unqualified to teach in Chinese universities," a university employee surnamed Huang told the paper.

The university said in a separate online statement that it has begun investigating the incident, and will hold relevant people accountable. The course was meant to introduce students to Islamic culture, history and festivals, and also to introduce Muslim conventions. The university said it did not find any evidence that the instructor had guided students to engage in religious practices during and outside the class, the report said.

The university responded after Xi Wuyi, an expert on Marxism at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, wrote on her Sina Weibo on May 30 that the university, in a clear violation of law, spread religious beliefs in class.

China's Education Law stipulates that education should be separated from religion. Xi's post sparked heated discussions online.

"We did not practice religion in the course and were not asked to memorise any religious texts," an anonymous student, who attended the course, told the paper. She said that many people chose this course because it's easy to pass, and the "teacher" conducts lectures in English, "so many students believe the course can improve their English skills."

"Universities are allowed to offer courses on religion. However, actions such as building religious sites, religious practices and advocating religious dogma in schools are strictly forbidden," Shen Guiping, a religious expert at the Central Institute of Socialism in Beijing, told the paper.

China's newly revised regulation on religious affairs, which took effect in February, bans religious practices and activities in schools and other educational institutions, except at religious schools. However, Shen noted that a fine line exists between introducing religions to students and guiding them to practice religions.

The university said it sticks to the ethnic equality principle and encourages cross-cultural exchanges. It also vowed to strengthen scrutiny over its courses and prevent religion from infiltrating the campus.

In May, Northwest Minzu University in Northwest China's Gansu Province stressed a ban on religious activities on campus during Ramadan, amid a clamour to regulate religious practices and make sure they do not "disturb public order."
New Delhi:

The Indian state of Kerala recently came under the attack of deadly Nipah Virus and at least 16 people lost their lives. The puzzling viral attack continued to wreak havoc in the state with no antidote available to contain the outbreak.

This was just one case but there are many others mosquito, tick and flea-borne illnesses which were on the rise across the world. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention, the reason behind this rise is warming temperatures and changing rain patterns.

Since 2004, there was a three-fold rise in the diseases caused by mosquitos, ticks and fleas. However, the report didnt mention climate change as a cause behind this but experts claimed the changing climate patterns were in part to blame,

With temperatures and rain patterns changing due to climate change, some disease-carrying insects like mosquitos and ticks can spread into wider territories rapidly.

Climate change is causing sea level rise

Due to the soaring CO2 emission, the rising water of our oceans will continue to accelerate inundating all the coastal cities of the world. Carbon burning is adding extra heat to the world which causes it to warm up and when water warms up, it expands.

Also the ice sheets on land in Greenland and Antarctica were melting rapidly due to the soaring temperature, adding more water to the oceans.

Mountains matter

The mountains are not just tourist and adventure junkies attraction but half the worlds population depends on mountain ecosystems. Yet, the climate change is threatening the continued existence of its ecosystems. For the sake of our future generations, its time for us to protect the worlds mountains.

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New Delhi:

Ukrainian model Daria Molcha, who was arrested by the special task force for staying in the country without a valid travel documents, was released on Friday.



The special task force arrested 20-year-old Molcha from a private hotel at Park Road in Gorakhpur and detained in the district jail on April 3.



The model was released after civil judge Surendra Pratap Singh issued her release order on Thursday.



"Daria Molcha, who was jailed under various sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and the Foreigners Act, was released around 1.00 pm. We had received the release order very late yesterday that is why she was released today," jail superintendent Ramdhani said.



Molcha has been sent to the Ukrainian Embassy in Delhi under police protection, Senior Superintendent of Police Shalabh Mathur said.



Two men from Kolkata -- Chandari Rawat and Adarsh -- had come here on a chartered plane and they went to the Chief Judicial Magistrate court for the release of Molcha. The application of the Ukrainian model's bail was rejected by the district court on April 12. After that, the bail application was filed in the high court which granted her bail about a week ago.

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Chandigarh:

A teacher of a private school in Haryana's Nissing town was arrested on Wednesday for allegedly sexually assaulting one of his students, police said.

The 20-year-old student of SD Model School today lodged a complaint against her physical education teacher Manoj Kumar alleging that he sexually assaulted her, they said.

She alleged that Kumar assaulted her several times between January and March this year when she studying in Class XII, the police added. The victim passed out of school this year.

The police said that the victim had attempted suicide last evening by jumping in a canal near Nissing, but was rescued by a passerby. An investigation is underway.
New Delhi:

Pakistan Army has said that there is no space for any war with India as both are nuclear powers but warned that its desire for peace should not be mistaken for weakness.

"We are two nuclear powers, and there is no space for war," said Maj Gen Asif Ghafoor, the Director General of Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) - the media wing of the army, while addressing a press conference in Islamabad on Monday.

Accusing India of carrying out 1,077 ceasefire violations since the beginning of 2018, Ghafoor said, "Our defence, our desire for peace, should not be mistaken for weakness... War happens when diplomacy fails".

Ghafoor said that the two sides remained in touch with each other over bilateral issues but India backed out of holding talks.

"Indians have to realise and understand where they want to go (in the future)," he said.

Ghafoor also said had not responded to Indian firing, which followed a ceasefire agreement by the two countries' militaries last week but was "compelled" to respond only when civilians were targeted. Pakistan wants to respect the truce agreement, he said.

"If India fires the first bullet and no harm is occurred, we will not respond. If India fires the second bullet, then we will give a befitting response," he said.

Local administration officials in Pakistan claims, an elderly woman and a minor girl were killed and 24 others, including four children and eight women, injured in mortar shelling by the Indian forces on villages along the Working Boundary yesterday.

On the Indian side, two BSF personnel were killed and ten civilians, including a woman, suffered critical injuries after Pakistani troops resorted to unprovoked and indiscriminate firing along the International Border in Jammu and Kashmir's Akhnoor sector on Sunday, according to reports.

Both the personnel, including an Assistant Sub-Inspector, were rushed to a nearby hospital but later succumbed to injuries while undergoing treatment.

(With PTI inputs)

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New Delhi:

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Monday issued notice to former finance minister P Chidambaram in connection to the Aircel-Maxis money laundering case.

Following the fresh summons, issued by the ED, the Rajya Sabha MP is expected to appear before the agency on Tuesday. Once he appears before the ED, the investigation officers will record his statement under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).

"Notice issued by Enforcement Directorate to P Chidambaram to appear before investigating officer tomorrow for questioning in Aircel-Maxis case," the news agency ANI reported.

Earlier on May 30, a Delhi court granted him protection from arrest till June 5 in the case, after he moved an anticipatory bail plea before the court of Special Judge O P Saini. The plea was filed after ED on May 30 had first asked him to appear before it.

On February 28, P. Chidambaram's son Karti was arrested at the Chennai airport while returning from the United Kingdom. The move came after his alleged role in facilitating Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) clearance for INX Media Ltd. and its directors, Peter Mukerjea and Indrani Mukerjea, came to the light.

Notice issued by Enforcement Directorate to P Chidambaram to appear before investigating officer tomorrow for questioning in Aircel-Maxis case: Sources pic.twitter.com/5SaNfjjoDf  ANI (@ANI) June 4, 2018

Also Read | Rs 25 per litre cut possible in fuel prices, claims P Chidambaram

The Supreme Court had on March 12 directed the CBI and the ED to complete their investigation within six months.

In October 2017, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) had found that FIPB approval given by Chidambaram in March 2006 in Aircel-Maxis case was beyond his mandate. It required the approval of the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA). The law enforcement agency, in its investigation, also found that the amount for FIPB approval was wrongly projected to conceal the facts.

In September last year, the ED had attached assets worth Rs 1.16 crore of Karti and a firm allegedly linked to him in connection with this case.

The Aircel-Maxis case is basically a series of allegations of kickbacks in the telecom sector, which was part of the wider 2G spectrum scam that engulfed the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) regime.

Also Read | Case against Chidambaram under Black Money Act Congress Nawaz Sharif moment: BJP

In 2011, former Aircel head C. Sivasankaran complained to the CBI that he was being forced by then telecom minister Dayanidhi Maran to sell Aircel to the Malaysia-based Maxis Communications group owned by T. Ananda Krishnan.

(With inputs from agencies)

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New Delhi:

Hitting back at Congress president Rahul Gandhi for his attack on the Modi government in his speech in Madhya Pradesh on Wednesday, senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Arun Jaitley said, 'How much does he know? When will he know?'.

"Every time I listen to the view of Rahul Gandhi, both inside and outside Parliament, I ask myself the same question, how much does he know? When will he know," Jaitley, who is recuperating from a kidney transplant surgery, said in a Facebook post.

Earlier in the day, Gandhi had addressed a rally at Pipliya Mandi in Mandsaur district to mark the first anniversary of police firing during an agitation in which six farmers were killed. In his speech, Gandhi took at dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, saying loans were given to industrialists and not to farmers.

"Listening to his speech delivered in Madhya Pradesh today reaffirms my curiosity about the answer. Is he being inadequately briefed or is he being a little too liberal with his facts," Jaitley wrote.

The BJP leader also refuted Gandhi's accusation that Modi has waived the loans of Rs 2.5 lakh crore of 15 top industrialists in the country. The government, he said has not waived a single rupee due from any industrialist. The facts are wrong, he said.

"Those who owed money to the banks and other creditors have been declared insolvent and removed from their companies by IBC enacted by Prime Minister Modi's government. These loans were given largely during the UPA Government," Jaitley said.

Jaitley also said that Gandhi's comment that Modi had given Rs 35,000 crore each to two diamond jewellers who have now escaped out of country is factually false. The banking fraud started since 2011 when the UPA II was in power and it was only detected during the NDA period, he said.

Gandhi was, perhaps, referring to absconding diamond jeweller Nirav Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi who have allegedly defrauded Punjab National Bank of over Rs 13,000 crore through fraudulent Letters of Undertaking (LoUs).



Jaitley then said the bulk of today's NPA or bad loans were given by the banking system during the period 2008-14.

"From 2014, we have been systematically taking one step after the other to recover these monies back" the post said.



And, on Gandhi's charge that jobs are not being created, Jaitley cited the latest GDP data.

"There is a double digit growth in construction, expansion in manufacturing, an increased capital formation which indicates investment increase, large investment in physical infrastructure and increased investment in rural India. All these are job creating sectors," he said.

Jaitley then mocked at Gandhis assertion that a Congress government in Madhya Pradesh will connect farms and villages to the cities. "His impression is of the Digvijay Singh era in Madhya Pradesh," he retorted.

Jaitley also mentioned that poor quality roads was one key reason for ousting the Congress in MP in 2003.



"Thanks to Shri Shivraj Singh Chouhan (Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh) and Prime Minister Modi who during the NDA Government, has tripled the investment in rural roads, in comparison to what the UPA spent, there is a revolution in the Gram Sadak Yojana," he added.

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New Delhi:

Congress leader Shashi Tharoor will face trial in wife Sunanda Pushkars death case as an accused, a Delhi court said on Tuesday. The court summoned Tharoor and asked him to appear before it on July 7.

Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Samar Vishal said that there were sufficient grounds to proceed against Tharoor for the commission of offences in the case.

The courts order came after the Delhi police on May 14 filed a nearly 3,000-page charge sheet, naming Tharoor as the only accused in the case.

The police accused Tharoor, a Congress MP from Thiruvananthapuram, of abetting the suicide of his wife Sunanda Pushkar, who was found dead in a Delhi hotel on January 17, 2014.

The Congress leader has been charged under sections 498 A (husband or his relative subjecting a woman to cruelty) and 306 (abetment of suicide) of the Indian Penal Code.

According to the police, Pushkar had sent an email to her husband on January 8, nine days before her death. She had written, "I have no desire to live...all I pray for is death." The police have taken her last emails and social media messages as her dying declaration.

Tharoor terms charges "preposterous and baseless"

Reacting to the court's order, Tharoor termed the police charges "preposterous and baseless" and said that they were the product of "malicious & vindictive campaign" against him.

In a press note released on his Twitter handle, the Congress parliamentarian said that he will continue to cooperate with the investigators as he believes that the truth will prevail through the judicial system.

Read Shashi Tharoor's full statement here:

My statement on today's news. pic.twitter.com/5zWf4PR9ue  Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) June 5, 2018





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New Delhi:

In a major relief to superstar Rajinikanth, the Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to stall the release of his highly-anticipated movie Kaala which will hit theatres on Thursday.

A petitioner named KS Rajashekaran had approached the apex court, seeking an injunction against the release of Rajinikanth-starrer Kaala.

However, a vacation bench comprising Justices AK Goel and Ashok Bhushan rejected the Rajashekaran plea, seeking an injunction against the release of the movie.

You want an injunction against the release of the movie. Everybody is waiting for the film to be released, the bench told the lawyer appearing for the petitioner.

The petitioner has approached the apex court against the May 16 order of the Madras High Court which has posted his plea against the release of the movie for hearing on June 16.

Petitioner Rajashekaran claimed that the producers of the Kaala used his copyright-protected work in the movie without taking his prior permission.

What the trailer of Kaala below:

(With inputs from agencies)
New Delhi:

A day after accusing Prime Minister Narendra Modi of giving scripted interviews, Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday mocked the ruling BJP government for coining "empty slogans and useless acronyms".

His tweet came after reports of the Centre slashing funds for soldiers' uniform surfaced on the internet.

"MAKE (empty slogans and useless acronyms) IN INDIA....meanwhile, make our soldiers buy their own clothes and shoes," tweeted the Gandhi scion, who is currently accompanying her mother Sonia Gandhi for a medical check-up in abroad.

MAKE (empty slogans and useless acronyms) IN INDIA....meanwhile, make our soldiers buy their own clothes & shoes. https://t.co/UaWqsIhnQx  Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) June 5, 2018

Also Read | Telangana man imitates government's fuel price cut; donates 9 paise to PM Relief Fund

Earlier, there were reports that the Indian Army cut down 50 per cent supplies from state-run ordained factories. Going by the reports, soldiers will now spend their own money to buy uniforms and other essentials from local markets.

The drastic step followed Centre's failure to allocate funds for purchasing critical ammunition for a short intense war. The cut affected critical ammunition and spares for a 'short intense war'.

Also Read | Amit Shah meets Yogi Adityanath; behind Kairana, Noorpur bypolls defeat

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New Delhi:

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Tuesday questioned businessman Raj Kundra, husband of Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty in connection with the Rs 2,000-crore GainBitcoin case.

According to officials, the ED interrogated Kundra about his involvement in the trade, termed illegal by the government.

Though ED officials did not elaborate further regarding the interrogation process, they found some instances of Kundra's involvement in the Rs 2,000-crore money laundering case and hence asked him to record his statement.

Later in the day, addressing media persons, Kundra said that he was summoned by the ED as a witness and is not a suspected in the Bitcoin case.

"ED called me as a witness. There is an Amit Bhardwaj, who is s involved in some scam. He had purchased poker team from our poker league but did not make payment so we expelled his team. I have given my statement," ANI quoted the businessman as saying.

ED called me as witness. There's an Amit Bhardwaj, who's involved in some scam. He had purchased poker team from our poker league but didn't make payment so we expelled his team. I've given my statement: Raj Kundra, Businessman who was called by ED in connection with Bitcoin scam pic.twitter.com/nQIuS2iNPc  ANI (@ANI) June 5, 2018

Also Read | Shashi Tharoor to face trial as accused in wife Sunanda Pushkar death case

Earlier in April, the Enforcement Directorate (ED), registered a criminal case under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) against GainBitcoin, its owner Amit Bhardwaj, his brother Vivek and seven others. The case was filed following an FIR by the Maharashtra Police in this case.

They allegedly cheated about 8,000 investors, who lost about Rs 2,000 crore funds by transacting on several portals, launched by them. Bhardwaj and his brother are also accused of diverting funds to China, Dubai and Hong Kong where they claimed to have crowd-funded cryptocurrency mining business.

Bhardwaj, who reportedly was behind ventures like GainBitcoin, GBMiners, MCAP and GB21, earlier was arrested by the Pune police from Delhi along with his brother.

Earlier, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had announced that government does not consider cryptocurrencies legal tender and will take all measures to eliminate the use of these crypto assets in financing illegitimate activities or as part of the payment system.

Also Read | Aircel-Maxis Case: Court extends P Chidambarams interim protection from arrest till July 10

The declaration came during Jaitley's annual budget speech on February 1.

The Centre had also cautioned investors to be wary of virtual currencies such as bitcoin, saying they are like Ponzi schemes with no legal tender and protection.

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London:

An 18-year-old woman has become the UKs youngest convicted female Islamic State terrorist after a court found her guilty of plotting a terror attack on the British Museum in London with the countrys first all-woman cell.

Safaa Boular was accused of planning to travel to Syria to join IS militants and later preparing to carry out a terrorist attack in London after her fiance, an Islamic State fighter, died.

A jury at the Old Bailey on Monday found her guilty of two offences of preparation of terrorism acts, the BBC reported.

She was also found guilty over an earlier attempt to travel to Syria for terrorism.

Her 22-year-old sister Rizlaine has already admitted planning a knife attack on London and their mother Mina Dich, 44, has pleaded guilty to assisting her.

Boular will be sentenced in around six weeks time, the report said.

During her trial, the court heard how Boular - then 17 - plotted a gun and grenade attack at the British Museum.

The sisters and Dich discussed their plans using Alice in Wonderland coded language, with Rizlaine as the Mad Hatter.

Aged 16, Boular was radicalised online in the wake of the 2015 Paris terror attacks.

She met IS fighter Naweed Hussain on Instagram and after three months of chatting, she declared her love for him with an online marriage ceremony.

The court heard how she had wanted to join Hussain in Syria, but her plan was thwarted when British security services confiscated her passport.

Boular told the police about Hussain and security services deployed officers to pose as fellow extremists and speak to the pair online.

On April 4, 2017, it was a security services officer, posing as an IS commander, who told Boular that Hussain had been killed in a drone attack.

The prosecution claimed this only strengthened her determination to carry out an attack in the UK.

Boular went on to tell officers posing as extremists about plans for an attack and on April 12, she was charged with preparing terrorist acts in Syria.

Despite being in custody, Boular continued to talk to her sister and mother about an Alice in Wonderland-themed tea party - code for an attack.

In one call Boular complained: Mate, you guys are partying without me.

Rizlaine and Dich carried out reconnaissance of major landmarks in Westminster and bought knives and a rucksack, the court was told.

They were arrested on April 27, the date of the planned attack, along with friend, Khawla Barghouthi.

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New Delhi:

In yet another dreadful incident, at least 10 people were killed and twenty-one others injured after a bus travelling from Shimla to Tikkar in Himachal Pradesh on Friday fell into a 500-ft gorge. The incident took place after the driver lost control while negotiating a steep turn, according to police.

The Himachal Road Transport Corporation (HRTC) bus was carrying 30 passengers when the bus fell into the gorge at Chhaila, 45 km from Shimla.

While five people died on the spot, three were declared dead at nearby Shimla's Indira Gandhi Medical College (IGMC). The driver of the bus also lost his life in the accident as well.

The other passengers, who were injured were rushed to a hospital in Theog, about 30 km from the accident spot.

The local administration extricated the bodies of the victims from the wreckage of the bus with the help of locals.

The death toll could rise further as the condition of three of the injured is serious, an official said.

Stressing that the exact cause of the accident was not known yet, the authorities hinted that the driver, while negotiating a curve lost control of the vehicle. A case has been registered by the police.

The deceased were identified as Rajeev, driver of the bus, Mahinder Chauhan, Sunil Sharma, Tula Ram, Rohini, Motu, Satya and Sukh Ram.

Governor Acharya Devvrat, Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur, Transport minister Gobind Singh Thakur, Education minister Suresh Bharadwaj and former minister and local MLA from Jubbal-Kotkhai Narinder Bragata expressed shock and grief over the accident and sent their condolences to the bereaved families.

(With inputs from PTI)

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New Delhi:

In wake of continuous shelling and firing from across the border, Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday gave a stern warning to Pakistan, saying that though India honours ceasefire agreement, it will not hold back if the neighbouring country provoked.

When it is an unprovoked attack the Army was given the right to retaliate. We honour the ceasefire but of course, a margin was given to us when there is an unprovoked attack, Sitharaman said in press conference in Delhi.

The defence ministers statement came after fresh firing from Pakistan in Nambh and Sher village areas of Jammu and Kashmirs Nowshera sector on Tuesday morning.

On being asked whether India will reach out to Pakistan for talks amid the restraint shown by the central government in Kashmir in the month of holy Ramzan, she said, Terror and talks cannot go hand in hand.

In May 2018, hundreds of people living along the international border and Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir had to leave their homes due the intermittent firing and shelling from Pakistani rangers.

Till May 31 this year, there were 1,252 incidents of ceasefire violations by Pakistan, which left at least 12 people, including two BSF jawans and an infant, dead and scores others injured.

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New Delhi:

Heavy rains lashed Mumbai as pre-monsoon hit Maharashtra and affected normal life across the city, but the inclement weather did not dampen the spirits of many. In fact, for the Shiv Sena, it provided an opportunity to fire another salvo at the BJP under the veil of the inefficiency of the state government and the BMC.

Even before the dark skies opened its fury on Mumbai, the Shiv Sena had announced that it will go solo in all upcoming elections, a move which many have not predicted, particularly after the meeting of BJP president Amit Shah and Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray.

During the more than an hour-long meet with Amit Shah on Wednesday, Uddhav Thackeray was said to have raised concerns like neglect of allies in the NDA, state government issues but none seemed severe enough so as to prompt the Shiv Sena to announce a standalone path for future elections.



The Shiv Sena was founded by political cartoonist Bal Thackeray in 1966. The party, in fact, carved its existence from a movement of demanding preference of Marathi Maus over non-Marathis. It started with propagating the Marathi ideology but as it expanded to other states, its thrust was more on Hindu nationalism because of wider acceptability of the theme.

After the demise of Bal Thackeray, the charge was taken up by Uddhav Thackeray though many believed that nephew Raj Thackeray was a better candidate for the post. Raj, being denied the Sena head position, floated his own party the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena based on the same philosophy of Marathi Maus but more fundamental in nature.

The Shiv Sena aligned itself with the BJP and became a part of the National Government during the Vajpayee era and there started the existential crisis for the Shiv Sena.

During all these times, the BJP was successfully making inroads into Senas strongholds piggybacking on it. In 2014, the state of Maharashtra was reeling under huge anti-incumbency factor against the Congresss rule, both the BJP and the Sena sensed the opportunity and started a discussion on seat sharing for the Assembly Elections but could not arrive at a mutual consensus, therefore, they decided to contest elections separately.



The BJP won 2014 state assembly elections with 122 seats while the Shiv Sena got only 63, buoyant with the win and Modi wave, the BJP slowly started to delve into the Shiv Sena.



Uddhav Thackeray clearly understood that if the BJP was given a free hand, the Shiv Sena will eventually lose its relevance among its core vote bank. It was highly hopeful of the Palghar bi-elections win but it turned the other way round with the BJP winning the seat.

The Shiv Sena wanted to send across a message to the BJP and send it really fast. The memo came in the form of the announcement today morning. The Shiv Sena appears to have kept its options open to align with the NCP if required and at the same time apparently take up the role of the main opposition in the state as well.



Shahs walking into Uddhav Thackerays house in itself was a big signal that the BJP really wanted to resolve all issues with their friends, but the Shiv Sena turned the other way, perhaps hoping for a better bargain.

Uddhav Thackeray must remember if the Congress is successful in inking a deal with the NCP, then whatever influence it has by the virtue of being in power would be totally ruined as the Congress-NCP is likely to benefit the most from the BJP-Shiv Sena feud.

The BJP has already blown the poll bugle with Amit Shah embarking on a Samapark for Samarthan mission under which he intends to meet 50 prominent people across various sections of the society. Other BJP leaders and workers may soon follow in his footsteps. The entire exercise is being carried out to create mass awareness of the BJPs achievement in last four years and generate a positive public perception among the core influencers of public sentiments.

BJPs troubleshooter Amit Shah knows that 2019 Lok Sabha elections would not be a cakewalk, therefore retaining existing allies would be extremely crucial for the party.

However, politics is a game of limitless possibility, wherein even the impossible seems to be possible. Just before the Lok Sabha elections, all NDA allies have stepped up their ante against the BJP only to emphasise their relevancy no matter whether its Uddhav Thackeray or Nitish Kumar or Chandrababu Naidu who already quit the NDA. But the question is how far would the BJP go to accommodate its partners.
New Delhi:

US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on Tuesday held historic talks in Singapore's Sentosa Island after months of twists and turns.

The unprecedented summit between Trump and Kim, which was aimed at complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula, was first between a sitting US President and a North Korean leader.

After a year of exchanging rhetoric and war threats, Trump and Kim shook hands at a luxury hotel in Singapore's Sentosa Island, a popular tourist spot. The US President expressed hope that the historic summit would be tremendously successful.

Sitting next to the North Korean leader, Trump said, We will have a terrific relationship ahead. (I) Feel really great, were gonna have a great discussion and a terrific relationship, I have no doubt, he added.

The North Korean dictator Kim sitting beside Trump acknowledged that there were many obstacles to the summit but they could overcome all.

"We overcame all kinds of skepticism and speculations about this summit & I believe that this is good for the peace," Kim told reporters through a translator.

As it happened

#02:40 PM: The United States will stop holding military exercises on the Korean peninsula, after today's meeting: Trump

#02:30 PM: I think this meeting was good for the United States as it was for North Korea. Only a person who hates Donald Trump would say that I have agreed to make a big commitment. Yes, it was a big commitment to meet Kim. But, it was good for us: US President Donald Trump

The sanctions will come off when we are sure that nuclear missiles are no longer a factor. I am looking forward to take them off: US President Donald Trump in Singapore. #SingaporeSummit pic.twitter.com/9vZ4qaprSJ  ANI (@ANI) June 12, 2018

#02:15 PM: Kim Jong Un has the chance to seize a better future for his country. Anyone can make war but only the most courageous can make peace: Trump

#02:10 PM: I will be inviting Kim Jong Un at the appropriate time & he has accepted: US President Donald Trump

#02:05 PM: Kim told me that we have never gone so far. He said that he never had the confidence in any of the previous Presidents in getting things done. He wanted to do this, even more than me: Trump

#02:02 PM: We signed a very comprehensive document today and I think when he (Kim Jong Un) lands in North Korea he will start the process soon: Trump

#02:00 PM: It is a great day & one of the greatest moments in the history of the world: US President Donald Trump

#01:55 PM: We are prepared for the new history. We are ready to write new chapters. The past does not have to define future: US President Donald Trump after meeting North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore.

#11:55 AM: Kim declares "world will see a major change" and he and Trump "decided to leave the past behind" as they sign document commits the US to 'security guarantees'.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un commits to 'complete denuclearisation of Korean Peninsula' in joint text, reports AFP. #TrumpKimSummit pic.twitter.com/rOKMnCDGLq  ANI (@ANI) June 12, 2018

#11:25 AM: 'We'll meet again & we'll met many times', says US President Donald Trump, when asked if he & North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will meet again in the future.

'We'll meet again & we'll met many times', says US President Donald Trump, when asked if he & North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will meet again in the future. #SingaporeSummit pic.twitter.com/CLEewpmyIr  ANI (@ANI) June 12, 2018

#10:30 AM: Trump describes his first-ever meeting with Kim as 'really fantastic': US President Donald Trump today described his first-ever historic meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as "really fantastic" and said they have agreed to "sign" an unspecified document after their "very positive" summit, aimed at normalising ties and complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula.

#10:10 AM: BREAKING: US President Donald Trump expects 'signing' with Kim Jong Un after Singapore Summit reports Reuters.

#09:45 AM: Better than anyone would have ever expected: US President Donald Trump after his meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un

Better than anyone would have ever expected: US President Donald Trump after his meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un #SingaporeSummit pic.twitter.com/N12pHUfUOI  ANI (@ANI) June 12, 2018

#09:30 AM: I think the entire world is watching this moment. Many people in the world will think of this as a scene from a fantasy, science-fiction movie: Kim Jong Un, North Korean Leader

#08:10 AM: Watch: Trump and Kim during the historic summit.

#WATCH: US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at #SingaporeSummit at Sentosa Island. pic.twitter.com/R1m745mpIE  ANI (@ANI) June 12, 2018

#08:05 AM: Donald Trump holds delegation-level talks with Kim Jong Un. This is the second meeting between the two leaders after the near 48-minute one-on-one meet.

#07:58 AM: Trump says one-on-one meeting with Kim Jong Un was very, very good, says they have an excellent relationship and will solve a problem, a big problem, a big dilemma.

US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un walk together along balcony after one-on-one meeting. pic.twitter.com/X50iX7VUWu  ANI (@ANI) June 12, 2018

#07:20 AM: Closed door meeting for peace begins: The historic meeting between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un behind the closed doors started.

#07:12 AM: VIDEO: Watch the historic handshake between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore.

VIDEO: Watch the historic handshake between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore, and see AP's latest coverage of the summit here: https://t.co/YHO5cCtD2D pic.twitter.com/RRbQBVofEc  The Associated Press (@AP) June 12, 2018

#06:50 AM: To be here, we overcame many obstacles: Kim Jong Un says we came here after overcoming all the obstacles. The way to come to here was not easy, Kim says, sitting at a table with Trump. The old prejudices and practices worked as obstacles on our way forward but we overcame all of them and we are here today.

#06:42 AM: And Trump's reply to Kim: we will have a terrific relationship, I have no doubt, the US president said when he met Kim.

I feel really great. Its gonna be a great discussion and I think tremendous success. I think its gonna be really successful and I think we will have a terrific relationship, I have no doubt, says Trump when asked how he felt in the first minute.

#06:40 AM: The world hears the voice of Kim Jong-un: Nice to meet you Mr President, says Kim Jong Un as he shakes hand with Trump.

#06:35 AM: And the wait is finally over: Trump and Kim shake hands as the historic summit begins. They become the first sitting leaders of their respective countries to meet each other.

US President Donald Trump meets North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at Sentosa Island ahead of their summit #Singapore pic.twitter.com/4fzTvW3Ggd  ANI (@ANI) June 12, 2018

#06:30 AM: The world is waiting for the handshake of peace: Trump and Kim are expected to share a handshake before they meet alone with their interpreters. The meeting may last as long as 45 minutes to an hour.

#06:15 AM: Here comes the North Korean dictator: Kim Jong Un has just arrived at summit venue. Kim is sitting inside his black armored limousine, surrounded by police vehicles and other black cars.

Singapore: Kim Jong Un's convoy arrives on Sentosa island where the North Korean leader will hold a summit with US President Donald Trump pic.twitter.com/mrVZ61d2lg  ANI (@ANI) June 12, 2018

#06:10 AM: Trump has arrived at the venue of the summit: US President Donald Trump at Sentosa island where he will meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in a summit

Singapore: US President Donald Trump at Sentosa island where he will meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in a summit pic.twitter.com/x4hmjECZMK  ANI (@ANI) June 12, 2018

#06:00 AM: Hello and welcome to the News Nation special LIVE coverage of Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un Summit in Singapore. After a year of exchanging rhetorics and war threats, the leaders of the United States and Noth Korea will hold a historic summit here at Sentosa Island. Stay with us for all the live updates as we keep a close eye on the summit.

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New Delhi:

A team of scientists from IIT Madras in Tamil Nadu have developed a solar powered system to convert non-recyclable plastic into fuel that can substitute use of diesel in generators, furnaces and engines.

The system has a mobile unit that can collect and process waste. The technology yields around 0.7 litres of fuel oil per kilogramme of plastic, the scientists said.

"India produces approximately 15,000 tonnes of plastic waste in a day. Centralised systems for plastic waste management cannot work to effectively deal with this much plastic waste on a daily basis," said Ramya Selvaraj, a research student at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras.

The team showcased its project on the World Environment Day event organised by the UN in Delhi. The theme of this year's World Environment Day was "Beat Plastic Pollution".

"We thought that if the plastic can't come to the industry, let the industry come to the plastic," Selvaraj was quoted as saying by PTI.

The conversion of plastic to fuel involves a process called pyrolysis - a thermochemical treatment that exposes the material to high temperature in the absence of oxygen, leading it to go through physical and chemical changes. This creates a low density fuel oil by breaking down the polymer chain of plastic at the temperature of 350-500 degrees Celsius. This oil can be used as a substitute for diesel to power generators, furnaces and engines.

"Our major proposition was instead of taking technology to waste, taking all the waste to a decentralised technology which is a very complex model in solid waste management," said Aravind E S, a research student at IIT Madras.

"We found that the current plastic waste management systems were not working because of the logistics involved; there were cost and space requirements that could not be met," Selvaraj added.

The team was led by Divya Priya, assisted by technical guide Professor Indumathi Nambi of IIT Madras, and industrial mentor Sriram Narasimhan of Samridhi Foundation, a Chennai-based NGO. The team won the Zero Carbon Challenge-2018, pioneered by IIT Madras, bagging an initial funding of Rs 5 lakh for the development of the prototype, and another Rs 10 lakh for incubating the idea.

"We have approached the government and municipal corporations in multiple cities in Tamil Nadu to put up the small recovery units at the material faculty in all the wards for waste collection and management. This can reduce costs involved in transportation, dumping sites and increase the efficiency with which the waste is dealt," Selvaraj added.

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New Delhi:

In a significant move to strengthen security situation in the countrys border state Jammu and Kashmir, Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Friday said that nine new battalions, including border battalions and women battalions, will be raised in the state.

Of the nine battalions, two will be dedicated to border areas and will be called 'Border Battalions' and two women battalions will be deployed each in Jammu and Kashmir divisions to take stock of ground situation in border areas, Singh told reporters in Jammu.

Five 'Indian reserve battalions' will be raised in which 60 per cent seats will be reserved for the people living in border areas, he said.

The home minister also said that 14,460 bunkers will be built in the state. Of it, 1,431 will be community bunkers and 13,029 will be individual bunkers. The bunkers will be built at a cost of Rs 450 crore.

Singh, who is on a two-day visit to the state since Thursday, also announced that ex-gratia amount to the family of victims of Pakistan shelling has been enhanced to Rs 5 lakh from Rs 3 lakh. The government has removed three years of fixed deposit term clause, he said.

On the relief for migrants, the cash assistance for Kashmiri migrants has been enhanced by 30 per cent and now each family will get Rs 13,000 compared to current relief of Rs 10,000, Singh said. It was last enhanced in 2015, he said, adding this will benefit 22,000 families in the state. The order will be issued soon after he returns to New Delhi, he said.

An advisory board for migrants to resolve their problems will also be set up, the home minister added.

In another announcement, Singh said that Rs 5.50 lakh compensation will be given to each family of west Pakistan refugees. The benefit will reach to 5,764 refugees. The Centre had announced compensation package of Rs 5 lakh for 36,454 families of PoK and Chammb refugees, he said, adding that out of which 12,763 families had been benefited so far.

Also Read | Rajnath Singh on two-day Jammu and Kashmir visit, to review security ahead of Amarnath Yatra

(With PTI inputs)

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New Delhi:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will address the World Environment Day 2018 event in the national capital on Tuesday - June 5.

India is the global host nation for the 43rd edition of the World Environment Day event.

In an effort to protect the environment for years to come and for future generation, the UN theme for this year's World Environment Day is 'beat plastic pollution'.

Environment ministers, UN representatives, and members from various industry bodies will be among the various dignitaries attending the event, a ministry statement said.

Modi, in his last edition of Mann Ki Baat' radio programme, had stated that India being named the official host of the World Environment Day celebrations was a recognition of the country's growing leadership in tackling climate change issues. He also urged the people to shun use of plastics.

Modi will also visit the exhibition organised on the occasion at the Rajpath lawns.

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New Delhi:

After 16 days of relentless fuel price hikes, the government's decision to reduce the rate in paise had left many a people stunned.

While people across the country are busy staging agitation to mark their protest, a Telangana man on Tuesday perhaps gave the most befitting reply to the Narendra Modi-led NDA government.

Mocking the cutting rates in petrol and diesel prices, V Chandraiah, from Sirsilla district, has donated a '9 paisa cheque' to Prime Minister's relief fund and marked his protest in 'out of the ordinary' way.

Chandraiah handed over the cheque to the district collector and said, "You reduced 9 paise in fuel price. The amount I saved from the drop-in petrol price, I am donating to the PMs relief fund. Hope my donation will be used for a good cause."

Also Read | Petrol price down by 15 paise in all metro cities, diesel by 14 paise in Delhi

Earlier in May, both the petrol and diesel prices touched a record high of Rs 76.24 and Rs 67.57 per litre respectively. The PSUs had decided four weeks of the relentless rise as they incurred a loss of Rs 35 crore per day during the 19-day pre-Karnataka poll hiatus in fuel price hikes.

Telangana collects a stupendous 35.2 per cent VAT on petroleum products and made prices of petrol and diesel go sky high in the state.

Also Read | India's per capita income grows 8.6% to Rs 1.13 lakh in Fiscal 2017-18

On Tuesday, petrol and diesel prices in Delhi were cut by 13 paise and 9 paise respectively for the seventh consecutive day. According to the new price chart, issued by Indian Oil, Petrol was notified to be sold at Rs 77.83 per litre and diesel at Rs 68.88 per litre in the national capital on Tuesday.

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LGBT people and their supporters have marched through the capital city of Hungary to defend their rights. It comes as the government tries to limit discussion of homosexuality and transgender issues in schools. A law to limit teaching on the subject came into force this month, and Prime Minister Viktor Orban plans to back it up with a referendum. Many of Hungary's EU partners are furious, and the bloc has begun legal action that could affect EU funding for Hungary.

Budapest holds this march every year, but the new law has given the 2021 event special importance. The event's aim is to stand up for a diverse, open and inclusive society. Thousands of people are said to have joined the march, which crossed the city's Liberty Bridge over the Danube. It was as much a celebration of identity as a protest against discrimination.

One marcher held up signs that read "Group of supporting parents" and "I love you, support you, accept you". Another sign simply said "Equal rights". A "Stop LGBT" ("LMBT" in Hungarian) protest was also held in the city. Supporters of the law argue they are defending traditional Christian values.

R. Kelly accused of abusing teenage boy

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Pakistan-occupied Kashmir legislative elections to witness tough triangular competition
What a rare coincidence that we are celebrating Mother and Father's Day the very next day of Guru Purnima. A rare coincidence is that the first guru of any child is his parents, the mother, and the father. National Mother and Father's Day is celebrated every year on the fourth Sunday of the month of July. On this day we respect the parents who play an important role in our lives. Let us memorize when and how this day has started. And what is important about parents in a child's life?

There is a popular verse in Sanskrit on the importance of parents,

'Matru Devo: Bhava: Pitra Devo: Bhava:' 'Acharya Devo: Bhava:'

That is, mother, father, and guru are all worthy of worship like God. Chanakya has also written on the importance of parents, every parent makes every effort to make their child honest and valuable. They fight hard for it. They give up all their happiness for a better future for the child. There will also be hundreds of examples of parental importance in Indian history. On this special day, a variety of parent-related celebrations are organized, but like last year, in view of the corona epidemic this year, people can honor and seek blessings from their parents by giving them gifts at home.

In which country is Parent's Day celebrated?

US President Bill Clinton began National Mother and Father's Day in 1994 when he signed the Congress resolution (36 USC 135) into law and Republican Senator Trent Lott presented the bill. It was then that National Mother and Father's Day began in the fourth week of July in the US and India. In South Korea, National Mother and Father's Day is celebrated every year on the 8th of May. Mother and Father's Day is celebrated in Vietnam on July 7. The Philippines celebrates National Mother and Father's Day on the first Monday of December, while Russia and Sri Lanka celebrate 'National Mother and Father's Day' on June 1 every year.

VIDEO: Taimur went out for a walk, seeing paparazzi said- 'Can I go'

Angered by daughter's affair, family members cut off lover's private part, then...

PM Modi to address about Tokyo Olympics today
New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi has addressed the nation at 11 am today through his monthly radio programme Mann Ki Baat. Let me tell you all that this was the 79th edition of the programme. It was also broadcast on all overall Doordarshan networks and all India Radio news and on mobile apps. First, PM Modi spoke about the Indian contingent participating in the Tokyo Olympics. He said, "Two days ago, some amazing pictures surfaced. Not only me but the entire country was thrilled to see Indian athletes walking for the tricolour at the Tokyo Olympics.''

At the end of his address, PM Modi said, "During festivals, do not forget that corona had not gone yet. Follow the Corona Protocol.'' He further said, 'In Mann Ki Baat, you send a variety of Ideas. We can't discuss all of them, but I do send many of them to the concerned departments so that all can be worked out further.' Let us resolve that the country will remain our biggest faith, the biggest priority, on the day of 'Amrit Mahotsav.' We have to move forward with the mantra of "Nation First, Always First."

He also said, "Whenever there has been an attempt to do something new, new gates have been opened for humanity, a new era has begun. When we learn something new, new avenues of progress are automatically opened up for us.'' He also said, "Lighthouses in Rajkot are being built with French technology, using monolithic concrete construction technology through tunnels. Homes built with this technology will be much more capable of facing disasters.''

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Muzaffarabad: A number of cases are coming to light from all over the world. Polling has begun at 8:00 am and will continue till 5.00 pm. More than 30 lakh voters will cast their votes today. The results will be declared only one hour after the polling is over. The election will be held to elect 45 assembly representatives including 33 in PoK and 12 for Kashmiri migrants.

Earlier, the National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC) had appealed for cancellation of elections in PoK for two months due to the crisis of the outbreak of corona infection, but it was rejected by all opposition parties. The general election to the PoK Assembly was held in July 2016 and was won by the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz led by former PM Nawaz Sharif.

It may be recalled that last year, Pakistan held assembly elections in Gilgit-Baltistan. India had criticised Pakistan for its decision to hold elections in Gilgit-Baltistan and said there was no legal basis for any action to change the condition of the military occupied area. India has bluntly conveyed to Pakistan that the entire region of the Union Territories, Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, including the areas of Gilgit and Baltistan, is an integral part of it (India).

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Barbados: The slated 2nd match was slated to play between West Indies and Australia at Kensington Oval at Barbados on 22nd July but the match was rescheduled for 25th July after the Covid-19 positive case. Let us tell you that from the very beginning West Indies had dominated the T20I series as they had thrashed Australia by 4-1 in the five-match series. However, in the end, the Australian team bounced back in style in the first ODI as they won by 133 runs. Thus, West Indies will aim to make a comeback whereas Australia will look to name the ODI series for them.

In the first match, Alex Carey played a captains knock as he scored 67 runs to help his team post 252 runs. On the other hand, West Indies were skittled out for a paltry score of 123 runs as Mitchell Starc scalped a five-wicket haul.

The Windies captain Kieron Pollard scored a fifty but none of the other hosts batsmen were able to get going. Australia will aim to continue the good show whereas Windies will look to stay alive in the series. The Thrilling match is soon to start to stay tuned for further updates

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PM Modi 'Mann Ki Baat': 'During festivals, do not forget that Corona has not gone'
Ten years after its establishment, Karnali Academy of Health Sciences (KAHS) will be starting MBBS classes, as it becomes the remotest medical school in the country. This comes as a boon to many students who had to pay millions extra and migrate to Kathmandu, Birgunj or Nepalgunj to study a bachelors in medicine. Consequently, those who left to study medical education, rarely came back to the area due to a lack of opportunities there as they chose to stay in the big cities or migrate abroad.

But, with the college starting the MBBS course soon, people believe that this is a major milestone as locals and activists had to go through a lot of hurdles to ensure the MBBS course started at the academy.

Hopes for change

If anyone had told a local from Jumla, Rukum or Jajarkot that they would be able to study MBBS at the KAHS, they would have called the person mad. Why wouldnt they? Pregnant mothers had to be carried out on a basket (doko), passing treacherous terrains to get to a health post as most places of the province did not even have a qualified doctor.

News of patients dying due to a shortage of medicine was common as even lawmakers from the area have addressed the issue countless times.

People have been dying in Karnali because they didnt have access to basic health care, says Naresh Bhandari, a member of the Provincial Assembly.

Every time the topic of starting an MBBS course at the KAHS came up, people who were against it always had one point  who would come study MBBS at a place where a medical officer could not last a few weeks?

Their concerns were valid too. There are hundreds of hospitals in major cities that offer doctors and students a better experience. If given a choice, even people from Karnali would choose to go to these major cities.

The academy was established in 2011. But, for the first nine years, there has been no talk of starting MBBS classes there, leaving a lot of people disappointed. Their disappointment was justified as Patan Academy of Health Sciences started MBBS classes a year after its establishment while Pokhara Academy of Health Sciences started its MBBS classes after four years.

Upon its establishment, the Karnali academy was also meant to provide medical services and education to nine different districts of the region, which was increased to 13 during its seventh general assembly.

Before the KAHS, the people of Karnali had to travel to cities like Birendranagar (Surkhet), Nepalgunj and Kathmandu to get proper medical service. Now, they will be able to get similar services in the 300-bed hospital at the KAHS. But there are challenges as it still takes a week to get to Jumla, where the KAHS is located, from Humla and Bajura. Even though the KAHS has promised to send health workers and set up health posts in more areas of the province, no inroads had been made as the academy did not produce any doctors so far.

Journey to start MBBS

The Karnali Academy of Health Sciences in Jumla

Even though the academy was established in 2011, it did not get any budget until 2014 when it started constructing the 300-bed hospital. The hospital was completed in 2017, but due to a lack of medical professionals and equipment, it was not under operation. Two vice-chancellors retired after doing little to no work.

But, things have got better after the appointment of Dr Mangal Rawal as the vice-chancellor. It took him a little over two months to get permission to start the MBBS programme at the academy. Despite it looking smooth on the outside, Dr Rawal says a lot had to be done to commence the MBBS course at the academy.

Former registrar of the academy, Bishwa Raj Kaphle, says that the previous leadership laid the groundwork as it constructed the hospital and labs and even decided on a syllabus/

Wed done everything and were ready to start MBBS classes, but due to Covid-19, that didnt happen as our term ended, says Kaphle.

He says they had done everything and were awaiting approval from the Education Ministry, but Covid-19 hit Nepal hard and things were postponed.

By 2015, the academy had already started MD, public health and nursing courses where five, 20 and 20 seats were allocated respectively. But, due to a lack of proper infrastructure, MBBS had been put on hold, says Kaphle.

In order to get affiliation from the Medical Education Council, an academy must have skilled faculty, proper equipment and infrastructure. As the academy did not fulfil these criteria, it did not get an affiliation, says Dr Dipa Sharma, the director of the council.

They had fulfilled the criteria to start MD, MPH and nursing, but we couldnt give them one for MBBS as they just didnt have enough resources to start the course, says Dr Sharma.

Dr Rawal says that he and Dr Rajendra Walge, the academys former vice-chancellor, had met former Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli regularly over the past three years. They had also gone to the Medical Education Council to ask for affiliation. The council over the past year had shown interest in doing so.

Medical education pioneers Dr Arjun Karki and Bhagwan Koirala were also in constant consultation with the government asking the council to give them permission to start it. But, they were also getting the same reason, the academy just did not have the resources to start it.

There came a time when we realised that the government will eventually give us permission. We had to make the institution stronger and carry on doing what we had to do to create a positive impression, says Dr Rawal.

Medical education campaigner Dr Govinda KC also played an important role in all of this as he even went to Jumla itself to stage his 18th hunger strike asking to make changes in the Medical Education Bill. One of his main demands was that the government help the academy start the MBBS course.

It was inevitable that we would have started MBBS classes here. But, without Dr KCs continuous pressure on the government, I dont think it would have happened so soon, says Dr Rawal.

Vision of the KAHS

Karnali Academy of Health Sciences in Jumla

Getting permission to start the MBBS course was hard. But, starting the academy in such a remote part of Nepal was harder.

It shocks me how this happened when the government and most of Nepal still doesnt care about the place, says politician Naresh Bhandari, who says hundreds of people have died in the region due to a lack of hospitals and doctors.

He says people sold their lands to charter helicopters and go to cities like Kathmandu for treatment.

Medical officers refused to stay here. When that happens, the future of an academy like the KAHS is always under threat, he says.

But, when Bhandari became a lawmaker in 2008, he along with others started a campaign to establish a hospital in the area. The same people who started the campaign to start the hospital then started to dream about the KAHS.

However, when he did bring forward a plan, people ridiculed him stating that there was no way that a place like Karnali which was so remote and geographically challenged could have such a major academy. But, the government and other lawmakers supported him and the idea to start a medical academy.

Now, Bhandari hopes the KAHS can do something that no one had ever dreamt of. This is the same place where they said no one will come and study or teach. Now in a few years, we will be sending doctors to the rest of Nepal, he says.

Now, the responsibility to take the academy forward falls on the shoulders of the 38-year-young Dr Rawal. He calls himself the medical sectors pilot project as he calls for more young people like him to change the face of medical education in the country.

When the country is seeking youth leadership in politics, why shouldnt we be looking for the same when it comes to the medical sector, he questions.

He says that the youth can help bring positive change to the sector as he adds that being a VC at such a young age will promote young people to work hard to be successful.

Had I been a VC at 75, it would have been a bad message and I myself wouldnt work as hard as I would have now. But, now I can do a lot more because I have a lot of ideas and am full of energy, says Rawal.

That said, there are challenges to run the MBBS course smoothly. The academy first needs doctors who specialise in various fields and the academy needs to arrange a place for them to live in. If these doctors do come there with their families, they will not have a proper school to send their kids to. But, Dr Rawal says he will deal with these challenges one by one as he aims to make the KAHS an example of a well-run medical school in the world.
Kathmandu, July 25

The Ministry of Health and Population has informed that the countrys Covid-19 tally has reached 734,799 as of Sunday afternoon.

The ministry 2,237 new cases were confirmed in the country in the past 24 hours.

In this period, 10,569 swab samples were tested in the RT-PCR method, of which 1,539 returned positive. Likewise, 3,265 people underwent antigen tests for the virus, of which an additional 698 tested positive.

Of total tests, 14.56 per cent of the PCR and 21.37 per cent of antigen samples returned positive, keeping the overall per-day positivity rate at 16.17 per cent.

As of today, there are 27,926 active cases across the country. Of them, 2,680 are hospitalised, 666 in intensive care units and 168 on ventilators.

In the past 24 hours, 2,050 people have achieved recovery whereas 18 deaths have been reported.

Of the total cases so far, 643,615 people have achieved recovery. Likewise, 9713 died, according to the ministry. Likewise, 1,398,178 people have been fully vaccinated whereas 3,383,038 have been vaccinated at least once.

Nepals current positivity rate is 94.6 per cent whereas the death rate is 1.5 per cent.
What Happened: China has announced a set of regulations that effectively ban the operation of for-profit education companies in the country. The new rules will no longer allow companies that teach school subjects to accept overseas investment, which could include capital from offshore registered entities of Chinese firms, according to a notice released by the State Council of China.

Bloomberg reports that firms will not be allowed to raise capital via stock markets to invest in for-profit education businesses and outright acquisitions are forbidden.

Why It's Important: The move is expected to cause a massive dissruption to Chinas $100 billion education sector. Threatening companies like TAL Education Group (NYSE: TAL), New Oriental Education & Technology Group (NYSE: EDU) and Gaotu Techedu Inc.(NYSE: GOTU). Among the big investors in the sectors are Alibaba (NYSE: BABA), Tencent Holdings Ltd. (OTC: TCEHY) and ByteDance Ltd. The for-profit education sector had been expected to generate 491 billion yuan ($76 billion) in revenue by 2024.

What's Next: The new regulations are focused on compulsory subjects, like math, science and history. While art or music classes mostly would not fall under the new restrictions. Online tutoring agencies will also be forbidden from accepting pupils under the age of six.

China plans to improve the quality of state-run online education services to make up for the shortfall, and will make them free of charge, the State Council said.

See more from Benzinga

 2021 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.
Are you intrigued by the possibility of using nuclear reactors to curb emissions, but worried about their water use and long-term safety? There might be an impending solution. LiveScience reports that China has outlined plans to build the first 'clean' commercial nuclear reactor using liquid thorium and molten salt.

The first prototype reactor should be ready in August, with the first tests due in September. A full-scale commercial reactor should be ready by 2030.

The technology should not only be kinder to the environment, but mitigate some political controversy. Conventional uranium reactors produce waste that stays extremely radioactive for up to 10,000 years, requiring lead containers and extensive security. The waste also includes plutonium-239, an isotope crucial to nuclear weapons. They also risk spilling dramatic levels of radiation in the event of a leak, as seen in Chernobyl. They also need large volumes of water, ruling out use in arid climates.

Thorium reactors, however, dissolve their key element into fluoride salt that mostly outputs uranium-233 you can recycle through other reactions. Other leftovers in the reaction have a half-life of 'just' 500 years  still not spectacular, but much safer. If there is a leak, the molten salt cools enough that it effectively seals in the thorium and prevents significant leaks. The technology doesn't require water, and can't easily be used to produce nuclear weapons. You can build reactors in the desert, far away from most cities, and without raising concerns that it will add to nuclear weapon stockpiles.

China is accordingly building the first commercial reactor in Wuwei, a desert city in the country's Gansu province. Officials also see this as a way to foster China's international expansion  it plans up to 30 in countries participating in the company's "Belt and Road" investment initiative. In theory, China can extend its political influence without contributing to nuclear arms proliferation.

That might worry the US and other political rivals that are behind on thorium reactors. The US-based Natrium reactor, for instance, is still in development. Even so, it might go a long way toward fighting climate change and meeting China's goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2060. The country is still heavily dependent on coal energy, and there's no guarantee renewable sources will keep up with demand by themselves. Thorium reactors could help China wean itself off coal relatively quickly, especially small-scale reactors that could be built over shorter periods and fill gaps where larger plants would be excessive.
(Bloomberg) -- Credit Suisse Group AG said it reached a settlement with its former wealth-management executive Iqbal Khan and a private detective firm, calling to a close a spying scandal that rocked one of Europes biggest lenders and ultimately led to the ouster of its chief executive officer Tidjane Thiam last year.

All involved parties have agreed to settle, and this matter is now closed, a spokesperson for the bank said on Sunday, confirming that it had reached a settlement with Khan, his wife and the private detective firm Investigo. No further details were disclosed. A probe by Swiss financial regulator Finma into the companys surveillance activities is ongoing.

The settlement closes one damaging chapter for Credit Suisse as it seeks to move past a string of recent scandals. It faces an exodus of senior bankers after suffering twin hits from the collapse of Archegos Capital Management and Greensill Capital. In the aftermath, new chairman Antonio Horta-Osorio pledged a review of the banks businesses.

The spying case dates back to 2019, when Credit Suisse hired a private investigator to follow Khan, once seen as a potential successor to the CEO before defecting to rival UBS Group AG. The incident culminated in a physical confrontation in downtown Zurich between Khan and the men who followed him, shaking Switzerlands financial world and setting off investigations by Zurichs prosecutor and the companys board of directors.

Thomas Gottstein, who succeeded Thiam as CEO, sought to steer the firm into calmer waters, but a series of missteps and scandals has since raised questions about the banks risk management and culture. Credit Suisse suffered $5.5 billion in losses from the collapse of Archegos, the family office of Bill Hwang, more than any other bank. It also had to freeze a $10 billion group of funds this year that it ran with Greensill Capital.

The scandals have thrown the lender into deepest crisis in years and prompted the departures of several top executives. Its shares are down about 20% this year, while rivals rallied as the economy recovers.

Story continues

Credit Suisse is set to publish second-quarter earnings on July 29. The settlement in the spying case was first reported by Swiss newspaper NZZ am Sonntag.

(Adds details on recent scandals from fifth paragraph.)

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NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / July 25, 2021 / WHY: Rosen Law Firm, a global investor rights law firm, announces the filing of a class action lawsuit on behalf of purchasers of the securities of Stable Road Acquisition Corp. (NASDAQ:SRAC)(NASDAQ:SRACW)(NASDAQ:SRACU) between October 7, 2020 and July 13, 2021, inclusive (the "Class Period"). A class action lawsuit has already been filed. If you wish to serve as lead plaintiff, you must move the Court no later than September 13, 2021.

SO WHAT: If you purchased Stable Road securities during the Class Period you may be entitled to compensation without payment of any out of pocket fees or costs through a contingency fee arrangement.

WHAT TO DO NEXT: To join the Stable Road class action, go to http://www.rosenlegal.com/cases-register-2122.html or call Phillip Kim, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email pkim@rosenlegal.com or cases@rosenlegal.com for information on the class action. A class action lawsuit has already been filed. If you wish to serve as lead plaintiff, you must move the Court no later than September 13, 2021. A lead plaintiff is a representative party acting on behalf of other class members in directing the litigation.

WHY ROSEN LAW: We encourage investors to select qualified counsel with a track record of success in leadership roles. Often, firms issuing notices do not have comparable experience, resources or any meaningful peer recognition. Be wise in selecting counsel. The Rosen Law Firm represents investors throughout the globe, concentrating its practice in securities class actions and shareholder derivative litigation. Rosen Law Firm has achieved the largest ever securities class action settlement against a Chinese Company. Rosen Law Firm was Ranked No. 1 by ISS Securities Class Action Services for number of securities class action settlements in 2017. The firm has been ranked in the top 4 each year since 2013 and has recovered hundreds of millions of dollars for investors. In 2019 alone the firm secured over $438 million for investors. In 2020, founding partner Laurence Rosen was named by law360 as a Titan of Plaintiffs' Bar. Many of the firm's attorneys have been recognized by Lawdragon and Super Lawyers.

Story continues

DETAILS OF THE CASE: According to the lawsuit, defendants statements throughout the Class Period were materially false and misleading when made because they misrepresented and failed to disclose the adverse facts about Momentus Inc.'s ("Momentus") business, operations, and prospects and Stable Road's due diligence activities in connection with the merger, which were known to defendants or recklessly disregarded by them, as follows: (1) that Momentus' 2019 test of its key technology, a water plasma thruster, had failed to meet Momentus' own public and internal pre-launch criteria for success, and was conducted on a prototype that was not designed to generate commercially significant amounts of thrust; (2) that the U.S. government had conveyed that it considered the chief executive officer ("CEO") of Momentus a national security threat, which jeopardized the CEO's continued leadership of Momentus and Momentus's launch schedule and business prospects; (3) that as a result of the foregoing, the revenue projections and business and operational plans provided to investors regarding Momentus and the commercial viability and timeline of its products were materially false and misleading and lacked a reasonable basis in fact; and (4) that Stable Road had failed to conduct appropriate due diligence of Momentus and its business operations and defendants had materially misrepresented the due diligence activities being conducted by SRC-NI Holdings, LLC and Stable Road executives in connection with the merger. When the true details entered the market, the lawsuit claims that investors suffered damages.

To join the Stable Road class action, go to http://www.rosenlegal.com/cases-register-2122.html or call Phillip Kim, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email pkim@rosenlegal.com or cases@rosenlegal.com for information on the class action.

No Class Has Been Certified. Until a class is certified, you are not represented by counsel unless you retain one. You may select counsel of your choice. You may also remain an absent class member and do nothing at this point. An investor's ability to share in any potential future recovery is not dependent upon serving as lead plaintiff.

Follow us for updates on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-rosen-law-firm, on Twitter: https://twitter.com/rosen_firm or on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rosenlawfirm/.

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Beyond their personal health, patients will have greater control over where their data goes and what their data is used forsuch as in clinical trials or for public health purposes (COVID-19 data sharing, for example). In some instances, they may be compensated for sharing their health data because those who need it will now need to gain their authorization.

Patients having access to and control of their data is giving them something they dont necessarily have currently: long-term historical context. Most providers are required to keep patient data for only seven to 10 years, which means critical health information simply wont be available after a prescribed period of time.

When patients have control, they can keep their data for as long as they choose. With innovative artificial intelligence (AI) technology, they will have access to deeper, richer insights with each passing year.

Its easy to see how patients benefit from patient health data ownership in terms of their health care, but what may not be as evident is how it positively impacts what I like to call businesses beyond carecompanies that arent health care providers, but rely on medical records to conduct business. Such industries include life insurance underwriters, personal injury law firms, and clinical researchers.
THE INTERNATIONAL Energy Agency may have started a firestorm with its blueprint for achieving Net Zero by 2050. Its measures demand a swift and immediate shift from petroleum to energy provided through sources such as wind, hydro, and solar power.

To avoid what it considers an impending climate disaster, the IEA has set short timetables for nations to cease investing in fossil fuels, end the sale of gas boilers and internal combustion engines, and force citizens to buy electric cars and trucks.

IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol justified its actions by stating that without a total transformation of the energy systems that underpin our economies, the world will fail to control world temperatures.

The G7 and the European Union jumped onboard in agreement in May. They jointly decreed that international investments in unabated coal must stop now, and also agreed to move to phase out financing for all fossil fuel projects. EU Vice President Frans Timmermans, who agrees that, We need to get out of oil, gas, and coal, chortled that I feel very supported in this by the IEAs recent Net Zero report.

But while the U.S. and the other G7 nations are marching in lockstep with the IEA, many world leaders think the organization is in the wrong.
PLATTSMOUTH  Grayson McGregor has used his musical talents to collect many noteworthy achievements in both high school and college.

He will look to pass that love of music on to the next generation in Plattsmouth this school year.

St. John the Baptist School officials announced this week that McGregor will be the new music teacher. He graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln this spring and was a member of several musical organizations at the college.

He is super excited to join our St. John the Baptist community, St. Johns spokesperson Deb Walton said. Please join us in welcoming Mr. McGregor to our school!

McGregor grew up in Cincinnati before his family moved to the Kansas City area. He graduated from Olathe East High School and moved to Lincoln to attend classes on the UNL campus.

McGregor played clarinet in the Cornhusker Marching Band all four years, and he used his work ethic to become a leader in the group. He and Molly Olander received the Duane and Laurine Zastrow Marching Band Awards in 2020 from the Glenn Korff School of Music. Marching band officials chose one male and one female from the entire group to receive awards.
An Afghan rights watchdog says that 33 civilians, including activists, tribal elders, and journalists, have been killed in "targeted attacks" in the southern province of Kandahar in recent weeks.

The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) said the attacks took place both in the Taliban-held districts and areas under government control.

"According to the reports we gathered, a total of 33 people, including two women, have lost their lives in targeted killings across Kandahar between June 24 and July 6," AIHRC spokesman Zabiullah Farhang told RFE/RL on July 25.

Local government employees, journalists, activists, tribal elders, and religious figures are being killed in targeted attacks, Farhang said.

The rights group expressed concern over "these alarming assaults on people who are not participating in the war" and urged both the government and the militant group to "protect civilians."

No group has claimed responsibility for the killings, the spokesman said.

Dozens of civil society activists, lawyers, journalists, and others were killed in targeted attacks across Afghanistan over the past year. The government blamed the attacks on the Taliban. But authorities rarely made any arrests or revealed the findings of their probes into the killings.

The security situation has deteriorated in Afghanistan in recent months as international forces complete their withdrawal from the war-torn country after 20 years.

The Taliban has made significant territorial gains and now controls about half of Afghanistan's roughly 400 districts. However, the militants have yet to capture any of the 34 provincial capitals.
The United States will continue to support Afghan forces fighting the Taliban with air strikes, a top U.S. general has said, as the insurgents make rapid battlefield gains ahead of the U.S. military's exit from the country.

The Taliban has pressed an offensive across Afghanistan in recent weeks, capturing swaths of territory, seizing border crossings and surrounding urban areas amid questions over the morale and capability of the Afghan National Army.

"The United States has increased air strikes in the support of Afghan forces over the last several days, and we are prepared to continue this heightened level of support in the coming weeks if the Taliban continue their attacks," General Kenneth McKenzie, head of the U.S. Central Command, told reporters in Kabul on July 25.

McKenzie said the U.S. military would continue to provide logistical support to the Afghan Air Force after August 31, when all U.S. forces are expected to withdraw.

However, he refrained from clearly stating whether the United States would conduct direct air strikes on the Taliban after the U.S. exit.

"We will continue to support the Afghan forces even after that August 31 date, it will generally be from over the horizon," McKenzie said, meaning from U.S. bases or assets outside of Afghanistan.

He added that the U.S. military will be able to strike against elements of two other extremist groups in the country, the Islamic State (IS) group and Al-Qaeda.

With the Taliban now in control of half of Afghanistan's roughly 400 districts, McKenzie recognized the government in Kabul may struggle.

"The government of Afghanistan faces a stern test in the days ahead," the general said.

But he noted that a Taliban victory was not inevitable and a political solution remained a possibility.

Intra-Afghan talks that began in September have made little progress, hampered by soaring Taliban violence, deep mistrust, and a huge gulf between the Taliban and Afghan representatives on key issues. Still, both sides continue peace talks.

Under pressure from Taliban advances, Afghan forces have recently consolidated around the key population centers and vital infrastructure, according to Afghan and U.S. officials.

In recent days, Afghan forces and Taliban militants have been engaged in fierce clashes around Kandahar, the country's second-largest city.

The militants have captured several districts surrounding the city and fighting has been reported on the outskirts.

McKenzie said the Taliban could focus on populated urban centers but it wouldn't be easy.

"They are going to have to deal with the cities if they want to try and claw their way back into power," he said. "I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that they are going to be able to capture these urban areas."

With reporting by AFP and Reuters
Colorado Springs, CO (80903)

Today

Partly cloudy with a slight chance of thunderstorms overnight. Low near 60F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 30%..

Tonight

Partly cloudy with a slight chance of thunderstorms overnight. Low near 60F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 30%.
You couldnt wipe the grin off cadet John Stanley if you tried.

The Air Force Academy sophomore from Chanute, Kan., let out a celebratory scream following his first free fall and solo parachute jump earlier this month during a week-long airmanship course.

It was absolutely amazing, Stanley said, while stuffing a bright yellow parachute into a bag. The class was a lot more intense than I expected but given what they just had us do, Im kind of happy it was.

Three days of intensive classroom instruction followed by five jumps each over two days earns cadets their jump wings.

They had us doing repetitive movements over and over, Stanley said. We had to memorize them down to a T. They would string us up on these hooks and spin us around and they would give commands and wed have to give responses within five seconds. And wed have to do it perfectly. Im glad that they did it as hard as they did.

The computer science and applied mathematics double major is also studying Arabic at the Academy and would like to go into intelligence. Stanley said he loves the language and would like to work with it daily.

Fellow computer science major Danny Kennedy of North Kingstown, R.I., was also all smiles after completing his first jump.

Im an adrenaline junky and when I heard I could jump out of a plane by myself, I had to jump on that, Kennedy said. It was everything Id imagined. I left the plane and was totally free. It is the coolest thing Ive ever done in my life.

After graduation, Kennedy wants to be a combat rescue officer so he can help people.

Some junior and senior cadets who have proven themselves amongst the best become members of the Wings of Blue, whose primary role is running the basic freefall parachuting course, Airmanship 490.

The cadet-led class attracts roughly 75% of all cadets and is the only certified jump program in the world where students first jump is solo.

Free fall is very unique, but we try to make it as familiar as possible for our students, said Corey Eisert-Wlodarczyk, a senior from Erie, Penn., who would like to be an intelligence officer.

Part of the training includes wearing virtual reality headsets to get the perspective of free falling, being suspended from a harness to learn how it feels being under canopy and visiting a wind tunnel in Denver to experience the amount of airflow.

Eisert-Wlodarczyk understands that most cadets wont be parachuting much during their military careers.

The goal of this program is not to make you a good skydiver  its to get you to stand in the door, to do something that you dont want to do," he said. "But because there are other people relying on you and you have to be brave in that moment, you have to have a clear mind, rely on your training and overcome that fear. Thats the whole point.

Cadets who began parachuting in 1962 without the Academys approval or knowledge ended up winning a national gold medal in a skydiving competition. As a result, a campus club started in May 1964 and the first parachuting course began the spring of 1967, according to the Academy website.

More than 50 years later, there has never been a fatality

We have a pretty impeccable safety record, said Lt. Col. Matthew Amig, director of the Academys parachute team.

Each year the school hosts as many as 24,000 jumps, according to Amig. That's most in the Air Force.

Cadets at the Academy jump from any of three UV-18 Twin Otter aircraft, which have a large square opening for easy exits.

The Wings of Blue has both a demonstration team and competition team. Both show off their skills at events throughout the world.

The demonstration team is scheduled to perform Saturday, July 31 as Colorado Springs celebrates its 150th birthday with an 11 a.m. parade on Tejon Street downtown followed by a festival from noon to 8 p.m. on Vermijo Avenue between the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Museum and the Pioneers Museum. Look skyward for them as the parade begins.

The Wings of Blue competition team competes against other schools and civilian teams.

We are the most decorated collegiate team in history, Eisert-Wlodarczyk said.

The team trains three days per week with jumps scheduled from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Some of the smartest people I know are here on the team, Eisert-Wlodarczyk said. I think the rigor of it and the intensity of the team definitely attracts a certain type of people. This type of opportunity is unbeatable.
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Eastbrooke residents place hope in city flood mitigation efforts

In just the past few years, Mason City resident Larold Robinette estimates that his home in the town's Eastbrooke neighborhood has had more than two feet of water get in from downpours.

When asked whether or not ongoing storm water mitigation by the city and Henkel Construction will help lessen or eliminate future damage from heavy rains, Robinette's answer was six words.

"I hope to hell it does," Robinette said.

Jared McNett / Jared McNett, Globe Gazette Machinery from Henkel Construction sits in a diversion ditch that's been shaped to carry water in the Eastbrooke neighborhood to nearby Ideal Creek.

The mitigation work, which was approved by the city council in April and is projected to cost at least $389,000, involves shaping a diversion ditch for storm water and then placing a bridge over the ditch that will tie into segments of the NIACC Trail, according to Mason City Engineer Mark Rahm.

"This project is to intercept water that had been flowing across a field out there and through the neighborhoods, washing debris in," Rahm said. "This project will intercept that water and carry it directly to Ideal Creek(It will) prevent neighborhoods from being overtaken by water flowing across fields."

The project was targeted by the city after flooding in June 2018 when some area residents got as much as eight inches of rainwater in their basements. At that time, Pattie Dunn, of the River Run subdivision, said "There was so much (water) pressure coming up from our backyard ... that a railroad tie went through the window." In 2016 and 2008, the area also dealt with major downpour concerns. During the 2008 flood, several residents could actually be seen canoeing in the area.

Residents start to clean up after weekend flooding, city keeping hotlines open MASON CITY | Pattie Dunn has lived in her house on Saratoga Court, in the River Run subdivision neighborhood near Eastbrooke, for the past 18 years.

Linda Giese, who's lived in Eastbrooke since 2015, said that when the project was still in the planning stages she actually sat in on an online meeting with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. She didn't get to have any input but said she doesn't really have any concerns with the work.

"It's great ... I think it's going to alleviate our water problem," Giese said.

A nearby resident named Mary said that her home doesn't have a basement so her water problem isn't quite the same but she's still hoping that the storm water mitigation works out for the best.

"When a downpour comes, it's scary," Mary said.

Jared McNett / Jared McNett, Globe Gazette Mason City Engineer Mark Rahm said that the Eastbrooke work also involves tying the existing NIACC trail into a bridge running over the storm water diversion ditch.

On Thursday afternoon, no work was happening at the diversion ditch, though Rahm has said that there's still plenty that needs to happen before the project is complete.

A big item to check off the list is the bridge. Per Rahm, a pre-fabricated structure should be coming sometime in August to span the gap created by the ditch and tie the NIACC Trail together. Rahm said that he hopes everything is done by September.

"That hinges on the bridge manufacturer. Everything seems to be taking longer with materials," Rahm said.

Mason City Council recognizes two local residents for "shining example" set during recent rescue effort The app-based rides could be in town as early as next week.

Down the line, Rahm said he anticipates city officials having to address storm water issues with a twin-box culvert on South Virginia Avenue and in an area north of the downtown district around about Ninth Street.

"With these more heavy rain events, those storm sewer pipes dont have the capacity to get that away fast enough so we do want to take a look as a city to see what is in the system," Rahm said.

By doing so, Rahm said that the city could well avoid future headaches with flooding. "Thats always the goal and intent is to make these improvements to mitigate some of the issues we see," he said.

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"When a downpour comes, it's scary," Mary said.

On Thursday afternoon, no work was happening at the diversion ditch, though Rahm has said that there's still plenty that needs to happen before the project is complete.

A big item to check off the list is the bridge. Per Rahm, a pre-fabricated structure should be coming sometime in August to span the gap created by the ditch and tie the NIACC Trail together. Rahm said that he hopes everything is done by September.

"That hinges on the bridge manufacturer. Everything seems to be taking longer with materials," Rahm said.

Down the line, Rahm said he anticipates city officials having to address storm water issues with a twin-box culvert on South Virginia Avenue and in an area north of the downtown district around about Ninth Street.

"With these more heavy rain events, those storm sewer pipes dont have the capacity to get that away fast enough so we do want to take a look as a city to see what is in the system," Rahm said.

By doing so, Rahm said that the city could well avoid future headaches with flooding. "Thats always the goal and intent is to make these improvements to mitigate some of the issues we see," he said.

Jared McNett covers local government for the Globe Gazette. You can reach him at Jared.McNett@globegazette.com or by phone at 641-421-0527. Follow Jared on Twitter at @TwoHeadedBoy98.

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I have heard yet another reason why some people refuse to be vaccinated. They believe God will take care of them, one way or another. This is a flimsy religious excuse because it ignores the fact that God also gave us the gift of making choices. If youre walking on a railroad track and a freight train comes roaring toward you, you have the choice to get off the track.

How many of you have children or grandchildren who are under the age of 12 and therefore cannot be vaccinated yet? How would you feel if your child or grandchild got the COVID disease from someone out there who wasnt vaccinated?

I end where I began. People who refuse to get the COVID vaccine are among the most selfish people on the face of the earth.

John Skipper retired from the Globe Gazette in February 2018 after 52 years in newspapers, most of that in Mason City covering North Iowa government and politics.

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A few days after the election in November, the polling organization YouGov reported, Democrats are 30 points more likely than Republicans to be worried about the speed of vaccine development (90% vs. 60%). Democrats concern about the eventual vaccines safety has increased steadily from 79% in mid-July  when the United States hit its prior high of coronavirus cases  to 90% in recent weeks.

Although other polls indicated that Democrats were, overall, a bit more likely than Republicans to say they would get the vaccine quickly upon release, the fact was, Democratic leaders had encouraged skepticism when skepticism was politically beneficial  during the campaign. After Bidens victory, Democrats fully embraced the vaccine  the very same vaccine developed under the Trump Operation Warp Speed program  and mounted a help-is-on-the-way public relations campaign.

What if Trump had been re-elected? Skepticism among some Democrats might well have expanded and hardened into a wariness about the COVID vaccine similar to what we see among some Republicans today. It was rushed! many Democrats might say. Scientists were pressured! Trump corrupted the approval process! Yes, that is speculation. But it is a fact that some Democrats were saying one thing about the vaccine before the election and another thing after.
Re: Harvard University's business school has more than one [ #permalink

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During the emergency declaration there was more transparency; as that has expired we are no longer allowed to share any more details, Garrett wrote in an email to the Register & Bee.

Since the start of the pandemic, 1,628 local COVID-19 cases have been linked to 52 outbreaks across myriad local settings. There are 100 deaths associated with those outbreaks.

When the most recent one surfaced last week, the overall outbreak caseload increased by five. There have been 18 outbreaks in congregate settings in Danville and Pittsylvania County since March 2020.

The outbreak occurred when the region  following step with the rest of Virginia and the nation  is seeing a rise in COVID-19 cases. A brief update by the University of Virginia Biocomplexity Institute shows the local heath district is in whats known as a slow growth trajectory. That means cases are rising, but not at levels strong enough to be considered a surge.

All neighboring districts also are in the slow growth designation, UVa reported Friday. The university only issues a full report every two weeks; the next one is due this coming Friday. In the interim, only a minor update is posted.
But there were seven more cases and another hospitalization in Patrick County.

The variant database on Friday showed that there were now 56 cases (up by six), 17 hospitalizations (up by three) and two deaths (up by one) caused by variants.

An update since then shows that all but five cases in the district but were caused by alpha, which is responsible for most of the variant-related outcomes in the state, and the other two were by gamma (which remains its total). Delta accounts for the remainder and one of the hospitalizations Both deaths are attributed to alpha.

No new outbreak

Franklin County on the weekend had seen a particularly strong burst of cases  12, the most in months  along with a death and a hospitalization, but officials said there is no indication of an outbreak causing that large number of cases.

To our current knowledge, there are no newly reported outbreaks in the West Piedmont health district at this time, VDH wrote in the email shared by Bell. However, it is important to note that outbreak investigations, case investigations, and data quality assurance processes are ongoing.
I was kind of wrangled into it. I went to a few meetings, she said. Military type things and CAP had never been a part of my life so I found it very interesting.

It is a way for me to give back to the community and to use the skills I have developed in my professional careers to further the CAP mission, Snyder said. CAP really gets involved with the community and it really shapes our young people, too.

She met Wooters in 2018 while working at Cone Health Urgent Care Center in Greensboro. A friendship developed, and now they live in Eden with Haleigh, Abby, and Maras three-year-old, Ellie Burchell.

Daughter of Shelby Pruitt Vernon and James Snyder, both of Madison, Snyder graduated in 2006 from Rockingham High School. She was certified as a CNA through Rockingham Community College then earned her two-year radiology certificate from Danville Regional Hospital.

Initially, Snyder worked at Madison Urgent Care before taking a job with Cones Urgent Care in Greensboro. When Reidsvilles urgent care opened in May 2020, Snyder transferred to the local facility as an X-ray tech.
WENTWORTH  The Rockingham Community College Board of Trustees on Tuesday welcomed Charles K. Rakestraw to its board. He replaces Robert Shelton, who has stepped down from the board, as an appointee of the Rockingham County Board of Commissioners.

Rakestraw is an alum of RCC and earned an associates degree on the Wentworth campus in 1989 before transferring to Elon University, where he graduated in 1992. He also served on the RCC Foundation board in the late 1990s.

The Madison resident became a North Carolina Real Estate broker in 1995, and a North Carolina general contractor three years later. He spent 10 years as a broker with Don Warren and Associates and is now president and Real Estate broker in-charge at Rakestraw Properties.

Rakestraw has served as Madison-Mayodan Rotary Club president and has been a member of the Rockingham County Airport Authority and the Rockingham County Planning Board. He was also a member of the board for the Rockingham County Partnership for Economic Development.

The Stoneville native further serves as a First National Bank advisory board member and a Rockingham County Board of Equalization and Review member.
A native son of southwestern Indiana, Jeremiah Galey was raised on the flavors of Posey County summer produce  mainly corn, tomatoes and watermelon.

These days, the executive chef at Amys on Franklin in Evansville, Indiana, enjoys finding innovative new ways to enjoy familiar ingredients.

I'm unabashedly out-of-the-box, he says. You'll likely catch me trying something absurd in the kitchen just to see what happens.

Searing watermelon slices in a cast-iron skillet is just one example.

Since it's grilling season, I like to grill things people may not expect, Galey explains. Grilled romaine is excellent. Any type of fresh vegetable you put in front of me usually ends up on the grill or smoker. I like to use citrus when possible, too  say a nice orange balsamic vinaigrette on a salad with grilled radicchio, goat cheese and shaved fennel.

Like many locavores, Galey admits he really only works with watermelon in-season during the summer to make the most of its peak flavor.

I created the watermelon cocktail featured here at Amys, and its been selling like wildfire, he says. Juicing a watermelon is so easy with a blender or food processor; you only lose a tiny amount of pulp, so utilizing fresh watermelon juice was a no-brainer.

Even with all of his creative experimenting, Galey concedes that the simple approach to fresh watermelon is sometimes the best way to go.

Just slice and eat! he laughs. I'm from the country, though, so I'm liable to drill a hole in it, dump a bottle of booze in and slice it up the next day.

For those days when you find yourself with extra watermelon on hand and a thirst for using it in three unique ways, try these recipes straight from the heart of watermelon country, each with seven ingredients or less.

+2 Cast-Iron Watermelon The ever-versatile watermelon is the star of this sweet-and-savory side dish mash-up featuring a balsamic reduction, Tajin seasoning and feta cheese.

+2 Jerry's Gin & Juice Watermelon juice and grenadine make this gin cocktail recipe as colorful as it is delicious.

Watermelon Sorbet This dairy-free dessert recipe makes the most of juicy watermelon with just five ingredients.
Parents were forced to navigate distance education

Farnan and her children were able to find creative ways to supplement their lack of social interaction. For example, her daughter connected with her classmates after school by playing video games while talking on the phone with them.

They understand that this is for their own, and our, health and safety, Farnan said. As soon as they are fully vaccinated, they can go and meet with their friends.

But it took time for many parents to find a rhythm of getting their kids through the school days while also working from home. Farnan spent mornings with her younger child sitting through the classes and shifted her work as a biostatistician at UNC-Chapel Hill outside of her usual hours.

The increased load of juggling work and homeschooling was the tip of an iceberg.

The pandemic often was more challenging for families with more than one child. Some families had children in different grades, trying to understand different subjects while also at different technology skill levels.
Perhaps no topic has dominated education news in 2021 like the debate over whether or not critical race theory should be taught  or whether it is even being taught  in Americas schools.

Critical race theory is an academic framework that holds that racism is embedded in American society and its institutions.

The debate about whether K-12 students should be exposed to this theory has prompted some Republican-controlled state legislatures to pass laws to make sure that never happens. As of early July 2021, six states have passed laws that seek to ban instruction on critical race theory in K-12 schools, although the laws rarely mention critical race theory by name.

The new laws in Idaho, Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa, New Hampshire and Tennessee all prohibit teaching that any race is superior. The laws also prohibit teaching that anyone should be subjected to discrimination or treated badly because of their race or sex. In short, it appears that these laws protect all students against racism and sexism in the classroom.

But the problem emerges when the laws seek to control what teachers can say about whether a state or the nation itself was racist from inception, or whether the U.S. or any states sought to promote white supremacy through their laws.

A teachers dilemma
In 1963, Gray successfully represented Vivian Malone and James Hood, who had originally been denied admission to the University of Alabama, the incident where Alabama Gov. George Wallace infamously declared his commitment to physically block the schoolhouse door to prohibit integration.

Gray also played a critical role in Selma, Ala., in the struggle for voting rights. Behind the scenes, Gray used his legal acumen to secure the protesters constitutional right to march from Selma to Montgomery.

It is with appreciation of this history, and the efforts of people like Gray, that I remain uncomfortable with current attempts to make voting more difficult. Without any evidence of voter irregularities, proponents say the provisions are necessary to shore up public confidence in the integrity of elections after the 2020 presidential contest. Such efforts have been bolstered by unsubstantiated claims of election fraud.

Unfortunately, one of the causes Gray has spent more than 60 years advocating is the historical aberration. With the exception of a 48-year window (1965-2013), a portion of the American narrative has always included those who wanted voting to be more difficult for some.
Railey gives a critical review of the sheriffs treatment of all the suspects, but, in the end, he does not charge any of them.

A great strength of Raileys rendition of the story is the suspense he creates for the reader, who will not know Raileys conclusion about the actual killer until the very end.

He puts his readers in the shoes of Sheriff Cahoon as he does his best to crack the case. Then readers are lead through Raileys research and the basis for his persuasive conclusion about the real killers identity.

The charm of the book goes beyond the authors storytelling gifts. He takes readers back to the 1960s on the Outer Banks and the town of Manteo, lovely and complicated, with its fishing and seafaring traditions. The history and relics of unsuccessful settlement in the late 1500s and todays production of The Lost Colony enrich this complex setting.

Railey gives bit parts to some famous people living in the town during the time of the murder: Andy Griffith, who made his home there, and the late powerful state legislative leader, Marc Basnight, who grew up and lived in Manteo.

Railey has promised to write a biography of Griffith. I wish he would write one about Basnight.
With the delta variant of COVID surging across the nation, North Carolina, unfortunately, has not been immune. It has surged here, too. Our response hasnt been the absolute best (that would be Vermonts), but its far from the worst (that would be Arkansass).

Despite our 60% vaccination rate (for at least one dose), many North Carolinians have been reluctant to be vaccinated for a variety of reasons. With 99% of COVID deaths now occurring among the unvaccinated, and our state reaching a three-month high of 1,800 cases reported by the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday (and 12 new COVID deaths reported), we hope that will change. We urge everyone to be vaccinated for their safety and that of their loved ones. All three vaccines are safe and effective; the reported side effects and breakthrough cases (catching the virus despite being vaccinated) have been greatly exaggerated and are extremely rare.

Fortunately, weve recently gained some new allies in the fight against the virus. Perhaps its because of their efforts that vaccinations are just beginning to rise in some of the states that have had the worst rates, including Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana and Missouri.
Were working on doing those infrastructure things, Debbie Blagg says. The goal is to bring the campground up to my standards. We want to add a lot of amenities that I think people will appreciate. Ive got high standards.

Landscaping around camping cabins has been upgraded. Blagg said packed gravel and some raised flower beds have been added as well as patio sets.

Id like to put in more cabins," she said. "Im working on how many and where to put them.

Blagg said she plans to put in KOA Patios this winter. Shes also been moving around activities and amenities that she said will better suit the space. The KampK9 that was once in a prickly pear cactus grove is moving to the volleyball area, while volleyball will move near the playground. She said she is also making improvements to the coin laundry, which is open to the public, even for non-campers.

She also wants to clear some space toward the back of the campground for potential boat slips. The Townsend/Canyon Ferry Lake KOA is a few miles from Canyon Ferry Lake boat ramps and docks.
Katie Mildenberger Brennan remembers working in family practice and noticing people coming in grumpy and leaving grumpy.

She knew there had to be a better way.

Whatever she has done to make people happier is apparently working, as the 35-year-old Brennan was nominated to be one of the 20 under 40 honorees.

She is the owner of Crafted Aesthetics & Wellness, with locations in Helena, Butte and Missoula and has about 24 employees total.

I think its pretty cool, she said of being an honoree. Whatever I am doing is clearly working for the community."

She was nominated by friend Judy Reddy.

Using her medical knowledge and experience, she developed an interest in helping women (and men) look and feel their very best (in body, mind and spirit), Reddy wrote.

She also said Brennan is one of the hardest-working people she knows. And she said she trains and motivates her staff to keep them up to date on the latest procedures.

Brennan, who received her nurse practitioner degree from Georgetown University, describes Crafted as a spa and medical service.
In levying the decision, the governor said FWP had not demonstrated that a call would achieve its objective of quantifiably increasing flows and that a process was not in place to make an informed decision. Specifically, the governor noted the agency had not consulted with water commissioners about which, if any, junior rights had already been called by senior water users; that FWP needed a system with parity for determining which junior users to call; and that any water left in the rivers for instream flow could be diverted by a water right senior to FWPs.

Indeed, given the flow rates associated with the junior rights proposed for call, the fact that a number of these junior rights may have already been shut off by commissioners, and the likelihood that any water released by a call would be consumed by other senior users on the sources, it seems a call would be ineffective at best and futile at worst, Gianforte wrote.

In the FWP memo, staff wrote that quantifying the value of making a call is difficult, with any benefits likely limited in scope.

Very rarely do we see (observable) flow response in a USGS Realtime gauge and we do not expect to in the Smith or Shields. However, though it is very difficult to quantify, there are likely some localized benefits, the memo states.
He took it really rough, Garza, the aunt, explained through heavy sighs. He just went recluse. He couldnt function at that point, so I dont believe he kept his job. He went through some mood swings, and my mom kicked him out.

Martinez's grandmother found a bottle of liquor in his room, confronted him and kicked him out. He couch surfed in Tacoma for a while before leaving for Billings.

He lived with family members and eventually moved in with a new girlfriend. He had a job in construction. His relationship still suffered dramas, and on occasion he would find himself without a place to sleep. As far as anyone knows, he never quit drinking.

Sometimes, when Martinez would get drunk, his girlfriend  who could not be identified or contacted for this story  would kick him out, said Garza. Hed apparently spend some of those nights at the Evangelical United Methodist Church on Broadwater where he would later be shot.

The pastor there at the time, Wendy Ochs, said Martinezs girlfriend had also told the pastor, after he was killed, that Martinez would end up sleeping at the church when he did not stay with her.
And of course theyre right that when state regulators rely on the outmoded dilution is the solution to pollution model, it doesnt work very well when water flows are reduced to trickles and the dilution upon which the discharge permits were based simply isnt there.

Indeed, if anyone doubts the severity of the problem, just check the U.S. Geological Survey streamflow website, where about the only thing to be said is, read em and weep. For instance, theres so little water in the Upper Big Hole, several stream gauges are no longer reporting any water flows or water temperatures. Then consider this is the last refuge of the fluvial Arctic grayling in the Lower 48 states. The last.

While the intention of these groups, individuals and businesses is undoubtedly sincere, by the time any task force gets appointed, meets and is brought up to speed by endless reports from state and federal agencies, any opportunity to save the grayling will be long gone, just like thousands of Montanas coldwater fish.
She said her involvement in the Snowbird Fund has been a humbling learning experience.

"It's a tangible way to use philanthropy to in some small way help solve this problem," she said. "I'm learning a lot about indigenous communities by listening to what they're saying. ... I'm humbled in realizing there is still a lot to learn."

Whitaker and her husband moved to Helena three years ago.

"My husband and I were looking for a place to raise kids," she said. "When we arrived in Helena, I said this is it."

The couple now has two young children.

"As a mother of two children under the age of 4, Teal did what so many of us thought impossible. She gave her very best to both her family and her profession amid a global pandemic," coworker Jessica Stewart-Kuntz wrote in Whitaker's nomination letter for the 20 Under 40 award. "Sometimes we are fortunate enough to work with a person who not only is the consummate professional, but is someone who always has our backs, is humble enough to learn from others, and courageous enough to show up as their authentic self no matter what."

Whitaker said she typically shies away from accolades, but called the award an honor.

"I feel really humbled," she said. "It means a lot to know my coworkers feel that way."

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SPRINGFIELD  Gov. J.B. Pritzker isnt considering using federal American Rescue Plan Act funding to pay down a multi-billion-dollar Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund deficit, he told Capitol News Illinois in a one-on-one interview Wednesday.

The reason Pritzker wont consider using federal ARPA funds on the $4.2 billion Trust Fund deficit, he said, is because he did not believe it a permissible use of the funding, and he is hopeful that the federal government will provide aid or rule changes to accommodate the 17 states that have outstanding federal borrowing balances in their trust funds amounting to $54 billion cumulatively.

You cant actually use ARPA funds according to the rules of ARPA. You can't repay any debt that's already owed to the federal government, Pritzker said in the interview with CNI, citing the states initial plan to repay pandemic related Municipal Liquidity Facility funding with the ARPA funds  a use later ruled impermissible.

Interim U.S. Treasury rules for ARPA funding and the plans of dozens of other states, however, contradict the governors statement on the use of ARPA funds to repay the Unemployment Trust Fund deficit. The Associated Press reported on May 27 that at least 29 states already have transferred or proposed to use a total of more than $12 billion of federal coronavirus aid for their unemployment trust funds.

Per the interim final rule, published May 17 in the Federal Register, recipients may make deposits into the state account of the Unemployment Trust Fund  up to the level needed to restore the pre-pandemic balances of such account as of January 27, 2020, or to pay back advances received under Title XII of the Social Security Act.

During a recent trip to Washington, D.C., Pritzker said, he spoke to President Joe Biden and Illinois congressional leaders to seek further federal assistance for the Trust Fund. He reiterated that Wednesday, saying federal aid could include legislation, rule changes or other actions.

Business groups last week called on Pritzker to reinstate more stringent work search requirements for Illinoisans who are on unemployment, to end a $300 federal monthly payment to unemployed individuals earlier than its September end date, and to infuse the Trust Fund with federal ARPA dollars.

But Pritzker said he is hopeful federal action might come through before that time period. Earlier this month, Illinois U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat, said he expects Congress to begin debating the next steps on unemployment as the current federal boost to benefits ends in September.

For his part, Pritzker said he has expanded child care availability in an effort to encourage a return to the workforce and alleviate stresses on the system.

* * *

PRITZKER ON PANDEMIC: Gov. Pritzker also spoke to Capitol News Illinois on his pandemic plans Wednesday as case counts rise.

Pritzker said his medical advisers tell him the main focus for monitoring disease spread should be intensive care bed and hospital bed usage. But he has not set a concrete metric for those numbers that would trigger another round of mitigations.

Those numbers were increasing statewide as of Wednesday night, although they were still far off pandemic highs. There were 119 ICU beds and 628 hospital beds in use by COVID-19 patients as of Wednesday. The states 3% case positivity rate was a high since May 7, five times its June 27 rate of 0.6%. The 1,993 new cases reported Thursday were a high since May 5.

What I can tell you is getting people vaccinated is the most important thing we can do right now, encouraging people to wear masks when they're indoors in crowded areas, encouraging children who are under 12 to wear masks when they go to school, ask parents to have them wear masks when they go to school, Pritzker said. But unvaccinated people make up 99% of all the deaths that are occurring in the state of Illinois.

Still, the governor said he wasnt considering vaccine passport requirements at this time.

Pritzker also touched on the states fiscal outlook and whether an energy bill is likely to pass the General Assembly this year. You can listen to the full podcast here.

* * *

REELECTION CAMPAIGN: Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced Monday he will seek a second term, joined once again by Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton as a running mate.

In a three-minute kickoff video ending with the tagline strong leadership in tough times, the governor emphasized his response to the COVID-19 pandemic and contrasted himself to former U.S. President Donald Trump, with whom Pritzker frequently sparred during the height of the pandemic.

When I ran for governor four years ago, I could not have imagined that I would end up leading the state through a global pandemic, Pritzker said in the ad. Look, I may not have gotten every decision right. But at every step along the way I followed the science and focused on protecting the lives and livelihoods of the people of Illinois.

The ad shows business owners, local politicians and Illinoisans from across the state touting Pritzkers pandemic response.

Another one-minute video posted to the Pritzker campaigns YouTube channel features Stratton, the states first Black lieutenant governor, touting the history of the pairs 2020 election to the states executive office.

The announcement comes as the state is in the middle of a broader reopening period after more than a year of economic restrictions levied by Pritzker, largely through executive order, in response to the pandemic that has killed more than 23,000 Illinoisans.

But it also comes as the state and nation are seeing a resurgence of the virus as vaccination rates stagnate and a new more contagious variant spreads.

He will join a 2022 field that includes three announced Republican candidates and a number of other intriguing potential candidates.

That includes Darren Bailey, a state senator from Xenia who was an outspoken critic of the governors pandemic response, challenging Pritzkers executive orders in court in a high profile case that was eventually tossed by a judge.

Paul Schimpf, an ex-state senator and former unsuccessful GOP candidate for attorney general in 2014, has also been campaigning across the state.

Gary Rabine, a Schaumburg businessman who founded the Rabine Group, an exterior services company, is also seeking the Republican nomination.

* * *

REDISTRICTING LAWSUIT: Lawyers for Illinois Democratic legislative leaders last week filed a motion to dismiss a lawsuit from Republicans and a Mexican American advocacy group regarding newly drawn legislative maps, calling the challenge purely speculative until full U.S. Census data is released.

The motion, filed Friday, July 16, was an expected move following a Wednesday, July 14, status hearing for two consolidated lawsuits filed by Republican legislative leaders Sen. Dan McConchie, R-Hawthorn Woods, and Rep. Jim Durkin, R-Western Springs, as well as the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or MALDEF.

Both suits name the Illinois State Board of Elections and its individual members as well as Illinois House Speaker Emanuel Chris Welch and Senate President Don Harmon as defendants.

MALDEF and the Republican leaders argued in their court documents that the use of American Community Survey data to draw maps represents an incomplete count and therefore violates the one person, one vote principle under the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.

The Republican leaders have asked the court to either force Welch and Harmon to appoint a bipartisan commission to oversee redistricting, or appoint a special party to draw the maps themselves. At last weeks status hearing, lawyers for the Democratic leaders argued that would be an extreme remedy in which federal judges are intervening in matters of state law.

But lawyers for the Democratic leaders  which include Michael Kasper, a longtime Democratic redistricting operative and ally to former House Speaker Michael Madigan  argued in the dismissal motion there is no way to measure the validity of Plaintiffs equal protection allegations until the Census Bureau issues the 2020 census data.

The lawyers for the Democratic leaders focused on the state constitution in other aspects of their motion to dismiss as well, arguing, Nothing in the U.S. Constitution or Illinois Constitution or statutes mandates only the use of final census numbers in redistricting.

The case is before a three-judge federal panel, which has a tentative trial date set for Sept. 27-29.

But there is also another status hearing scheduled for Aug. 24  or just over a week after full census numbers will be made available. In an order scheduling that hearing, the court acknowledged that planned expert testimony is likely to be affected (perhaps substantially) by information that will not be available until the census numbers come out.

* * *

COLLEGE REOPENING GUIDANCE: The states higher education agencies released updated COVID-19 guidance Monday encouraging all public and private higher education institutions in Illinois to issue mandatory vaccine policies.

Vaccination against COVID-19 is now widely available, and all persons over the age of 12 are eligible, the guidance document from the Illinois Board of Higher Education and the Illinois Community College Board reads. Vaccination is the leading prevention strategy against COVID-19 and all public and private universities are strongly encouraged to require vaccination (with appropriate exemptions) to protect campus populations and slow COVID-19 transmission in surrounding communities.

Some schools, including Northwestern University, Northern Illinois University, the University of Illinois System, Loyola University Chicago and DePaul University, among others, have already announced they will require vaccinations for in-person learning.

The states higher education guidance falls in line with U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Illinois Department of Public Health guidance on masking as well.

Unvaccinated persons and those who might need to take extra precautions should wear a face covering and, where feasible, maintain physical distance while indoors, the state guidance reads. Institutions should use space wisely to allow for physical distancing to the extent practicable.

Higher education institutions are also strongly encouraged to continue COVID-19 testing of unvaccinated individuals to identify and slow virus transmission, and should follow CDC guidelines on safe hygiene practices and health equity.

* * *

SCHOOLS GUIDANCE: State school districts will be under suggested rather than required guidance when it comes to face coverings with an emphasis on local control in imposing mitigations.

Pursuant to CDC guidance, Illinois school districts have local control over how they should work with local public health officials to determine the prevention strategies needed in their area by monitoring levels of community transmission and local vaccine coverage, and using screening testing to detect cases in K-12 schools, an Illinois State Board of Education spokesperson said in an email Thursday.

In accordance with other CDC guidelines, masks will still be required for all passengers on school buses, regardless of the schools mask policies.

Otherwise, districts are encouraged to take a layered mitigation approach, accompanying masking and distancing with screening testing, cohorting, improved ventilation, handwashing and covering coughs and sneezes, staying home when sick with symptoms of infectious illness including COVID-19, and regular cleaning, according to the CDC.

The guidance also recommends that if school administrators remove any prevention strategies based on local conditions, they should do so one at a time and monitor closely (with adequate testing through the school and/or community) for any increases in COVID-19 cases.

Free testing programs are available to Illinois schools through IDPH, while districts can also use federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funding for screening testing as well, according to ISBE.

Operationally, ISBE has regulatory authority to reduce the recognition status of any school district exhibiting deficiencies that present a health hazard or a danger to students or staff, pursuant to state law, according to the spokesperson. But the state board is not invoking that authority.

ISBE is not currently taking any recognition action against any school districts. We will continue to support school districts in aligning with the new CDC guidance, the spokesperson said.

Districts should also promote vaccination, which is currently the leading public health prevention strategy to end the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the guidance.

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Typical jobs deal with surface right-of-ways; we dont usually get into the minerals. This job has it all, he said. Somebody is going to own the surface, somebody else is going to own the minerals and somebody else is going to own the rights to mine the minerals. It has its complexities.

Popular Creek Phase B, if we did this the old method of design, build, delivery, we would be in the ballpark of $500 million to $600 million to complete a job of this size and this magnitude. Were going to complete it with a budget of [about] $200 million, Halloway said. A typical VDOT [roadbed] fill is probably 6 inches. Here were probably going from 3 to 6 feet per fill. When youre coming up 200 feet through these hollow fills, it would take a lot of time to compact it. A geo-tech engineer comes and reviews the project quarterly, theyll set up haul patterns to utilize the heavy equipment to compact the areas as opposed to the standard rollers. When they get to a certain tolerance of the road bed they have to switch back to conventional methods to get the compaction in the roadway.
Thats where you can find a lot of rural American goodness, said Wilson, whose business is Left Behind Photography.

Lots of times, his photos evoke an emotional response from his audiences.

My photos start the stories, and I like for the buyers to finish the stories. A lot of times its nostalgia. People see these photos, and it reminds them of their grandfathers barn or grandmas farmhouse or the truck they learned to drive. I hear a lot of that, and it puts a smile on my face, he said.

I found this old farmhouse in North Carolina, said the artist surrounded by his work. I named it Abandoned because the farmland around it was still being plowed, but the old house was collapsing.

Another photograph is an old truck with the evening sun casting light on the grill. I waited on the sun to be just right. I like the way it turned out.

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Other photos show shelves of library books scattered on a floor, some tattered and torn. Wilson said the photo was taken in a library that had closed due to the buildings disrepair.

What makes his photography so eye-catching is a high tech process that causes the images to literally jump off the page with color and clarity.
2. For Youngkin: If Virginias economy is really in the ditch as you claim, then how did Virginia attract Amazon and how did Northern Virginia emerge as a global tech capital? For McAuliffe: If Virginia is really doing so well as you and other Democrats insist, then why is there such economic disparity between rural Virginia and the urban crescent and so many rural counties where the main cause of population decline is people moving out?

3. For both: Are you vaccinated against COVID-19? What would you like to say to those who arent vaccinated and are hesitant about getting the vaccine? Why do you think theres such a vast disparity in vaccination rates between Southwest and Southside Virginia and the rest of the state? And what, as governor, would you do about that?

4. For both: Do you think the low vaccination rates in Southwest and Southside Virginia will make it more difficult to attract new employers to the region, or do you believe that will have no effect?
In a quest to help the people of her native state of Tennessee, Dolly Parton gave a million-dollar donation to Moderna for vaccine research. Then she made a commercial showing herself getting the shot, and she even rerecorded the song Jolene with the word vaccine to help the rollout effort. Dolly is all about using her fame and fortune for the common good.

Meanwhile, the elected leadership of the Volunteer State evidently does not feel the same need to address the gravity of the COVID pandemic. Gov. Lee and U.S. Sens. Blackburn and Hagerty have gotten vaccinated while preaching a gospel of freedom. They pander to their base: MAGA cultists, anti-vaxxers and conspiracy peddlers who tune in religiously to watch Tucker Carlson denigrate the need to vaccinate. Tennessee ranks 43 out of 50 in vaccinations per capita, even as the delta variant is surging, hospitalizations and deaths are on the increase, and the need for another mask mandate is growing.

The same politicians do not extend a right to make personal choices to Tennessees transgender youth, whose bathrooms they insist on closing, or to the LGBT community which is openly discriminated against, or to womens reproductive rights that they want to micromanage.
While attending Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, he became a Rhodes Scholar and was deeply influenced by the work of French philosopher Albert Camus and his ideas of rationality and moral purity for social change. Moses then took part in a Quaker-sponsored trip to Europe and solidified his beliefs that change came from the bottom up before earning a master's in philosophy at Harvard University.

Moses didn't spend much time in the Deep South until he went on a recruiting trip in 1960 to "see the movement for myself." He sought out the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta but found little activity in the office and soon turned his attention to SNCC.

"I was taught about the denial of the right to vote behind the Iron Curtain in Europe," Moses later said. "I never knew that there was (the) denial of the right to vote behind a Cotton Curtain here in the United States."

The young civil rights advocate tried to register Blacks to vote in Mississippi's rural Amite County where he was beaten and arrested. When he tried to file charges against a white assailant, an all-white jury acquitted the man and a judge provided protection to Moses to the county line so he could leave.
This is an issue predominantly among the unvaccinated, which is the reason why were out there, practically pleading with the unvaccinated people to go out and get vaccinated, Fauci said.

Fauci said government experts are reviewing early data as they consider whether to recommend that vaccinated individuals to get booster shots. He suggested that some of the most vulnerable, such as organ transplant and cancer patients, are likely to be recommended for booster shots.

He also praised Republicans, including Govs. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas and Ron DeSantis of Florida, and the second-ranking House leader, Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, for encouraging their constituents to get vaccinated. Their states have among the lowest vaccination rates in the country.

What I would really like to see is more and more of the leaders in those areas that are not vaccinating to get out and speak out and encourage people to get vaccinated, Fauci said.

-

This story has been corrected to say that 49% of the total U.S. population, not just those eligible, are fully vaccinated.

Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Representative image

Beijing [China], July 25 (ANI): China's market regulator has ordered Tencent Holdings Ltd. and its affiliated companies to relinquish exclusive rights to music labels, in what appears to be yet another case of a clampdown on the multinational technology conglomerate.

China's State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) in a statement on Saturday said, "To restore market competition, Tencent and its affiliated companies must end their exclusive music copyrights within 30 days and stop charging high prepayment and other copyright fees."

Tencent should not demand superior treatment compared to competitors from copyright owners without justified reasons, the SAMR added. The company was also fined about USD 77,340, the SAMR statement read.

China's market regulator started a probe into Tencent in January this year after receiving market reports about the firm's acquisition of China Music Corporation (CMC) in July 2016, Xinhua news agency reported.

The market regulator said that this is the first ruling China took necessary measures under antitrust law. Those penalizing measures will help reshape the competition and lower the barrier for market entry, it said.

Meanwhile, experts believe that this development is another example of Beijing's crackdown on influential IT giants. Earlier this April, the Chinese government imposed a huge fine on Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group. Later in July, the regulator had announced probe into US-listed tech firms.

Claiming a crackdown on anti-competitive practices among Chinese internet giants, Beijing has ramped up a broader effort to clean up the operations of the country's fast-growing and freewheeling tech sector.

Chinese regulators have been calling out tech companies for alleged offences, including inconsistent pricing, user privacy concerns and difficult working conditions, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported.

Beijing has been infamous for using antimonopoly rules to curb the market influence of foreign firms. Tech companies have responded with pledges to be good corporate citizens. (ANI)
The once unstoppable growth of hard seltzer has gone flat.

That warning is coming from Boston Beer, the creator of Truly Hard Seltzer, which said that popularity of the low-calorie drink has faded.

Boston Beer founder Jim Koch said that the "hard seltzer category and overall beer industry were softer than we had anticipated." He added that the seemingly endless arrival of new seltzer brands is causing "consumer confusion" and fewer people are trying the once-hot beverage.

Shares plummeted 25% in afternoon trading Friday after the company's second-quarter earnings came in below analysts' expectations late Thursday. Boston Beer has regularly beat analysts' earnings expectations in recent years because of Truly's sales strength, so the weak earnings came as a bit of a shock.

CEO Dave Burwick said in a statement that the company "overestimated the growth of the hard seltzer category in the second quarter and the demand for Truly, which negatively impacted our volume and earnings for the quarter and our estimates for the remainder of the year."
The Concord Police Department found missing woman Catherine Richardson dead in a vehicle on Littleton Drive at approximately 9:10 a.m. Saturday morning.

Richardson's family had reported her missing Friday, July 23.

Preliminary investigation does not indicate any signs of trauma; however, the Concord Police Department is continuing to investigate.

The Concord Police Department expressed condolences to the family of Mrs. Richardson and thanked all who assisted in the search.

Richardson was reported missing from her residence at 814 Winborne Ave. SW Concord by her family at approximately 12:45 p.m. Friday afternoon July 23.

Ms. Richardson was a 75-year-old female approximately 56 in height and 120 pounds with grey hair and brown eyes. She was last seen wearing a grey shirt with yellow writing on it, blue jeans and no shoes. Mrs. Richardson had been diagnosed with dementia.

As of 10:30 p.m. Friday, Richardson had not yet been located. Concord Police, along with search teams from the Cabarrus County Sheriffs Department, local volunteer fire departments and others continued to feverishly search.
The decision comes as both of Missouris urban areas are seeing a big uptick in cases in hospitalizations that began in rural areas of the state, especially in southwestern Missouri. The Kansas City Star reported Friday that medical leaders in that region appear to be on the verge of calling for a new mask mandate there as well.

Dr. Fredrick Echols, acting director of health for the city of St. Louis, said more than 500 St. Louisans have already died from COVID-19, and if our region doesnt work together to protect one another, we could see spikes that overwhelm our hospital and public health systems.



ISTANBUL  Turkey has recorded a further increase in daily COVID-19 infections with 11,094 new positive cases and 60 deaths in the past 24 hours.

The 7-day average is now hovering above 8,660 cases, according to health ministry statistics. The total reported death toll is at 50,821.

Turkeys government eased the majority of restrictions on July 1, lifting nighttime and Sunday curfews and opening nearly all businesses. While mask mandates remain, compliance has visibly dropped. People travelled for a 9-day holiday to seaside towns where distancing and masking rules were not followed.
Because it was a heavily trafficked pedestrian spot, hundreds of passersby were able to watch the work in progress, ask questions, offer suggestions and assist the artist while he worked on the piece through the hottest weeks of the summer. Possessed of a relentlessly sunny disposition, he welcomed input from anyone he happened to encounter at his work station or elsewhere in the community.

The wall reconsidered

In 2019 a confluence of factors brought new attention to the Memory Wall. Local public-art enthusiasts bemoaned its deterioration and damage from vandalism, while some proponents of downtown redevelopment talked of having it removed or chopped into pieces and redistributed to other parts of the city. Detractors tried to link the Memory Wall to social problems in the vicinity  drinking, drug use, fighting, loud arguments and public urination.

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These issues were discussed in a series of meetings organized by the citys Public Art Commission (PAC) during 2019 and 2020. The arguments for removing the piece were overruled in the PACs decision to support its gentle restoration, in David Browns term.
You have questions. I have some answers.

Q: Will they continue the series Chicago Fire, Chicago Med and Chicago P.D.? These are great series and should be continued.

Answer: NBCs lineup for the fall will have all three shows in its One Chicago lineup on Wednesday night. And they are just one part of the programming empire of producer Dick Wolf. He will also have all three NBC shows on Thursday night with the new Law & Order: For the Defense and returning series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Law & Order: Organized Crime. If that is not enough Wolf for you, over at CBS his programs will fill Tuesday nights in the fall with FBI, FBI: Most Wanted and another new series, FBI: International. (Before you NCIS fans panic, that show will be back  only on Mondays instead of Tuesdays.) And those are just the highest-profile parts of Wolfs operation. which includes shows on broadcast, cable and streaming services.

Q: One of my favorite shows was Ed in the early 2000s, starring Tom Cavanagh, Julie Bowen, Justin Long, etc. Is this show streaming anywhere? I cant find it.
Q: What can you tell me about those car warranties that I keep getting calls about?

 W.K.

Answer: SAM is guessing youve gotten calls saying your car warranty has expired and that you need to call a number immediately to sign up to protect your car.

Lechelle Yates, a spokeswoman for the Better Business Bureau of Central and Northwest North Carolina, said people should be leery of such calls  and warranties, which are often not what buyers are led to believe.

A third-party auto warranty, sometimes called a vehicle service contract, has no direct business relationship with your automaker. And the coverage is different than the manufacturer extended warranties that pay for repairs at your dealership.

The BBB has warned consumers about the marketing tactics used by the third-party car warranty industry for more than a decade, she said.

The offers come in auto-dialed, pre-recorded phone calls, letters and postcards. They often contain phrases that are meant to cause a sense of urgency.
CONSUMER LITIGATION: The House has passed the Consumer Protection and Recovery Act (H.R. 2668), sponsored by Rep. Tony Cardenas, D-Calif., to authorize the Federal Trade Commission to seek permanent injunctions in the federal courts for monetary fines of businesses for violating commercial law that is enforced by the Commission. Cardenas said the authority would help ensure that defrauded consumers without other legal remedies will be supported by the Commission. An opponent, Rep. Greg Pence, R-Ind., said: The bill lacks sufficient guardrails that would provide checks and balances to the Commissions expanded authority. The vote, on July 20, was 221 yeas to 205 nays.

REGULATING PFAS CHEMICALS: The House has passed the PFAS Action Act (H.R. 2467), sponsored by Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., to designate perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) as hazardous substances, with associated stricter regulatory control. PFAS are synthetic chemicals used in various products, frequently as a coating to repel water and other liquids. Dingell said the PFAS class of chemicals is extremely persistent in the environment and has long been linked with adverse health effects, including cancer. An opponent, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, said that if the bill became law, a police department that purchases one of the most popular bulletproof vests to protect its officers against rising crime would now be subject to environmental lawsuits. The vote, on July 21, was 241 yeas to 183 nays.
Then, as the protest group passed by chanting Hands up, dont shoot, the officer said: Hey, wave goodbye. Theyre all about to get gassed.

While police initially said it had done nothing wrong  a subsequent state investigation found that police had not violated any of its policies  the tactics drew quick condemnation from most of the City Council. Then-Chief Kerr Putney eventually acknowledged that mistakes had been made.

Last night was one of the those times that none of us would want to see happen in our city. But it did, Mayor Vi Lyles said the day after the incident. And I hope everyone is aware that thats not the kind of department we want to have for policing.

The lawsuit against police by marchers and local and state advocacy groups was filed two weeks after the confrontation.

The settlement comes more than 13 months later. How big a role the complaint played in bringing about the subsequent police reforms is unclear. Police announced changes to some policies at about the same time the lawsuit was filed.
He was on the right road

Zeigler traveled into Durham regularly, and used to live there, Coppin said. He made his living as a dump truck driver, but his passion was his work in prison and street ministry.

Every Thursday night, he would speak to young people who were incarcerated and let them know theres a life after prison, and you dont have to go back, she said.

Zeigler spent more than three years in prison, Coppin added, and it was there he turned to faith.

He was on the right road, she said.

In his journal that I found after he passed away, he would ask the Lord to be with him on his journey to Durham, she said. Because he felt that he could do something for Durham.

He was the kind of person who helped everyone, Coppin added.

Whether it was a family function or a doctors appointment, she said her son always came to drive her.

When I had chemo for my liver, Wendell was there every day, she said. He moved into the house with me.
So, it turns out that Americans are not the election stealing, vote-frauding cheaters that Donald Trump and his what he said supporters seem to believe they are. For months we have listened to the former president bloviate about how the presidency was stolen from him. It was a rigged election, he claimed three weeks after his 2020 loss to Joe Biden. Massive fraud has been found.

Eight months later, Trump told wedding reception guests at Mar-a-Lago  seriously, a wedding reception  that the election was rigged and that the wedding guests should watch what happens in Arizona. I wouldnt be surprised if they found thousands and thousands and thousands of votes, he said. And after that, youll watch Pennsylvania and youll watch Georgia, and youre going to watch Michigan and Wisconsin  and youre watching New Hampshire.

Well, the results of reviews of voter records are accumulating, and they are showing what the rest of us knew all along  the only things that were massive in the 2020 election, aside from the 81 million people who voted for Joe Biden, were Trumps ego, his ability to convince millions of Americans that he had been ripped off and that he was counting on them to Stop the Steal.
Boys Town National Research Hospital is pleased to announce the arrival of three pediatric neurologists. These new physicians bring specializations that complement the current Boys Town Pediatric Neuroscience program and expand service offerings to provide even greater access to highly specialized neurological care for children.

Isabella Herman M.D., Ph.D.,  Dr. Herman specializes in neurogenetics, rare diseases and neuroimmunology, building on the pediatric neurology, neurogenetics and rare disease expertise at Boys Town. She received her combined medical and Ph.D. degrees from Baylor College of Medicine and completed her combined pediatric neurology residency and neurogenetics postdoctoral fellowship at Texas Childrens Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine, both in Houston, TX. Dr. Herman is passionate about combining science and medicine and looks forward to growing her neurogenetics and neuroimmunology clinics at Boys Town.
"The Hero's Way," by Tim Parks, W.W. Norton, 384 pages, $27.95.

If you've ever visited Italy, at some point you likely encountered Giuseppe Garibaldi. Not in the flesh, of course, as he's been dead more than 120 years, but as a statue or the namesake of a piazza, pizzeria or cafe. The ubiquitous revolutionary is considered one of the forefathers of modern Italy, along with Giuseppe Mazzini, Vittorio Emanuele II and Camillo Cavour.

Due to the political and military efforts of these four men, the handful of states, kingdoms and duchies that partitioned the Italian peninsula in the mid-19th century were unified in 1861. (Rome wasn't added for another nine years, but don't worry about it; Italian history is complicated.)

While Garibaldi's military victories immortalized him, his reputation was largely built on how he handled defeat in 1849. Following the loss of Rome to the French fighting on behalf of Pope Pius IX (remember, complicated), Garibaldi refused to surrender and instead led a monthlong, 400-mile retreat to Ravenna.

In 2019, exactly "a hundred and seventy years and twenty-three days" after Garibaldi fled Rome with his pregnant wife, Anita, and 4,000 volunteer troops, English writer Tim Parks and his partner Eleonora walked the same route, yielding "The Hero's Way," part history, part travelogue.
It was one of many deals the travelers were offered.

They were so accommodating, so pleased to have tourists, said Mark Vail, who joined the tour with his wife, Lisa.

The Vails arrived a few days early, landing in Rome and setting out for the Vatican  among other attractions  before joining the Momo crowd in Florence.

On a pre-COVID summer day, the line to get in the popes palace would start queuing up early and, if you werent there by 8:30 a.m., you could expect to wait until noon to cross the threshold.

We were in at 8:25, Mark Vail said. There was no line at all.

Everywhere they went, they had freedom to roam. Clear views of sites normally obscured by crowds.

The joy followed them to wineries and the island of Elba, to a family-run olive oil orchard and intimate dinners.

They all wore masks.

They were all happy.

It was one of the best vacations Kim and I have ever had in our lives, Tony Goins said.
Lincoln Police are investigating a report of an early morning shooting downtown that left one person critically injured.

Capt. Jake Dilsaver said that at 3:20 a.m. on Sunday, police were called to the intersection of 14th and O streets for a report of gunshots fired. There, police found a 30-year-old man who was wounded and later transported to an area hospital.

The man remains in critical condition, and police have not located a suspect. Dilsaver said that there were "a lot of people around" at the time of the shooting.

Several casings could be seen near 14th and O as police investigated, and at least one business and a nearby parked car had visible bullet holes.

The investigation into the shooting shut down several nearby streets. The area bounded by 13th, N and P streets and Centennial Mall was closed to vehicle and pedestrian traffic until about 1:50 p.m. on Sunday.

Dilsaver said police are still trying to find out what led to the shooting and ask anyone with information to call LPD or CrimeStoppers at 402-475-3600.

This is a developing story. Please check JournalStar.com for additional updates.

Reach the writer at 402-473-7228 or hmuslic@journalstar.com

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BISMARCK, N.D. (AP)  An effort to recall a Republican legislator largely over his vote to expel a fellow GOP lawmaker accused of sexually harassing women at the state Capitol is being viewed as a litmus test for party loyalty, the state GOP s new chairman said.

The move to recall Rep. Dwight Kiefert over his vote to oust former Rep. Luke Simons has fanned the flames of an intraparty fight that has a far-right faction seeking to control the party apparatus and replace Republicans they see as too moderate.

Perrie Schafer, who was elected chairman of the state GOP last month, has the task of repairing damage to the partys image.

I dont like this infighting, he said. My goal is to get people rolling in the same direction.

North Dakota Republicans wield supermajority control in the Legislature and hold every statewide office. The party, however, began splintering in the past decade with the emergence of the loosely organized Bastiat Caucus, fervent supporters of limited government and spending and privacy and gun rights.

Simons, who was expelled by the House in March, was one. The caucus has said 30 legislators paid dues in 2019, though the membership has not been publicly disclosed.
As the Legislature approaches its politically charged redistricting assignment, current population estimates suggest that the Omaha-Lincoln-Sarpy County metropolitan complex may be entitled to up to two additional legislative seats.

And early figures point the way to congressional redistricting that will once again increase the geographic size of Nebraska's vast 3rd Congressional District, which currently spreads across three-fourths of the state, encompasses two time zones and is larger than three states.

The Legislature is preparing to meet in special session in mid-September to tackle its once-every-decade task after it receives and is able to process final data from the U.S. Census Bureau, whose 2020 census was delayed by the coronavirus pandemic.

The challenge of drawing new legislative and congressional districts typically strips away the nonpartisan fabric of Nebraska's unique one-house Legislature as political parties actively participate in the process, with the state's majority Republican Party clearly holding the upper hand.

Thirty-two of the 49 members of the Legislature are Republicans.

Enough to pass any redistricting plan, but one count shy of the 33 needed to avoid an opposition filibuster.
A used omnibus, refitted with flanged wheels, was purchased in Chicago for $700 and arrived in December. The repurposed original car did not perform as anticipated, having trouble with turns, and was retired in about a month as four, 16-foot, purpose-built cars were in service by the end of January.

By the end of the first quarter of 1869 the requisite mile of track had been completed, probably at a cost of $5,000 to $6,000. A barn for 26 horses and an employee dormitory were then completed at 21st and Cuming, at the terminus of the first tracks extension.

Initially cars ran every 10 minutes with fares set at 10 cents or eight rides for 50 cents. Only about a year old, the firm was still losing money and substituted 10-foot long cars as a means of cutting expenses.

In 1870 a short, approximately four-block extension was built to Ninth and Jones, terminating just north of the Union Pacific depot. Although still losing money, fares were cut to 5 cents, fare boxes were introduced and conductors removed, then most of the corporation stock was bought by A.J. Hanscom in January of 1873, but a subsequent sheriffs foreclosure sale transferred all assets to Captain W.W. Marsh for $24,500.
The deployment to the border itself is highly questionable.

Abbotts border enforcement initiative and his destined-to-fail effort to build a border wall is more political stunt than serious policy, designed to theatrically oppose and embarrass the Biden administration.

Not surprisingly, Ricketts, who has positioned himself as a vocal critic of seemingly every Biden policy, signed on to the deployment. So did two other outspoken, politically ambitious Republican governors -- Kim Reynolds of Iowa and Kristi Noem of South Dakota

Iowa will be paying for its troopers, putting its taxpayers in the same boat with Nebraskans. South Dakotas costs are being covered by a private donor.

The latter should never be considered in Nebraska. Allowing private individuals or companies to pay state expenditures is horrible public policy almost certain to be abused for partisan purposes and economic gain -- and likely illegal.

Even if the deployment could be justified as policy, Nebraskas role was inconsequential.

Serving in a backup capacity, the patrol said it made 500 traffic stops while at the border -- to be blunt, thats $1,000 per stop. Not surprisingly, it made 500 fewer stops in Nebraska, where the troopers should have been working.
Gov. Pete Ricketts' administration sends over $50,000 of taxpayer money to a conman in India for death penalty drugs that will (thankfully) never be delivered.

Ricketts' administration signs a child-welfare contract with a Kansas outfit after their management spends generously on Cubs tickets; as it happens, that outfit can't do the job, and ends up costing us more than the other bidder would have.

For years, his administration turns a willfully blind eye to the toxic pollution put out by the AltEn plant.

Most recently, he sends Nebraska state troopers to Texas in response to a non-existent crisis, at a cost of $334,000.

Is there anyone in this state to whom it isn't abundantly clear that Ricketts is a self-promoting opportunist, who's using his office to burnish his conservative credentials for some future campaign, with precious little regard for the welfare of the people? Maybe in the next election we should try not voting for a Republican shill, just once?

Jordan Stump, Lincoln

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Great news! The Senate just passed the Growing Climate Solutions Act with only eight senators voting no. Both Sens. Deb Fischer and Ben Sasse voted for this bill, with Fischer being a long term co-sponsor.

The Growing Climate Solutions Act would require the Department of Agriculture to establish a program to help the agricultural sector gain access to revenue from voluntary greenhouse gas offset credit markets. Access to carbon offsets would pay farmers/ranchers for keeping carbon in the soil while also improving the soil.

Farmers could get paid for the good soil practices they already do like strip and no-till, cover crops, crop rotations and good pasture management. Passage of this bill would be a big win for Nebraskas ag economy. This bill has had strong support from the Farm Bureau and the Farmers' Union as well as conservation groups such as Audubon and the Nature Conservancy

Climate change is real. Its here. Its getting worse. However, we can do something about it. Urge your organizations to support this bill and lobby their representatives. Both Reps. Jeff Fortenberry and Don Bacon are co-sponsors of the bill in the House. Thank them and encourage a vote in the House soon. If you live in third district ask Rep. Adrian Smith to also support the Growing Climate Solutions Act.

Moni Usasz, Lincoln

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RACINE COUNTY  As people get out this summer to their favorite rivers and lakes, they can also play an active role in keeping our waters clean and vibrant. They can do this by keeping their eyes, ears and minds open and curious to what is living in and around our waters.

By taking as little as five minutes, we can begin to understand how different plants and animals interact and influence each other. We can also see when aquatic invasive species (AIS) begin to out compete with native species, impacting the health of our waters and our ability to use them. Knowing when and where AIS are occurring can help us better manage our waters and keep them healthy for future generations to enjoy.
July 19-23

This list is not comprehensive. Municipalities are listed as they appear on the criminal complaint. Suspects are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. To see mugshots of the accused, visit journaltimes.com/gallery. Additional information about the complaints can be found at: journaltimes.com/news/local/crime-and-courts.
1. Yes. A sudden surge could be devastating. A mask mandate may be required.

2. Yes. Each county faces different COVID challenges. Let local officials act accordingly.

3. No. Nobody should be forced to wear a mask. It should always be optional.

4. No. A mask mandate isnt any more effective than a strong recoommendation.

5. Unsure. Its hard to say whether a change is in policy is necessary at this point.

Vote

View Results
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Two days after performing in Kearney, the comedian plans to record a comedy special.

Its going to be a really fun night, he said of the Kearney show. They will get to see the act before it gets immortalized on film or on vinyl, I dont really know how they do it.

Hoff finds most of his comedy in everyday family life.

Im just elbow deep in children here, he said. I have three kids ages 7, 5 and 3. So Im just in the thick of it. Anybody who has had kids or grew up in a family with brothers and sisters, they know exactly what Im talking about. Those are the people Im talking to, those are the ones who come up to me after my show and say, I know exactly what youre saying, and they put their hand on my shoulder and breathe deeply with me. And we hold each other for awhile.

All humor aside, Hoff relishes his children.
The pathway program is a road map to a four-year degree. Students can follow a semester-by-semester course plan or take classes at a pace that better fits their schedule.

The first 60 credit hours are earned at CCC, which offers an Associate of Applied Science degree in criminal justice through its Grand Island, Hastings and Columbus locations as well as some online. The associate degree equips students with the skills and knowledge necessary for entry-level employment in law enforcement, corrections and related careers within the criminal justice field.

Students who follow the road map and complete their degree now have a local option to complete both a two- and four-year degree in criminal justice, said Candace Walton, CCC vice president of innovation and instruction. We are proud to provide continued opportunities for central Nebraskans to study, live and work near home.

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After graduating from CCC, students can complete a bachelors degree through UNK in just two years. This option is also available to working professionals with an associate degree from CCC who want to advance their education or move up in their careers. Under the Nebraska Law Enforcement Education Act, sworn officers may be eligible for a waiver covering 30% of their resident tuition costs.
We are very excited to be able to host our Nationals in Grand Island at Fonner Park, the ASCA Board of Directors said in a statement. We thank the people at Fonner Park and G.I. Tourism for providing this opportunity. We have found everyone so helpful and easy to work with.

ASCA is the largest single breed registry in the world and this is the largest single breed dog show in the world. It will be a great event for spectators and Aussie fans from Nebraska to attend. Upon visiting Fonner Park, we were impressed with the cleanliness of their state-of-the-art facilities and the friendliness of their staff.

The city of Grand Island, Grow Grand Island and Grand Island Tourism, along with GILCA, are providing financial support for this event. A preliminary economic impact study based on the number of teams shows a direct impact for Grand Island at more than $650,000 for this eight-day show planned in Grand Island for two consecutive years.

GILCA seeks to market and promote the effective and optimal utilization of the communitys state-of-the-art facilities by holding and promoting events that are best suited for the agriculture and livestock industry of Nebraska and across the nation.
Minneapolis-based Caribou Coffee says its new Caribou Cabin drive-thru and walk-up coffee shop will open Friday at 4107 Mormon Coulee Road, on part of the former South Lanes Bowling & Pizza site on the South Side of La Crosse.

Meanwhile, a Northland Brew drive-thru and walk-up coffee shop opened last week in Sparta.

Caribou Coffee officials say their new La Crosse location will be the 13th Caribou Cabin and will be only the second one in Wisconsin. The first of the small-format locations opened in 2019.

Caribou Cabin has no inside seating, but will have outdoor patio seating.

Customers are encouraged to order ahead via the Caribou Perks App for contactless payment.

The new La Crosse location will celebrate its grand opening with a $1 discount on large and extra-large beverages Friday, and for every visit next Saturday and Sunday, Caribou will donate $1 to the Aptiv Foundation.

The foundation exists to support Aptiv Inc., which helps individuals with disabilities live more independently and learn life skills.
The origin of this idea began when I realized that my artist friends in Mexico were struggling with the pandemic situation, Marvan said. I know how talented they are, and I know that the world would be interested in knowing more about their art. Our goal with this Collective is to develop a connection between the Mexican folk artists living in Mexico and the Mexican folk artists living in the USA, empowering our art through sharing our process, our towns, our inspiration. We think that sharing this with you will be a way to give greater value to our work. We deeply believe that by working together we can show a sample of our cultural diversity and demonstrate that the future is better working in Collective. I moved to the USA in 2019, and I feel so happy to be bringing Mexico with me through my art and now through my artist friends art.
CALEDONIA  The Caledonia Police Department announced on Saturday afternoon it would be conducting a comprehensive internal review after cellphone video surfaced online that appeared to show a CPD police officer planting evidence in a vehicle.

The video has been widely circulated on social media.

In the video, shot from within the front-seat area of the vehicle, the officer can be seen walking up to the vehicle, throwing something small and white into the back seat, then preparing to put on his gloves.

The video then pans to show a baggie on the back seat of the vehicle.

Chief responds

Caledonia Police Chief Christopher Botsch posted a message to social media on Saturday afternoon asking for the publics patience while his department investigates the allegations.

He said the department is taking the allegations seriously.
If the conversation begins, Did you hear about  its going to be gossip. Gossip is talking about someone who is not present.

On average, we spend 52 minutes a day gossiping: 15% of gossip is negative; 9% is positive and roughly three-quarters is neutral.

Neutral gossip: Bandit, a wanted racoon, surreptitiously raided the Joness chicken coop.

Positive gossip: Harvey Milkweed dove into frigid lake water to save Einstein, the neighbors labradoodle that cant swim.

Negative gossip: Looks like her plastic surgery went south while her face went north.

Women neutrally gossip more than men; otherwise, both men and women gossip similarly.

Younger people negatively gossip more than older people. Maybe because us geezers are just grateful to be in one or two pieces.

A rabbi, imam and preacher debate the evils of gossip. The rabbi says speaking ill of a person, even if the facts are true, is sinful. The imam says gossiping is the equivalent of eating the flesh of ones dead brother. Both look to the preacher.

Ex-preacher, says the preacher. I had three affairs going at once. Everything went smoothly until the three women bumped into each other. Not a vegetarian in the bunch  just flesh eaters.

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Its technical name is the Limited License Legal Technician and the Washington Supreme Court decided in 2020 to sunset the program, which allowed non-lawyers to perform some legal tasks. While the program officially ends on the last day of July there has been word on the legal street of at least one strong upcoming challenge to ending the program.

Why the court might be interested in the right case dealing with the LLLT is because ending the program tightens the legal professions hold on having only lawyers perform legal tasks in an environment that is re-examining fundamental industry questions such as who is allowed to own a law firm.

There is one other case that isnt yet a case but could very well become one fast. The Texas special legislative session legislature this month will deal with several important issues, one of which is antiabortion legislation. What makes the legislation unique, and may make it perfect for review from the highest court in the land, is how bizarre its enforcement mechanism is.

The Texas law is one of approximately 100 new restrictive abortion laws coming in across the country. What makes the Texas law unique is the fact that this heartbeat law wont be enforced by the state but can be enforced by anyone.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has confirmed that employers have the authority to require that their workers be vaccinated  even though COVID-19 vaccines still have only emergency-use approval from the Food and Drug Administration. As the FDA works on granting full approval by the end of summer, hospitals and nursing homes should move ahead with mandates, as epidemiologists and infectious disease doctors have urged.

Many colleges and universities are also demanding that students, faculty and staff be vaccinated. Last Monday a federal judge upheld Indiana Universitys mandate. Some banks are requiring employees to disclose their vaccination status. Morgan Stanley has told its workers to get their shots or stay home. It makes sense for companies of all kinds to allow only vaccinated employees to work alongside others.

The U.S. has made impressive progress toward defeating COVID-19.

Although not quite 60% of adults are fully vaccinated, almost 80% of those over 65 are. So even as the delta variant spreads, the most vulnerable are well protected.
Television, internet and phone service provider Comcast is getting competition in suburban Lancaster.

A Virginia-based telecom named Shentel plans to spend tens of millions of dollars to bring its state-of-the-art internet service, plus its cable television and phone services, to municipalities that ring Lancaster city as soon as 12 to 18 months from now.

We think that this will be transformative for your community. This is the infrastructure for the 21st century, said Chris Kyle, vice president of Shentel, to the West Lampeter Township supervisors on July 12.

Shentel has signed franchise agreements so far with Lancaster Township, East Hempfield Township and Mountville Borough, the first of several procedural steps it needs to fulfill in order to start building its own infrastructure here. The company is talking to East Lampeter, West Lampeter and Manheim townships and has alerted West Hempfield Township itll be in touch soon.

While Shentel will offer all three services, what telecoms call the triple play, its emphasis will be on its Glo Fiber internet service, where Shentel believes its entirely fiber-optic network offers significant advantages over Comcasts.

Shentel runs its own fiber-optic wire all the way to homes or businesses, using existing utility poles and underground conduit where possible, Kyle said. In contrast, Comcast runs its fiber-optic wire some of the way, then switches to coaxial wire for the final distance to homes or businesses, he said.

That means Shentel customers enjoy upload speeds that are equal to download speeds, whereas Comcast customers dont, according to Kyle. Pure fiber-optic networks are more reliable too, he said, because they have fewer failure points.

Business and institutional customers have long valued these symmetrical upload and download speeds, Kyle said. Then, with the pandemic forcing students and adults to work remotely from home, that attribute suddenly became critical to residential customers too, he said.

It used to be that people used their internet at home most of the time in the evenings for downloading Netflix and other videos, pulling data down. But when COVID hit, your house started performing a lot more like a business location, he said to LNP | LancasterOnline.

While students are headed back to their classrooms, this (remote) workforce thing is not going away, and to do that, you need people who have this technology in their homes. They need to be able to push this data up, not just bring data down, Kyle added.

Its in high demand among businesses and institutions too, he said, making Glo Fiber a powerful economic development tool. All the larger cities in the U.S. are clamoring for this. We know theres a market for it, a need for it -- and its only going to grow over time.

Comcast acknowledged that Shentels internet infrastructure is constructed differently than Comcasts, but disputed the significance. Research by The Internet & Television Association showed that uploads accounted for just 6% to 7% percent of internet traffic during pandemic, compared to 5% before the pandemic.

Comcast spokesman Bob Grove said the company operates one of the worlds largest, smartest, fastest and most reliable fiber-based networks in the country. We compete everyday with providers that offer different technologies, but customers continue to choose Comcast because we offer an unparalleled internet experience that includes gigabit speeds across our footprint, the best WiFi coverage and controls in the home, and a network of more than 20 million WiFi hotspots.

East Hempfield Township Manager Cindy Schweitzer said the need for speed is real.

Those upload and download speeds are very important to those residents who now work from home and do a lot of uploading of documents and materials, she said. So that might grab some people. Great download speed is nice but if I want to have a home office, I need upload speed as well. It makes me more productive.

Lisa Riggs, president of the Economic Development Company of Lancaster County, a nonprofit that supports business growth here, was encouraged by Shentels decision to come to the county.

We see it as a good sign that they are entering the marketplace and offering consumers and businesses a choice with a fiber-optic product, as we know this option is reliable and provides good speeds, Riggs said, noting its a service the entire county needs.

Looking ahead, any market that doesnt offer reliable, rapid and affordable broadband is at a competitive disadvantage from both an economic development and quality of life perspective, she added.

In the neighborhood

Shentel, based in Edinburg, Virginia, about 100 miles west of Washington D.C., is targeting Lancaster County and other southcentral Pennsylvania counties largely because it already has laid a foundation here  a fiber-optic backbone built decades ago to provide service for Sprint wireless (now T-Mobile).

Its reached a franchise agreement with Carlisle Borough, Cumberland County, and Hanover Borough and York Township in York County. The company also is pursuing franchise agreements with other municipalities in those counties. Ten days ago, Shentel was picked by York College to provide high-speed internet and phone service at its three campuses.

We already have a significant investment up there and it just makes sense to leverage it in this way, Kyle said. Had Shentel not already built this foundation doesnt mean wed never (expand in southcentral Pennsylvania), but (having the backbone in place) absolutely makes it easier.

Comparison shopping

Consumers and businesses can expect to be the beneficiaries of an extremely competitive marketplace, especially for internet service  Shentels primary focus.

We believe were going to provide an improved internet offering at or below the standard pricing of Comcast , Kyle told the East Hempfield Township supervisors at their May 5 meeting.

But that will trigger more aggressive, competitive tactics from (Comcast), he predicted. Theyre going to compete very hard for the consumers in your market. And at the end of the day, who wins when businesses compete? Your citizens are going to win.

Judging from the prices that Shentel and Comcast list for comparable but not identical products, if purchased by themselves, Shentel has an edge in top-speed internet. Comcast has a price advantage with cable TV. (See chart for details.)

But Comcast offers more tiers within a given product category, such as six levels of internet service, including an option for low-income customers, compared to Shentels three.

The different volumes of products are the result of different philosophies. Were trying to keep it simple, Kyle explained. Comcast offers many tiers of service in an effort to match consumers varying needs.

Comcast also offers related categories such as home security. Both Shentel and Comcast offer discounts when buying more than one product.

As the product lineups vary, so do the sizes of the two publicly held telecoms.

Consider Comcast. Besides having the largest home internet business and largest cable TV business in the country, Comcast also owns NBCUniversal and DreamWorks Animation. With first quarter revenue of $27 billion, it has more than 150,000 miles of fiber optic line and 168,000 employees.

Shentel, in contrast, is a publicly held regional company that posted first quarter revenue of $60 million; as a point of reference, that exceeded Lancaster-based Burnham Holdings first quarter revenue ($44 million). Shentel has 7,000 miles of fiber optic line and 1,050 employees.

Though its a fraction of Comcasts size, Shentel is plenty big enough, strong enough and experienced enough to handle the expansion in Lancaster County, Kyle emphasized. The 118-year-old firm has been building purely fiber-optic networks for years, he pointed out.

Actually, being a smaller firm has its advantages, Kyle told the East Hempfield supervisors: Were not too large, so theres no bureaucracy, where you dont know who to get in touch with, he said.

Role reversal

Comcasts situation as the incumbent in central Lancaster County is the opposite of the position it took in northern Lancaster County two years ago.

There its the challenger, beginning to construct its own infrastructure in 2019 in West Earl, Warwick and Ephrata townships, and Lititz, Akron and Ephrata boroughs, a region where Blue Ridge has operated for decades. Comcasts build-out is essentially complete in Lititz, Warwick, West Earl and Akron. Ephrata township and borough will be done by year-end.

Welcome addition

The six municipal managers where Shentel has reached or is seeking a franchise agreement unanimously embraced the opportunity to give their residents and businesses another choice of internet, cable TV and phone providers.

I would imagine that the residents would welcome another option to consider and would appreciate some competition. Its like which grocery store do you want to go to? Some people like Weis, some people like Giant, some people like Wegmans. Its a personal decision, said Dee Dee McGuire, West Lampeter manager, voicing a view shared by her counterparts.

There are those that are very happy with Comcast and there are those that may want an alternative to that service, said Jim Drumm, Manheim Township manager. This would give them that.

Kyle was reluctant to say which other of the countys 60 municipalities Shentel will approach in the coming months, in hopes of bringing them its future-proof technology, except to say that Lancaster city is among them.

Lancaster city has the highest population (about 59,000) and population density (about 8,200 people per square mile) in the county. From a business point of view, it just makes sense. We want to load up our network (with customers), he said.

As for the remainder, Shentel is analyzing them for population density and the willingness of municipal leadership to support Shentels arrival. Those are the cheapest to serve, shortening the time it would take for Shentel to recoup its investment in infrastructure and turn a profit.

Though Kyle declined to estimate how much Shentel will spend to develop its own network here, other than say tens of millions of dollars, he did say that Shentel will invest $700 to $1,200 per every home its network goes past.

It gets more difficult for us where (population) density falls off drastically. Right now, were concentrating our fire. Well hit the dense areas and then spiderweb out, he explained.

Kyle also declined to estimate how many permanent jobs it will create here, saying that figure will depend on the number of customers it draws. But permanent positions will include jobs in sales, customer service and operations.

Reaching a franchise agreement is just one of the hurdles that Shentel has to clear before it can begin building its infrastructure in a given municipality. The company also has to perform an engineering study to figure out how it will be built  a precursor for obtaining a building permit from the municipality.

Kyle acknowledged that building the infrastructure would be disruptive, but not overly disruptive, as he told West Lampeter supervisors.

Homes and businesses are most likely be served by following the way the structures get electricity  via utility poles or underground. The latter option would use conduit if its already in place and has space, or Shentel would bore or trench to the home or business, he said, then restoring it to its original condition.

Thats something were going to look at closely, said Drumm, Manheim Townships manager. I wouldnt expect it to be terribly disruptive. But it could close a street for an afternoon, as theyre working and putting in lines.
Shortly after midnight on July 26, 1896, 125 years ago, 18-year-old Barbara Hershey and her escort, 23-year-old Enos Barge, lost their lives when their horse and buggy collided with a train at the Pennsylvania railroad crossing at Bird-in-Hand.

Barbie died instantly and Enos died less than 24 hours later. Enos repeatedly called for Barbie and asked that she be brought to him.

Barbies cousin and her escort were traveling home with Barbie and Enos in a separate horse and buggy, and they crossed the railroad tracks just before the train approached around a dangerous curve. The occupants in the first buggy witnessed this tragic accident. Enos horse sensed danger and reared up right on the tracks.

Barbie Hershey was born in June 1878, one of 12 children of Peter and Barbara Buckwalter Hershey. Losing Barbie was not the only loss of children that the Hersheys experienced.

Two of their children were born silent (stillborn) and in April 18 78, just two months before Barbie was born, they lost two young girls to scarlet fever  Mary, age 8, and Ellen, 3. Two-year-old Martha survived scarlet fever, but it left her frail and deaf in one ear. Pap Hershey picked out the name Barbara for Barbie, naming her after her mother. Pap said Barbie brought sunshine back into the into Mam Hersheys life after the loss of the girls to scarlet fever.

Unlike Martha, Barbie grew up strong and healthy. She worked out in the fields of their large farm with her brothers and father. Barbie was the delight of the Hershey family. Their farm was located along Strasburg Road in Paradise Township, near the Strasburg Rail Road.

Barbie had dated Enos but had broken up with him because he was several years older and more serious about marriage than Barbie. During this era, Mennonite youth attended parties hosted by Mennonite families. The host family would mail out invitations, matching up couples. Imagine Barbies chagrin when she picked up the mail at the post office and there was an invitation to a party at a farm in Witmer Station, matching up Barbie and Enos.

Barbie thought she had a perfect alibi. She wanted to go to the rural New Holland area to help her oldest sister, Sarah, with a newborn. Mammy Hershey decided that she and Pap Hershey should go since Sarah had just delivered her seventh child. Mam thought more mature help was needed.

Mam and Pap left home to help Sarah, and Barbie left home with Enos. The dilemma Barbie found herself in cost her her life. When the news of Barbies death reached Pap and Mam Hershey, Mam became so hysterical the doctor thought she might die.

Although the railroad company never acknowledged fault, they offered a monetary settlement to help with the funerals, etc. Pap Hershey always declined, saying he would not accept money for his childs blood. Finally, the railroad sent an older man from Philadelphia. When they emerged from the parlor in the large farmhouse, everyone knew they had reached a settlement. Pap Hershey accepted free passes for a train trip to Niagara Falls for Pap, Mam and Martha.

Enos family suffered a great loss that year, too. Less than five weeks after Enos died, his sister, Ella May Barge, age 12, died of an inflammation of the bowels.

After Enos and Barbie died, these Mennonites removed themselves further from the things of this world regarding dress and social events. They hosted fewer social parties and encouraged their children to become involved in volunteering in mission projects.

The author lives in rural New Holland with her husband, Will. Will is a great-grandson of Sarah Lucinda Hershey Eby, oldest sister of Barbie Hershey. More about the story can be found in a 1984 novel titled I Hear the Reapers Song, written by Sara Stambaugh  a granddaughter of Barbie Hersheys brother, Silas Hershey.

If you know an interesting story, please write it in 600 words or less and send it to Mary Ellen Wright, LNP editorial department, P.O. Box 1328, Lancaster, PA, 17608-1328, email it to features@lnpnews. com. Please include your phone number and the name of the town you live in.
When Lancaster County sold its government-run nursing home in 2005, top leaders responded to the intense public blowback by promising to hold the new private owners accountable for the care of the area's poor, sick and elderly.

That promise quickly faded.

In the time since, evidence has mounted that inadequate staffing at the 446-bed home may compromise the safety and well-being of residents  the very thing former county officials once assured the public wouldnt happen.

Under a contract included in the sale of the property, owners of the home were to provide quarterly reports, meet with county commissioners and maintain a baseline level of care in perpetuity.

But an LNP | LancasterOnline inspection of public records indicates county officials ultimately deserted those contractual obligations by failing to enforce them.

That failure meant that when Montgomery County-based Complete Healthcare Resources sold the facility in April to a new owner with a troubling track record, county officials were locked out of any role, and unaware the 2005 contract gave them one.

I am not aware of the county having any role in (the nursing home) since the sale many years ago before I was on the board, Republican County Commissioner Chairman Josh Parsons said in response to an inquiry from LNP | LancasterOnline.

If county officials had maintained the oversight powers laid out in the sales agreement to Complete Healthcare, a contract law expert told LNP | LancasterOnline the county may have been able to preserve some influence over the facilitys operations.

When you try to attach a right to control property after you sell it, you have to be vigilant about protecting those rights, or you lose them, said Marie Reilly, a professor at Penn State Law who teaches contract law.

Now the facility, renamed in April Lancaster Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, is left to a company with no such obligations to the county. New Jersey-based Imperial Healthcare Groups own sale agreement with Complete Healthcare is confidential, a spokesperson for Imperial said. LNP | LancasterOnline was unable to obtain a copy and the countys attorney said she doesnt have one either.

That suggests Lancaster County is officially cut out of its former property for good.

Oversight unravels

Interviews with leaders who fought the sale of Conestoga View in 2005, current county officials and a review of newspaper archives show that after Complete Healthcare Resources managers produced several public reports to show it was maintaining previous staffing levels and accepting poorer residents, attention to the issue disappeared.

Former Lancaster Mayor Art Morris, who helped lead a public fight against the sale in 2005, said he went back and reviewed the sale agreement last year, when Conestoga View became a local symbol for the nursing home industrys failures during the initial outbreak of COVID-19, at one point carrying a higher death toll than any other facility in the state.

Morris said he knew oversight provisions were added to the contract 16 years ago, but it took going back to the agreement to realize that county commissioners were supposed to require quarterly meetings and reports.

I don't think people on every single issue, even if it's significant to them, are going to be checking regularly on every single thing that they may have been involved in, Morris said, explaining why the issue fell off the radars of activists like himself. There was a lot of passion, a lot effort and a lot of disappointment for a lot of people after commissioners went through with the sale, he said.

Dr. Robert Shultz, who said he saw patients living in Conestoga View for some 25 years until his retirement last year, volunteered to be a plaintiff alongside the Lancaster City & County Medical Society, in a 2005 lawsuit against the board of commissioners and Complete Healthcare challenging the sale.

Shultz, who retired last year at the age of 80, said he wasnt aware the sale agreement required the facilitys owner to maintain a baseline of care in perpetuity, no matter who owned the place.

I don't understand why nobody held their feet to the fire for years. I was not even aware they were supposed to give reports to the county commissioners, Shultz said. Why didn't the county commissioners ask for the reports on what was happening?

Only two of the three commissioners in office in 2005 are alive today. Republican Pete Shaub did not respond to a request for comment. Democrat Molly Henderson declined to answer any questions about the sale. Republican Dick Shellenberger died in 2019.

After 2007, its unclear if the countys oversight role at Conestoga View ever entered public discussion again. Following extensive coverage of the actions of the board of commissioners, a review of archives indicates Lancasters newspapers did not cover whether Complete Healthcares reporting to county officials continued past that year.

The medical society did not return requests for comment.

County Solicitor Christina Hausner gave LNP | LancasterOnline what she said were all the quarterly performance reports from Complete Healthcare on file.

There were just three  one each from 2005, 2006 and 2007. It's unclear if the promised meetings ever took place, either.

A 2006 story in the New Era reported on a quarterly report from Complete Healthcare Resources no longer available in the countys records. Complete Healthcares manager produced the report more than two months late, according to the story.

Hausner said it was unclear if anyone at the county was even supposed to be keeping track of the reports.

I've been here over five years, and I haven't heard a blessed thing about Conestoga View, Hausner said.

All three current county commissioners said no one at the county ever mentioned the agreement to them, including Democratic Commissioner Craig Lehman, who was first elected in 2007.

The solicitor said she thinks the county has no document retention policy that would require the county to maintain the reports.

Opportunities lost

Hausner told LNP | LancasterOnline that the 2005 agreement is unenforceable, and all three current county commissioners deferred to the solicitor.

The new owner, Imperial, has no legal obligation to follow a contract it wasnt part of, Hausner said.

Reilly, at Penn State Law, more or less agreed with that view.

But that doesnt address another part of the original sale agreement with Complete Healthcare: the countys restrictions on Conestoga View say they also apply to future owners.

Theoretically, Reilly said, the county would have been in a stronger position to play a role in future sales of Conestoga View if it had continued to enforce the contracts provisions.

In other words, use it or lose it.

Thats why if you really want to be certain that your right to control property persists after you sell it, you put the restriction in the deed to the land, she said.

That didnt happen, according to a review of property records.

But the county's failure to follow through is not the only reason to believe it would be hard, if not impossible, to enforce the stipulations in the sales agreement. The agreement itself has flaws.

At a May 2006 Lancaster County commissioners meeting, then-county Chief Administrative Officer Don Elliott defended the countys measures to hold Complete Healthcare accountable as a new owner. Should the company ever fail to meet the quality-of-care standards agreed to in the sale, the county could sue, he assured skeptics at the time.

But for what?

Its another hole in the 2005 sale agreement, according to law professor Reilly. After reviewing the contract, Reilly said its unclear what kind of damages the county would be claiming it lost.

When someone sues over a breach of contract, Reilly said, its to try to win compensation for what they were supposedly promised. Those are called damages, and they come in the form of money, she said.

Things like maintaining Medicaid beds, and treating indigent people  I think it would really be pretty hard for the county to prove what its damages are, Reilly said. What's the monetary value of that?

That complication points to how unusual the 2005 deal county commissioners agreed to in the first place, Reilly said. It's unclear if the covenants the county won from Complete Healthcare were ever designed to be enforced in the first place, or if they were simply meant to quell a backlash from the public.

Thats because real estate agreements, Reilly said, are really designed for one party to transfer over a property to another, not to manage what happens to it afterward.

If you walk away from the closing of your house, you dont expect to be able to come over on Saturday nights and sit on the patio, right? Reilly said.

A judge may conclude that if the county really wanted an effective way to control quality of care at Conestoga View, for instance, they couldve simply not sold it in the first place, according to Reilly.

The three county commissioners in office at the time resigned or lost their seats by 2007. The sudden announcement and approval of the sale of Conestoga View in 2005  and its ultimate price tag of just $8.5 million  produced enough suspicion to draw an investigation by the district attorney.

The three commissioners pleaded guilty to violating public meetings laws in the states Sunshine Act.

Shaub resigned in 2006 after his guilty plea. Shellenberger, who died in 2019, did not seek re-election in 2007. Henderson lost re-election to Lehman, who remains in office.

Henderson is a candidate for the School District of Lancasters board in this year's municipal elections.

Immediate jeopardy

County officials back in 2005 said the provisions in the sale agreement would allow them to intervene if questions arose about quality of care at the facility, such as those that have emerged recently.

A recent state inspection of Lancaster Nursing and Rehabilitation, which is the name Conestoga View took on after the April change of ownership to Imperial, cited the facility for failing to maintain legally required minimum levels of staffing in 13 days out of 14 days.

It was the first such inspection since Imperial took over. Its not the first time a facility associated with Chaim Charlie Steg ran afoul of state staffing requirements for nursing homes.

In August 2017, state health inspectors found widespread neglect of patients at the St. Francis Center of Rehabilitation and Healthcare in Darby, according to a three-year investigation by the attorney generals office and local police. Department of Health officials gave the facility the most severe violation for nursing home, called immediate jeopardy.

During that time, three residents ultimately died of preventable injuries that resulted from dangerously low staffing levels, something Steg refused to address out of cost concerns, according to the criminal complaint.

One victim, an 86-year-old woman, ultimately died of septic shock after developing bed sores that exposed tendon and bones, according to the complaint.

It led to the sanctions against Steg, who managed the home, and a $1 million settlement between the St. Francis and the attorney general. The facility will also have to maintain an increased minimum staffing level and undergo quarterly audits from state inspectors.

Steg was also effectively barred from operating or owning a majority share of any Pennsylvania nursing homes for five years, according to the attorney generals office.

A spokesperson from the state Department of Health told LNP | LancasterOnline that Steg still is one of five owners of Lancaster Nursing and Rehabilitation Center.

According to the latest nursing home ownership data from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Steg is also an owner of 12 other facilities, including Newport Meadows Health and Rehabilitation Center in Christiana. Newport Meadows was previously named Harrison House.

All of them are in Pennsylvania, and all of them Steg and others bought since 2018, according to the data.

On Wednesday, Pennsylvanias acting health secretary, Alison Beam, announced the Wolf administration will pursue regulatory approval to raise the required staffing levels from 2.7 staff hours per resident per day to 4.1 hours statewide. National experts have long said 4.1 hours per resident is the minimum threshold to deliver adequate care to residents. Most nursing home facilities in Lancaster County show staffing ratios between three and five staff hours per resident, according to the DOH website.

No way back

When asked if the county should have kept up with the covenants their predecessors secured and tried to enforce Complete Healthcares quarterly reports all along, Lehman said common sense tells him when the sale occurred in 2005 to a private entity, the county's chapter at Conestoga View ended.

If the county had been officially engaged by Complete Healthcare prior to closing with Imperial Healthcare, there may have been an opportunity for the county to insist that the Complete Healthcare covenants be transferred to Imperial Healthcare due to the buyers clause in the original sales agreement between the county and Complete Healthcare, Lehman said in an email.

However, I believe that the recent sales transaction between Complete Healthcare and Imperial Healthcare would have stalled if county participation had been legally necessary to close the deal.

Republican Commissioner Ray DAgostino said in an email he did not have enough information to answer the question. Parsons did not provide a response.

Shultz told LNP | LancasterOnline that he was deeply disappointed by the medical societys settlement with the county and Complete Healthcare. The doctors group ultimately had little to show for the money it invested in the lawsuit, he said.

But as a doctor in private practice, Shultz visited the nursing home often when it was owned by the county and Complete Healthcare.

I personally think the care met the minimal standards the state agrees should be given to people in nursing homes, but I dont think it was any kind of care I would want my mother, father, brother, or sister to receive, Shultz said, despite the hard work of staff in the building.
Kirsten Krimmel said she and her husband found a hidden gem when they moved to their South Side Lancaster city neighborhood in 2009.

We really like it here, Krimmel said of their Highland Avenue home. Its been a very nice, quiet neighborhood.

Krimmel, 42, said she had heard neighbors complain about drivers speeding down her street, sometimes crashing into parked cars, before her parked car was involved in a similar crash.

That incident put a fire under me to approach someone from the city government to fix the speeding issue here, Krimmel said.

She eventually found herself at a forum where city residents could discuss issues in their neighborhoods and learn how to address them. It was at the forum that she learned about the Neighborhood Leaders Academy.

We created the Neighborhoods Leaders Academy (NLA) to empower residents who are already active in their neighborhoods and provide training and education on community building, Milzy Carrasco, the citys director of neighborhood engagement, said in an email. Through NLA, the neighborhood leaders increase their understanding of the function of local government, develop relationships with City leadership, and learn how to engage with the community, understand their neighborhood and leverage all of these resources to create resident-led solutions to neighborhood issues.

Krimmel was sold, and although she didnt realize it at the time, her quest for a solution to stop drivers from speeding through her neighborhood would have a snowball effect.

The Neighborhood Leaders Academy was created in 2019, with 11 joining its first class. Since then, 52 more people have participated.

LNP | LancasterOnline spoke to Krimmel and three other city residents who found a common training ground to refine their skills and capacities through the program. Here are their stories.

Stand up and find answers

After joining the Neighborhood Leaders Academy, Krimmel continued to appraise her neighborhood and soon learned about South End Park, an unkept park near her home. It prompted her to evaluate how vital a few small changes in the appearance and maintenance of the park could improve the quality of life of the residents of that area, especially the children and youth.

I figured that everyone needed to feel connected and have vested interest in this place in order for things to function, Krimmel said.

With trash bags in hand, Krimmel started frequenting the park to pick up trash, stopping along the way to talk with residents. Soon, neighborhood kids were talking to her about making the park and its playground a special, clean place for them to spend time and play.

The children shared that creating art in the park would be a fun and meaningful project, so Krimmel commissioned local artist Adam Serrano to work with them.

Sometimes inner-city kids dont think of themselves as artists because they are not mentored in that kind of experience, Serrano said. When I was approached by the neighborhood team I thought it was a great opportunity to show the kids that art can be a positive outlet and can beautify the neighborhood, so I was immediately drawn to the project.

They decided to paint a mural on the wall of a building in the park.

The kids came up with a concept of characters that would reflect the names of some city streets and they helped choose what images to use in the murals design.

It was an amazing process, Serrano said. The kids who play on that playground had such sense of pride.

Krimmels familiarity among the South Side residents grew as she continued to survey neighbors about making the park a gathering space for everyone. Neighbors felt encouraged.

In the places Ive lived before, we never had our voice heard by anyone in the local government, said Iris Martinez, who lives on Highland Avenue. In this neighborhood, we now have someone willing to be our voice and share our concerns with the authorities.

The improvements at the park got underway with funds from the citys Love Your Block mini-grant program, which offers grants for projects that focus on reducing litter and addressing multiple simple exterior repairs in neighborhoods. The city provided picnic tables, grills, metal trash cans and planted trees. The Rotary Club of Lancaster donated three benches, and volunteers applied a fresh coat of paint to the playground equipment.

I never thought that when I knocked on my neighbors doors the very first time it would end up in the creation of a neighborhood group and me leading the group, Krimmel said. When people feel that what they say matters in the decision-making process, it just helps build trust between government and residents. When you feel that your community  your neighborhood  is being wronged, you stand up and find answers and possible outcomes.

Your voice means everything

Larock Hudson calls himself an activist and an agent of change because I know the issues going on in my orbit and figured I need to take some sort of action to bring some of those issues to light.

Hudson, 40, said he draws upon his memories and challenging life experiences to keep his passion for activism alive. He said he comes from a single parent home, has been on public assistance, has been incarcerated and lived in his car for nine months.

There are not a lot of circumstances that I havent been through that some of these people out there are facing right now, Hudson, who lives in the citys northwest, said.

Hudson said he finds satisfaction in being able to bring people together to work for the greater good. He said he protested on city streets last year after a 27-year-old man was shot to death by a police officer. The incident occurred amid months of widespread protests across the nation over police brutality and systemic racism and it proved to Hudson what he has always believed.

Theres a time to be on the street marching and holding a sign, but I believe there needs to be a pathway to progression, he said.

Hudson set out to show others with a heart for activism what that pathway could look like. This was also the moment that took him from protesting against law enforcement policies and government institutions to working with them.

Its about meeting people where they are at, interjecting yourself into the policy-making procedures, and educating yourself and others, he said.

Enter the Neighborhood Leaders Academy.

NLA taught me who the local stakeholders are and showed me what each level in our local government does and who these people are, Hudson said. There is a disparity when it comes to having that knowledge, but NLA provides that.

After completing the training, Hudson didnt join any specific neighborhood group. Instead, he chose to do volunteer work locally and in the south-central Pennsylvania region, joining organizations whose mission and vision align with his interests. Eventually, he landed a job with Lancaster city.

In speaking about last years protests, Hudson said he advocated for bail reduction and equitable treatment for some of the people who were arrested.

That led to a meeting with the mayor and the chief of police, and those interactions turned into relationships that later brought me to this point, he said.

In his current position as equity, diversity and inclusion fellow for Lancaster city, Hudson is tasked with developing a strategy behind the citys comprehensive plan so that historically unheard voices are brought to the forefront and social disparity is acknowledged and addressed.

There is no reason to shy away and think you are not worthy of sitting at the table and being part of the decision-making process, Hudson said. Your voice means everything.

Be the change I wanted to see

Tene Darby  a lifelong resident of the citys southeast, where she grew up on Green Street  describes herself as a humanitarian, an activist and community liaison. Aware of how essential it is for residents to voice their concerns with the city, she got involved in advocacy and volunteerism to find solutions to issues affecting her neighborhood.

Ive always been an advocate for my family and thought maybe its time for me to be a voice for the families in the southeast and beyond, she said.

Darby, 49, inquired about becoming a member of the citys Democratic committee in response to a post she read on Facebook. She was later appointed to serve as the committee person for the citys 7th ward, 5th precinct. The appointment caused a chain of events that helped cement her image as a community leader and connector.

The citys Deptartment of Neighborhood Engagement took notice and invited Darby to join the Neighborhood Leaders Academy. Last November, she became the first Black and Latina chairperson of the Lancaster City Democratic Committee.

I represent all those people with a great sense of responsibility and hope, Darby said. Most times I am the only person of color in the room, and there is pressure to do well, but I am not intimidated by that.

Darby said one of the things she learned at the Neighborhood Leaders Academy is how to access community resources that are available through city government but often remain untapped because people simply dont know they exist.

Learning those things has enabled me to help the residents in my neighborhood and gain their trust as a leader, Darby said. Im able to stand up and speak on the issues that most matter to them because I am a southeast resident myself.

She said her work becomes more relevant and gratifying when she sees others being inspired by it.

I wear many different hats, Darby said. I didnt really expect to hold these many positions, but how can I ask someone to be engaged in our neighborhood if Im not willing to try it myself.

I had to be the change I wanted to see.

I feel empowered

Lisa Colon feels an innate need to give back to her local community. She also believes that a community succeeds when its residents are involved in all processes and their voices are heard.

The city is what impacts my life as far as the decisions they make, Colon, 47, said. I wanted to know how the different levels of city government intertwined and how they came about making the decisions that affected us as residents.

When the city put out a message to residents about learning more about city and county government through the Neighborhood Leaders Academy, Colon was quick to respond.

I realized that I wanted to make change for people, make things better and truly make an impact, she said.

Using what she learned through the Neighborhood Leaders Academy, Colon set out to work on bringing together the business and the residential communities in the northwest quadrant of the city where she lives.

They seemed to be very disconnected from each other, Colon said. There seemed to be no sense of community as compared to the southeast. It seemed to be missing in this area.

Colon opted to coordinate a fall fest at Janice Stork Corridor Park. The event was a success and the experience, she said, planted a seed in her.

Colon started Red Rose Blue Star Moms, the local chapter of the Blue Star Mothers of America. She serves as president of the local chapter, which offers a support system to local military families and their service members.

She currently serves as chairperson of the Lancaster City GOP and assistant treasurer of the Republican Committee of Lancaster County.

NLA gave me training and more confidence. I might not know all the answers but now I know where to find the answers. I feel empowered, Colon said.
East Cocalico Township police

ASSAULT

DENVER: Pavel I. Zimin, 42, of Denver, was charged with aggravated assaut, simple assault and two counts of harassment after assaulting a woman in the 700 block of Main Street, then kicking officers as he was being arrested, at 2:10 a.m. on July 24, police said. Officers arrived at the scene to find the woman crying with minor injuries, stating she didnt want Zimin to hurt her anymore, police said.

East Hempfield police

BURGLARY

EAST HEMPFIELD TWP.: James Andrew Strube, 25, of Columbia, was charged with burglary, criminal trespass, resisting arrest and criminal mischief after forcing entry into a neighboring apartment in an attempt to escape officers who were serving him an arrest warrant in the 3800 block of Nolt Road at 6:20 p.m. on July 17, police said. Strube had multiple active warrants for his arrest from various law enforcement agencies in Lancaster County, most recently from when he fled from officers on a motorcycle at the same address on July 10, police said. Rebecca Marie Lexa, 29, of East Hempfield Township, was charged with hindering apprehension or prosecution after she was found to have moved shelving back into place inside the apartment to conceal Strubes actions, police said.

EAST HEMPFIELD TWP.: An unknown burglar broke through the rear door of a UPS at 1155 Enterprise Road and removed $10,000 worth of cell phones sometime between 11:59 a.m. on July 18 and 1:15 a.m. on July 19, police said.

CRIMINAL MISCHIEF

EAST HEMPFIELD TWP.: An unknown vandal punctured the tires of two vehicles, causing $2,430 in damage, in the 1900 block of Columbia Avenue sometime between July 5 and July 21, police said.

CRUELTY TO ANIMALS

EAST HEMPFIELD TWP.: Debra Wheeler, 62, of West Chester, was charged with cruelty to animals after her dog was found in her vehicle in distress on a day with 88-degree temperatures and high humidity at Physicians Surgery Center at 2150 Harrisburg Pike on July 13, police said.

THEFT

EAST HEMPFIELD TWP.: An unknown thief removed catalytic converters valued at a combined $2,000 from two vehicles at Excentia at 1810 Rohrerstown Road sometime between 8 a.m. on June 16 and 3 p.m. on July 15, police said.

EAST HEMPFIELD TWP.: A pair of $450 Oakley sunglasses were stolen from an unlocked vehicle in the 1300 block of Banner Drive sometime between 4 p.m. on July 18 and 6:45 a.m. on July 19, police said.

EAST HEMPFIELD TWP.: An unknown thief was seen on surveillance footage removing cash and rummaging through two unlocked vehicles in the 1400 block of Hammock Way between 3:44 a.m. and 3:48 a.m. on July 19, police said.

EAST HEMPFIELD TWP.: An unknown thief removed an $800 catalytic converter from a vehicle at R.H. Cooper and Son at 115 West Main Street sometime between 1 a.m. and 8:02 a.m. on July 21, police said.

East Lampeter Township police

THEFT

EAST LAMPETER TWP.: An unknown man concealed three packages of underwear in an Under Armour bag and then left without paying for them from a Tommy Hilfiger outlet store at Tanger Outlets around 1:30 p.m. on July 2, police said.

Manheim Township police

THEFT

MANHEIM TWP.: An unknown thief removed catalytic converters valued at a combined $3,200 from two vehicles on Knollwood Drive sometime during the night of July 21-22, police said.

Northern Lancaster County Regional police

FLEEING AND ELUDING

PENN TWP.: Jonathan Pabon-Ayala, 29, of Lancaster, was charged with fleeing and eluding and two summary traffic violations after failing to pull over and fleeing at a high rate of speed after officers attempted to stop him on South Main Street near Lancaster Road, starting a chase, on May 31, police said. The pursuit was ended due to safety concerns, police said.

WARWICK TWP.: Nicholas Dylan Sites, 28, of Lititz, was charged with receiving stolen property, fleeing and eluding and agricultural vandalism after driving a stolen motorcycle into a planted farm field in the 500 block of Furnace Hills Pike while fleeing from police on June 28, police said. The chase was discontinued after Sites, who was driving the motorcycle at night with no lights, drove into the field, disappearing, police said.
The explosion ripped through the sultry late June night. Three more followed in rapid succession. In the milliseconds between the explosions, dogs began to bark, babies began to cry, and lights flickered on in row homes.

It is summer in Lancaster, a place once dubbed Americas refugee capital, where humans seek asylum from war-torn countries. My heart aches for them. My heart aches for the veterans of war and the survivors of domestic violence all triggered by the detonations, night after night  often into the early hours of the morning  during the stretch from before Memorial Day until after Labor Day.

My poor rescue dog, who suffered unfathomable abuse before I adopted her, trembles in her thunder shirt as I arise to dose her with Xanax again.

I think of the city residents who have to go to work in the morning, of the kids who have to attend summer school, of those who keep their windows open because their homes lack air conditioning.

I dread the sleep deprivation that summer in the city brings. As a health care provider, I know the health hazards of sleep deprivation: hypertension, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, cancer, depression and an increase in motor vehicle accidents.

Six years ago, I moved to this lovely city after residing elsewhere in the county for the previous 18 years. I planned to live out my golden years here. I love Lancaster. I love its walkability, its diversity, the quaint shops and phenomenal restaurants. I love the culture here, and most of all, I love the people.

I have lived in many states in my lifetime. I have lived in large cities, small towns, villages and way out in the country. I love living in Lancaster city most of all, except for the noise.

Commercial-grade fireworks were legalized for sale to consumers in 2017, creating a downward spiral in the quality of life in the city.

There are rules against firework use within 150 feet of occupied structures. And a Lancaster city ordinance prohibits the use of fireworks on city property, including streets, parks and sidewalks. These rules are disregarded and rarely enforced. Some residents call law enforcement, but are informed that is almost impossible to catch the culprits. As LNP | LancasterOnline reported, the city said ahead of the Fourth of July holiday that it had a no-tolerance policy for illegal use of fireworks and that police would be stepping up patrols, but that crackdown resulted in just a single citation being issued by city police over the holiday weekend.

Last year, carelessly discharged fireworks caused more than $100,000 in damage in Lancaster city after a fire broke out just before midnight on the Fourth of July. Five neighboring properties experienced exterior damage and two city firefighters were treated on the scene for heat exhaustion.

I have witnessed sparks flying into my yard and into the yards of my neighbors from fireworks set off behind our houses.

What will it take to outlaw these commercial-grade firework sales to individuals? Clearly, destruction of property is not enough. Must we wait until someone is seriously injured or dies as a result of fireworks?

Like others, I have complained on neighborhood social media sites. People who complain are often ridiculed and told to suck it up; we are told that this is what living in a city is like. I, for one, have lived in much larger cities than Lancaster, and I have never witnessed this scale of noise pollution night after night. When I visit my daughter in Brooklyn, New York, during the summer, it is quieter than in Lancaster.

State Sen. Gene Yaw, R-Lycoming County, who authored the 2017 Pennsylvania fireworks law, recently told people unhappy about it to get over it. But after the resulting outcry, he has changed his tune.

Last week, in a legislative memo seeking support from his colleagues, he proposed changes to the legislation that would offer guidance to local governments on reasonable controls for the use of fireworks, implement constraints on the times of day that fireworks can be discharged, and increase the criminal penalties for selling or using consumer fireworks in violation of state law.

We need to find a solution to this problem before many valued residents leave the city because of the poor quality of life caused by the noise pollution and its devastating effects. We should not be held hostage by the few who live here who have a total disregard for others.

Pamela Lilith Craddock is a certified nurse midwife and holistic health care provider.
To the casual observer, these are the dog days of summer. The dread of the impending school year is looming all too quickly. We are getting in our time at the pool or the shore, taking our family vacations, and complaining about the heat and humidity.

On the Jewish calendar, though, its one of my favorite times of the year. (Granted, most Jews are now asking, What could he possibly be talking about?)

Weve just observed a holiday commemorating the cataclysms brought on by the destructions of both the First and Second Temples, and now we find Gods comfort, leading us ultimately to the awareness of the possibilities represented by atonement, forgiveness and the promise of a new year.

Listen to some of messages we hear every year at this time from the prophet Isaiah: Be comforted, be comforted, My people (40:1). Let every valley be raised, every hill and mount made low. Let the rugged ground become level and the ridges become a plain (40:4). Truly, God has comforted Zion, comforted all her ruins. God has made her wilderness like Eden ... Gladness and joy shall abide there, thanksgiving and the sound of music (51:3). Awake, awake, O Zion! Clothe yourself in splendor (52:1). Arise, shake off the dust (52:2). Arise, shine, for your light has dawned (60:1). Truly, this is the most optimistic time of the year.

How wonderful these thoughts are, and how timeless, too. COVID-19 has been plaguing us for 16 months, and now we have to figure out how to respond to the new, highly contagious delta variant. The political tension, social unrest and general sense of upheaval we have been feeling is still very much present. Wouldnt it be delightful to hear that God is going to comfort us?

Christians speak of grace as an undeserved gift of kindness from God. Jews struggle with that notion. We have a sense that we have to work for it. That we have to repent to find Gods goodwill when we have lost our way. Looking back at Isaiah, we have to rouse ourselves, we have to arise and shake off the dust. It begins with us, and then God meets us along the way as soon as we turn back to the right path.

In Jewish life, one sage suggests that we repent one day before we die. Of course, with the uncertainty as to when that will be, we are encouraged to repent every day.

In just two weeks, we will begin the Jewish month of Elul, a month of inner reflection, a time for a spiritual and behavioral audit. In the language of 12-step programs, it is time for us to make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. That means looking at oneself and not pointing fingers at others.

According to Leviticus 16, we learn that before the high priest can offer sacrifices for the atonement of the people, he must atone for himself. Jews recall this sequence every year when we observe Yom Kippur, the end of a season focusing on atonement.

Heres the thing  none of us are innocent. We all bear guilt. Lets begin there. For some Christians who are reading this, that guilt is a condition of being human and a belief in original sin. For Jews, it is a reality of the choices we make with our free will. Regardless of where it originates, we carry some of the responsibility for the state of our country.

I read the letters to the editor in this newspaper. It seems that most of them come down to, Youre evil and Im not, and if you would just do what I do, what my political leader of choice does, what my religious denomination does, well all be fine.

Oh, to live in that world of childish naivete!

No one among us can claim to have clean hands and a pure heart (Psalm 24:4). That condition remains aspirational and likely always will. Do I give in to despair, or do I do my best anyway? Yes, the choice is very much mine.

Ultimately, as we say in the daily Jewish liturgy, Aleinu, its on us.

-Jack Paskoff is rabbi at Congregation Shaarai Shomayim in Lancaster. Email: jpaskoff@shaarai.org.
THE ISSUE

Earlier this month, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued a 22-page advisory warning of the dangers of misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a July 15 White House briefing, Murthy noted that surgeon general advisories are reserved for urgent public health threats. And while those threats have often been related to what we eat, drink and smoke, today we live in a world where misinformation poses an imminent and insidious threat to our nations health. The threat, he said, demands a national response.

We were warning of the dangers of misinformation long before the COVID-19 pandemic upended our lives.

But the consequences of misinformation during a global public health crisis have proven to be particularly dire.

As Murthy writes in his advisory, misinformation has led people to decline COVID-19 vaccines, reject public health measures such as masking and physical distancing, and use unproven treatments.

He noted that a recent study showed that even brief exposure to COVID-19 vaccine misinformation made people less likely to want a COVID-19 vaccine.

Misinformation also has led to the harassment of, and violence against, public health workers, health professionals and other front-line workers tasked with communicating evolving public health measures.

That is appalling. And misinformation-fueled reluctance to get vaccinated against COVID-19 is tragic.

As Dr. Joseph M. Kontra, chief of infectious diseases at Penn Medicine Lancaster General Hospital, wrote in last Sundays Perspective section, Getting vaccinated all but eliminates the possibility that you will die of COVID-19. In fact, according to the CDC, 99.5% of all deaths from COVID-19 in the past few months have occurred in people who were not vaccinated.

He also noted: Despite widespread misinformation, the currently available COVID-19 vaccines are among the safest and most effective vaccines ever created.

Kontra is a thoroughly reliable source. According to the Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health website, he went to medical school at the University of Pittsburgh; did his residency at Virginia Commonwealth University; and did a fellowship at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

Hes devoted his career to the fight against infectious diseases. Hes been on the COVID-19 front lines for the past 16 months. His only agenda is wanting people to be healthy.

The LNP | LancasterOnline Opinion staff checked his credentials so we can say with confidence that when Dr. Kontra urges people to get inoculated against COVID-19  especially as the highly contagious delta variant threatens the unvaccinated  people ought to heed his advice.

Combating viral spread

The LNP | LancasterOnline Editorial Board relies, as much as possible, on primary sources. When writing editorials, we dont just depend on other newspapers reporting of medical research, for instance  we try to read the actual research. When were writing about COVID-19, we rely on websites we can trust, like those of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center and the National Institutes of Health.

As consumers, we all need to check the credibility of sources, especially before sharing information on social media.

As the surgeon generals advisory puts it, If youre not sure, dont share.

Because, as The Washington Post reported Thursday, social media companies content-recommendation algorithms are still generally designed to boost content that engages the most people, regardless of what it is  even conspiracy theories.

While social media companies Facebook, Twitter and YouTube insist they have worked to reduce misinformation and to encourage users to read trustworthy information, their fundamental business model is premised on generating volumes of activity from which they derive data that they use to sell access to discrete audiences. Until they change that lucrative business model, misinformation will continue to proliferate.

Check your sources

Once misinformation spreads online like the virus it is, it can stubbornly persist.

The fundamental problem with misinformation is that once people have heard it, they tend to believe and act on it, even after its been corrected, Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychology professor at the University of Bristol in Britain, said in the March edition of the American Psychological Associations Monitor on Psychology.

In an editorial that same month, we offered the following list of questions  gleaned from NewsGuard, a nonpartisan media rating organization  that readers can use to determine whether a website is a reliable source.

 Is it easy to figure out whos behind the site?

 Is it clear who owns and finances it, and who is in charge of content?

 Is it easy to contact the site creators and content creators?

 Does it disclose conflicts of interest?

 Is advertising clearly identified?

 Are the headlines deceptive?

 Does the site have an agenda?

 What is the reputation of its owners and creators?

 Do they say how they ensure their reporting is fair and accurate?

 Do they correct any mistakes they make quickly and publicly?

This list of questions may seem time-consuming. The good thing is, if you get your information from a newspaper like LNP | LancasterOnline, professionally trained journalists have done the checking for you. As Executive Editor Tom Murse wrote in a letter to subscribers in March, this newspapers team of journalists has worked tirelessly to debunk disinformation and misinformation that spread virally across social media to keep you and your families informed about COVID-19.

Locally owned  and so therefore locally accountable  community newspapers such as LNP | LancasterOnline are a sadly diminishing breed. This newspaper gathers information not just from official sources but from community members with direct experience of whats happening. It doesnt serve up the generic content that often fills newspapers owned by hedge funds and large, distant corporations.

Theres a real accountability that comes when a journalist is likely to encounter his sources in the supermarket or at the local farm stand. We have to be able to look people squarely in the eye.

Admitting mistakes

In his advisory, the surgeon general doesnt shy from the fact that some of the information about COVID-19, especially early on in the pandemic, was confusing.

Murthy points out that scientific knowledge about COVID-19 has evolved rapidly over the past year, sometimes leading to changes in public health recommendations. Updating assessments and recommendations based on new evidence is an essential part of the scientific process.

Unfortunately, some people have exploited the changing health recommendations to undermine the credibility of health officials.

Again, heres one sign that a source is presenting information honestly and in good faith: It admits and corrects its mistakes.

This may seem counterintuitive, we know. But sources that claim to be all-knowing and refuse to correct errors should be avoided like, well, the plague (though, as YouTube video creator Jenny Nicholson tweeted last year, that expression probably ought to be retired because it turns out humans do not do that).

LNP | LancasterOnline prints corrections on Page A2 of the newspaper, and corrections are noted online. We dont hide our mistakes, hoping no one notices. That would be the easy, the irresponsible, way out. It is mortifying to make a mistake in print, but we take our medicine.

It also can be mortifying to point out to friends and family members when theyve shared an unverified item online that we know to be untrue. This takes some sensitivity, because no one enjoys feeling like theyve been misled or have been naive.

In his advisory, the surgeon general offers this advice: Engage with your friends and family on the problem of health misinformation. If someone you care about has a misperception, you might be able to make inroads with them by first seeking to understand instead of passing judgment. Try new ways of engaging: Listen with empathy, establish common ground, ask questions, provide alternative explanations and sources of information, stay calm, and dont expect success from one conversation.

This is sound advice.

As the surgeon general said in his July 15 briefing with journalists, We must confront misinformation as a nation. Every one of us has the power and the responsibility to make a difference in this fight. Lives are depending on it.
July 25: Inventor Garrett Morgan used his recently invented gas mask to rescue workers trapped in a gas-filled tunnel, 1916

July 25: Inventor Garrett Morgan used his recently invented gas mask to rescue workers trapped in a gas-filled tunnel, 1916

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A new report says that more than 10,000 kinds of living things could disappear forever because of the Amazon rainforests destruction.

The rainforest surrounding South Americas Amazon River is the worlds largest. The report said 35 percent of the rainforest has been destroyed or damaged.

The report is by the Science Panel for the Amazon. The project brought together 200 international scientists through the United Nations Sustainable Development Network. It is a detailed study of the Amazon rainforest and its importance to the worlds climate.

Reducing deforestation and forest destruction to zero in less than 10 years "is critical," the report said. The scientists also called for replanting trees that were destroyed.

The rainforest stores large amounts of carbon and is extremely important in fighting climate change. The report said that the plants and soil of the Amazon hold 200 billion metric tons of carbon. That is 400 percent of the world's yearly carbon dioxide emissions.

The continued destruction of the Amazon rainforest also threatens more than 8,000 plants and 2,300 animals, the report added.

Mercedes Bustamante is a professor at the University of Brasilia. She spoke in an online presentation of some of the studys findings. She said the destruction of the Amazon also presents a serious risk to humans.

"There is a narrow window of opportunity to change this trajectory," she said. "The fate of Amazon is central to the solution to the global crisis.

Colombias former President Juan Manuel Santos also spoke during the online discussion. He said there has been a lack of political leadership among the eight countries in the Amazon area.

The report said 18 percent of the Amazon area has already been deforested -- mostly for agriculture and illegal timber. Another 17 percent of the rainforest has been damaged.

Scientists said the main goal should be protecting existing plants and bodies of water rather than repairing damaged areas.

Marielos Pena-Claros is a professor at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. She said: "Restoration actions can be costly and complex to implement, so it's actually better to avoid deforestation, she said.

A separate study, released in the science publication Nature, said that some parts of the Amazon are releasing more carbon than they take in.

Luciana Gatti from Brazil's space research agency led the study. She said carbon emissions are highest in the southeastern part of the Amazon area, where there are high rates of deforestation. She said many trees there are dying from lack of rain and rising temperatures.

Im Dan Novak.

Stephen Eisenhammer and Oliver Griffin reported this story for Reuters. Dan Novak adapted for VOA Learning English. Mario Ritter, Jr. was the editor. _______________________________________

Words in This Story

critical  adj. extremely important

emission  n. the act of producing or sending out something (such as energy or gas) from a source

opportunity  n. a chance or situation in which something can be done or an aim can be reached

trajectory  n. often used figuratively to describe a process of change or development that leads toward a particular result

fate  n. the future that people or things will have

timber  n. trees that are grown in order to produce wood

restoration  n. the act or process of returning something to its original condition by repairing it, cleaning it, etc.

implement  v. to begin to do or use (something, such as a plan) : to make (something) active or effective


remaining of

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I fully support her.

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Seventy different wine grape varieties are grown in in Santa Barbara County's seven AVAs, encompassing 14,927 acres of vineyards. The average yield per acre is 3.36 tons, with an average price of...
As a deadly heat wave scorched the Pacific Northwest last month, overwhelming hospital emergency rooms in a region unaccustomed to triple-digit temperatures, doctors resorted to a grim but practical tool to save lives: human body bags filled with ice and water.

Officials at hospitals in Seattle and Renton, Washington, said that as more people arrived experiencing potentially fatal heatstroke, and with cooling catheters and even ice packs in short supply, they used the novel treatment to quickly immerse and cool several elderly people.

Zipping heatstroke patients into ice-filled body bags worked so well it could become a go-to treatment in a world increasingly altered by climate change, said Dr. Alex St. John, an emergency physician at UW Medicines Harborview Medical Center.

I have a feeling that were looking at many more days of extreme heat in the future, and this is likely to become more common, he said.

+3 Bill of the Month Podcast: A Hospital Charged $722.50 to Push Medicine Through an IV. Twice. Research shows, little stands in the way of hospitals charging through the roof, especially in a place like an emergency room. A National Nurses United report found that hospital markups have more than doubled since 1999, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Despite the macabre connotation of body bags, using them is a cheap, convenient and scalable way to treat patients in mass casualty emergencies caused by excessive heat, said Dr. Grant Lipman, a Stanford University professor of emergency medicine. He co-authored a pioneering case study documenting the use for heatstroke of what doctors call human remains pouches.

When people are this sick, youve got to cool them down fast, Lipman said.

Heatstroke is the most dangerous type of heat illness, a medical emergency that leads to death in up to a third of hospitalized patients. It occurs when the body overheats, either because of exertion in high temperatures or because of prolonged exposure to heat with no relief. The core body temperature rises to 104 degrees Fahrenheit or higher, which can damage the brain and other organs.

Heatstroke can be particularly dangerous for children and older people, whose bodies dont regulate temperature well. Also, elderly people may take medications that impair their ability to tolerate high temperatures.

Patients typically would be treated with strategically placed ice packs or misted with water and placed in front of huge fans. Some emergency room staffers immerse patients in large tubs of water or insert cooling catheters into the bodys large veins.

During emergencies, however, equipment, ice and time may all be in short supply.

St. John treated nearly two dozen heatstroke patients on June 28, the hottest period of a six-day heat wave, when temperatures in Seattle shot up to a record-breaking 108 degrees. That was more than hed seen at one time in his decade as a doctor, including working in hospitals in the Arizona desert, he said.

Similarly, the University of Washington Valley Medical Center in Renton saw more than 70 patients with heat-related illnesses, including three who were treated using body bags, said emergency department director Dr. Cameron Buck.

The large number who came in very quickly taxed the system, Buck said.

Overall, nearly 2,800 emergency department visits for heat illness were logged from June 25 through June 30 in a region that includes Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Alaska, including more than 1,000 on June 28 alone, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At least 112 deaths in Washington and 115 deaths in Oregon have been linked to the heat wave, state officials said.

Among the sickest patients St. John saw was a woman in her 70s who arrived at the Harborview ER on June 28 confused and weak, with a core body temperature of 104 degrees. A family member had discovered her ill at home. St. John said a colleague had mentioned the body bag technique just days earlier, so he gave it a try.

The treatment involves filling a body bag with a slurry of water and ice, putting the patient inside and zipping the bag just up to the armpits to allow access for medical equipment and close monitoring. The self-contained bag keeps the ice and water close to the patients skin.

Within several minutes of being placed into the bag, the womans temperature dropped to 100.4 degrees, just enough to get her out of that danger zone, St. John said. She was removed from the bag, dried off and placed on a gurney, allowing her bodys natural cooling abilities to take over. After being admitted to the hospital, she recovered fully, he said.

Hospital Trauma Centers Charge Enormous Fees to Treat Minor Injuries and Send People Home The care was ordinary. A hospital in Modesto, California, treated a 30-year-old man for shoulder and back pain after a car accident. He went h

As the effects of climate change lead to hotter temperatures in more places  including historically temperate zones where air conditioning isnt in wide use  using body bags to rapidly treat heat illness is a logical solution, said Lipman, who directs Stanfords Wilderness Medicine Fellowship and runs Global Outdoor Emergency Support, or GOES, which provides medical guidance for outdoor travelers.

Every hospital has body bags. Every hospital has ice machines, Lipman said.

He and colleagues described the treatment of an 87-year-old woman with cancer who was found unconscious in a parking lot during a heat wave in the San Francisco Bay Area, another region not accustomed to sustained high temperatures. It was July 2019, which was then designated the hottest month recorded on Earth. Using the ice-and-water-filled body bags, doctors cooled her temperature from 104 degrees to 101.1 within 10 minutes. She, too, fully recovered.

Immersing patients in cold water has long been the gold standard for treating athletes with heatstroke caused by exertion, Lipman said. Its the most efficient method, because water conducts heat away from the body about 25 times faster than air.

For now, the body bag treatment has been studied mostly in younger, healthier people, and some doctors worry about the effects of cold water on older people and whether the technique might induce shivering that actually raises body temperature. Lipman agrees further study is needed but said his experience has found the cooling benefits will outweigh any harm of shivering.

And what about patients who might shudder at the thought of being zipped into a body bag?

Because theyre generally so ill when they arrive and get treated so quickly, its unlikely theyre aware, Lipman said, adding: But youd need to ask them.
CalMatters reporter Laurel Rosenhall contributed to this story. This article was originally published by CalMatters.
Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
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They get that a whole-state strategy is key to winning Wisconsin.

While it is certainly true that the Democratic strongholds of Milwaukee and Madison provide a lot of the votes in Democratic primaries, and serve as the base for Democrats running in November, Wisconsin is a state with rural progressive and populist traditions where Democrats still have the potential to run well in farm country. In 2008, Democrat Barack Obama won 45% of the small-town and rural vote. That was more than enough support, when combined with his strong urban support, to secure a big win. Obama won almost half the state's counties in 2012, as did Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Tammy Baldwin.

In 2016, however, almost two dozen Wisconsin counties that had voted for Obama and Baldwin backed Trump and, in many cases, Johnson. Hillary Clinton won just 35% of the rural vote, losing counties that had voted for George McGovern, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis, as well as Obama.

In 2018, Democrats won a number of those counties back  in an election that saw Baldwin win, along with Gov. Tony Evers, Barnes, and state Treasurer Sarah Godlewski, another contender for the party's 2022 U.S. Senate nomination. In the 2020 presidential race, Biden improved on the Democratic numbers from 2016 just enough to carry the state. But there is still work to do.

That's something Barnes knows. And it will serve him well as a candidate in the primary and, if he faces Johnson in November of 2022, against an incumbent who has shown little interest in the challenges facing family farmers and rural communities.

John Nichols is associate editor of The Capital Times. jnichols@madison.com and @NicholsUprising. 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.
Wisconsins emerging role in space will be discussed Sept. 14 during a Wisconsin Technology Council luncheon in Madison. Panelists are Steve Ackerman, vice chancellor for research and graduate education and a professor in the UW-Madison Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences; and Eric Wilcots, dean of the College of Letters and Science and a professor of astronomy.

Renewed interest in space starts with unlocking the secrets of the universe. It is about better understanding our origins, and about making practical advances in science and technology that will improve life on Earth. Someday, our ability to aim tiny rockets at hurtling asteroids millions of miles away may save the human race from extinction.

Space is increasingly about commerce, as well. Space startups raised more than $7 billion in 2020, twice the total from two years earlier, according to figures from space analytics firm BryceTech. Communications, human life support, mining, tourism, reusable rockets, satellites, supply chains and energy are among investment targets.

Nearly 65 years ago, America was shocked into the space age when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the worlds first artificial satellite. A sense of national emergency was born because the Cold War compelled the nation to maintain a competitive edge, especially in the strategic arena of space flight.

Thanks in part to private moguls Branson, Bezos and Musk, a sense of opportunity is being rekindled while providing a timely reminder of the worlds need for scientific analysis and discovery. We may never take a joy ride into space, but we may all benefit from them.

Tom Still is the president of the Wisconsin Technology Council. Email: tstill@wisconsintechnologycouncil.com.
Dr. Ryan Westergaard, a chief medical officer with the health department, said in a media briefing last week that theres concern that college communities like Madison could see an increase in cases shortly after students return to campus this fall, a trend that was clearly noticeable last September.

Now is the ideal time for people who will be attending universities in the fall to get vaccinated so theyre fully protected by the time they come back, he said.

How it works

Universities will be establishing their own processes to let students share their vaccination status. The data received will be used to calculate if the institution has met the 70% threshold.

Sometime after Oct. 15, the deadline by which students must receive their full series of shots, schools that meet the goal will hold a drawing for the scholarship awards.

The number of scholarships each school receives depends on their share of the Systems enrollment. If a campus doesnt cross the 70% threshold, their share of the scholarships will be divvied up among the schools that did.

The estimated cost of an in-state student living on campus this school year ranges from just shy of $15,000 at UW-River Falls to about $20,000 at UW-Milwaukee.
HOUSE

EXPANDING FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION POWERS: Voting 221 for and 205 against, the House on Tuesday restored (HR 2668) the Federal Trade Commissions authority to take scammers and fraudsters to court to return stolen money to consumers. The FTC had such powers until an April Supreme Court ruling invalidated a key section of the FTC Act.

EXPEDITING EVACUATION OF AFGHAN ALLIES: Voting 407 for and 16 against, the House on Thursday streamlined (HR 3985) the visa process for Afghan allies seeking refuge in the United States and boosted the number of Afghans eligible for special immigrant visas by 8,000 people. The term Afghan allies refers to Afghan citizens who assisted U.S. forces during the 20-year-long war in Afghanistan as translators and in other capacities.
So when we talk about raising the minimum wage and the Fight for 15, you can see how important that is for Black Milwaukee given the very low wages that are earned by Black males, Levine told Wisconsin Watch. My estimate is that almost 40 to 45% of Black workers in Milwaukee would benefit from raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

For state Sen. Melissa Agard, D-Madison, the issue of raising the minimum wage is a moral one. Far too many people in the state who are working 40 hours a week  and who are disproportionately people of color  are still unable to take care of themselves and their families with dignity, she said.

On June 17, Agard announced she would reintroduce legislation to raise the minimum wage to $15 in Wisconsin. She said it is embarrassing and shameful that the minimum hourly wage in the state has been frozen at $7.25 since 2009.

Low-wage workers on public assistance

Many minimum-wage workers are forced to rely on public assistance programs, which cost the state billions. Addressing income inequality, in part by raising the minimum wage, could actually save the state money in respect to government-funded assistance programs because people would be able to better support themselves and their families, Agard said.
One of Kelchs final restoration projects involved a Travel Air 4000 flown by Lindbergh, according to a 2005 profile of Kelch, published in Vintage Airplane shortly after his death.

He was hooked on old biplanes from an early age before they were even old, Weeden said. With the success of his business he was able to start collecting vintage aircraft and he liked to concentrate on rarities, less-built ones, the unknown ones. He amassed a pretty good collection.

After Lois passed away in 2009, a trust was created to fund the operations of a nonprofit for the creation of the museum. Weeden was hired in 2014, followed by the purchase of property and a more than five-year fundraising effort. Fundraising continues for a third phase that would construct a grand entrance and connect the museum building to another building that houses offices, a library, archive and an event space.

It also holds the collection of the Wisconsin Aviation Hall of Fame, an estimated 22,000 photographs and negatives and 10,000 books and rare magazines.

The next generation

But the museum isnt just about celebrating the past. There are plans for movie nights, educational opportunities and a mission to attract younger people to the museum and its stories.
We are seeing some kinds of overuse that are happening and creating things for the water that might not inherently be good, Gardner said.

Gardner has also seen a dramatic increase in paddlers on the Snake River between Centennial Park and Pillar Falls. He estimates usage went from 25-50 boats in a given day six years ago to 300 or more canoes and kayaks on a typical day now.

Gardner worries about the increase in usage and how it could affect the water of the Snake River, and he really worries that if more people are going outdoors, there will be more situations where people could get injured or require a rescue.

But Gardner is overwhelmingly optimistic about more people going outdoors, and he traces that optimism directly back to interactions with thousands of clients.

Every single day on my raft trips we have a focus where we talk about humans relationship with the waterways, Gardner said. One hundred times a summer, any person who sits on my boat will hear about how we as humans have affected this place. And youre hearing it from someone who truly cares about it. As you listen to someone and see how passionate they are and you see these sites and see your experiences  you have some sort of change moment.
BOURBON COUNTY, Ky.  About 250 years ago, farmers looking for a way to make their surplus corn crop profitable decided to distill it. Today, that leftover grain has become a billion-dollar industry and a symbol of the Bluegrass States identity, economy and culture.

How bourbon came about is (what) ... the American spirit looks like: business, independence, freedom, a little bit of luck and a lot of perseverance, said Justin Thompson.

Thompson and his colleague Justin Sloan are the proprietors of The House of Bourbon, the worlds largest bourbon store, located on West Main Street in Lexington right across from Mary Todd Lincolns childhood home.

And right now, business is booming.

Thompson and Sloan started collecting rare and vintage bottles of bourbon 20 years ago, when the drink was out of favor. Then, four years ago, the state passed a law allowing the resale of distilled spirits and the duo opened their store, selling not just their stockpile but the history of the drink itself.

Bourbon is concocted from a strict formula. By law it has to be made with a minimum of 51% corn, aged in charred new oak barrels and stored at no more than 125 proof and bottled at no less than 80 proof, Thompson said.
For all that, firefighters efforts to outsmart and suppress wildfires is counterproductive if all it does is postpone fires in areas that will eventually burn, argued Richard Minnich, a professor in Riverside who studies fire ecology.

No matter how sophisticated the technology may be, the areas they can manage or physically impact things is small, he said. Were in over our heads. You can have all the technology in the world  fire control is impossible.

Working with wildfires is more realistic, he said, by taking advantage of patches that previously burned to channel the spread of new blazes.

Timothy Ingalsbee, a former federal firefighter who now heads Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, also said firefighters need to adopt a new approach when confronting the most dangerous wind-driven wildfires that leapfrog containment lines by showering flaming embers a mile or more ahead of the main inferno.

It's better to build more fire-resistant homes and devote scarce resources to protecting threatened communities while letting the fires burn around them, he said.
Opinion: Like it or not  and there are a lot of people who wont like this  the Idaho Freedom Foundation is the most powerful lobbying group in Idaho.

There isnt even a close second.
Once, as a child, it snowed where I lived. Youd have thought the world had come crashing to an end.

Our family lived in what many would consider a paradise, about five miles from the beach, and only about 150 miles north of the border. The last time snow had fallen in my town was four decades before I was born.

Nevertheless, there it was; a genuine skiff of snow outside my window, resting gently on our blooming roses.

The snow was fascinating enough, but there was more. As I looked out my window, I realized that in order for there to be snow, the temperature would be in the low 30s.

Never in my short life had I experienced temperatures so cold. I ran out to greet the morning in my usual outfit; a t-shirt, shorts, and a pair of those flimsy rubber beach thongs on my feet.

It was the first time genuinely cold weather smacked me in the face in a way I can still clearly recall six decades later. The air was sharp, and clean as polished silver. It made me aware of my own skin. I could feel it entering my lungs as I inhaled. I was so surprised at this that I inhaled rapidly a few times just to make sure I wasnt imagining it.

Well, I was six or seven years old, and for me this was a first. Cut me some slack.
The science is clear that vaccinations and masks help keep our communities safe from COVID-19, Secretary of Health and Human Resources Daniel Carey said in a statement released by his office. Due to the dedication, expertise, and close partnership of the Virginia Department of Health and the Virginia Department of Education, the commonwealths children and the individuals that help them learn will be protected by proven strategies, without a one-size-fits-all approach.

All schools in Virginia are required to make in-person instruction available to all students in the 2021-2022 school year, and physical distancing of at least 3 feet is recommended, but not to the extent that it would reduce in-person learning.

We know that students learn best in school buildings, and this guidance ensures that divisions have the flexibility and support they need to provide access to in-person learning 5 days a week, Secretary of Education Atif Qarni said in the release. Im grateful to all of the school administrators, educators and staff who have gone above and beyond to provide high quality instruction and support to students during this challenging time.

Gov. Ralph Northam continued to recommend strongly that every eligible Virginian get vaccinated.
New River Health District Director Noelle Bissell said not to read too much into the number of students reporting their vaccination status prior to the deadline.

I used to work at Shiffert Health Center at Virginia Tech, and even before the COVID vaccine, there were lots of other required vaccinations to enroll, she said. Students notoriously wait until the last minute to upload those forms.

Tech is not requiring employees to be vaccinated, although they are highly encouraged to get their shots. About 61% of employees so far have reported they are vaccinated.

Tech President Tim Sands said last month that an employee survey in April showed that nearly 90% of employees were vaccinated or were in the process of being vaccinated. He also said there was a possible legal complication in mandating the vaccine for employees.

We do not think we have the ability from a legal point of view to require the vaccinations for the employees, especially for a sub-population of classified staff who are protected by a different set of rules and regulations, Sands said. We didnt feel we could have one group among the employees have a mandate and the others not.
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

Jordan's health ministry announced Saturday that COVID-19 vaccines will now be available for children aged 12 and above.

The ministry "has decided to lower the COVID-19 vaccination age to 12 years, starting from Sunday July 25" and without requiring an appointment, the ministry said in a statement on its Facebook page on Saturday.

"Vaccination will be optional, and those under 18 will be able to receive the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine with the consent of their guardian," the statement added.

Jordan, a country of 10 million people, has officially recorded more than 763,900 coronavirus cases, including over 9,900 deaths, since the start of its outbreak.

Some 1.9 million people have been fully inoculated against COVID-19, while 2.7 million have received an initial vaccine dose.

The United States, Canada and the European Union have already authorised the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for 12-year-olds.

Amman said last month it had concluded several agreements to obtain a total of around 12 million COVID-19 vaccine doses, and planned to order five million additional jabs.

The country last weekend received half a million Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine doses from Washington.

Authorities are pushing the population to take up the vaccines, and have adopted restrictive or punitive measures targeting those who fail to do so.

The measures include requiring unvaccinated or partially vaccinated public sector employees to present a negative COVID-19 test twice a week, and prohibiting the issuance or renewal of work and residency permits for those who are not fully vaccinated.

Explore further US orders 200 mn more Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine doses

 2021 AFP
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on Sunday said the country had "largely" passed the peak of its third coronavirus wave and eased restrictions, including a ban on alcohol sales.

The African country worst hit by the virus went back into a partial lockdown last month to stem a surge in COVID-19 cases widely attributed to the highly transmissible Delta variant.

Ramaphosa on Sunday said the average number of daily new infections had stood around 12,000 over the past week, a 20 percent drop from the previous week.

"The latest figures suggest that we have largely passed the peak of the third wave of infections, although there are areas in the country where we still need to be concerned," the president said in an address to the nation.

While new daily cases have declined steadily in the most populous Gauteng provincethe third wave's epicentreinfections are still rising in the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and Western Cape provinces, he cautioned.

But Ramaphosa still announced the easing of restrictions on gatherings, in-country travel and alcohol sales with almost immediate effect.

A nighttime curfew remains in place and face masks are still mandatory, he added.

Schools closed for the winter vacation are also permitted to reopen as scheduled on Monday.

To date South Africa has recorded over 2.3 million coronavirus casesmore than a third of all recorded cases in Africaof which at least 69,775 have been fatal.

Ailing businesses

Inoculation against COVID-19 has been sluggish and hit by several setbacks, including the scrapping of AstraZeneca shots after a study suggested the formula was less effective against the local Beta variant.

Just over 2.3 million people have been fully vaccinated since February out of a 2022 target of 40 millionwhich would be around 67 percent of the population.

Ramaphosa said the inoculation programme had "made huge strides", with over 240,000 jabs administered each week day, up from around 100,000 last month.

He vowed to increase vaccination capacity and said people aged between 18 and 34 would be eligible for a jab from September.

Ramaphosa also extended financial support to those made vulnerable by coronavirus restrictions, and said new measures would be implemented to help businesses recover from an unrelated bout of unrest and looting this month.

The unrestsparked by the jailing of South Africa's ex-president Jacob Zumaleft thousands of businesses destroyed and jobs at risk in an economy already in recession before the pandemic hit.

"The effect of the recent violence on investor confidence is a great threat to our recovery," Ramaphosa said, adding that troops deployed to quell the riots would remain in place for the time being.

Explore further South Africa keeps most COVID curbs to battle third wave

 2021 AFP
A man cools his head with an ice bag waiting to be vaccinated against Covid-19 at the Isabel Zendal Hospital in Madrid, Spain, Tuesday, July 20, 2021. Spain is trying to stamp out a new wave of COVID-19 among its youth thanks to a robust vaccination program that is widely supported. Spain like the rest of the European Union got off to a slow start to compared to the United States and Britain when the first vaccines were released. But it has quickly made up ground once deliveries by drug makers started flowing. Credit: AP Photo/Olmo Calvo

Like many of Spain's 20-somethings, Sergio Rosado has seen the new, more contagious coronavirus strain strike those too eager to cut loose when authorities rolled back health restrictions with vaccinations picking up pace.

But the 22-year-old student shares the country's widespread public trust in the vaccines, and Rosado plans to get his shots as soon as his turn comes.

"I have friends that have caught COVID-19 at big parties. Lots of people I know have caught it," Rosado said. "I did go out too, but to places without many people and in controlled spaces, and with face masks."

Spain, like its fellow European Union members, got off to a slow start in administering shots compared to Britain and the United States after regulators approved the first vaccines. But once deliveries by drugmakers started flowing to meet demand, the country quickly made up ground.

After only fully vaccinating 10% of its adults from January until the end of April, now nearly 54% of its adults, around 25 million people, have received two vaccine jabs, making Spain one of the inoculation leaders in the 27-nation European Union.

The program is built on Spain's efficient public health care system, a well-ordered vaccination plan that stuck strictly to age groups, and a populace confident in the safety of childhood immunizations and therefore largely resistant to skepticism about COVID-19 jabs.

People queue to be vaccinated against COVID-19 at the Isabel Zendal Hospital in Madrid, Spain, Tuesday, July 20, 2021. Spain is trying to stamp out a new wave of COVID-19 among its youth thanks to a robust vaccination program that is widely supported. Spain like the rest of the European Union got off to a slow start to compared to the United States and Britain when the first vaccines were released. But it has quickly made up ground once deliveries by drug makers started flowing. Credit: AP Photo/Olmo Calvo

"Vaccination forms part of our genome," Amos Garcia, president of the Spanish Association of Vaccinology, told The Associated Press. "Our professionals have always believed strongly in the benefits of vaccines. We have always strongly encouraged children from a very young age to get their vaccines."

He said general vaccination rates for children in Spain were over 95%.

Spain's public health care system, which has suffered budget cuts in the past decade, buckled last year under the first wave of the virus, which has claimed at least 81,000 lives in the country.

But fears that the health system wouldn't be up to the job of managing a massive vaccine rollout proved unfounded. Eligibility information was widely disseminated, and people didn't hesitate to sign up when it was their age group's turn. Vaccination lines generally moved swiftly, and unlike France, there was no paperwork to get in the way when people went to their local clinics or mass vaccination points.

People queue to be vaccinated against COVID-19 at the Wanda Metropolitano stadium, Madrid, Spain, March 30, 2021. Spain is trying to stamp out a new wave of COVID-19 among its youth thanks to a robust vaccination program that is widely supported. Spain like the rest of the European Union got off to a slow start to compared to the United States and Britain when the first vaccines were released. But it has quickly made up ground once deliveries by drug makers started flowing. Credit: AP Photo/Olmo Calvo

It also helped that no politician, not even on the fringes of the right or left, sowed doubts about the vaccines. The only political issue regarding the vaccines was when they weren't arriving fast enough, and regional health authorities in charge of administering them demanded more quicker.

"This is not a question of progressives or of conservatives. It is a public health question," Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez told MSNBC while on a visit last week to the United States.

Unlike Germany or France, Spain doesn't have a big anti-vaccine movement. More than 90% of Spain's public health workers have been vaccinated, compared with 42% of public health workers in France.

So while France and Greece have had to pressure skeptics and procrastinators into getting their shots by making vaccines mandatory for people working certain jobs, such as paramedics and nursing home workers, Spaniards have so far needed very little prodding.

Hundreds of people queue to be vaccinated against COVID-19 at the Enfermera Isabel Zendal Hospital in Madrid, Spain, Tuesday, July 7, 2021. Spain is trying to stamp out a new wave of COVID-19 among its youth thanks to a robust vaccination program that is widely supported. Spain like the rest of the European Union got off to a slow start to compared to the United States and Britain when the first vaccines were released. Credit: AP Photo/Olmo Calvo

In methodically working its way from the most elderly downward, Spain achieved its first goal: stopping the most vulnerable from dying. But the emphasis on vaccines as the salvation could also have contributed to Spain's young letting down their guards as curfews and face mask requirements were lifted, just as the delta variant arrived.

The result is that, despite its smooth vaccine rollout, Spain is currently one of Europe's hot spots for new infections. Spain is reporting more than 25,000 new cases a day now compared with 3,400 a day a month ago, according to Our World in Data.

"A month ago, when we let go of the most of the restrictions, we didn't call it 'Freedom Day' like England, but basically it was a fairly big move toward more freedom," Rafael Bengoa, former Director for Health Systems at WHO and one of Spain's leading public health experts, told the AP.

People protect themselves from the sun while waiting to be vaccinated against COVID-19 at the Isabel Zendal Hospital in Madrid, Spain, Tuesday, July 20, 2021. Spain is trying to stamp out a new wave of COVID-19 among its youth thanks to a robust vaccination program that is widely supported. Spain like the rest of the European Union got off to a slow start to compared to the United States and Britain when the first vaccines were released. But it has quickly made up ground once deliveries by drug makers started flowing. Credit: AP Photo/Olmo Calvo

A worker from the Madrid Medical Emergency Service vaccinates a man against COVID-19 at the Wanda Metropolitano stadium, Madrid, Spain, March 30, 2021. Spain is trying to stamp out a new wave of COVID-19 among its youth thanks to a robust vaccination program that is widely supported. Spain like the rest of the European Union got off to a slow start to compared to the United States and Britain when the first vaccines were released. But it has quickly made up ground once deliveries by drug makers started flowing. Credit: AP Photo/Olmo Calvo

A worker from the Madrid Medical Emergency Service takes the temperature of a woman who is going to be vaccinated against COVID-19 at the Wanda Metropolitano stadium, Madrid, Spain, March 30, 2021. Spain is trying to stamp out a new wave of COVID-19 among its youth thanks to a robust vaccination program that is widely supported. Spain like the rest of the European Union got off to a slow start to compared to the United States and Britain when the first vaccines were released. But it has quickly made up ground once deliveries by drug makers started flowing. Credit: AP Photo/Olmo Calvo

People queue to be vaccinated against COVID-19 at the Isabel Zendal Hospital in Madrid, Spain, Tuesday, July 20, 2021. Spain is trying to stamp out a new wave of COVID-19 among its youth thanks to a robust vaccination program that is widely supported. Spain like the rest of the European Union got off to a slow start to compared to the United States and Britain when the first vaccines were released. But it has quickly made up ground once deliveries by drug makers started flowing. Credit: AP Photo/Olmo Calvo

Hundreds of people queue to be vaccinated against Covid-19 at the Isabel Zendal Hospital in Madrid, Spain, Tuesday, July 20, 2021. Spain is trying to stamp out a new wave of COVID-19 among its youth thanks to a robust vaccination program that is widely supported. Spain like the rest of the European Union got off to a slow start to compared to the United States and Britain when the first vaccines were released. But it has quickly made up ground once deliveries by drug makers started flowing. Credit: AP Photo/Olmo Calvo

Hundreds of people queue to be vaccinated against COVID-19 at the Enfermera Isabel Zendal Hospital in Madrid, Spain, Tuesday, July 7, 2021. Spain is trying to stamp out a new wave of COVID-19 among its youth thanks to a robust vaccination program that is widely supported. Spain like the rest of the European Union got off to a slow start to compared to the United States and Britain when the first vaccines were released. But it has quickly made up ground once deliveries by drug makers started flowing. Credit: AP Photo/Olmo Calvo

That is one of the reasons that we have the present epidemiological situation."

"If you want to control the pandemic in this situation, you have to be doing both the traditional public health restrictions plus the vaccinations," Bengoa explained.

In response, some regions have put new restrictions back into place, such as a nightly curfew in the region that includes Barcelona.

Spain is counting on its vaccine program to make quick inroads with people under age 40 and it seems that the desire to get vaccinated hasn't fallen victim to a generation gap. Spain's government polling bureau said last week that nearly 90% of respondents under 35 said they wanted to get vaccinated.

Still, Bengoa thinks virus restrictions will remain in place for a while.

"We have to explain to the population that this is here to stay," he said. "We will control it. But ... you're going to have to live with a virus that is more dangerous than the flu."

 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
"We lost this transmission and it would improve water pressure in the neighborhood and give us more robustness to our distribution system if we can get this opened up again," Ross Mollenhauer, Missoula Utility Project manager, said to the city's Public Works committee on July 14.

Mollenhauer said the city is looking to pay for it through the state's revolving fund and that the bid was 25% over an engineering estimate on the project.

Chip seal work to conclude in August

Missoula's annual chip seal program is underway across town.

Chip sealing is the process of using oil and then adding chips, or aggregate, to the road to seal it. After a period of two to three weeks, the rock chips are then swept up by a street sweeper.

A Missoula news release said the process delays reconstruction and reduces pot holes. This is the 34th year of the program, which began in 1987.

The process is a way to extend the life of asphalt streets to avoid having to tear up the road and replace it more often, which is expensive. The project, which will cover around 100 blocks in the Garden City, should be done around Aug. 3.

Jordan Hansen covers news and local government for the Missoulian. Shout at him on Twitter @jordyhansen or send him an email at Jordan.Hansen@Missoulian.com

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With a multi-ethnic population of about 300,000, the former French colony is made up of five archipelagos with a total of 118 islands. Since 2004, it has autonomous status, defined as an overseas country within the republic which is governed freely and democratically, by its representatives.

But Macron is still its head of state, and the long-awaited visit is part of what his office calls his Tour de France aimed at reaffirming our proximity to overseas territories.

For historian Jean-Marc Regnault of the University of French Polynesia, this trip is linked to Frances determination to show its power in the Indo-Pacific, and its long-term resource objectives.

The 4.8 million-square-kilometer (1.85 million-square-mile) Exclusive Economic Zone of French Polynesia has significant fishing and mineral resources, and authorities are seeking U.N. permission to extend the territorys continental shelf.

France is trying to strike back at obvious Chinese lust for Pacific resources, said Regnault, who wrote a recent book called The Indo-Pacific and the New Silk Roads.

He pointed to a French military operation in the region last month, when Rafale warplanes and other military jets zipped from Europe to French Polynesia in a show of strength.
It is indisputably essential to modern life, now more than ever when you consider green energy essentials like electric cars, solar panels and wind turbines. This is being written from atop the Richest Hill on Earth, where theres more copper remaining than has been mined over the past 120 years. Weaning ourselves from fossil fuels means more and more demand for copper and other metals. We are entering what amounts to a new electrification of America, and just as the first depended on Buttes copper, this phase depends on metals and minerals that must be mined. But the mining must be done responsibly.
The claim: China announced an end to its one-child policy and will now allow couples to have three children

China's decades-long child-limit restrictions on couples have generated controversy and misinformation on social platforms.

In 1980, China introduced a one-child policy in an attempt to slow its surging population growth. The government limited most urban couples to one child and allowed two children for rural families if their firstborn was a girl.

But one viral social media post suggests that the nationwide one-child limit in China recently came to an end and that couples can now have up to three children.

"#BreakingNews The Chinese government has announced an end to the one-child policy and will allow couples to have up to 3 children because of the aging majority and lack of young workers," reads a screenshot of a tweet shared to Instagram on May 31.

Fact check: Photo misleads about US women's national team's Olympic demonstration in Tokyo

The Instagram post has more than 1,300 likes and was shared by Conflict Collective News, which told USA TODAY via email that "their intern should have clarified it more but technically nothing he said was untrue."

This claim is misleading. China said it would allow married couples to have up to three children, putting an end to its existing two-child policy.

China's one-child policy ended in 2015

While it's true that China is now allowing couples to have three children, the government ended its one-child policy years ago, not recently, as the post suggests.

On May 31, China announced married couples could now have up to three children as it deals with an aging population, which is adding strains on the country's economy and society, the Associated Press reported.

State-run Xinhua News Agency said a ruling party meeting led by President Xi Jinping introduced the measure to "actively deal with the aging population" and agreed that "implementing the policy of one couple can have three children and supporting measures are conducive to improving Chinas population structure.

Story continues

However, China's one-child policy ended in 2015, and it was replaced with a two-child limit per couple. This change did not happen recently.

The one-child restriction was removed "to improve the balanced development of (China's) population," Beijing's ruling Communist Party said in an October 2015 statement.

China says the one-child policy led to 400 million fewer births and helped millions out of poverty due to a decreased demand for resources. Researchers, however, say the birthrate would have declined regardless due to rising education levels, resulting in more women in the workforce, USA TODAY reported.

Fact check: Viral image depicts 2018 protest in France about fuel tax hikes

Data from the National Bureau of Statistics shows China has a population of 1.41 billion, with the number of births declining. Couples say they are put off by the high costs of raising children, disruptions to work and the need to look after elderly parents, according to the Associated Press.

Our rating: Missing context

The claim that China announced an end to its one-child policy and will now allow couples to have three children is MISSING CONTEXT, because without additional details it could be misleading. China recently announced married couples could have three children, up from its previous two-child limit. China's one-child policy ended in 2015, not recently.

Our fact-check sources:

Thank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or electronic newspaper replica here.

Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: Couples in China can now have 3 children, up from 2
Morrows Chapel United Methodist Church, 1536 Brawley School Road, Mooresville, will host its annual revival July 27-29 at 6:30 each evening under the church arbor, weather permitting. This years theme will be Come Lets Worship Together.

On Aug. 1, the church will celebrate camp meeting Family and Friends Day during the 11 a.m. worship service.

Different speakers will bring the message during the four days of special services.

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On July 27, the Rev. Will Greene of Faith UMC in Mooresville will preach. Greene, who was born in Santee, South Carolina, was appointed pastor of Faith UMC in July 2019. He and his wife, Dr. Tamikia Greene, have been married for more than 20 years and, in 2006, they founded the Illumination Youth Empowerment Corporation, which seeks to empower the youth and young adults of the community.

The Rev. Dr. Anthony Davis will bring the message on July 28. Davis grew up in Chester, South Carolina, and Charlotte and graduated from West Mecklenburg High School. Davis is the pastor of Reeves Temple AME Zion Church in Davidson, where he has served for four years. He is married to RonJent C. Davis, and they have four children.
The thing that is so positive about the Shriners is its ability to help children that have been injured or have a debilitating disease that compromises their ability to stand, walk or run, Stamey said. With the help of the Shriners Childrens Hospital, these children have the chance to be seen by some of the best medical professionals in the nation that can look at treatment options/surgery to get them to the place where they can have close to normal life. They do this with no cost or very little cost to the patient. The Shriners, through their fundraisers and support to the hospital, is the reason this can happen.
While the extent to which mass incarceration helped bring about the eventual decline in crime rates is contested, it almost certainly had at least a modest deterrent effect, Guze writes. The costs of achieving that modest level of deterrence, however, were extremely high. It required an enormous increase in public funding. . . and it added considerably to the woes of the poor and black communities that were already carrying so much of the burden of the crime wave.

That last point underlines why fighting crime effectively tends to produce tremendous benefits for African-Americans, by the way. It isnt just that blacks account for a disproportionate share of the incarcerated population  and thus of former inmates who may struggle to get work or otherwise reenter society. It is also that blacks make up a disproportionate share of crime victims.

In 2019, about two whites out of 100,000 were victims of a reported crime. For blacks, the rate was 17 out of 100,000. After decades of decline, homicides and other violent crimes are surging right now in many cities, including several here in our state. Guze argues that black and poor North Carolinians will pay a heavy price unless state and local officials get out ahead of the problem.
'SPECIAL DAY'

Scott Steinhardt, Butte Stake president, was on hand to pitch in.

"We have an ongoing relationship with the Butte Rescue Mission," he said. "About three years ago, we had a fast in our stake. We invited our members to go without two meals, and donate the money they would have spent on the meals. We collected the money and donated $25,000 to the rescue mission."

Then, the next year, the church's presidency made a humanitarian donation of $20,000 to the Mission. And last year, during COVID, when the stake's congregations were not meeting in person, its Bishop's Storehouse program raised livestock and grew crops which were donated to the Mission and to Butte's Food Bank, among others.

"But part of our ministry is also assisting with projects like this," Steinhardt said as drills whirred and hammers thunked behind him.

"This is a special day for us," Steinhardt said. "July 24 is our church's Pioneer Day, commemorating the July 24 (in 1847) when the church's first pioneers entered the Salt Lake Valley and our prophet Brigham Young said, 'This is the place.'

"This is our way of celebrating Pioneer Day this year."

MISSION, MINISTRY
Protect voting rights

It has been said that freedom isnt free. Many Americans made the ultimate sacrifice for democracy. John Lewis said, "Freedom is not a state; it is an act." What acts are you willing to do to protect your right to vote and have your vote counted? Are you willing to fight? Are you willing to do as John Lewis admonished to get into good trouble? If we dont fight for voter rights now, what freedom be taken away next? If we do nothing, nothing will change.

Congress hasnt done anything to protect our voting rights. It is not just our right to show up at the polls. It is our right to choose who counts our votes and to have our votes make a difference. Our vote is our voice. Do we want recounts that are done by unqualified people who ruin our ballots, destroy our voting machines, and perform never ending fraudits? This ruins the integrity of our elections more than just a few fraudulent votes.

Montana has thrown out same day registration and voting, changed the hours some polls are open, closed some polling places, tightened identification needed to vote, and made it more difficult for absentee voting. This affects rural Montanans, and the disabled and elderly. If we cant get to the poll, we cant vote. This doesnt just affect national elections; it affects our ability to elect our local and state officials.
It would be nice to build my own, he said.

A hovercraft is an air cushion amphibious vehicle capable of travelling over land, mud, water, ice and most other terrain. They use blowers to produce high volumes of air below the hull to float above the running surface.

Dan Heidel of Cincinnati, Ohio skipped out on the club cruise on the Mississippi as he was working the bugs out of his hovercraft. The retired engineer said that he had always enjoyed playing with hovercrafts but had bought his first one in 2007. The craft he brought to Muscatine was previously owned by the Hamilton County, Ohio rescue squad. Heidel said he had bought it at an auction after the squad decided not to keep it. He set about restoring the craft to a more original form.

It is a rescue craft, he said. It is slow in the water. It is used to pull people out of the water. Its got a Mazda rotary engine from the 1980s in it. Most have lawnmower or snow blower engines in them.

Heidel said his enjoyment of hovercraft comes from the technical challenge of doing the work on them. He said owners of hovercrafts do most of the work themselves, as hiring someone to work on a hovercraft is expensive.
Starting in the 1930s, dentists observed people who drank water with naturally-occurring fluoride seemed to have fewer cavities, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. Scientists started researching fluoride, a mineral released from rocks, to try to find out if it could safely be added to water to protect people from tooth decay.

In 1945, Grand Rapids, Mich., became the first U.S. city to add fluoride to drinking water. The move paid off when five years later researchers learned that Grand Rapids children had significantly fewer cavities than did children from surrounding communities, the CDC reported. Other U.S. cities started adding low levels of fluoride to boost the natural levels to a standard set by the government.

The city of Iowa City has been fluoridating drinking water since the 1960s, now adding fluoride until the natural levels of about .25 milligrams per liter reach .7 milligrams per liter, said Craig Meacham, assistant water superintendent for the city of about 75,000.

The city has flow-controlled pumps, so if the water flow reduces, the fluoride feed slows down. Water operators test the raw drinking water and finished drinking water for fluoride every day. The city also sends a monthly water sample to the State Hygienic Laboratory in Coralville so the local tests can be verified for accuracy.
Telkoms share price fell by over 8% on Friday after the company announced its CEO, Sipho Maseko, will step down.

Telkom said in a SENS that Maseko will step down on 30 June 2022 and that it is in the process to appoint a successor.

Maseko joined Telkom on 1 April 2013 at a time when the organisation faced severe challenges and helped to turn the business around.

Under his leadership, Telkom evolved from a traditional fixed business to a company with a range of businesses, including mobile, IT, wholesale infrastructure business, and a masts and tower portfolio.

Telkoms mobile business grew to become the third-largest in South Africa during Masekos tenure, with more than 15 million customers generating R20 billion revenue.

He also helped oversee Telkoms migration from ADSL to fibre, and the number of homes connected with fibre now exceeds the number of homes connected with copper.

In a letter to staff, Maseko said his mission was clear when he took the reins eights years ago  we must save the company, get it to be sustainable, and able to hold its own in the future relative to its peers.

Im broadly satisfied that this mandate has been fulfilled. Today, Telkom is a stable company. We have de-risked our business, and we have a very clear strategy for each of the business units, he said.

We are on a clear and definite path to unlock value for our shareholders, indeed all our stakeholders.

So, this is the right time for me to step aside and make way for a new leader able to take Telkom to even greater heights.

The market did not like the news of Masekos departure. Telkoms share price fell by over 8% on the news  from R44.70 to around R41.00 per share.

Telkom share price

The image below shows the Telkom share price at 13:00 on Friday.
While South Africas Covid-19 vaccine drive started poorly, it quickly caught up to the best in the world.

Speaking to the Sunday Times, Business for South Africa chair Martin Kingston said many things had to come together for the vaccine rollout to ramp up the way it did.

My sense is that over the last several weeks, weve seen it come together very effectively, he said.

As vaccinations in South Africa have ramped up, Kingston said that vaccination rates per capita are now comparable with the best in the world.

Kingston predicted that the country could be administering 420,000 jabs a day by mid-September.

However, he said that reaching this target will require an uninterrupted supply of vaccines and simplified registration at vaccination sites.

According to Kingston, the increase in vaccination rates is largely due to the public and private sectors pooling their resources.

He said that there is now clear acknowledgement that the rollout will only be effective if South Africa harnesses all its resources in a more coordinated way.

Acting health minister Mmamoloko Kubayi-Ngubane announced on Friday that South Africa is administering over 250,000 vaccine doses per day during the week.

Kubayi-Ngubane also said that government aims to surpass President Cyril Ramaphosas target of 300,000 vaccines per day and inoculate at least 400,000 people per day.

Professor Helen Rees, executive director of the Wits Reproductive Health and HIV Institute, said that many countries experienced problems with the start of their vaccine rollouts.

If you compare SAs start-up to other countries, it hasnt been too bad, she said.

The question will be, can our supply keep up?

Rees said the most important thing we can do in South Africa is ensuring as many people get vaccinated as quickly as possible.

She said that the impact of widespread vaccination coverage is evident in countries like the United Kingdom.

Even as the UK experiences its own third wave of coronavirus infections driven by the highly infectious Delta variant, its number of hospitalisations and deaths have decreased substantially compared to other waves.

However, professor Francois Venter, Ezintsha director at Wits health sciences, told the Sunday Times that its important not to lose sight of how many people over 60 are being vaccinated.

There is a lot to be celebrated in our vaccine rollout. But we need to ask how many of those being vaccinated are over 60, Venter stated.

He said that the number of people over 60 getting vaccinated remains an important measure as they are at greater risk than younger people.

Vaccinating one 60-year-old is more important than vaccinating two 35-year-olds, said Venter.

Venter is not convinced that South Africa can vaccinate 35 million people by the end of the year.

Even if the country could hit the target, he said it wouldnt be that great if most vaccines were administered to people younger than 50.

The head of the Centre for Social Science Research, Jeremy Seekings, and economics professor Nicoli Nattrass  both at the University of Cape Town  said they are worried about South Africas slow usage of its Johnson & Johnson vaccines.

Seekings and Nattrass said the vaccines have an expiry date, and the government said it hasnt even used half of its stores after more than a month.

They said that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine should have been used in rural areas.

We dont understand why it has been used for special occupational groups, i.e. public sector workers, stated Seekings and Nattrass.

They also warned that at the pace of the vaccination rollout last week, the government will only achieve its goal of vaccinating the adult population of South Africa in early 2023  not in early 2022 as originally promised.
American Canyon is requiring residents and businesses to up their water conservation efforts from 10% to 20%, though it's not yet ready to impose penalties.

There is really a call to action tonight. Were really hoping our customers can buy into the program and help us achieve our goal, City Manager Jason Holley told the City Council on Tuesday.

While all five Napa County cities are taking water conservation measures, each is in a different situation when it comes to water sources. The south county city of American Canyon has no local reservoir and relies on State Water Project supplies that have seen a drastic cutback.

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American Canyon residents should reduce turf irrigation. Businesses should eliminate turf irrigation that uses drinking water, a city report said. Some watering is done with recycled water.

Watering yards or washing vehicles and equipment between noon and 6 p.m. is prohibited. So is filling a new swimming pool, spa or pond, washing sidewalks and driveways and irrigating in such a way that water runs down the gutter.

American Canyon will delay imposing punitive measures such as fines and surcharges to enforce the required 20% cut. The city believes it can work cooperatively with citizens to reduce demand, a city report said.
For the first time, the Vatican published information about its real estate holdings. It turned out that he owns more than 5,000 properties, according to Reuters.

This information was contained in two documents: the consolidated financial statement of the Holy See for 2020 and the first ever public budget of the Office of Church Property of the Apostolic See (APSA).

APSA, a kind of general accountancy, manages real estate and investments, pays salaries, and acts as a purchasing and human resources department.

The two documents, with an unprecedented number of pie charts, graphs and maps, are 30 pages long and show that the Vatican owns 4,051 properties in Italy and about 1,120 abroad, in addition to its diplomatic missions around the world.

Only about 14% of Italian real estate in the Vatican is rented at market rates, while the rest were at reduced rates, many by church employees. About 40% of the buildings are schools, monasteries and hospitals.

The Vatican has invested in real estate in prime locations in London, Geneva, Lausanne and Paris. One building in London's South Kensington area resulted in huge losses after it was bought by the Vatican's secretariat of state as an investment in 2014.
Armenia's Journalists Union condemns actions of National Security Service against journalist Nairi Hokhikyan

US orders 24 Russian diplomats to leave country by Sep. 3

Armenia ruling party MP on his future activities in parliament

Armenia justice minister recalled from leave

Officials from 73 countries to attend inauguration of Iran's President-elect

France Ambassador to relatives of Armenian POWs: Captives shouldn't be used to exert pressure on Armenia

Aurora Prize Laureate Kyaw Hla Aung passes away

Bus transporting tourists overturns in Turkey, leaving 3 dead

Armenia MOD: Azerbaijani army opens fire at Yeraskh and Kut villages with firearms of various calibers

Relatives of Armenian POWs from Armenia's Shirak Province submit documents to France Ambassador

'Armenia' bloc MP: We will apply to Constitutional Court to demand restoration of deputies' parliamentary immunity

Armenia PM congratulates Alen Simonyan on being elected parliamentary speaker

Russia's Putin congratulates Nikol Pashinyan

Armenia MP Hakob Simidyan appointed Advisor to PM

Armenia Armed Forces Combat Readiness Department chief dismissed

Digest: Armenia MPs discuss parliament speaker's candidacy, Armenian soldier found dead in Artsakh

His Holiness Karekin II sends congratulatory message to Nikol Pashinyan

Armenia's ruling Civil Contract faction elects Alen Simonyan parliamentary speaker in the absence of opposition blocs

Lilit Makunts appointed Armenia's Ambassador to the United States of America

Armenia Gegharkunik Province ex-governor appointed territorial administration and infrastructure minister

Armenian ruling party MP: Security comes first, and Armenia will always be a sovereign state

Opposition MP: Even if there is pause in the current situation, it can't help ensure long-term peace for Armenia

Dollar and euro continue to go up in Armenia

Karabakh: Remains of another 4 Armenian servicemen found in and removed from Varanda

Armenia's new parliament convenes special session today

Kazakhstan President congratulates Armenia's Pashinyan

Second secret ballot for election of Speaker of 8th convocation of Armenia National Assembly being held

Karabakh President congratulates Nikol Pashinyan on being appointed Armenia's premier

Argentina President congratulates Armenia PM

Relatives of Armenian POWs gather near parliament building, demand inclusion of captives' issue in agenda

Armenia Gegharkunik Province governor sacked

Armenia President signs decisions on appointing Deputy Prime Minister and 3 ministers

Armenia Investigative Committee: Soldier who left military unit dies from explosion of illegally kept grenade

Armenia Prosecutor General receives Russia Ambassador, Armenian POWs' issue discussed

Opposition 'Armenia' bloc MP: Government has forgotten about motion that ex-PM had filed for Nikol Pashinyan

Coronavirus in Armenia: 2 new deaths

Armenia first deputy minister of labor and social affairs sacked

Armenian PM recommends that President appoint Suren Papikyan Deputy PM and Arshak Karapetyan defense minister

Armenia PM dismisses first deputy defense minister Arshak Karapetyan

Nikol Pashinyan appointed Prime Minister of Armenia

Body of 22-year-old soldier found in Artsakh

President: For preserving statehood in Armenia, it is necessary to overcome the existing split

Young Liberals of Australian Capital Territory recognizes Armenian, Greek, Assyrian Genocides

Azerbaijan refutes information about opening of air corridor over Armenia

Armenia's new parliament discusses candidates running for speaker

Azerbaijani authorities sentence 2 captured Armenians to 20 years in prison

Deputies of newly elected Armenian parliament take oath

Safoian-founded SADA named Google Cloud Partner of the Year for third year in a row

Oil is getting cheaper

Newly elected parliament session kicks off in Armenia

Hackers paralyze vaccination record in Italy

California: 4 people die in a helicopter crash

YouTube suspends Sky News Australia channel amid COVID-19 disinformation

New surge in COVID-19 incidence expected in Canada

No COVID-19 new cases reported in Artsakh

Armenian president sends congratulatory message to his Swiss counterpart

Trump to return $ 1 million for taxes on skyscraper in Chicago

Iran rejects allegations of involvement in attack on tanker in Arabian Sea

Israeli FM discusses attack on chemical tanker with US Secretary of State

Magnitude 5.7 earthquake struck off the coast of Greece

Over 200,000 people held 3rd series of protests in France

Prohibition on eviction of insolvent persons expires in US

229 new cases of COVID-19 reported in Armenia per day

U.S. Senate debates $ 1 trillion infrastructure bill

Azerbaijanis open fire in direction of Yeraskh at car with food

UN urges countries to redouble their efforts to protect planet

US military assists damage Israeli tanker with oil products

US approves deal to supply Israel with 18 attack helicopters

Armenia acting Deputy PM dismisses advisor

Iran FM addresses UN Secretary-General about West's breach of JCPOA

Premier of Kurdistan Region of Iraq condemns attack on Kurdish family in Turkey

Karabakh reports 2 cases of coronavirus

Russian peacekeepers say they have ensured movement of over 2,000 cars in Karabakh

Putin confirms provision of assistance to Turkey to put out forest fires

Armenian soldier Aram Atasyan who was severely wounded on July 23 transferred to hospital room

Armenia Supreme Judicial Council acting chairman tours general jurisdiction courts in provinces

Adam Schiff attaches importance to increasing the role of OSCE Minsk Group and development of US-Armenia relations

US Congresswoman calls on Azerbaijan to withdraw from Armenia territory immediately and stop violence

Armenian political scientist on Iran's nuclear program, Meghri road and Armenia's future actions

Greece releases terrorist who killed a politician

Condor launches flights to and from Frankfurt and Yerevan

Meteorite falls in western Turkey

243 new cases of coronavirus reported in Armenia

Turkish and Afghan defense ministers discuss security of Kabul International Airport

Republican Party of Armenia spokesperson on country's interests and demarcation/delimitation of border with Azerbaijan

Armenia MOD: Azerbaijani army's units open fire at Armenian military posts located in Yeraskh sector of border

Banak.info releases photo of Azerbaijani UAV downed by Armenia's air defense forces

Armenia Ombudsman shows picture of house under direct target of Azerbaijanis in Verin Shorzha village

Ombudsman presents violations of rights of Armenia's borderline residents to international organizations

Russia and Turkey are considering conclusion of a long-term agreement on natural gas transit

Armenia acting PM considers Azerbaijan's practice inadmissible during talk with ICRC President

Karabakh emergency situations service: Remains of another Armenian serviceman found in Varanda

Opposition 'Armenia' and 'I Have Honor' blocs agree on which member will be nominated as deputy parliamentary speaker

Armenia acting PM signs decision on setting up commission for burial of poet and journalist Armen Shekoyan

Armenia MFA comments on statement by Co-Chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group

Digest: Azerbaijani UAV shot down in Armenia, MEPs condemn Azerbaijani claims on Armenian territory

Armenia parliament approves sensational law on criminalizing heavy insults

Court to examine appeal against arrest of Meghri's ex-mayor, MP of opposition 'Armenia' bloc on Aug. 2

Armenia acting PM awards 29 general secretaries

Armenian authorities want to criminalize swearing
Microbiologist says HK needs 90% vaccination rate

Microbiologist says HK needs 90% vaccination rate

Top microbiologist Yuen Kwok-yung has warned that Hong Kong was not out of the woods yet despite going another day without any local infection, as he urged the public achieve a vaccination rate of more than 90 percent for social distancing measures to be further relaxed.



Officials had earlier said that Hong Kong needed a vaccination rate of at least 70 percent to achieve herd immunity.



But Yuen said that was not enough to keep the coronavirus at bay.



"You need more than 90 percent to be safe," he told reporters on Sunday after attending a seminar.



"It's not safe even if you reach a vaccination rate of 70 percent, because that means you have 30 percent of the population not yet inoculated, that's over two million people, there could still be major outbreaks," warned the government adviser.



Yuen noted that there had recently been imported cases slipping into the community but that Hong Kong had been able to avoid a new major outbreak due to face mask wearing, hand hygiene, and improved contact tracing capabilities.



The University of Hong Kong professor was speaking as the city reported three newly confirmed Covid cases - all of them arrivals from overseas.



One of the patients, who had been to Spain, Greece, Italy and Switzerland this month, had received two doses of the Moderna vaccine in March.



The other two were seafarers who had arrived from Russia and Tanzania.



Professor Yuen also said he didn't think Hong Kong needed to extend its quarantine period for fully-vaccinated travellers from low-risk places.



Currently, arrivals from the mainland, Macau, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand, need only do seven days of quarantine if they can prove they have had two vaccine doses.



Professor Yuen said most positive cases in such people would be found within the first seven days.
US to continue air strikes supporting Afghanistan

Top US general Kenneth McKenzie says the US has increased air strikes in the support of Afghan forces in the last few days. Photo: AFP

The United States will continue air strikes in support of Afghan forces fighting the Taliban, a top US general said on Sunday, as the insurgents press on with offensives across the country.



Since early May, violence has surged after the insurgents launched a sweeping assault just days after the US-led foreign forces began their final withdrawal which is now almost complete.



The Taliban's deadly assault has seen the insurgents capture scores of districts, border crossings and encircle several provincial capitals.



"The United States has increased air strikes in the support of Afghan forces over the last several days, and we are prepared to continue this heightened level of support in the coming weeks if the Taliban continue their attacks," General Kenneth McKenzie, head of the US Army Central Command, told reporters in Kabul.



McKenzie acknowledged that there were tough days ahead for the Afghan government.



"The Taliban are attempting to create a sense of inevitability about their campaign. They are wrong," he said.



"Taliban victory is not inevitable," he said, adding the US military will continue giving logistical support to Afghan air force even after the end of August 31 when all foreign forces are expected to leave.



"We will continue to support the Afghan forces even after that August 31 date, it will generally be from over the horizon," McKenzie said.



Experts say a key factor that helped the Taliban in seizing vast swath of territory in a short time was the lack of regular air support from US forces to Afghan troops.



But on Sunday McKenzie vowed to support Afghan air force going forward, and that the US air force will also retain ability to "strike into Afghanistan" against two other jihadist groups the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda.



McKenzie said it will be clear in the next "days and weeks" if the Afghan government will be able to defend the country from the Taliban.



"I don't think it's going to be an easy path .. (but) I do not accept the narrative that there is going to be a civil war of necessity," he said. (AFP)
The Guardian

US viewers have been able to see everything at any given moment while understanding fundamentally nothing about whats going on The womens 100m final was a brilliant spectacle but you might have had to wait to watch it. Photograph: Dylan Martinez/Reuters If theres one message the Olympics unfailingly conveys, its that elite competition is all about making the right choices. At a certain point every athlete needs to make the decision not to do certain things: the fencer lunging for the head ra
People wearing masks aboard a tourist boat travelling along the Singapore River on 18 July. (PHOTO: Getty Images)

SINGAPORE  The Ministry of Health on Sunday (25 July) reported the detection of 125 new cases of COVID-19 infection in Singapore, taking the country's total case count to 64,179.

There are 117 new locally transmitted infections in the community, of which 46 are linked to the Jurong Fishery Port cluster and five are linked to the KTV cluster, said MOH in a news release. The latest figures take the case counts for the two clusters to 787 and 237, respectively.

Of the new local cases, 43 are linked to past cases and have already been quarantined, while 36 are linked to previous cases and were detected through surveillance. Another 38 cases are unlinked.

There are also two infections among seniors above the age of 70. who are unvaccinated or partially vaccinated, and are at risk of serious illness.

Also detected were eight imported cases, who have already been placed on Stay-Home Notice (SHN) or isolated upon their arrival in Singapore. Four was detected upon arrival, while the other four developed the illness during SHN or isolation.

In its nightly update on Saturday, MOH said that an 83-year-old Singaporean woman had died of COVID-19 infection. The woman, who was unvaccinated and had a history of hypertension and high cholesterol, was linked to the 121 Bukit Merah View cluster, which has 94 cases to date.

To date, 37 people in Singapore have died of COVID-19 from the coronavirus.

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Medical staff member Gabriel Cervera Rodriguez raises his fist to celebrate after receiving the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine at the United Memorial Medical Center on December 21, 2020 in Houston, Texas. Go Nakamura/Getty Images

Amid rising cases of COVID-19, doctors are begging people to get their vaccines.

One doctor said, "it's a choice between the jab or death."

But anti-vaxx trolls are attacking these people online, making them nervous to speak out.

See more stories on Insider's business page.

Whilst COVID-19 deaths soar in the USA amongst unvaccinated people, doctors have been pleading with people to get their vaccines.

Dr Brytney Cobia, a doctor based in Alabama, made a heartfelt Facebook post this week - sharing the potentially life-saving importance of getting the COVID-19 jab when offered.

"I'm admitting young healthy people to the hospital with very serious COVID infections. One of the last things they do before they're intubated is beg me for the vaccine. I hold their hand and tell them that I'm sorry, but it's too late.

"A few days later when I call time of death, I hug their family members and I tell them the best way to honor their loved one is to go get vaccinated and encourage everyone they know to do the same. They cry. And they tell me they didn't know. They thought it was a hoax."

Read more: The anti-vax movement is killing people, and the right-wing media is egging it on

On Thursday, Gov. Kay Ivey of Alabama, who for much of the coronavirus pandemic resisted public-health measures, criticized her state's unvaccinated population.

"I don't know, you tell me," she said when asked what it would take to get more people vaccinated. "Folks supposed to have common sense. But it's time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks, not the regular folks. It's the unvaccinated folks that are letting us down."

Alabama has the fourth-lowest vaccination rate nationwide, according to a New York Times tracker.

Dr Cobia's post attracted a lot of attention, with many praising her candid approach to sharing the lessons she's learnt working as a doctor in the pandemic. However, others trolled her with insults and death theats - meaning she is now uncomfortable with giving any interviews to the media - reported an NBC reporter who tried to get in touch with Dr Cobia.

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Hateful messaging were even posted on the reviews section of Dr Cobia's Web MD page.

A screenshot of recent sham reviews of Dr Brytney Cobia, who is being trolled for begging people to get vaccinated against COVID-19 Insider

Dr Catherine O'Neal - a doctor in Louisiana - echoed Dr Cobia's message in a news conference on 16 July: "I want to be clear after seeing what I've seen the past two weeks. We only have two choices: we are either going to get vaccinated and end the pandemic. Or we are going to accept death."

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A number of people on Twitter replied to the video of Dr O'Neal's pleas, slamming it as "propaganda," and that the Delta variant was "released" in order to re-up fear of COVID-19.

Currently, 40% of COVID-19 cases in the USA are in just three states - Texas, Florida and Missouri - with low rates of vaccinations, with1 in 5 cases in Florida alone.

Now, as the cases of COVID rise at an alarming rate - with 63,818 new cases recorded in the USA on July 22 - previously vaccine-hesitant Republican senators are urging people to get their jabs.

Read the original article on Business Insider
German Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks, during her annual summer news conference in Berlin, Germany, Thursday, July 22, 2021. Wolfgang Kumm/dpa via AP

People who have yet to get vaccinated in Germany may face restrictions from places like stadiums and restaurants.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's chief of staff Helge Braun's made the warning amid a rise in COVID-19 cases.

Approximately 49% of people in Germany are fully vaccinated against COVID-19.

Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

An aide for a top official in Germany said unvaccinated individuals might face restrictions, including being barred from places like restaurants, as the country's COVID-19 cases continue to surge.

The Delta variant, a more contagious strain of the virus, has been the cause of increased cases throughout the country since earlier this month, raising concerns for officials that daily numbers could grow immensely in coming months, Reuters and the Associated Press reported.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's chief of staff, Helge Braun, told German newspaper Bild am Sonntag authorities are not anticipating another lockdown but people who have not received the vaccine could potentially not be allowed at some establishments.

"This could mean some things such as restaurant, cinema, and stadium visits would not be possible for tested unvaccinated people because the residual risk is too high," Braun said, according to Reuters.

Braun told the newspaper that "vaccinated people will definitely have more freedoms than unvaccinated people," according to the Associated Press.

Braun's remarks were met with criticism from fellow politicians, including Armin Laschet, a candidate to replace Merkel, who pointed to the "rights to freedom" of individuals.

"I don't believe in compulsory vaccinations and I don't believe we should put indirect pressure on people to get vaccinated," Laschet told German broadcaster ZDF in an interview set to air Sunday night, according to the Associated Press. "In a free country there are rights to freedom, not just for specific groups."

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Nearly half of the people in Germany, an estimated 49%, are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. Reuters reported as of July 22 that 60% of people in Germany have received their first dose of the vaccine.

In the past month, the country recorded 28,955 new cases of COVID-19 and 847 deaths, according to JHU data.

Chancellor Merkel previously expressed concern over the recent rise in cases, telling reporters that "the key to overcoming the pandemic, the only way, is vaccination," the Associated Press reported on July 22.

US officials have also urged Americans to get the shot, calling it the "pandemic of the unvaccinated" as they make up most of the hospitalizations in the country.

Read the original article on Insider
Leaving their small Indiana hometown was Kristin Dave Dauschs first step toward finding their identity and community.

The latter entailed the Queens debut of their pop-up lesbian bar, with Dauschs eye on opening the boroughs only lesbian-owned tavern and creating a place for the community to gather starting with an event this past Saturday in Astoria.

There are a lot of us and we dont have enough places to convene, adds Dausch, who views their hoped-for business as the solution.

We need spaces to be vulnerable and Daves Lesbian Bar is going to elevate that in a different direction because we want mutual aid by day. We want a community fridge, a free store with a rack of clothes for people to take if they need, we want a pantry drop-off.

The coolest thing that can happen is that shows start happening at Daves and people start paying the cover charge in nonperishable goods.

Dausch moved to the city in 2007 to attend the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, and came out six years ago before launching their mission of inclusion.

It was very important to me because I felt like I was robbed of the freedom to be queer because of where Im from, said Dausch, who lives in Astoria. Queens is the most diverse place in the world. I love the people and I love the community.

According to Dausch, Astoria is home to a pair of gay bars where they never felt the lesbian community was fully represented. There are only two lesbian-owned bars in New York City right now, Dausch noted. A third bar, in Brooklyn, closed during the pandemic, only boosting the resolve to open a new place.

I want it to be like gay Nashville, added Dausch. Theres constantly music, we are open and music is happening. Community, music, alcohol. People will come to this. But when they get there I want to have a big binder behind the bar that I let everyone look at thats like, Oh, I need to buy soap  well, heres a queer person that makes soap.

I want it to be a community hub for people to get more involved in the queer community while helping queer musicians and establishments.

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The planned pop-ups are intended to create some buzz for the new bar, and a fundraiser has already garnered more than $10,000 in donations.

Dausch is hoping Daves Lesbian Bar can have a monthly pop-up until they can get their space, with the target date for a permanent location about 18 months away.

I am not giving up on it, they vowed. I dont care if it takes 10 years, I am making this my lifes work. I believe in this more than Ive believed in anything else.

The pop-up of Daves Lesbian Bar on Saturday was held next door to Heart of Gold, an Astoria bar that like so many businesses has struggled during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nonetheless, Heart of Gold owner James Rutuelo said he was glad to help a potential competitor.

The community helped us out so much over the last year. The gay community especially gave more than anyone else, more than anyone could ask for, so were giving back, Rutuelo said.

Beth Mariah Glick, an Astoria resident and stand up comic, was impressed with the Saturday night pop-up event.

This is a bar thats doing a fundraiser for another bar to open. Thats amazing. Thats Astoria, Glick said.

With Elizabeth Keogh
LONDON (Reuters) - The Belfast Trust, which runs hospitals in the Northern Irish capital, called on nurses to work later on Sunday and overnight to help ease "extreme pressure" at two hospitals because of an increasing number of COVID-19 patients.

The number of new cases is still high across the United Kingdom, fuelled in part by a highly transmissible new variant and a relaxation in restrictions imposed to try to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

On Twitter, the Belfast Trust said: "We are under extreme pressure in the RVH & Mater (two hospitals in Belfast) as we care for an increasing number of Covid19+ patients, alongside emergency admissions."

"We are asking for help from our Trust nursing staff to work tonight & overnight."

Health is a devolved matter in Britain so Northern Ireland has pursued its own tailored strategy to tackling the pandemic, moving more slowly than England in relaxing COVID restrictions.

(Reporting by Elizabeth Piper; Editing by Susan Fenton)
Reuters

Former U.S. President Donald Trump will challenge a recent U.S. Justice Department order that his tax returns should be turned over to a House of Representatives committee, one of his personal lawyers signaled on Monday. "There is no evidence of any wrongdoing here and I object to the release of the returns not only on behalf of my client but on behalf of all future holders of the Office of the President of the United States," said Trump lawyer Ronald Fischetti in a statement. "This politicization and harassment of Mr. Trump is uncalled for and outrageous," Fischetti said, adding that he had "never seen anything like this" in his career as a lawyer.
Nicole Warner and her daughter, Piper, at their home in Woodstown, NJ., July 23, 2021. (Hannah Yoon/The New York Times)

BOSTON  Joseph Charnock, like many parents, drew a sigh of relief when he dropped his 12-year-old daughter off for an eight-week session at Camp Quinebarge, on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire.

It worried him a little, in the days that followed, when no sunlit pictures appeared on the camps Facebook page. Or when the camps director, in a note to parents, confessed that the last couple of days have been a bit rough.

But nothing prepared him for the message he got five days later, announcing that staffing shortages and delays in food delivery had made further operation impossible.

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We are asking parents to pick up their campers tomorrow, said a note signed by the camps director, Eric Carlson, and other administrators.

When Charnock arrived at the camp the next morning, he said he found the campers possessions in a field, in a drenching rain, and his daughter waiting inside, crestfallen. He said Carlson circulated among the parents, describing with frustration the number of counselors who had walked off the job.

The meltdown at Camp Quinebarge is an extreme example of an industrywide problem as summer camps reopen after coronavirus-related closures into a historically tight labor market, without the international seasonal workers who usually do much of the work.

While most camps have found ways to navigate the smaller labor pool, some camp directors complain that young adults they have hired are ghosting them  failing to show up or leaving jobs without notice. And some counselors say that they are underpaid and stretched thinner than in past years, leading to chaotic operations, abandoned activities and inadequate supervision.

You would hire two counselors, youd get three calls a day of drops, said Jay Jacobs, director of Timber Lake Camp, in the Catskills, who said he managed to fully staff the six camps he oversees by starting early and recruiting multiple candidates for important positions.

Story continues

They make a commitment, then they find out their friends are doing something else, or the job opportunities are ramping up, he said. Throw in the trauma of a year and a half of the COVID experience, and it undermines the sense of what matters. The commitment level is weaker. Its all about me and how Ive suffered so much in the past year and I need to take care of myself.

Many camps have tapped into networks of former campers to fill vacant positions or offered higher wages or time off to make the positions more appealing, said Michele Rowcliffe, executive director of the American Camp Associations New England chapter.

It is nearly unheard-of for camps to shut down midseason  the financial fallout alone could be devastating  but this month so far, the directors of three camps in the Northeast have made that decision.

Appel Farm Arts Camp, a camp in Elmer, New Jersey, notified families this week that late-summer sessions would be canceled. The camp offered refunds or alternative bookings at other camps. Staff was short in the kitchen, the facilities and among the cleaning teams, and food supply chain problems made keeping camp open unsustainable, Greg Orlandini, secretary of the Appel Farm board of trustees, said in a statement.

Some parents said they were supportive of the decision.

Theres going to be angry parents, but Im not going to be one of them, said Nicole Warner, whose daughter Piper, 14, was planning to attend. Marybeth Boger, whose son Zamir, 11, was enrolled in a session later in the summer, said she commended the camps leaders for making a tough call.

It takes a lot of courage and belief in what you do to say, This year, it is not possible to provide the experience we want for your kids, she said.

Camp Shane, a residential weight loss camp in Kent, Connecticut, closed abruptly July 13. The camps director, David Ettenberg, said 10 of his 22 counselors left their jobs during the first two weeks of camp.

More and more staff are starting to leave, and Im getting panicky, he said. I literally spent days and days looking, but ultimately I hit a point where I said, 'I cant produce the product I should have. We really cant find anybody.'

He said the duties proved too much for the counselors he had hired, particularly because coronavirus restrictions prohibited them from leaving camp during their time off.

Youre busy, busy, busy getting camp ready, and it never dawned on me that these kids needed to come out of the year and a half of what they went through, he said of the counselors. They had mental stress there, too. I didnt realize it. I guess none of us did.

Megan Thompson of Plymouth, Massachusetts, whose 16-year-old son was scheduled to attend Camp Shane for six weeks at a cost of $8,700, described a chaotic environment, with few planned activities and little medical supervision.

I really should have gone to get him after Day 5, she said. I was thinking maybe he was embellishing because he wanted to get out of there.

The day the camp closed, Connecticuts Office of Early Childhood and the states Department of Children and Families conducted an investigation of the camp because of concerns about campers safety and well-being, said Maggie Adair, an agency official. The investigation is pending, she said.

On its website, Camp Quinebarge offered campers teasers of what awaited them in the woods of New Hampshire: crackling campfires and cannonballs into the lake.

But by spring, the camps director was scrambling. Of 60 workers that had been hired by June 1, only 36 showed up, said Carlson, in written answers to questions.

In past summers, seasonal workers on J1 visas, who Carlson described as great workers and less likely to quit, made up between one-quarter and one-third of the staff. More than 25,000 summer workers usually travel to the United States to work as camp counselors and staff, but most have been grounded by travel restrictions.

At the same time, the camp had enrolled 20% more children than it had in 2019, he said.

In interviews, five staff members said they were hired hastily and thrust into positions of responsibility with little training.

M.J. Lowry, 21, a college student, said it was clear the camps director was desperate to make hires. To sweeten the deal, Camp Quinebarge paid for a plane ticket from Louisiana, agreed to allow Lowry to continue college coursework online and bring along a cat, an emotional support animal.

I was like, OK, Im able to fly out, Lowry said. Ill do it. Ive worked with kids before.

Lowry arrived two days before the first group of campers, and it became clear that there would be no time for studying.

We were treated like garbage, Lowry said, and also given garbage pay.

By the middle of the first week, dissatisfaction among counselors was simmering, and senior staff members called an emergency meeting that deteriorated into angry shouting.

Max Planchon, 22, who left his job after that, said the counselors needed to unionize but could not find the time. He noted that, during a summer when fast food restaurants are offering $20 an hour for some positions, camp jobs may have lost their appeal.

A lot of people cant afford to be doing this kind of work right now, said Planchon. Ive worked at Walmart and CVS in pharmacy. Those jobs are stressful and fast-paced, but they were less stressful than this job, which does not make sense.

On Friday, Carlson informed parents that he had been forced to close because the camps food service had canceled or delayed food orders.

Shannon Mutschler, a spokesperson for Sysco, the food distributor, said the company was prepared to deliver the camps order, but it would have been delayed by one day.

Rebecca Gove, whose son and daughter attended the camp, said as they drove home, Our kids started telling us this unbelievable stuff, and she began exchanging stories with other parents on a private Facebook page.

Gove described inadequate supervision and a chaotic environment. She was disturbed to learn from her daughter that four girls in her bunk were quarantined because they were vomiting, saying she would have immediately picked her up had she known.

She had chosen the camp, in part, because her daughter is immunocompromised, and she had been impressed by what appeared to be strict COVID-19 protocols.

Carlson said a nurse had determined that the girls were sickened by dehydration, and tested and quarantined them to comply with the camps coronavirus protocols.

Gove discovered that counselors positions were advertised as paying only $2,500 for the summer. Before he quit, she said, one of her sons counselors told her son he could make more money working at Target.

I did not know they were paying that low, and to be honest, I would not have sent my kids knowing that counselors were being exploited like that, she said.

Carlson said the camp paid $2,000-$4,000 per summer and added incentives like travel allowances and a $500 completion bonus.

Charlotte Charnock, 12, said campers were aware that staff were under stress. But she said she believed the disorganization was related to the coronavirus.

Camp was one of my favorite places like on earth, she said. My friends got really annoyed when I would constantly talk about camp and how fun it was. I think this year was just an off year.

Her father said that, under his daughters urging, they have rolled over this summers tuition payment of $9,800 to be used toward summer 2022.

Charlotte is fiercely loyal to Camp Quinebarge, he said. Ive asked her about these incidents, and she said, Stop trash-talking camp.

 2021 The New York Times Company
BEIJING (Reuters) - China has administered a total of 1.5387 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines as of July 24, data from the National Health Commission showed on Sunday.

(Reporting by Sophie Yu and Dominique Patton; Editing by Christian Schmollinger)
Dr Anthony Fauci said he was frustrated by the slump in vaccine uptake

The US is heading "in the wrong direction" on the coronavirus pandemic as infections surge among the unvaccinated, the country's top infectious disease expert has warned.

Dr Anthony Fauci said the Delta variant of Covid-19 was driving the spike in areas with low vaccination rates.

He said health officials were considering revising mask guidance for vaccinated Americans to curb cases.

Offering booster jabs to vulnerable people was also under review, he said.

The coronavirus situation in the US is becoming "a pandemic among the unvaccinated", Dr Fauci, the chief medical adviser to US President Joe Biden, told broadcaster CNN on Sunday.

Vaccinations in selected countries

More than 162.7 million people - or 49% of the population - have been fully vaccinated in the US, official data shows.

The US had been a world leader in jab uptake until April, when vaccination rates started to drop off.

Vaccination rates are particularly low in southern states, where fewer than half of residents have received their first dose in some cases.

Meanwhile, daily coronavirus infections are on the rise again after numbers fell in May and June.

The resurgence has added to the more than 34 million cases and 610,000 deaths recorded so far in the US.

The trend has been attributed, in part, to the rapid spread of the highly transmissible Delta variant of Covid.

Chart showing cases and deaths in the US since the start of the pandemic. Updated 23 July

The sharpest increases in Covid cases are in states with lower vaccination rates, such as Florida, Texas and Missouri.

Earlier this week, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said 99.5% of Covid deaths were occurring among unvaccinated people.

In his interview with CNN, Dr Fauci said local leaders in areas with low vaccination rates needed to do more to encourage people to get jabbed.

He said he was "very heartened to hear" the Republican governors of Arkansas and Florida promoting vaccinations in their states. Both leaders have been critical of Dr Fauci's advice in the past.

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Dr Fauci has been a key adviser to President Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump, through the pandemic.

He said he was involved in discussions to change mask guidance issued by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

As it stands, the CDC says people who are fully vaccinated can "resume activities that you did before the pandemic without wearing a mask".

Dr Fauci said local governments could issue their own rules under the current CDC guidance.

But he noted that some local governments had reinstated indoor and public mask requirements to curb rising infections.

In Los Angeles County, masks are now required indoors for both vaccinated and unvaccinated people.
Serial killer Rodney Alcala died of natural causes Saturday while awaiting execution, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced. He was 77.

Alcala was nicknamed the "Dating Game Killer" because of his appearance on the show in 1978. He was chosen to be a contestant despite having already served two prison sentences  one for assaulting 8-year-old Tali Shapiro in 1968 and the other for assaulting a 13-year-old girl in 1974  and being a registered sex offender. He was introduced on the program as a "photographer" and managed to win.

Alcala was originally sentenced to death in 1980 for the 1979 murder of 12-year-old Robin Samsoe. That conviction was overturned in 1984, and Alcala was granted a new trial. He was convicted and sentenced to death again in 1986. That conviction was again overturned in 2003 and Alcala was granted yet another trial.

Alcala in 2010 was again convicted and sentenced to death for the kidnapping and murder of Samsoe, along with the murders of four other women. The additional murder charges were brought about after DNA evidence connected Alcala to the victims. Alcala received an additional 25 years to life in prison in 2013 after pleading guilty to two more murders in New York.

Authorities say Alcala may have been responsible for as many as 130 murders, according to The Associated Press.

California Governor Gavin Newsom in 2019 signed an executive order halting all executions in the state.

Sole survivor of Chino Hills massacre describes what happened

Chicago man plunges into Lake Michigan every day for a year

Black father launches puzzle business to promote diversity
Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia. SAUL LOEB/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

Sen. Mark Warner would back a "small carve-out" to the filibuster to pass voting-rights legislation.

Warner said he supports the For the People Act and lamented the raft of restrictive GOP-led voting bills.

He lamented the result of the 2013 filibuster rule change as it pertains to the Supreme Court.

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Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia on Sunday said that he would support a "small carve-out" on the filibuster to pass voting-rights legislation.

On "Fox News Sunday," he cautioned against the Senate morphing into the House, where the majority party holds enormous sway over legislation, emphasizing the importance of preserving voting rights.

"I don't want the Senate to become like the House," Warner said. "But I do believe when it comes to voting rights, when it comes to that basic right to exercise and participate in democracy, I get very worried what's happening in some of these states where they are actually penalizing, saying if you give somebody water waiting in line to vote, or in states like Texas where they're saying a local government can overcome the results of a local election. That is not democracy."

He added: "If we have to do a small carve out on filibuster for voting rights - that is the only area where I'd allow that kind of reform."

Warner supports the sweeping voting-rights legislation known as the For the People Act, also identified as S.1, which would end partisan gerrymandering, expand early and absentee voting, establish national standards for voter registration, and blunt voter purges, among other measures.

Read more: Gov. Kristi Noem's inner circle is packed with family, Trump aides, and connected South Dakotans. Meet the gatekeepers for her potential 2024 presidential run.

Democrats would also like to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore federal preclearance from the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that was weakened in the 2013 Supreme Court decision Shelby County v. Holder.

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Former President Donald Trump's false election claims have only deepened the partisan divide on voting rights, and GOP congressional leaders have come out against the Democratic-led voting bills.

Last month, a vote to advance the For the People Act failed 50-50, with Democrats unable to win any Republican support. In order for the bill to pass under current rules, it would need to meet the 60-vote threshold to overcome a legislative filibuster.

In an evenly divided Senate, that task has become nearly impossible, especially since the bill cannot be passed through the budget reconciliation process and moderate Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona oppose nixing the filibuster entirely.

Democrats, who have strongly opposed the raft of restrictive voting bills that have passed this year in states like Arizona and Florida, sense a narrowing window for voting rights as the 2022 midterm elections approach.

In the interview, Warner questioned former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's 2013 decision to change the filibuster rules for most presidential nominees, which now only require a simple majority.

"I would wish we wouldn't even have started this a decade ago," he said. "When the Democratic leaders actually changed the rules, I don't think we would have the Supreme Court we did if we still had a 60-vote margin on the filibuster."

He added: "But we are where we are, and the idea that somehow to protect the rights of the minority in the Senate, we're going to cut out rights of minorities and young people all across the country, that's just not right to me."

Read the original article on Business Insider
Protesters in downtown march and stop at the Detroit Police Station for a second night of protests in Detroit May 30, 2020. They were marching to protest police brutality and the death of George Floyd.

Amid a jump in violent crime in this and other cities nationwide, Detroit residents report being much more worried about public safety than about police misconduct, a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University/Detroit Free Press Poll finds.

By an overwhelming 9-1, they would feel safer with more cops on the street, not fewer. Though one-third complain that Detroit police use force when it isn't necessary  and Black men report high rates of racial profiling  those surveyed reject by 3-1 the slogan of some progressives to "defund the police."

"It's scary sitting in the house, and when you go outside to the gas station or the store, it's possible someone will be shooting right next to you," said Charlita Bell, 41, a lifelong Detroit resident who was among those called in the poll. Last year, when her car was hit by stray bullets during a shopping trip, she hurried home rather than wait for the police for fear the shooter might return.

"It's scary sitting in the house, and when you go outside to the gas station or the store, it's possible someone will be shooting right next to you," said poll respondent Charlita Bell, 41, who has lived in Detroit all her life.

"It's always some random shootings," sighed Rita Gibbs, 70, who is so distressed she hates to turn on the news these days. "I just can't stand it."

The Detroit survey was the second in a series called CityView, a project by the USA TODAY Network and the Suffolk University Political Research Center exploring attitudes of residents in major American cities toward policing, public safety and community. The first poll, which was taken in Milwaukee last month, found broad dissatisfaction with law enforcement practices there.

More: Poll: Detroit residents not enthused about James Craig's GOP run for governor

The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year by a police officer and other examples of brutality toward Black people, some of them caught on cellphone video, have caused massive protests demanding police accountability and a reckoning on racial justice. But growing concern about a sharp rise in murders and shootings across the country last year is also threaded through the national debate about law enforcement and criminal justice.

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In Detroit, 1 in 5 residents (19%) cited public safety as the biggest issue facing the city, second only to education, named by 23%. On a list of eight concerns, police reform ranked last, at 4%.

The poll found a significant racial divide on the question. Black residents ranked crime at the top of their list of concerns: 24% cited public safety, and just 3% named police reform.

But white residents were a bit more concerned about police reform than public safety, 12% compared with 10%. Education was by far the biggest issue on their minds, named by 31%.

"I think the Detroit police are representative of most if not all police organizations in the United States, in which they structurally contain behaviors that encourage racism and white supremacy," said Justin Fenwick, 35, a real estate agent. "It's hard to look at a police department and say they're doing a good job."

The poll of 500 adults, taken July 13-17 by landline and cellphone, has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points. The poll covered all residents of Detroit, not just registered or likely voters.

More: Paleologos: Black Detroit residents show varying opinions on crime, policing

A contrast: Black men and Black women

There was a striking contrast in the interactions with police reported by Black men and Black women.

Black men were twice as likely as Black women to report having been stopped and questioned by police investigating crimes, 38% compared with 17%. What's more, Black men were twice as likely as Black women to say they weren't satisfied with how police handled the encounter, 46% compared with 20%.

"You have some good cops and then you have some bad ones," Derrick Wilson, 52, who also goes by the name D.J. Raw, said in a follow-up interview. At times, some of those surveyed said they had seen racial profiling in the approach police took toward them personally and toward their neighborhoods in general.

Among Black men and Black women, half said they were treated differently because of their race, and most agreed their treatment was worse. But while nine of the 208 Black women polled said they were treated better because of their race, not one of the 155 Black men surveyed said they had been treated better.

"The differences in opinion of the police along gender lines within the Black community potentially reflect the differences in the daily lives of Black men and women," said David Paleologos, director of Suffolk's Political Research Center. "Many would argue that this harsher feeling toward police stems from a daily routine of Black men being on guard from the very moment they leave their house. 'The conversation,' as it is called, that happens frequently between young Black men and their parent or guardian is very much centered on the idea that Black men are held to a different standard than the rest of the population."

Race relations were cited by just 5% as the leading issue facing Detroit, which has the highest proportion of Black residents of any large American city. In 2019, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that 78.3% of Detroit's population of 670,000 people were African American, 14.7% white, and 1.8% two or more races.

In comparison, race relations ranked near the top of concerns in the CityView poll in Milwaukee, which has a population that is 44% white, 39% Black and 4% two or more races.

In Detroit, those surveyed found news accounts depicting police misconduct and racism across the country credible. By 2-1, 64%-26%, they didn't believe the news media were exaggerating those stories. That is at odds with higher levels of skepticism nationwide. In a USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll this month, a plurality, 46%-34%, said they believed the stories were exaggerated.

"People are more aware," said Wanda Jan Chris Hill, 71, a retired city employee who is Black. "Everywhere you look people are getting killed. We know there's a history of harm against African Americans. We're tired."

"We know there's a history of harm against African Americans. We're tired," said Wanda Jan Chris Hill, 71, a retired Detroit city employee.

Detroit residents gave middling grades to the city's police department. Seven percent called its performance excellent, 33% good, 43% fair and 15% poor. That means a 58% majority rated local law enforcement as mediocre or worse.

But they also rely on the police. Eight in 10 would be likely to ask a police officer for help if they needed it. Even more, 87%, would be likely to provide information to the police about a crime they had witnessed.

When it comes to equitable treatment of different races, they gave the Detroit Police Department high marks.

More than three-fourths of those surveyed, 77%, agreed with a statement that the Detroit police "generally do a good job and treat people fairly, even if there are a few bad apples on the force."

Only 16% said the police are "racist in the way they treat people, even if some of them try to do a good job."

"I feel like they're one of us; they're not some invading force," said Kenneth Wolfe, 74, a retired landlord. "This is a society that is based on law and order. If you don't have people there to support law and order, then you don't have a society. They're the enforcement of law and order."

After a decline, why are violent crimes rising?

Crime rates in Detroit and nationwide have been falling significantly for decades, although most residents don't realize that. Half said, inaccurately, that there was more violent crime in Detroit compared with 30 years ago. Just 1 in 5 said, accurately, that there was less violent crime.

But the relatively steady decline in homicides and shootings was reversed last year. While property crime declined, Detroit recorded 327 criminal homicides in 2020, up 19% from 2019, and 1,173 nonfatal shootings, up a stunning 53%. Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and other major cities reported similar spikes.

More: Detroit sees sharp increase in homicides, shootings in 2020

In the poll, 28% of those surveyed said they had seen an increase in murder and shootings in their neighborhoods; 35% reported a decrease.

Barbara Landrum, 66, was shocked when a young woman was shot just a few blocks from her home in the Warrendale section of Detroit this year. The retired chef no longer feels safe taking walks in a nearby park. "It's gotten to the point where I'm afraid to do that," she said.

By 65%-23%, those surveyed don't support the slogan "defund the police." They divide 49%-42% in support for the idea of cutting some funding from the police and using the money for social services  for instance, to help the homeless and the mentally ill.

More: Detroiters get real about city's crime: What they said in new poll

Why do Detroit residents think violent crimes have risen?

The reasons are a complicated mix, they say, including the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns, the availability of guns, and a lack of jobs. Each of those three factors was cited by 13% of those surveyed.

Terrell Garner, 41, a contractor who works in construction, blames the stress of the pandemic lockdown that confined many to their homes, sometimes in difficult situations. "Now that the world is coming back open, people are getting outside and taking this pent-up frustration on whomever," he said.

Terrell Garner, 41, a construction contractor, blames the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns for a spike in violent crime. "Now that the world is coming back open, people are getting outside and taking this pent-up frustration on whomever," he said.

Unemployment and poverty play a part, too, said Jerome Washington, 53. "There is no money, and that's where your crime comes in," he said. In Detroit, "everybody is struggling."

"It's very dangerous now in the city," said Melanie Taylor, 50. "I don't even get gas in the city because of all the shootings and the road rage that's going on on the freeways." The mother of two sons, she worries that women and children are increasingly the victims of violence: "It seems like there is no code of honor."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Public safety over police reform: Detroiters make voices heard in poll
Dr. Anthony Fauci suggested that it wouldve been negligent for the National Institutes of Health not to fund bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and declined to commit not to collaborate with Chinese government scientists in the future, insisting that we have always been careful.

Last week, Sen. Rand Paul requested Attorney General Merrick Garland criminally investigate Fauci over his Senate testimony, during which he said the NIH never funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, which the Kentucky Republican says is a lie. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, insists the NIH grants did not fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab.

On Sunday, CNNs Jake Tapper referenced last weeks back-and-forth between Paul and Fauci, noting the NIH has insisted the U.S. government-funded experiments proposed by the EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan lab did not meet the NIHs definition of gain-of-function research and asked if the United States should "collaborate" with such labs whose research critics consider risky.

Fauci defended the NIHs approval process and the funding of bat coronavirus research in Wuhan, saying it had been important to try to understand where SARS-CoV-1 originated, years before the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

If you go back to when this research really started and look at the scientific rationale for it, it was a peer-reviewed proposal that was peer-reviewed and given a very high rating for the importance of why it should be done to be able to go and do a survey of what was going on among the bat population because everyone in the world was trying to figure out what the original source of the original SARS CoV-1 was  and in that context, the research was done, Fauci insisted. It was very regulated. It was reviewed. It was given progress reports. It was published in the open literature. So, I think if you  if you look at the ultimate back rationale, why that was started, it was almost as if you didnt pursue that research, you would be negligent because we were trying to find out how to prevent this from happening again.

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RAND PAUL SENDS DOJ CRIMINAL REFERRAL ON FAUCI

At issue in Paul's criminal referral is Fauci's testimony before Congress on May 11, when he denied under oath that the NIH funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab. Paul pointed to NIH grants going to the EcoHealth Alliance, which then provided funding to the Wuhan lab that a Trump State Department fact sheet contended carried out secretive gain-of-function experiments and worked with Chinas military. At the time, Fauci told Paul: The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

NIHs RePORTER website said the agency provided $15.2 million to Peter Daszaks EcoHealth Alliance over the years, with $3.74 million toward understanding bat coronavirus emergence. Daszak maintained a long working relationship with Wuhan lab bat lady Shi Zhengli, sending her lab at least $600,000 in NIH funding. Daszak was also part of the World Health Organization-China team that dismissed the lab leak hypothesis as extremely unlikely earlier this year.

On Sunday, Tapper pressed Fauci on whether he is still confident collaboration with China can continue after the Asian country's government has not allowed for transparency.

Going forward, we are always going to be very, very careful. Go through all kinds of review, including the risk-benefit ratio. So, if your question  is looking forward, are we going to be very careful about the research that we do? Well, we have always been very careful," Fauci said. "And looking forward, we will continue to be very careful in what we do. And we are always willing to reexamine the criteria that are used when you do research, wherever you do them.

The health authority added: But I think doing research in the context of where these things happen is very important. And SARS-CoV-1 originated in China, and that is the reason  if we were starting to look for bats in Secaucus, New Jersey, or Fairfax County, Virginia, it wouldnt contribute very much to our understanding of where SARS-CoV-1 originated.

Paul told Garland that a 2017 paper on Shis experiments at the Wuhan lab, which cited an NIAID award, included research that fits the definition of gain-of-function research.

During the most recent hearing on Tuesday, Paul said that it was a crime to lie to Congress and stated that gain-of-function research was done entirely at the Wuhan institute by Dr. Shi and was funded by the NIH.

I have never lied before the Congress, and I do not retract that statement, Fauci said. This paper that you are referring to was judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain-of-function.

Paul asked, When you take an animal virus, and you increase its transmissibility to humans, youre saying thats not gain-of-function?

Fauci replied, That is correct, and Sen. Paul, you do not know what you are talking about.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the WHO, said earlier this month that there was a "premature push" to dismiss the lab leak theory during the first WHO-China investigation earlier this year and insisted upon a follow-up inquiry into the Wuhan lab. The Chinese government shot down a second investigation into its government labs last week. The Biden White House called Chinas decision irresponsible and, frankly, dangerous.

The U.S. intelligence community said in May that at least one of its 18 agencies is leaning toward the lab leak hypothesis. That same month, President Joe Biden ordered all of the spy agencies to redouble investigative efforts and gave them 90 days to report back. Former President Donald Trump, former CDC Director Robert Redfield, former COVID-19 testing czar Brett Giroir, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, House GOP China Task Force Chairman Michael McCaul, and others have said the Wuhan lab is the most likely origin for COVID-19.

The NIH contended this year that the NIAID "determined the research in the grant" to the EcoHealth Alliance "was not gain-of-function research."

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Tags: News, China, Merrick Garland, Justice Department, Wuhan Lab, Anthony Fauci

Original Author: Jerry Dunleavy

Original Location: Fauci says it's 'negligent' not to fund research at Wuhan lab, suggests collaboration with China continue
Dr Anthony Fauci speaks at a congressional hearing.

Dr Anthony Fauci is calling for more efforts from GOP leaders in areas where vaccination rates are low, amid growing frustrations around the country regarding the persistence of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In an interview with CNNs State of the Union on Sunday, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director applauded comments from Gov Kay Ivey of Alabama and Rep Steve Scalise of Louisiana in recent days, both of whom urged their constituents to get the Covid-19 vaccine.

Their statements come as a divide is growing around the county, with some states reporting high vaccination rates and others still struggling to get even half of their eligible populations vaccinated.

Concerns about that divide are only growing as the Delta variant continues to spread in the US; the new strain of Covid-19 poses a severe danger to the unvaccinated, particularly those who are immunocompromised in some way, while also a risk of infection for vaccinated Americans though the danger of severe symptoms is far lower for vaccinated individuals.

She has every right to be frustrated, Dr Fauci said on Sunday in response to a clip of Ms Ivey complaining that unvaccinated Alabamans were letting us down.

"I was very heartened to hear people like Steve Scalise come out and say, hey we need to get vaccinated. Even Governor Desantis in Florida is saying the same thing, Dr Fauci continued.

Messaging about vaccinations continues to be extremely mixed in the Republican Party. Some prominent leaders have embraced the calls for Americans to get vaccinated being issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and broader Biden administration, while others have lambasted the administration for simple efforts to raise vaccination rates, including a much-maligned door-to-door educational volunteer effort, or even speculated about the safety, necessity or efficiency of the vaccines themselves.

Former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, whose served under former President Donald Trump and is now running for governor of Arkansas, also penned an op-ed over the weekend in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette explaining her personal choice to get the Covid-19 vaccine.

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"Based on the advice of my doctor, I determined that the benefits of getting vaccinated outweighed any potential risks, she wrote.

About 57 per cent of the total US population has received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, while 49.2 per cent are fully vaccinated, according to the Mayo Clinic.

The Delta variant, meanwhile, has been detected in all 50 states and is believed to be a primary factor behind rising case rates around the nation. Case rates began rising again in early July, and the US seven-day average of new cases per day is now at 51,209.
Prince's estate will soon issue a completed record from the mercurial artist's storied music vault, the first never-before-heard album released since the musician's shock death five years ago.

"Welcome 2 America" -- a 12-track album finished in 2010, but shelved for reasons unknown in the famous vault at Prince's Paisley Park compound near Minneapolis -- offers a prophetic window into social struggles at today's forefront, delving into racism, political division, technology and disinformation.

Melding urgent lyricism with languorous funk, the pop shapeshifter Prince sings of America as the "land of the free / home of the slave."

The artist, who died at 57 on April 21, 2016 following an accidental fentanyl overdose, could not have known that in the years following his death his beloved home city would explode in furor and protest after the police killing of George Floyd, a Black man.

But Prince was a career activist, advocating for the empowerment of Black people in the recording industry and beyond.

"You go to school just to learn / about what never existed," Prince sings on the closing track "One Day We Will All B Free."

"But if your history only burns / it's better to resist it."

The album, out July 30, sees Prince level "a laser-focused assault on the condition of America," said Morris Hayes, Prince's longtime keyboardist and musical director.

"What's going on with social media, social justice, and social consciousness... this is a concerted effort to really speak about these things," said Hayes, who co-produced the album.

"I really dug how raw it was, and as far as my production, I just wanted to keep it to where its raw and I don't get in the way of what he's trying to say."

- 'Liberty and justice' -

For Hayes, the singular artist "was way ahead," like a "sage sitting in the Himalayas somewhere," in foreshadowing the current moment.

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"He wanted, I believe, a country that actually stood for what it said it stood for: liberty and justice for all," Hayes told AFP in an interview. "And we painfully know that that's not the case."

For Prince a key component of freedom was ownership, according to Hayes: "if you don't own your own things, you don't have any freedom."

The artist was well known for taking labels to task, famously scrawling "slave" on his cheek and changing his name to an unpronounceable "love symbol" in the 1990s to protest Warner's bid to rein in his prolific musical output.

Hayes said Prince -- who didn't carry a cell phone and memorized necessary phone numbers -- also discussed freedom in terms of technology and devices, which he saw "as something that handcuffed people."

But while the album tackles decidedly weighty topics -- "Running Game (Son of a Slave Master)" centers on racism, while "Same Page, Different Book" touches on religious strife -- the album also includes vintage danceable and carnal slow jam Prince in the mix.

"Hot Summer" is a major-key, guitar-heavy, feel-good track, while the sparsely arranged "When She Comes" featuring the artist's falsetto recalls the hypersexual "Dirty Mind" Prince of yore.

- Excavating the vault -

An untold number of songs -- upwards of 8,000, per Princian lore -- were stored in the vault under Paisley Park, though some of its contents have been moved to the Los Angeles climate-controlled storage facility Iron Mountain.

"It was crazy," Hayes says of the vault. "All of this music, like all over the floor, all stacked up to the ceiling."

"You have to think about how prolific a cat has to be to have his own vault full of stuff. And I mean FULL of stuff."

Hayes recalled that in the mid-1990s Prince told him he had taken time off for the first time.

"He said, 'never in my career have I taken a week where I didn't write a song and pick up my guitar.'"

The release of Prince's vast trove of music remains a sensitive subject; the superstar was controlling of his work, image, and carefully constructed enigmatic persona. Doing right by him is no small challenge.

Previously the estate has re-released expanded versions of Prince's milestone albums, like "1999" and "Sign O' The Times," along with demos of songs he wrote that eventually became othe

r artists' hits.

Prince was never clear about his intentions for his unheard work, but he had taken steps to preserve his tapes, films, scripts and music along with his Paisley Park compound, leading his estate -- run by his sister and five half-siblings -- to believe he wanted it shared.

Asked by Rolling Stone in 2014 what he wanted to come of his oeuvre after he was gone, Prince himself was characteristically nebulous.

"I don't think about 'gone.'"

mdo/dw
A Frenchman on hunger strike in Tokyo seeking access to his children said an appeal from President Emmanuel Macron to Japan's leader had "changed nothing", as his protest entered its third week.

Vincent Fichot, 39, says his two children were abducted by their Japanese mother, and he has been on hunger strike since July 10 in a bid to be reunited with his family.

For two weeks, the former finance worker -- who has lived in Japan for 15 years -- has sat night and day outside a train station near the Olympic Stadium, where the opening ceremony for the virus-postponed Tokyo Games was held on Friday.

Macron, who attended the ceremony with Paris set to host the next Olympics in 2024, held talks Saturday with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga.

During their meeting, Macron brought up Fichot's "extremely tragic situation", according to the French president's office, which called the issue a "priority".

Joint custody of children in cases of divorce or separation does not exist legally in Japan, where parental abductions are common and often tolerated by local authorities.

Fichot's wife accused him in court of domestic violence but later retracted the claim, he said. His wife's lawyer refused to comment to AFP, but denounced "biased" media reports.

"While it's good that Suga and Macron at least discussed my case... it has changed nothing about the situation my children are in, so I will continue," the Frenchman told AFP on Sunday.

After the leaders met, Macron tweeted about the two countries' "exceptional" relationship -- drawing ire from Fichot, whose health is beginning to deteriorate.

"France doesn't even know if my children are alive," he said on Saturday of his six-year-old son and four-year-old daughter, who he has not seen since August 2018.

"It's unbelievable. It's 'business' first and our children after that."

Story continues

Macron's advisors, but not the president himself, met Fichot during their short trip to Japan.

No official numbers exist, but rights groups have estimated that about 150,000 minors are forcibly separated from a parent every year in the East Asian archipelago.

etb/kaf/jfx
The first direct commercial flights between Israel and Morocco landed in Marrakesh on Sunday, more than seven months after the countries normalised diplomatic relations in a US-brokered deal.

Passengers from Tel Aviv arrived on an Israir flight early on Sunday afternoon to be met with dates, cakes and mint tea at a welcoming ceremony organised in their honour.

"I am originally from Marrakesh. I've come back here around 30 times but this time, the trip has a special flavour -- it's as if it were the first time!" an emotional Pinhas Moyal told AFP from the tarmac, his mask and bag in the colours of the Moroccan flag.

"This is a historic moment, this flight can only strengthen the bridge between Israel and Morocco," said Benjamin Ron, a tour guide hoping to bring in other Israelis in the future.

Israir spokeswoman Tali Leibovitz told AFP that two to three flights per week were planned on the route.

A second flight, by the Israeli national carrier El Al, landed in Marrakesh later in the day.

El Al said it plans five flights per week to Marrakesh and Casablanca.

At a ceremony sending off the El Al flight attended by Moroccan envoy Abderrahim Beyyoudh, Israel's Tourism Minister Yoel Razvozov said the service would boost "trade, tourism and economic cooperation between the countries", according to an El Al statement.

- 'Great to return' -

Morocco was one of four regional states to agree to normalise ties with Israel last year, along with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan.

The move came as the administration of former US president Donald Trump recognised Morocco's sovereignty over Western Sahara, a disputed and divided former Spanish colony.

The US State Department said on Twitter it was "excited" at Sunday's El Al flight, calling it "another important development stemming from improved relations between our partners and friends in Israel and Morocco".

Story continues

Morocco is home to North Africa's largest Jewish community, which numbers around 3,000. Some 700,000 Jews of Moroccan origin live in Israel.

"It's great to return to the land of my ancestors," said 58-year-old Sophie Levi, originally from Casablanca, who was one of hundreds of people to arrive on Sunday.

"We're finally breathing again after two years of Covid."

Some 50,000 to 70,000 tourists annually travelled to Morocco from Israel via third countries before the coronavirus pandemic, many of them of Moroccan origin.

In December last year, a direct flight carrying Israeli officials travelled from Tel Aviv to Rabat, where they signed several bilateral deals, including on air links.

Rabat had a liaison office in Tel Aviv but relations came to a halt during the 2000-2005 second Palestinian intifada, or uprising.

The normalisation deals between Arab states and Israel have been deemed a "betrayal" by the Palestinians, who believe the process should only follow a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said last week that he would visit Morocco once direct flights commenced.

Lapid's announcement came shortly after rights groups accused Morocco of having used the Israeli spyware programme Pegasus.

Rabat strongly denied the reports and said it was suing the rights groups.

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In this Jan. 27, 1987, file photo, Jackie Mason poses in his dressing with a globe as he stars in his own Broadway show in New York. AP Photo/Carlos Rene Perez, File

Jackie Mason, one of the last Borscht Belt comedians, died Saturday at age 93.

Mason had been hospitalized for more than two weeks.

Mason was known for embracing Jewish themes and political incorrectness.

Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

Jackie Mason, the legendary stand-up comedian who rose to prominence in the 1980s with a series of one-man shows on Broadway, has died. He was 93.

Mason died Saturday evening after being hospitalized for more than two weeks at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, celebrity lawyer Raoul Felder told the Associated Press.

The rabbi-turned-comedian was one of the last Borscht Belt comedians and was known for embracing Jewish themes and political incorrectness.

Tributes to Mason have poured in since the news of his death. Fellow comedian Gilbert Gottfried tweeted a photo of him and Mason, writing, "One of the best."

Read the original article on Insider
Alpha Stock / Alamy Stock Photo

So you still think the bloody riot in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 was an aberration? You still think that an armed mob trying to overthrow a duly elected government is not who we are? If so, Ive got a book for you.

Wilmingtons Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy by David Zucchino, which was awarded this years Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, tells a story thats more than a century old but feels as fresh as todays headlines. After the collapse of Reconstruction, the port city of Wilmington, North Carolina, was one of the few locales in the South where a so-called Fusion government of Black and white officials, both elected and appointed, ran a smoothly functioning city that was prosperous, racially integrated, and relatively peaceful.

The county coroner, jailer, and treasurer were Black. There were Black doctors, lawyers, magistrates, letter carriers, and health inspectors. Ten of the citys 26 policemen were Black. The mayor and police chief were white Republicans. John C. Dancy, a Black man appointed federal customs collector, earned the astonishing salary of $4,000 a yearmore than the governor. And the Black-owned Daily Record newspaper enjoyed a wide readership and a solid advertising base among businesses both Black and white. Nowhere in the South during post-Reconstruction did whites and blacks so successfully unite in a multiracial political partnership, Zucchino writes. Fusionists managed to win the statewide election in 1894 and seize control of the North Carolina legislature.

With the 1898 elections approaching, white supremacists set about making sure history did not repeat itself. Spurred by the Raleigh newspaper editor Josephus Daniels and other prominent white supremacists, the white men of Wilmington decided to do exactly what the pro-Trump mob in Washington tried to do on Jan. 6. As Zucchino writes, It was tacitly understood among white supremacists, at both the state and local level, that violence might be required to overthrow city government regardless of the election outcome in November.

Story continues

Nothing Prepared Me for the Horrors of Tulsa and the Red Summer Massacres

A coordinated propaganda campaign was set in motion to energize whites, intimidate blacks and, if necessary, trigger a coup. On the eve of the election, armed white men on horseback patrolled the citys streets, and when they rode past the home of Fusionist mayor Silas Wright, they fired their guns into the air and shouted Hang Silas Wright!a verbatim prelude to the Capitol mobs chant of Hang Mike Pence! Given the volatile atmosphere in Wilmington in 1898 and in Washington in 2021, violence was inevitable. Here are the sites where it unfolded in Wilmington:

Thalian Hall

Over the years, Thalian Hall, a grand antebellum theater built by slaves and free Blacks in downtown Wilmington, had drawn crowds to marvel at the likes of Frederick Douglass, Buffalo Bill Cody, and Tom Thumb. On the night of Oct. 24, 1898, the hall was packed with a crowd hungry for something very different. For months the states newspapers, led by Danielss Raleigh News & Observer and the white-owned Wilmington Star and Messenger, had been publishing inflammatory liesactual fake newsabout Negro rapists, incompetent Negro office holders, an imminent uprising of armed Negroes, and the necessary remedy of the lynch mob. Wilmington gun merchants were doing brisk business. White businessmen pooled their money and bought a powerful Colt rapid-fire gun and put it in the hands of the Wilmington Light Infantry. Employers threatened to fire Blacks who tried to vote in the November election. Merely trying to register to vote earned many Blacks a beating. The tinder was in place.

"Thalian Hall" Bill Morris

On the night of Oct. 24 at Thalian Hall, Col. Alfred Moore Waddell, a failed Confederate soldier and unofficial spokesman for Wilmingtons aggrieved white populace, supplied the match. For nearly an hour Waddell warmed up the packed house, lamenting that Wilmington had become a shameful Negro paradise and that if violence was required to wipe away that paradise, I trust that it will be rigidly and fearlessly performed. (As Trump told the crowd on Jan. 6 before they marched on the Capitol to disrupt the transfer of presidential power: If you dont fight like hell, youre not going to have a country anymore.) Now Waddells voice rose to a shout: The people are aroused! Shall we surrender to a ragged rabble of Negroes led by a handful of white cowards? No! A thousand times no!... We will have no more of the intolerable conditions under which we live. We are resolved to change them if we have to choke the Cape Fear with carcasses! The thought of Black corpses floating in the nearby river sent the crowd into a frenzy. Men raised their fists and roared and charged the stage. They were ready.

New Hanover County Courthouse

On the night before the election, several hundred members of the citys White Government Union clubs jammed into the meeting room in the ornate Gilded Age county courthouse to plot strategy for the coming day. They were given astonishingly explicit instructions. First, as Zucchino tells it, they were told to round up every white man they could find and escort him to the polls with instructions to vote Democratic. In the citys two gerrymandered Black wards, they were ordered to challenge any black man attempting vote. And finally, club members were told to go to every ward after the polls closed and ballots were being counted, and they were drilled on the most efficient ways to remove Republican ballots and replace them with phony Democratic ballots. The steal was on, only this one was real.

New Hanover County Courthouse Bill Morris

After the meeting adjourned, Col. Waddell walked across the street to Thalian Hall to reprise his Oct. 24 speech. This time his instructions were even more blunt: Go to the polls tomorrow, and if you find the Negro out voting, tell him to leave the polls. And if he refuses, kill him! Shoot him down in his tracks!

Wilmington Light Infantry Armory

Democratic candidates won in a landslide, both locally and statewide. On the day after the election, a thousand white men returned to the courthouse to hear the reading of the Wilmington Declaration of Independence, a document penned by a leading local white supremacist named Hugh MacRae, who headed a group called the Secret Nine and whose name would adorn the citys largest park until it was removed in 2020 as a gesture of racial conciliation. The last of the Declarations seven resolutions called for the forced closing of the Daily Record, the removal of its printing press and the banishment of its editor, Alex Manly. Three months before the election, Manly had published an incendiary editorial suggesting that sexual relations between black men and white womenthe chief cause of the lynching bees then sweeping the Southwere rarely acts of rape and instead were often consensual. He went on to excoriate white men as hypocrites for freely pursuing Black women while condemning Black men for pursuing white women. The editorial outraged white Wilmington.

Wilmington Light Infantry Armory Bill Morris

Two days after the election, on Nov. 10, a mob of 500 armed white men gathered at the marble-and-brick Wilmington Light Infantry Armory, where the newly purchased Colt rapid-fire gun had been mounted on a wagon, ready for battle. With Col. Waddell leading the way, the mob marched toward the Daily Record office, attracting more gunmen as it went. By the time it reached the newspaper office, the mob had swollen to 1,500 armed and bloodthirsty men.

The Daily Record Office

Alex Manly, rightly fearing for his life, had already fled town. Undeterred, the mob kicked down the door and set about ransacking the office and tearing apart the printing press. Soon kerosene was sloshed on the floorboards, a match was tossed, and the building went up in flames.

Firefighters from the nations first all-Black steam engine company arrived to douse the fire and keep it from spreading to neighboring buildings. The white men jeered, then they gathered in front of the gutted building for a photograph. Each man wore a stern, satisfied look, Zucchino writes, as if he had just completed a hard days labor. During and after the Jan. 6 riot, social media swarmed with images of pro-Trump rioters inside the Capitol, including video of a protester named Ashli Babbitt trying to smash a door and getting shot dead by policefor no reason, according to Trumpand the unforgettable picture of an Arkansas contractor named Richard Barnett with a foot resting on Speaker Nancy Pelosis desk, as though he needed to rest after completing a hard days labor.

The Corner of 4th and Harnett

The Corner of 4th and Harnett Bill Morris

Now the mob seethed north into the black neighborhood known as Brooklyn. At the corner of 4th and Harnett they encountered a group of anxious Black men gathered outside of Brunjes Saloon. Some of them were armed. They cursed the white men for burning down a cherished piece of the Black community. Taunts and curses flew back and forth. Soon bullets were flying. Moments later, Zucchino writes, four white men unleashed a fusillade from a .44-caliber navy rifle, two 16-shot repeating rifles, and a double barreled shotgun loaded with buckshot. Three Black men toppled to the wood-slatted walkway. All three would die.

Three white men were wounded in the exchange of gunfirewhich led to the false rumor that the long-feared negro uprising had begun. On this pretext, every available resource was turned on the citys Black populace, including the Wilmington Light Infantry, Naval Reserves, militia units from Wilmington and two nearby towns, armed with everything from Winchester rifles to the Colt and Hotchkiss rapid-fire guns. Armed white men poured into the city from surrounding towns and countryside, eager to join the fight. The Black people of Wilmington didnt have a prayer.

Pine Forest Cemetery

The killing went on all day. At nightfall a cold ran began to fall, soaking the processions of terrified Black men, women, and children trudging out of the city. Many melted into the nearby swamps and piney woods. Some families broke away and bedded down among the worn tombstones of Wilmingtons colored cemetery, known as Pine Forest, Zucchino writes. They thought white men would not venture there.

When the shooting stopped, more than 60 Black people lay dead. Not a single white man was charged with a crime. Officials who were not voted out of office in the rigged election were forced to resign. After Mayor Silas Wright was removed from office, Col. Waddell was appointed mayor by the coup leaders. Many prominent blacks and sympathetic whites were rounded up and banished from the city. All that remained was for the white victors to frame a narrative of the coup. They started the very next Sunday.

In the riot the negro was the aggressor, Rev. James W. Kramer, a member of the armed white mob, said from the pulpit of Brooklyn Baptist Church that Sunday. It was a lie that would become gospel. I believe that the whites were doing Gods services We will give the negro justice and will treat him kindly, but never again will we be ruled by him.

As the rioters were melting from the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6, leaving behind five dead bodies and one of the darkest chapters in American history, Donald Trump told them, We love you. Youre very special. Later that day he tweeted: These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long.

In other words, if Americans feel they have been wrongedif they believe they are living under intolerable conditionsthey will resort to just about anything to rectify the wrong, whether its real or imagined. That is who we are. And that, as Zucchinos timely book lays out, chapter and verse, is who we have always been.

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A look at what's happening around the majors today:

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STAR STARTERS

The White Sox and Brewers close a weekend full of impressive pitching matchups in Milwaukee with arguably the best of the bunch Sunday night.

Lance Lynn (9-3, 1.94 ERA) starts for the White Sox against Brandon Woodruff (7-4, 2.04) in a duel of All-Star right-handers.

The NL Central-leading Brewers started Freddy Peralta and Corbin Burnes earlier in this series, while the AL Central-leading White Sox turned to Lucas Giolito and Carlos Rodon.

Of those six starting pitchers, Giolito is the only one who didnt make the All-Star Game this season. According to STATS LLC, this is the first three-game series in major league history to feature five All-Star starting pitchers from the current season.

Its exciting, said injured Chicago catcher Yasmani Grandal, who worked with these Brewers pitchers while playing for Milwaukee in 2019. Thats what you want to see  having two young teams having high-caliber guys coming in and out every night, doing it at a high level and putting up the numbers they are.

HILL ON THE HILL

Rich Hill is scheduled to make his debut with the NL East-leading New York Mets when they host Toronto.

The 41-year-old lefty was obtained in a trade with Tampa Bay on Friday for veteran pitcher Tommy Hunter and minor league catcher Matthew Dyer.

Hill bolsters a rotation that has been depleted by injuries, most notably ace Jacob deGrom being on the 10-day injured list with tightness in his right forearm.

Hill went 6-4 with a 3.87 ERA in 19 starts for the Rays this season. He faced Toronto on July 11 and gave up three runs on four hits and three walks in five innings.

TRYING TO AVOID A DIRTY DOZEN

The Texas Rangers will try to break their season-high 11-game losing streak when they send Taylor Hearn (2-3 4.70) to the mound to oppose Zack Greinke (9-3, 3.58) at Houston.

The losing streak is the third-longest in franchise history and the Rangers' worst since they dropped 12 straight in 1982. Texas has lost nine games since the All-Star game and is the only team in the majors to go winless since the break.

Story continues

The Rangers lost 4-1 Saturday, when they were held hitless until the eighth inning.

The Rangers have already been no-hit twice this season, by Joe Musgrove of the San Diego Padres on April 9 and Corey Kluber of the New York Yankees on May 19.

MISSING MAX

The Nationals expect ace Max Scherzer to make his next scheduled start after he was scratched with what the team described as mild right triceps discomfort.

Manager Dave Martinez said Scherzer had an MRI and it was extremely clean. Jon Lester started in Scherzers place Saturday night at Baltimore.

Scherzer is 7-4 with a 2.83 ERA in 18 starts this season. The three-time Cy Young Award winner, who turns 37 on Tuesday, has been the subject of trade speculation as Washington continues to struggle. His absence now is another issue for the Nationals rotation, which has been without Stephen Strasburg since early June because of lingering neck problems.

HUSTLING HARPER

Bryce Harper is 12 for 12 on steal attempts this season after his latest swipe for the Phillies.

The slugger stole third base on Saturday night against Atlanta, a day after stealing second, third and home in a win over the Braves.

This weekend marked the first time since September 2019 that Harper had stolen bases in consecutive games.

Harper's career high for stolen bases in a season is 21, done in 2016 when he also was caught stealing 10 times for Washington.

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More AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/MLB and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports
In this screengrab from ABC7, Keegan Casteel leaves jail at the 18th District police headquarters in Chicago July 7, 2021. ABC7 via AP

An man caught by police with guns in his Chicago hotel room said it was "an honest to God accident."

Footage viewed by media outlets showed that police had worried "it could've been a Las Vegas thing."

Keegan Casteel, 32, was arrested and charged with two felony counts.

Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

An Iowa man found with firearms in his Chicago hotel room sparked fears of a Las Vegas-style massacre, but told police officers it was all "an honest to God accident" and he "didn't mean to startle anyone," according to footage viewed by the Associated Press and the Chicago Sun-Times.

Keegan Casteel, 32, was arrested and charged with two felony counts of aggravated unlawful use of a weapon. His lawyer derided the media coverage of the incident, saying his client was visiting the city to propose to his girlfriend, not to commit a mass shooting, the Associated Press reported.

The incident began on the Fourth of July weekend, when an employee of the W Hotel reported seeing the weapons - a handgun and a rifle with a scope - and ammunition in Casteel's room. The room reportedly had a view of the Navy Pier and Lake Michgan, where crowds were gathering.

The find led officials to believe they had stopped a "tragedy" before it happened on a holiday weekend, the Sun-Times reported, citing the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting, in which a gunman opened fire on a music festival from his hotel room.

Casteel was reportedly staying in the hotel with his girlfriend and two kids, who cried as the officers raided the room. The Sun-Times reported that one officer chastised Casteel for not properly researching the hotel, which prohibited firearms, before arriving with his guns.

"Brother, I wish you didn't bring any of this s--- with you," the officer said, according to the report. "It kills me that your kids are here."

Other officers could be heard on video remarking that "it could've been a Las Vegas thing," the Sun-Times reported.

Story continues

Casteel told police the whole incident was an accident - in his rush to pack his gun range bag for the trip, he mistakenly believed his guns were not inside it, the Sun-Times reported.

But he found the weapons in the bag when the family was preparing to go to the beach, and removed them and left them in the hotel room. That's where the hotel employee found them.

"I didn't expect anything to happen. I just left them there for the day. Went to the beach. Came back. Went shopping," Casteel said, according to the Associated Press.

He added: "It's my fault. I didn't mean to startle anyone. I understand 100% why I'm here. But like I said, it's an honest to God accident," the outlet reported.

Casteel later proposed to his girlfriend after he was released on $10,000 bond, the Sun-Times reported.

Read the original article on Insider
BALTIMORE (AP)  Matt Harvey allowed one hit in six scoreless innings in another outstanding performance and the Baltimore Orioles held on to beat the fading Washington Nationals 5-3 on Saturday night.

Harvey (5-10) allowed only one baserunner  Trea Turner hit a double in the fourth. The right-hander struck out four. Harvey went 12 straight starts without a win, but now he's thrown six scoreless innings in each of his past two starts.

Feeling really good with all the pitches, Harvey said. Especially the curveball. I haven't thrown that a whole lot in the past  being able to get that over for a strike, and also be able to feel confident with it both to righties and lefties.

Trey Mancini and Ryan Mountcastle each hit a solo homer, and the Orioles added three more runs in the sixth. Washington, which scratched ace Max Scherzer before the game because of triceps discomfort, has lost 14 of its last 19.

Weve still got a lot of baseball left. We really do," Nationals manager Dave Martinez said. "Offense needs to get it going again.

Juan Soto hit a solo homer for the Nationals in the seventh, and Turner added a two-run single in the eighth. But Dillon Tate worked a scoreless ninth for his second save.

Jon Lester (3-5) allowed three runs and three hits in five-plus innings after starting in place of Scherzer.

I felt like I threw the ball pretty well, Lester said. Just no results.

Mancini, who has a seven-game hitting streak since the All-Star break, gave the Orioles a 1-0 lead in the first when he went deep for the first time since finishing second to Pete Alonso of the Mets in the Home Run Derby. Mountcastle homered in the fourth.

Cedric Mullins doubled to lead off the Baltimore sixth, chasing Lester. Then Austin Hays hit an RBI double off reliever Austin Voth, and Mancini followed with a run-scoring single. Maikel Franco's sacrifice fly made it 5-0.

Orioles reliever Tanner Scott hit the first two batters he faced in the eighth, loading the bases with nobody out. Then pinch-hitter Victor Robles struck out looking on a full count, and Alcides Escobar struck out as well.

Story continues

Turner singled to make it 5-3, but Soto followed with a foul popup.

He made the pitch of the game getting Soto out there. I know that the hit to Trea was disappointing, as well hitting two guys on the foot, Orioles manager Brandon Hyde said. He got out of the inning, and left that inning with the lead.

MOVE

The Orioles selected the contract of RHP Conner Greene from Triple-A Norfolk.

TRAINER'S ROOM

Nationals: Martinez said Scherzer is expected to make his next start. ... Washington put INF Jordy Mercer on the 10-day injured list, retroactive to Wednesday, with a left calf strain. The Nationals recalled INF Carter Kieboom from Triple-A Rochester. He struck out to end the game.

UP NEXT

John Means (4-3) starts for the Orioles in Sunday's series finale against Washington's Paolo Espino (2-2). The Nationals swept a three-game series at home against Baltimore in May, and now the Orioles are trying to return the favor by taking three in a row.

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Follow Noah Trister at www.twitter.com/noahtrister

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More AP MLB: https://apnews.com/MLB and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports
USS Theodore Roosevelt in the Gulf of Alaska after exercise Northern Edge 2019, May 25, 2019. US Navy/MCS3 Erick A. Parsons

US Navy aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt sailed to Alaska in May for exercise Northern Edge.

The carrier took part in the exercise in 2019, when it became the first carrier to do so in 10 years.

The trips reflect the Navy's increasing focus on the Arctic and its efforts to get used to operating up there again.

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Hot, long days and dangerous working conditions are typical for Petty Officer 2nd Class Austin Moore, whose job is helping launch and recover aircraft from the flight deck of the USS Theodore Roosevelt.

The carrier routinely deploys to the Indo-Pacific region, where the warm weather adds to the heat on the deck and steam from the catapults. Moore's complex duties only get harder when the carrier does nighttime flight operations.

When the flattop arrived in the Gulf of Alaska in early May for Northern Edge 2021 - a two-week exercise involving 15,000 sailors, soldiers, Marines, and airmen - Moore looked forward to wrapping up a six-month deployment in unfamiliar surroundings, bundling up against the cold for operations in a region where the sun barely sets at this time of year.

Two F/A-18 Super Hornets launch from USS Theodore Roosevelt, April 29, 2021. US Navy/MCS3 Erik Melgar

"Having that opportunity to have daylight all day, we were always on our game, always a step ahead," Moore told Insider.

The carrier's trip reflects the Navy's increasing presence in and around the Arctic, prompted by increasing Chinese and Russian activity there.

Lawmakers, including Rep. Elaine Luria, a retired Navy commander, have also sought to increase the US military's focus on the region.

Last month, Luria and other legislators introduced a bill that would require the Pentagon to complete an Arctic security assessment and develop a five-year plan to give the services the resources necessary for specific strategic needs in the region.

"The Arctic is where the future of military conflict and free trade will be decided," Luria said in a statement.

Building up 'core knowledge'

Story continues

Sailors watch flight operations aboard USS Theodore Roosevelt during Exercise Northern Edge 2021, May 7, 2021. US Navy/MCS2 Zachary Wheeler

Building sailors' muscle memory for operations in those increasingly accessible waters has important implications for the fleet.

"We haven't had sailors operating in these areas since the late '80s, since the end of the Cold War, so a lot of that core knowledge is no longer there, except for those of us who have done it," said Lt. Alex Morgan, the Theodore Roosevelt's assistant navigator.

"So it's really important that we capture these experiences" and share them across the service, added Morgan, who plans the carrier's movements. "One of the nice things is that nobody stays in one place very long, so we'll be in ships and squadrons across the fleet within just a couple of years."

Sailors move ordnance across the flight deck of USS Theodore Roosevelt during Exercise Northern Edge 2021, May 7, 2021. US Navy/MCS Seaman Hayden Burns

The last 16 months have been tumultuous for the crew of Theodore Roosevelt.

A COVID-19 outbreak in 2020 lead to the death of one chief petty officer and sidelined the carrier for weeks following the ouster of its popular commanding officer, Capt. Brett Crozier. Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modley resigned after his remarks to the crew during a visit drew widespread backlash.

The carrier returned to San Diego in summer 2020, but that homecoming was brief. Now, after a "double pump" deployment, the carrier and about 3,000 crew members are switching homeports to Bremerton, Washington.

The flattop will undergo maintenance at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, including an upgrade to enable the flight deck to handle the F-35C.

The operations off Alaska capped a chaotic period for the crew and offered them a new set of challenges: cold weather, low visibility, stiff winds, long supply lines, and marine wildlife.

"We started all that planning when we're operating off the coast of Guam, which was obviously a vastly different experience - warm temperatures, high humidity," Morgan said. "Within the space of the week, we went from sweating at every step to bundled up and seeing our breath on the bridge. So it was definitely a mentality shift."

An E-2C Hawkeye launches from USS Theodore Roosevelt during Northern Edge 2021, May 3, 2021. US Navy/MCS3 Terence Deleon Guerrero

Theodore Roosevelt also participated in Northern Edge in 2019, the first time a carrier had done so in 10 years. Morgan and others said they leaned on the playbook from that experience.

"In 2019 the carrier was more limited," said Morgan, who participated in the exercise for the first time this year. "We had to be closer to shore. We had more flexibility this time because our pilots were certified to operate farther from land."

While the Navy trains to operate around marine wildlife, crew members said they were surprised by how often they spotted whales and dolphins.

"We had to be very cognizant of where we were operating and keep a good lookout," Morgan said.

Water temperatures ranged from the high 30s to low 40s Fahrenheit, markedly different from the 80-degree water temperatures around Guam, said Capt. Eric Anduze, Theodore Roosevelt's commanding officer. Keeping sailors warm became a priority, including shortening rotations to help "maintain awareness."

"When you live in a floating metal box, it really permeates through the skin of the ship and makes everything extremely cold," Anduze said.

Sailors signal an F/A-18E Super Hornet before it launches from USS Theodore Roosevelt during exercise Northern Edge 2021, May 4, 2021. US Navy/MCS Seaman Eduardo Torres

A person in water that cold can only survive about 20 minutes, said Ensign Jorge Miguel, a bridge officer of the deck. That leaves an extremely small window to maneuver the carrier and the resources necessary for search and rescue if someone goes overboard.

"You don't want to wait 20 minutes," Miguel said. "By then it's too late."

A lingering weather system created days of low visibility, reducing the ability to launch aircraft, Anduze said.

Operations slowed but didn't stop, and that low visibility made extra vigilance necessary, Miguel said.

"If you're not able to see out the window and see any contacts out there, at that point you're relying on radars to see what you have in front of you and make the best decision with what you have available to you," Miguel said.

Poor weather also caused problems for pilots one day during the exercise, forcing them to divert to an Air Force base inland, Morgan said. With the pandemic ongoing, the crew did not want to strand pilots overnight.

US Navy aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt in the Gulf of Alaska during Exercise Northern Edge 2021, May 7, 2021. US Navy/MCS3 Nicholas Huynh

"One of the unique things about being an aircraft carrier is you can always move the airport, but it was so thick that day, we had to delay recovery by several hours," Morgan said.

"That was a lot of work between our air department [and] our meteorologists on board. We were working with the strike group and just trying to figure out where we can position the ship so that we can recover those aircraft before sunset," Morgan added.

While longer days meant more light on the flight deck, Moore, who was aboard for the 2019 exercise, said they also made it more difficult to rest. Sleep deprivation is a major readiness problem for the Navy.

For Miguel, the experience presented a challenge partly because it was brand new, but he said novelty shouldn't be an obstacle.

"Whether we're in Alaska or, say, Fifth Fleet or Seventh Fleet, it doesn't really matter. We should be able to execute and use to training that we've gone through to execute accordingly," he said.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Gunmen who seized 121 students at a high school in northwestern Nigeria in early July have released 28 of them, a school official told AFP on Sunday.

The attackers stormed Bethel Baptist High School in northwestern Kaduna state on July 5, abducting students who were sleeping in their dorms.

The kidnapping was the latest by heavily armed gangs, known locally as bandits, who have long plagued northwest and central Nigeria by looting, stealing cattle and kidnapping, but have lately targeted schools and colleges.

The 28 released students had been reunited with their parents after being released on Saturday, Joseph Hayab, the Bethel Baptist High School official, told AFP.

"We were able to send out church buses to go to where the captors dropped them to pick them up," he said.

In all, thirty-four of the kidnapped children were now free: five escaped earlier and one was released on health grounds, Hayab said.

Some money had been paid to the gang, he said, declining to say how much.

"The most important thing now is to get all the remaining children released," he said.

Parents of those released reacted with joy.

"I'm so happy what God had done for us, it is our day," said mother Jumai Francis.

"The joy, I'm overwhelmed," said father Zambo Egeje, but still had some words of criticism for the authorities.

"Physically, we did not see any government officially consoling us," he said.

- Rise in school kidnapping -

Kaduna state police were not immediately available for comment when contacted by AFP.

Of the five children who escaped on July 21, two were found by police and the other three made their own way back to the school, Hayab said.

"They escaped from the bandits when they were sent to collect firewood for cooking."

After the kidnapping, the gang asked the school for food and a ransom to free the hostages.

Kidnappings of travellers on the roads or of influential people for ransom are common in Africa's most populous country.

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Boko Haram Islamists first kidnapped children from schools in 2014, when they took more than 200 girls from their dormitory in Chibok, causing a worldwide public outcry.

Abductions of schoolchildren have risen sharply since then, with around 1,000 students and pupils have been abducted across Nigeria since December.

Most have been released after negotiations by local officials with the organised criminal gangs.

Many though remain captive, including a hundred children abducted in early June from a Muslim school in the neighbouring state of Niger, and still held hostage.

"The Tegina boys and girls, some as young as five, have been in captivity for 56 long days now," tweeted Nigerian analyst Bulama Bukarti on Sunday.

"Its clear that parents have been left completely on their own, with both state and federal govt not making any concrete security or non-security efforts to free the helpless children."

President Muhammadu Buhari, who is under fire for growing insecurity in the country, has ordered the security forces to ensure safe and early release of all kidnap victims.

abu-cma/mbx/pbr/har
Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the US House. (Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

US Rep Adam Kinzinger, a Republican congressman from Illinois known for his criticism of former President Donald Trump, has been appointed to the House panel being created to investigate the riot at the US Capitol on 6 January.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi confirmed on Sunday that she would ask the congressman to join the panel during an interview with ABCs This Week following days of speculation on the issue. Her office had refused to comment to The Independent on Mr Kinzingers potential appointment as recently as Thursday. In a statement later on Sunday, Ms Pelosi confirmed the appointment of Mr Kinzinger.

Mr Kinzinger will be one of two Republicans on the bipartisan committee following House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthys decision last week to withdraw all of his nominations after Ms Pelosi declined to name two of them, conservative Reps Jim Jordan and Jim Banks, citing Mr Jordans potential status as a material witness to the events of the riot and Mr Bankss unserious comments about the attack on the Capitol to members of the news media.

Around noon on Sunday after Ms Pelosis comments were first made, Mr Kinzinger released a statement of his own, confirming his participation.

"Today, I was asked by the Speaker to serve on the House Select Committee to Investigate January 6th and I humbly accepted, he said, according to Forbes.

In her own statement, Ms Pelosi said that Mr Kinzingers addition would bring great patriotism to the panel.

Democrats have faced sharp criticism from Mr McCarthy over their decision to block the two congressmen from participating, though Republicans declined to support legislation earlier this year that would have established a select commission to probe the attack and given Mr McCarthy full control over the selections for five spots on the panel.

The legislation to create such a commission was initially negotiated with the help of Republican members of Congress including Rep John Katko, but was staunchly opposed by Mr McCarthy and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell at the time, resulting in it gaining little GOP support on the House and Senate floors. Now, Republicans are hammering Ms Pelosi for exerting control over the Democrat-led House panel established by the speaker in response to the failure of that bill, and have complained that her decision to bar Mr Banks and Mr Jordan is undemocratic.

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Ms Pelosi and her allies have responded by pointing to the statements of Mr Banks, who famously blamed the events of 6 January on the Biden administration despite the mob being made up of Trump supporters attempting to illegally block Mr Bidens election victory, and the Biden administration not existing at the time of the riot.

Ms Cheney noted in her own press conference on the steps of the Capitol that Mr Jordan may very well be a material witness to events that led to that day, to January 6.

In an angry response to Ms Pelosis decision on Wednesday, Mr McCarthy vowed that the GOP would pursue its own investigation into the 6 Jan attack, though as the minority party in the House and Senate, Republicans do not have the power to establish official committees.

Unless Speaker Pelosi reverses course and seats all five Republican nominees, Republicans will not be party to their sham process and will instead pursue our own investigation of the facts, claimed the California congressman.

Read More

'I don't care if you think I'm Satan reincarnated': Biden says no excuse for people underplaying Capitol riot
Almost a decade ago, Michael Sherwin, an associate professor of art at West Virginia University, discovered that a shopping center was being built on a Monongahela burial ground in his then-hometown of Morgantown, West Virginia. The realization shook him deeply and prompted a yearslong exploration of what happened to other Native American sites of sacred and historical importance across the country.

"The Suncrest Town Center is a really banal, anywhere-in-consumer-America kind of a site. It's just a generic shopping mall with a grocery store, etc. And yet it held  and it still holds  this whole other spiritual importance to the Monongahela culture," Sherwin said when talking about the origins of this project with BuzzFeed News. "Once you have the knowledge and the understanding of previous inhabitants and the importance of it, you can't help but recognize that within the site. It really transformed the way I was looking at that landscape."

His work is being published in a new book, Vanishing Points, which challenges the idea that history is ever fully decided with large-format photographs that look critically at seemingly familiar American landscapes.

"He takes me to the place by creating this beautiful photograph," said Bonnie Brown, the director of Native American studies at West Virginia University who helped Sherwin research the book. "And then he makes me think about, what is permanent, what has not vanished, who were the other people who have enjoyed this very same vista?"

Sherwin, who is white, acknowledges that its complicated for him to present the overlapping layers of history of Indigenous cultures. Working with Brown and archaeologists, Sherwin took care to work only on sites that were already accessible to the broader public to explore how Native history was being distorted or ignored. He struggled with questions of complicity over the course of his research, which led him to many sites that were practically in his backyard.

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"Even though I am a white male without this ancestry, I feel like it's important that I recognize that and that I talk about that in the work, he said. I hope that the photograph ultimately builds awareness about these issues, and the importance of these sacred sites."

In documenting well over 100 sites across the US, Sherwin did not collaborate with local tribes on his project, seeing it more as a personal quest to reconnect with the land.

He had one particularly meaningful moment at Medicine Wheel, an ancient sacred site in a region that has been inhabited for thousands of years within what is now Bighorn National Park in Wyoming. Medicine Wheel is a rolling limestone plateau that aligns with constellations at certain times of the year. It is still used for ceremonies by numerous tribes, and the landmark boundaries were greatly enlarged after tribal consultation to include over 100 smaller wheels across the surrounding landscape. Sherwin references his experience with a single photograph that pays homage to Red Cloud, an important historical Oglala Lakota leader.

"Some tribes would forbid such a book being written, especially by non-Natives, since it deals with sacred sites, such as the Medicine Wheel," said Joshua Mann, the tribal preservation officer for the Eastern Shoshone Tribe in Wyoming. "I know some tribes would consider that disrespectful."

Mann's job as a tribal preservation officer is to ensure that the interests of the tribe are represented in land use projects and that there is a point of contact to consult when artifacts or remains are found. Created in 1990 by Congress and the National Parks Service, the role of a tribal preservation officer is a relatively new one, but is seen as crucial to the preservation of Native culture.

"Everything is still active," Mann said. "With this job, now we can at least acknowledge the past existence and classify areas of being sacred, and they can still be utilized by our tribe."

Sherwin also urges people to learn about and support organizations that seek to protect Native American sites and cultural history.

"Some of the photographs in this series were made on the lands of sovereign Native nations," he wrote both in his book and online. "Many of the other photographs were made on Indigenous lands that were ceded to, seized, or stolen by the United States government through treaty and federal statute."
Mr Kishor helped political parties win eight of the nine elections he was hired for

Prashant Kishore is not an ordinary political consultant.

According to his telling, he rarely watches news on TV and he doesn't read newspapers. He doesn't write emails, or take notes, and he hasn't used a laptop in a decade. The only gadget he uses is his phone, he told me. Mr Kishor has posted 86 tweets in three years on Twitter, where he has half a million followers.

"I am not a believer in work-life balance and have literally no interests outside my work," he said.

Mr Kishor is India's best-known political consultant and strategist, though he dislikes the description. He is seen as a high-profile handler of politicians and an astute tactician who has perfected the art of winning elections and influencing people.

Since 2011, Mr Kishor and his political consultancy firm have struck success with eight of nine elections in which they have run campaigns for different parties. He has had offers from Disney, Netflix and even Bollywood's Shah Rukh Khan for biopics - all of which he has refused.

Mr Kishor has successfully advised politicians of all hues - from BJP's Narendra Modi in his sprint to power in 2014 to arch-rival Mamata Banerjee of regional Trinamul Congress party in her sensational third-term win in May against a resurgent BJP. His supporters call Mr Kishor a man with a Midas touch; his critics say he chooses his clients carefully, based on their chances of winning.

In May, Mr Kishor, 44, announced he'd had enough with the job he was doing. "I am quitting this space," he said. "I want to do something else."

But in recent weeks, he has been in the headlines again. Meetings with key opposition politicians, including Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi, have sparked reports about the canny consultant trying to help cobble an alliance against Mr Modi's Bharatitya Janata Party (BJP); or even joining Mr Gandhi's party to shore up its flagging fortunes.

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All this is speculation, Mr Kishor said.

"I am definitely not going to do what I was doing earlier. I have a few options but I haven't made a decision. It is quite possible that I end up doing something which has got nothing to do with politics. As soon as I take a decision I will formally share it," he said.

With general elections three years away, India's opposition parties appear to be struggling to mount a robust challenge to Mr Modi. Mr Kishor believes the BJP is not quite the supremely powerful party it's made out to be, and there is "always space for a party, existing or new, to mount a challenge on its own and in combination with other parties".

The Congress has seen a steep decline - it's share of votes and seats falling since the mid-1980s. In 2019, it picked up 20% of the popular vote, won a paltry 52 seats and lost its second consecutive election. But the party still has about 100 MPs in parliament and 880 state legislators. It remains the largest opposition bloc to take on BJP.

"I am nobody to comment about what is wrong with Congress. I can only say that the problems of the party are much deeper than what appears in their electoral performance of last decade. They are more structural," he said.

Mr Kishor has worked with politicians of all hues

Floating a new federal party is easier said than done. Cobbling together a third opposition alliance is neither "doable or sustainable" because a rag-tag coalition does not bring, which has not already been tested and rejected by voters, to the table," Mr Kishor said.

Yet he believes that the BJP - which will be seeking a third term in 2024 - is not invincible. "There are options and enough examples to show that with right strategy and efforts they could be defeated," he said.

Mr Kishor said winning parties in India, no matter how popular, usually don't win more than 40-45% of the popular vote. In 2019, BJP picked up 38% of the vote and won more than 300 seats.

The BJP, he says, has not be able to win more than a fifth of the 200-odd seats in seven states in eastern and southern India as regional parties have been able to effectively prevent the party from making inroads.

The remaining 340-odd seats are in the north and the west of the country, where the BJP is influential. A challenger to the BJP pick up around 150 seats in these parts, reducing BJP's margin, Mr Kishor said.

The way Mr Kishor works offers a glimpse into how political consultancy works in a country like India. His firm Indian Political Action Committee (IPAC) - which has up to 4,000 people working during campaigns - embeds itself in the party they are hired to work for.

Mr Kishor most recently helped West Bengal Mamata Banerjee win

"We act as a force multiplier helping the party to do whatever is required for them to do well in the elections," Mr Kishor said.

"We make some difference, but it is difficult to quantify how much exactly."

Mr Kishor's takeaways from a decade in Indian electoral politics: high turnouts at campaign meetings are insignificant to poll outcomes; entry barriers to politics are higher as elections become more expensive; and a politics and society that are getting increasingly polarised.

And what informs the voting choices of more than 800 million Indians?

"Delivery of welfare benefits, identity, empowerment, access, many intangibles. I could never hazard a guess," Mr Kishor said.

"I never try to second guess voters. I just try to develop systems to find out what people are saying. And we are always surprised and humbled by the new information that comes from listening."

In 2015, his team went to 40,000 villages in Bihar, India's poorest state and Mr Kishor's birthplace, to find out more about their problems.

"The number one issue was lack of drainage," he said. They found a fifth of the police complaints in police stations were related to fights over bad drainage.

In Bengal last year, Mr Kishor helped set up a helpline to record people's complaints. Seven million people dialled in. The majority of them complained of delayed delivery or corruption over caste or affirmative action certificates, Mr Kishor said. Acting on the complaints, the government issued 2.6 million such certificates in six weeks.

Despite his successes, he thinks - curiously - that politics is not his strong suit. "I don't really understand it very well," he said. He strength lay instead in common sense, he said, and listening carefully. "And I love to work under pressure".
By Tarek Amara

TUNIS (Reuters) -Police and protesters clashed in several Tunisian cities on Sunday as demonstrators demanding the government step down attacked offices of Ennahda, the moderate Islamist party that is the biggest in parliament.

Witnesses said protesters stormed or tried to storm Ennahda offices in Monastir, Sfax, El Kef and Sousse, while in Touzeur they set fire to the party's local headquarters.

The violence came as hundreds of protesters rallied in each of the main cities after a spike in COVID-19 cases that has aggravated economic troubles and exposed the failings of a squabbling political class.

The protests, the biggest in Tunisia for months and the biggest to target Ennahda for years, were called by social media activists. No political parties publicly backed the rallies.

In Tunis, police used pepper spray against protesters who threw stones and shouted slogans demanding that Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi quit and parliament be dissolved. There were other big protests in Gafsa, Sidi Bouzid and Nabeul.

The protests raise pressure on a fragile government that is enmeshed in a political struggle with President Kais Saied, as the government tries to avert a looming fiscal crisis amid a weeks-long spike in COVID-19 cases and increased death rates.

The pandemic has hammered the economy which was already struggling in the aftermath of the 2011 revolution that ousted long-time authoritarian leader Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.

Public support for democracy has waned amid surging unemployment and crumbling state services.

"Our patience has run out... there are no solutions for the unemployed," said Nourredine Selmi, 28, a jobless protester. "They cannot control the epidemic ... They can't give us vaccines."

Last week, Mechichi sacked the health minister after chaotic scenes at walk-in vaccination centres during the Muslim Eid al-Adha holiday, where large crowds queued for inadequate supplies of vaccine.

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After a year of wrangling with Mechichi and the leader of Ennahda, Rached Ghannouchi, who is also parliament speaker, President Saied declared the army would take over the pandemic response.

Some analysts saw the move as an attempt to expand his powers beyond the foreign and military role assigned to the president in the 2014 constitution.

Ennahda, banned before the revolution, has been the most consistently successful political party since then and a member of successive government coalitions. It has backed Mechichi, a political independent, in his disputes with the president.

"The message of anger was well received... but violence and burning are unacceptable," said party official Maher Mahioub.

Government paralysis could derail efforts to negotiate an International Monetary Fund loan seen as crucial to stabilising state finances but which could also involve spending cuts that would aggravate economic pain for ordinary people.

(Reporting by Tarek Amara; Writing by Angus McDowall; Editing by Edmund Blair)
Jul. 25EDITOR'S NOTE  The following article contains graphic depictions of sexual assault and child abuse. Discretion is advised.

Alexander Ramos, 37, Richmond, was charged with first-degree rape of a victim under twelve on Saturday after he was arrested on a warrant by the Kentucky State Police (KSP).

According to the KSP, officers were alerted on March 15, 2020, about allegations of sexual assault between a man and a juvenile which occurred approximately eight-years-ago in Estill County.

As a result of the investigation, Ramos was identified and charged.

Ramos is lodged in the Madison County Detention Center.

The Register collects and publishes police reports as a public service to its readers. The reports often contain allegations against individuals and do not mean the individuals committed a crime. All people named in connection with a crime are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
Jul. 25NORWAY, Maine  As Wednesday's flash rainstorm lashed the windows of the 290 Maine Street pub, state Sen. Rick Bennett was holding court.

The Republican from Oxford County sat with Carol Howard and Linda DuBois, a Republican from New Gloucester and a Democrat from Hampden, respectively. They were not constituents, but opponents of Central Maine Power's transmission corridor project who wanted to meet Bennett in person.

They wanted to know why Bennett, a top CMP critic, had introduced a joint resolution on the final day of the session declaring the Legislature felt the corridor constituted a "substantial alteration" of public lands. The approved resolution was aimed at a court case centered on whether a lease of public lands critical to the project should require a legislative vote.

Bennett said he wanted to ensure the Legislature had the last word in the debate after Bennett saw the biggest efforts to hurt CMP that he championed fall to Gov. Janet Mills' veto pen. Those included bills limiting referendum spending for companies with foreign government ownership and asking voters to create a consumer-owned utility.

"I'm not frustrated," he said, "it's just the way it is."

Bennett was just elected to the state Senate last fall, but he is well acquainted with the way political power moves in Augusta, and he quickly signed onto the biggest political fights of the year after he was sworn in.

A lawmaker for 12 years in the 1990s and early 2000s  he also ran for Congress in 1994, losing to Democrat John Baldacci  Bennett has long been known as a shrewd political broker.

He famously devised a power-sharing agreement with Mike Michaud  then a fellow state senator who would later be elected to Congress  when the Senate was evenly divided from 2000 to 2002. The partnership led to the two concocting their own budget deal in 2001, throwing out months of their colleagues' budget work and alienating many in both parties in the process.

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After leaving the state Senate in 2004, Bennett ran for the U.S. Senate in 2012, but didn't make it past the Republican primary. He went on to serve as the Maine Republican Party chair from 2013 to 2017.

Bennett's trajectory this session has at times aligned him with Democrats and led him to actively defy his own party. He notably was one of two Republican defectors who ensured a supplemental budget passed in March. But his deep ties to the GOP and loyalty on key party issues make him a valuable member, while his willingness to forge bipartisan alliances and engage the media show a drive to get his message across through whatever avenues are available.

"My fidelity is not to a party," he said during a Thursday interview. "My fidelity is to the people who elected me, and I never want to be put in the position of saying well, 'I did that because that's what the Republicans were doing.'"

Bennett's legislative efforts ran the gamut from proposing a ban on aerial spraying of certain herbicides with Senate President Troy Jackson, D-Allagash, to allying himself with Rep. Nicole Grohoski, D-Ellsworth, to propose the referendum spending bill and a successful first-in-the-nation recycling bill that charges manufacturers to dispose of packaging to help fund local recycling programs.

He partnered with Mills to create a new authority to steward Maine's broadband future.

At the same time, Bennett also supported limiting the governor's emergency powers and held steady with Republicans to vote against simple-majority budgets proposed by Democrats. Bennett said he was likely to support former Gov. Paul LePage in his comeback campaign against Mills next year, saying he was "disappointed" in her stance toward CMP-related bills, although LePage also supports the corridor that Bennett opposes.

"He's a bit of an enigma," said Sen. Stacy Brenner, D-Scarborough, who co-chairs the Legislature's environmental committee and has a podcast with Bennett. "He's in the media every day, he's good at getting his message out there. ... It's fascinating, super interesting to watch in action."

Rep. Seth Berry, D-Bowdoinham, said he saw a chance for alignment with Bennett on the consumer-owned utility bill based on his status as a candidate receiving Maine Clean Election Act campaign funding and involvement with the board of Maine-based internet and telecom company Great Works Internet. Berry said the alliance would have made sense regardless of their differing political affiliations.

Chris Jackson, a lobbyist with Mitchell Tardy Jackson who became Bennett's special assistant when he led the Senate and managed his 2012 U.S. Senate campaign, said none of his votes should surprise those who know him.

"I think his focus is and always has been on what's best for the people of Maine in general and more specifically his constituents in western Maine," Jackson said. "But he's still inherently political, even as his voting record becomes increasingly bipartisan. Perhaps he's attempting to change the party."

Bennett attributed his success in making alliances to a willingness to see issues differently, saying lawmakers tend to think "narrowly" about certain issues. He pointed to the recycling bill. Some Republicans viewed it as a packaging tax, but Bennett, who was the lone Senate Republican to support it, said it was a matter of corporate responsibility.

"Why shouldn't the companies that produce the packaging deal with it, instead of the taxpayers?" he said.

That attitude resonated with Howard, the New Gloucester Republican who attended Bennett's office hours last week. Though they share a party affiliation, Howard said she liked that Bennett seemed to vote for "what he thinks is right."

With such a high profile, some wonder if Bennett sees another run for higher office in his future. Bennett did not rule the idea out entirely, but for now, he only intends to run for his seat again next fall.

"I really love the freedom I have in policymaking and many other ways by just focusing on what people honored me with, which is being their state senator out here in these 13 towns," he said. "I just really want to do a good job at that."
By Echo Wang and Krystal Hu

(Reuters) - Robinhood Markets Inc is considering launching U.S. retirement accounts, CEO and co-founder Vlad Tenev said on Saturday in a webcast with users of its trading app looking to participate in its initial public offering, which is set to price next week.

The online brokerage has about 18 million funded investment accounts on its platform, most of which are held by retail traders.

Offering individual retirement accounts (IRAs) and Roth IRAs, which offer tax advantages to those saving for retirement, would allow Robinhood to tap a vast market. Americans held $12.6 trillion in IRAs at the end of March, up 2.8% from the end of December, according to the Investment Company Institute.

"We are interested in building more account types, including IRAs and Roth IRAs, we've been hearing that a lot from our customers. We want to make first-time investors into long-term investors," Tenev said in response to an investor question.

Due to the penalties involved in withdrawing money, IRAs tend to attract long-term investments, rather than the quick flip in stocks, options and cryptocurrencies that some investors turn to Robinhood for.

In his webcast, however, Tenev said: "We see evidence that the majority of our customers are primarily buy and hold."

Robinhood, which is targeting a valuation of up to $35 billion in its IPO, has said it will allocate 20% to 35% of shares offered to its users, an unusual move for a high-profile offering. One of the reasons many IPOs enjoy a first-day trading pop is because the retail investors that Robinhood has invited are excluded and must buy shares in the open market.

Robinhood launched its IPO Access platform earlier this year to enable users to buy into the IPOs of other companies if it can negotiate deals with the investment banks handling them.

Some individual investors are calling for a boycott of Robinhood's IPO on Reddit and other social media over its handling of the 'meme' stock-trading frenzy in January. Robinhood placed restrictions on buying GameStop Corp and other stocks that hedge funds had bet against, on grounds it was needed for the financial and operational stability of its platform.

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Tenev said in Saturday's webcast that Robinhood had invested in the stability of its platform to avoid another such incident.

PAYMENT FOR ORDER FLOW

Robinhood's popularity has soared over the past 18 months of coronavirus-induced social restrictions that have kept many retail investors at home. It has said its mission is to "democratize finance for all" by allowing users to make unlimited commission-free trades in stocks, exchange-traded funds, options and cryptocurrencies.

The brokerage has been criticized for relying on "payment for order flow" for most of its revenue, under which it receives fees from market makers for routing trades to them and does not charge users for individual trades, however.

Critics argue the practice, which is used by many other brokers, creates a conflict of interest, on the grounds that it incentivizes brokers to send orders to whoever pays the higher fees. Robinhood contends that it routes trades based on what is cheapest for its users, and that charging a commission would be more expensive.

Robinhood chief financial officer Jason Warnick left the door open for the company to change the practice if necessary.

"If a ban or other limitations on it were to be imposed, we believe Robinhood and the industry would adapt and explore other revenue sources," Warnick said.

Robinhood was founded in 2013 by Stanford University roommates Tenev and Baiju Bhatt, who will hold nearly two-thirds of the voting power after the offering, a filing with the stock exchange showed.

Robinhood customer Minjie Xu, who works as a software engineer in Missouri, remained unimpressed after the presentation on concerns the offering was overpriced.

"This is not unique to them, as I think most IPOs are overpriced," Xu told Reuters.

(Reporting by Echo Wang and Krystal Hu in New York; Editing by Greg Roumeliotis and Sonya Hepinstall)
BANKING

Joaquin Guerrero has been promoted to assistant vice president/senior business development officer at Centennial Bank in Miami. He was portfolio manager. Maggie Papelian-Gonzalez has joined the bank as a portfolio manager. She was vice president/commercial lender with Valley National Bank for 12 years.

FOOD

Ashley Mady has joined ITSUGAR, a Fort Lauderdale-based specialty candy retailer, as vice president of brand development. She was head of brand development at Basic Fun!, a toy company in Boca Raton. The company also has promoted Chris Lindstedt to assistant vice president of merchandising. She joined ITSUGAR in 2013 and quickly rose through the ranks of the company having served as a buyer and senior buyer.

PROPERTY DEVELOPMENT

Matthew Adler has joined ZOM Living in Fort Lauderdale as senior vice president of finance. He was the chief investment officer at Mast Capital in Miami.

LAW

Jose Ferrer has joined Mark Migdal & Hayden in Miami as a partner. He specializes in international litigation and arbitration. He was an equity partner at Bilzin Sumberg in Miami.

This space lists promotions of executives at the director level and above who are based in Broward, Miami-Dade or Monroe counties. Announcements, also at miamiherald.com, are for full-time, paid positions. Send items, with a high-resolution jpeg of a head shot, to movers@miamiherald.com.
Simone Biles. Danielle Parhizkaran-USA TODAY Network

Simone Biles faltered during her floor routine at Tokyo Olympics gymnastics qualification.

The American superstar flew out of bounds during her tumbling pass for a massive deduction.

Biles still made the finals for the event, but she found herself in a rare position: second place.

Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

Simone Biles suffered a rare - and massive - error during her first competition at the Tokyo Olympics.

During the floor exercise at the women's gymnastics qualification event, the American superstar stepped out of bounds for a major deduction.

And while Biles has been known to teeter out of bounds from time to time due to the immense power on some of her passes, Sunday's error was more jarring than usual; Biles flew clean off the mat during the second-to-last pass of her other-worldly routine.

Simone Biles flies out of bounds during Olympic qualifying in the floor exercise. Rob Carr/Getty Images; Insider

Biles' showing on Sunday was a far cry from what her floor routine looks like at its best - and from what it looked like during podium training just two days before the qualifying competition. Even so, the 24-year-old finished with a 14.133 score, leaning heavily on her high difficulty value to get herself into the final.

Still, the greatest of all time in her sport found herself in a rare and unfamiliar position for the floor exercise: second place.

Simone Biles steps off the mat during her floor routine. Danielle Parhizkaran-USA TODAY Network

Biles will have some time to right the ship ahead of the floor final, which is set to begin a 4:45 a.m. ET on Monday, August 2. Fans can tune in then to watch live via NBC.

Check out the video of Biles' whole floor routine from qualifying below:

Read the original article on Insider
A small flotilla of boats returned to Miami on Saturday evening after motoring off Cubas coast and setting off fireworks and flares in a show of support for the Cuban people and democracy.

The boaters had left Miami on Friday morning.

"We also want to draw the attention to the United States government that they have to do something," organizer Jose Portieles told The Associated Press. "We feel identified with what is happening in the protests in Cuba. We could be the ones who are there."

Cuba considered the boats a provocation. Cuban Foreign Affairs Minister Bruno Rodriguez called the flotilla illegal and urged the U.S. government to halt them "to avoid incidents which are not in anyones best interest."

The U.S. Coast Guard warned the boaters it would be illegal for them to depart U.S. waters with the intention of entering Cuban territorial waters. However, for those intending only to go near Cuban waters, the agency merely advised against doing so.

The boats reportedly stayed in international waters.

BLOODIED LITTLE HAVANA DEMONSTRATOR SLAMS BIDEN: CUBANS DONT WANT VACCINES, THEY WANT FREEDOM

Boater Marcos Suarez told WSVN-TV in Miami the experience gave him "chills."

"Theyre going to see us," organizer Osdany Veloz said while the boaters set off the fireworks. "Theyre going to see us, and theyre going to see that were there for them."

Portieles said most of the boaters were Cuban-American entrepreneurs who know each other from the South Florida boating community and share a desire to see a free Cuba.

The boaters also thanked the Coast Guard for helping make the trip possible, WSVN reported.

Cubans historically took to the streets earlier this month in massive numbers to protest food shortages, high prices and other grievances against the government.

Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel acknowledged government shortcomings in the lead-up to the unrest in the country after the protests broke out.

He has been widely criticized for the countrys violent crackdown and Internet blackouts.

"We have to gain experience from the disturbances," he said in an address earlier this month. "We also have to carry out a critical analysis of our problems in order to act and overcome, and avoid their repetition."
Somalia has delayed elections that were due to start on Sunday after months of political crisis in the deeply unstable Horn of Africa country, officials told AFP.

Indirect parliamentary and presidential polls were due to open on July 25 with four days of voting for the upper house by state delegates. The election cycle was due to end with a presidential poll on October 10.

"Even though the plan was for the upper house election to start around the various states today, there is a delay, the election may not take place as planned," a member of the electoral commission told AFP on condition of anonymity.

The delay was due to the fact that federal regions were neither able to submit candidates' lists in time, nor to form local committees to cast the ballots, the source added.

A spokesman for the federal government, Mohamed Ibrahim Moalimu, told AFP that the elections were "delayed," without providing details.

Prime Minister Mohamed Hussein Roble, who was tasked by the presidency with organising the elections, had expressed his dissatisfaction to Somali state leaders, Moalimu said.

He "expressed how he is unhappy about the technical delays today," the spokesman said, adding that premier had called for "the acceleration of the process and (to) resolve the technical issues and the leaders agreed to that".

Last week, the country's Al-Shabaab jihadists warned politicians against taking part in the elections, which were due to kick off after months of deadlock and delays.

- Voting timetable -

The threat, in an audio message purportedly recorded by Al-Shabaab leader Ahmed Umar Abu Ubaidah, underscores the security challenges facing the election process in the country.

The Al-Qaeda-linked group has been fighting to overthrow the federal government since 2007 and frequently attacks government, security and civilian targets.

Somalia was plunged into an unprecedented constitutional crisis early this year, when President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed and the leaders of Somalia's five states were unable to agree on the terms of a vote before his term lapsed in February.

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After months of stalemate that at times turned violent, the political leaders finally agreed last month on a voting timetable.

According to the agreed plan, delegates from the five federal states, chosen by various clans in that state, elect parliamentarians, who then elect a president. The process was due to kick off on Sunday.

But according to several sources who spoke to AFP, the sole state that was capable of carrying out a vote "during the week" was Jubaland. According to one source, the state has already chosen its delegate committee and could publish a list of candidates "during the week."

"We are expecting the election to take place soon," said Mohamed Adan, a senior government official in Jubaland. Another source said the electoral process could kick off in the state later on Sunday.

In Puntland state, sources told AFP that the elections were delayed because of "technical reasons."

In Galmudug state, the local parliament is on a break and will reconvene in early August.

In South-West state, the process is blocked because the regional president is out of the country.

- Impasse explodes into violence -

Somalia's political impasse exploded into violence in April when negotiations collapsed and the lower house extended the president's mandate by two years, sparking gun battles on the streets of Mogadishu.

Under pressure the president, commonly known as Farmajo, reversed the extension and ordered his prime minister to reconvene with the state leaders to chart a fresh roadmap towards elections.

The ballots follow a complex indirect model whereby special delegates chosen by the country's myriad clan elders pick lawmakers, who in turn choose the president.

Successive leaders have promised a direct vote but political infighting, logistical problems and the Al-Shabaab insurgency has prevented such an exercise.

The upper house vote will be followed by elections for the lower house from September 12-October 2, according to an updated timetable issued last week.

According to a statement issued in June, both assemblies were due to convene to vote for the president on October 10, but no date for this election was given in the updated timeline.

Somalia has not held a direct one-person, one-vote election since 1969, the year dictator Siad Barre led a coup and went on to rule for two decades.

Barre's military regime collapsed in 1991 and Somalia sank into anarchy.

str-md/pbr/spm
David Dastmalchian spoke with Insider about getting cast as Polka-Dot Man in James Gunn's "The Suicide Squad." Warner Bros.

You may not know who Polka-Dot Man is now, but you will after seeing "The Suicide Squad."

Director James Gunn told Insider he wanted to find the dumbest villain and give him a soul.

The role resonated with David Dastmalchian, who was bullied and called Spots and Polka Dots as a kid.

Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

Obsessed with DC villains and Marvel superheroes, David Dastmalchian spent his money on comic books growing up in Kansas.

So, when his friend and director James Gunn reached out to him in 2019 about a potential role in "The Suicide Squad," Dastmalchian told Insider he was beyond elated.

"I was like, 'What!?'" said Dastmalchian, who is no stranger to superhero movies and previously appeared in "The Dark Knight" and the "Ant-Man" films. "The whole time I'm thinking, 'Suicide Squad! What character could it be? I know everybody. I know all the characters.'"

Over the years, the comic, which was created by John Ostrander in the late '80s and served as inspiration for Gunn's film, has followed various groups of DC baddies who are sent on top-secret missions for a sketchy off-the-books government organization called Task Force X (aka the Suicide Squad). If they misbehave, boom! They're killed on sight.

The squad has showcased well-known villains ranging from Poison Ivy and Killer Frost to Black Adam and Harley Quinn.

Dastmalchian was ready for just about any character Gunn was going to throw his way - except an obscure Batman villain who's often portrayed as a joke in the DC Universe.

"He says, 'Polka-Dot Man,'" Dastmalchian said, admitting he was caught off-guard. "I'm like, 'Huh.'"

"Aside, honestly, from the video game, from a couple of appearances in 'Gotham City PD,' and a little tiny cameo in 'The Lego [Batman] Movie,' I didn't know anything about Polka-Dot Man," he continued. "I was like, 'What the heck?' I was very embarrassed... I thought James was hoping I would know who Polka-Dot Man was."

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Created by writer Bill Finger and artist Sheldon Moldoff, the character, otherwise known as Abner Krill, made his first comic appearance in 1962 as Mr. Polka-Dot and was more of a nuisance than an outright villain to Batman and Robin. He performed dot-related crimes and hijinks (one involved a leopard).

Each colored dot on his costume contained a different power.

Polka-Dot Man's first comic appearance in Detective Comics #300. DC Comics

Dastmalchian said Gunn assured him that he'd tell him everything he needed to know to play the character. At the time, Dastmalchian had no clue how much of a personal connection he'd have to the role.

When "The Suicide Squad" is released simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max on August 6, not only will you know who Polka-Dot Man is, but you'll likely be rooting for Krill. He may even become one of your new favorite DC characters.

James Gunn purposefully chose Polka-Dot Man to be in 'The Suicide Squad' after Googling the 'dumbest super villains of all time'

Polka-Dot Man's first comic appearance in Detective Comics #300. DC Comics

"From the beginning, I was just trying to figure out who would be in the Suicide Squad," Gunn told Insider during a virtual Q&A after a screening of the film recently.

Gunn wanted the film to include a mix of characters, "some of whom are very well known to comic-book fans, but not to general audiences."

"Seriously, I would look up like who are considered the dumbest super villains of all time on Google and at the top of every list was Polka-Dot Man," Gunn said.

"I wanted to take this character and give him a soul," Gunn added, saying a lot of what drove him with this movie was Abner Krill, "who we think is like the dumbest character of all time, who is made fun of at the beginning of the movie by the other dumb super villains who think he's dumb. Yet he has this incredibly dark, dark, dark backstory."

Dastmalchian has a surprisingly profound connection to Polka-Dot Man

As his name suggests, Polka-Dot man shoots polka dots in "The Suicide Squad." Courtesy of Warner Bros.

Once Gunn filled in the holes of Krill's story for Dastmalchian, the director allowed him to bring as much as he wanted to the table. The actor told Insider he had a Polka-Dot notebook where he jotted down little stories and histories about his character.

"I immediately connected with Abner on several levels," Dastmalchian said. "I have personally struggled with abject depression and mental unwellness, which we know Abner is definitely dealing with - feeling very alone, feeling very isolated. He's haunted by darkness in his past and his childhood."

"I think it's something that almost all of us, if not all of us, have felt at one time or another in our lives," he said. "So being an outsider, feeling alone, feeling hopeless - that's just such a common state of being for so many of us at so many different parts of our lives and Abner embodies that in a really powerful way thanks to James' beautiful script."

Indeed, with Abner Krill, Gunn takes a character you have no business caring about, and turns him into an extremely relatable character who gives a voice to those who may feel different, misunderstood, and alone.

"I think most of us in the world probably relate a lot more to Polka-Dot Man than we do Captain America," Gunn separately told Insider in the post-screening Q&A, referencing the heroic Marvel character played by Chris Evans who was injected with a super soldier serum and frozen in ice for decades before becoming the leader of the Avengers.

Dastmalchian said he's hoping people can identify with that so they don't write Polka-Dot Man off as a "gimmicky, goofy" character.

His connection to the 'villain' runs even deeper than that because of an autoimmune disorder

"Something that personalized it for me in a way that James didn't see coming was the fact that I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder called vitiligo when I was in third grade," Dastmalchian said.

"Basically, my body destroys it's own pigmentation," he explained as he raised his hands during our interview. "As you can see, I have spots - polka dots - all over my face, my elbow, my knees."

David Dastmalchian unexpectedly tells us that, like his DC character, he grew up with spots all over his own body. It's a little tough to see here in this screenshot from our interview. Warner Bros.

"When I was a kid, going to the pool, Spots, Polka Dots. I had all kinds of nicknames from my brother to some of the bullies at the pool," Dastmalchian said, adding that he struggled with that and "a great deal of insecurity" for a very long time until he met his wife, actress and writer, Evelyn Leigh.

The two were married in 2013.

"The way she looked at my spots, and what I thought was a deformity, as something really beautiful and personalizing was kind of awesome for me," he said. "It changed the way I looked at it."

Evelyn Leigh and David Dastmalchian are seen at the "Avengers: Endgame" premiere in 2019. Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Disney

Without giving too much away, in "The Suicide Squad," Polka-Dot Man is given a new origin story in which his spots grow on his skin, threatening to kill him from the inside out.

Even more interestingly, Dastmalchian's personal connection to the character was a complete coincidence. Gunn was unaware of Dastmalchian's diagnosis when casting him, and it didn't influence Gunn's writing of the character.

"James and I were very close and he had never even really thought much about it," Dastmalchian said of living with vitiligo. "When he cast me, I said to him how meaningful it was for me to get to play a character who's made fun of for his spots and then finds power in that. I think it was really cool."

"The Suicide Squad" is in theaters and streaming on HBO Max on August 6.

Read the original article on Insider
LONDON (Reuters) -British health minister Sajid Javid apologised for and deleted a tweet urging people to take a COVID-19 vaccine and not to "cower" from the virus, saying on Sunday he had made "a poor choice of word".

Javid, who replaced Matt Hancock as health minister last month after his predecessor stepped down for breaking COVID rules by kissing an aide in his office, had been criticised for using the word "cower" when tens of thousands in Britain have died from the virus and many are trying to keep safe.

Britain, which has one of the highest official COVID death tolls, has shifted its strategy to fight coronavirus from using restrictions to limit its spread to opening up society in the hope vaccines will protect most people from serious illness.

Cases are high, but so is uptake of COVID-19 vaccines, and officials argue the shift is needed to help businesses in sectors such as hospitality and the night-time economy.

Writing on Twitter, Javid said on Sunday he had "deleted a tweet which used the word 'cower'."

"I was expressing gratitude that the vaccines help us fight back as a society, but it was a poor choice of word and I sincerely apologise. Like many, I have lost loved ones to this awful virus and would never minimise its impact."

On Saturday, he had written that he had recovered after testing positive for COVID, after suffering mild symptoms.

"Please - if you haven't yet - get your jab, as we learn to live with, rather than cower from, this virus."

Angela Rayner, deputy leader of the Labour Party, was one of several lawmakers from opposition parties and people who had lost family members to the pandemic to criticise his use of the phrase "cower from".

"127,000 people have died from this virus, tens of thousands of whom would still be here if it wasn't for the catastrophic failures of your government," she said on Twitter.

"So how dare you denigrate people for trying to keep themselves and their families safe."

(Reporting by Elizabeth PiperEditing by Mark Potter)
A Wisconsin man was sentenced last week to 25 years in prison and 10 years supervision following his conviction in May for shooting and killing a bystander during a fight last year.

Antwon Matthews, 31, was found guilty of first-degree reckless homicide in the death of Robert Roy on April 1, 2020, in Milwaukee, according to FOX 6 in Milwaukee and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

A physical fight reportedly broke out outside a convenience store on the north side of the city and several bystanders gathered to watch, according to the Journal-Sentinel.

CALIFORNIA DEATH ROW INMATE, DATING GAME KILLER, DIES IN PRISON OF NATURAL CAUSES

A witness who was part of the original fistfight between two men told police Matthews had originally tried to break it up. The witness said he also noticed Matthews had a gun with an extended magazine sticking out of his pocket.

A man later identified as Matthews is reportedly seen pointing a weapon in the direction of Roy, the Journal-Sentinel reported.

"Get the gun! Get the gun!" someone can be heard yelling on a cell phone video taken of the incident. The recording shows Matthews fire one shot and the sound of two others is heard as the person recording the incident flees the scene.

Someone also says, "He shot an innocent man!" on the video, according to FOX 6.

He said he saw Matthews point a gun toward Roy and heard the shot and saw him fall to the ground.

The victim later died at a hospital, FOX 6 reported.
A Wisconsin police department released video apparently exonerating one of its officers after a social media post accused him of planting evidence.

Hours after a Twitter user accused a Wisconsin police officer of planting evidence, the Caledonia Police Department released body camera footage it said disputed the accuser's account. Law enforcement said officers stopped a vehicle on Wednesday at approximately 3:22 p.m. for traveling at 63 miles per hour in a 45 mph zone. Moments later, officers removed the driver and rear passengers from the vehicle, and following a pat-down of one of the men, they located an "empty corner tear" plastic bag that did not contain narcotics, police added.

The department said the searching officer handed the baggie to another officer, who then turned the baggie over to the officer seen on camera, who placed the empty baggie in the vehicle as a means of discarding it.

DC LEADERS STRUGGLE WITH RISING CRIME AFTER CUTTING POLICE

"The front seat passenger tells the officer that his actions are on video, and the officer replies that he is also recording the incident," Christopher Botsch, chief of police, wrote in the department's Facebook post on Saturday. "The officer acknowledges to the front seat passenger that he (officer) put the item there and explains that it was taken from one of the passengers and the officer did not want to 'hold on to it.' Essentially, he appears to be discarding the empty baggie."

Botsch did "discourage officers from discarding items into a citizens vehicle," though he rejected the suggestion law enforcement planted evidence.

"The video is clear that the officer is NOT planting evidence or doing anything illegal. Additionally, the empty corner tear is not itself illegal," he wrote.

Earlier in the day, footage posted by a Twitter user appeared to show an officer with the Caledonia Police Department dropping something in the back seat of a sedan while a passenger recorded the incident. The video was accompanied by the caption, "Cop caught in 4K planting evidence," and the user posted a link to the department, apparently encouraging people to heckle authorities.

Story continues

"Hey, buddy, you just threw that in here," the unidentified man is heard saying on tape.

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CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

No arrests were made during the stop, and the driver was issued a citation for his speed, according to Botsch.

In all, six hours of body camera footage were developed through four different officers, and the department expects to release all the footage at a later date.

Washington Examiner Videos

Tags: News, Wisconsin, Police, Law Enforcement, Drugs, Body Cameras, Social Media

Original Author: Jake Dima

Original Location: Wisconsin police department releases footage it says exonerates officer accused of planting evidence
Amherst County Public Schools Superintendent Rob Arnold on July 15 publicly announced the recent hiring of Jeremy Hutchinson as the new principal of Madison Heights Elementary School and Gary Roakes as the divisions new supervisor of maintenance.

Hutchison, who has served the past five years as assistant principal at Madison Heights Elementary, succeeds Marvin McGinnis, who served in the role since 2014 and recently was appointed the divisions new supervisor of learning and innovation.

Hutchison, who graduated from Radford University and later received a masters degree from Virginia Tech, began his career in Montgomery County where he spent six years as a teacher. He joined ACPS in 2014 as a third grade teacher at Amelon Elementary School.

Hutchinson said he is honored to become new principal at Madison Heights Elementary and looks forward to working with administrators and staff to provide the best education possible.

Over the last five years I have grown the love the school and the community which we serve, Hutchinson said.

Roakes worked 13 years as director of public safety for Amherst County and has an extensive background of public service in Amherst County as a paramedic. He retired from the public safety position in the spring of 2018.
So, before we sink back into the morass of COVID statistics and dysfunction on Capitol Hill, let us savor the remarkable, inspirational life of Wally.

Funk made her first attempt at flight about age 5, donning a Superman cape and flying off her daddys barn onto a bale of hay. She later made balsam wood airplanes and hung them in her bedroom, she said in an oral history interview.

In learning about Funk, I discovered she and I have something in common. We both attended Stephens College in Columbia, Mo. Stephens started an aviation program for women students in the 1940s. The Flying Susies was the first of its kind in the country. The college ended the program in the early 1960s, before I arrived.

Funk went to Stephens in 1956, earning her pilots license at age 17. At that time, Stephens was a two-year girls school, and Funk transferred in 1958 to Oklahoma State University, which had a robust aviation program.

In 1961, three years before Bezos was born, Funk volunteered for the Mercury 13 program, a privately funded program aimed at testing whether women could be astronauts. At 21, she was the youngest of the 13 women selected. They called themselves the FLATs  First Lady Astronaut Trainees.
NatalieJean Ahrens has been in the field of nursing for 30 years, the most recent four as an oncology nurse navigator in the Thoracic Clinic at Methodist Jennie Edmundson Hospital.

Ahrens was born and raised in Juneau, Alaska and met her husband, Dr. Pat Ahrens, in Helena, Montana, where they both attended college. They have been married for 30 years and moved to Council Bluffs 19 years ago when Dr. Ahrens joined Council Bluffs Surgical Associates as one of their general surgeons. He is also the vice president of medical affairs for Methodist Jennie Edmundson Hospital.

NatalieJean and Dr. Ahrens both work closely with cancer patients and are well versed in the benefits provided by Spirit of Courage.

Cancer does not discriminate who it affects. When patients come in and are facing the bills that come with cancer, they are stressed, NatalieJean Ahrens said. It is really awesome to have a fund that assists them in these situations. Spirit of Courage helps to ease the financial burdens placed on our patients and their families.

NatalieJean and Dr. Ahrens have two children, Mark and Kristen, and two St. Bernards. In her spare time, NatalieJean loves to read, travel and spend time with her family.
A Council Bluffs businessman has been found guilty of sex trafficking and drug charges in federal court.

Hershal James Ratliff, 71, a longtime area businessman and owner of Jimmys All American Malt Shop and Grill in Council Bluffs, was found guilty on Friday of four counts of sex trafficking minors, two counts of sex trafficking adults and two counts of distributing a controlled substance to a person under 21 years of age, the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Southern District of Iowa said.

The verdict came after a four-day trial before U.S. District Court Chief Judge John A. Jarvey, the U.S. Attorneys Office said in a release.

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The office said evidence presented at trial showed that Ratliff, over the last 10 years, would have minor girls come to his house and perform sex acts on him and with his friends in exchange for money, drugs and other material things. The testimony showed that Ratliff provided the minor girls with alcohol, prescription Xanax and marijuana both before and after they participated in sex acts at his residence.

In addition, the evidence showed that Ratliff obtained sex acts for his friends from adult women by the use of force and coercion. No sentencing date has been set.
We teamed up with a counselor, he said. We help veterans get counseling, and we share the bill with (other nonprofits that serve veterans). We have helped quite a few veterans in our area. I will never turn a veteran down if they come to us needing help.

According to the Operation 22 Til Freedom website, 5,000 to 6,500 veterans take their own lives each year.

The suicide rate for veterans is three times what it is for non-veterans. Male veterans between the ages of 18-44 are at higher risk.

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The act can be triggered by PTSD, hopelessness/depression, homelessness, financial problems, separation from the structure provided by the military, issues adjusting to civilian life or substance abuse, the website states.

The following may be signs that a person is at risk for suicide:

 Seems sad, depressed, anxious or agitated (more than usual)

 Sleeps a lot or not much at all

 Has no regard for their appearance, hygiene or well-being

 Stops talking or associating with friends, family or members of their community

 Seems to have lost interest in things they were previously very passionate about
BLY, Ore.  The nations largest wildfire raged through southern Oregon on Friday but crews were scaling back some night operations as hard work and weaker winds helped reduce the spread of flames even as wildfires continued to threaten homes in neighboring California.

The Bootleg Fire, which has destroyed an area half the size of Rhode Island, was 40% surrounded after burning some 70 homes, mainly cabins, fire officials said.

At least 2,000 homes were ordered evacuated at some point during the fire and an additional 5,000 were threatened.

The upper eastern edge of the blaze continued to move toward Summer Lake, jumping fire lines on Thursday and prompting an evacuation order for some portions of Lake County to be raised to go now! fire officials said.

Winds up to 10 mph could drive the flames through timber but not at the pace seen last week, when the wind-driven blaze grew exponentially, fire information officer Angela Goldman said.

The fire, which was sparked by lightning, had been expanding by up to 4 miles a day, pushed by strong winds and critically dry weather.
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The training doesnt end there. Under State Patrol guidelines, the teams are audited monthly and must pass a recertification every year to remain in service as a team.

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Rice said he has dedicated training days each week with Jerry alongside fellow dog handlers in other agencies. He also works with Jerry daily, whether on obedience or other small tasks.

The thing you have to keep in mind is that theyre dogs, not a machine that you can just turn on and off, said Rice, who started with the State Patrol in the Lincoln area before he moved to Troop D and the K-9 unit.

When we are at work, we have a job to do and we need to do it, Rice said. When we are at home, I give him down time where he can just be a dog and run around in the backyard.

Rice said Jerry is a hard-driven dog and likes to have a purpose, which is a quality of the breed. Rice doesnt focus on the number of deployments the team has been called to, or the amount of narcotics that might have been seized as a result.

I dont really focus on the amount, Rice said. I mean, lets be honest, the bigger the number, the more excited people get about it.

Instead, his focus is on the larger picture.
Family, Career and Community Leaders of America hosted the organizations first-ever hybrid National Leadership Conference. More than 4,500 students from around the country got a taste of normalcy at this years National Leadership Conference, which ran June 27 to July 2.

The conference was hosted in a hybrid format, with participants attending in-person in Nashville, Tennessee, and virtually from across the country. After over a year of health mandates, social distancing and virtual learning, FCCLAs student members were ready to reunite in person to participate in professional development opportunities, career exploration and youth leadership sessions aimed at advancing families, careers and communities through Family and Consumer Sciences education.

Nebraska had more than 70 students and advisers attend the conference in Nashville with another 160 participants taking part virtually.

Those attending virtually could experience the conference very similarly to those attending in-person, and however members participated, they were still able to grow as individuals and leaders, said Kaylee Hilbers, 2021-22 Nebraska State FCCLA president.
This is the first place Ive ever lived where it doesnt feel like theres a test you have to pass before people accept you, he said, explaining that at their practice in Alabama, the community was slow to warm to outsiders, and that in Wyoming, the independence of the West meant they didnt have a strong sense of community. But in North Platte, from day one, weve felt like weve always been here. People are really welcoming and excited and grateful.

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Warren was among the first to use a new 3D microscope by Aesculap in his surgeries. His experience with the technology has led the company to send other surgeons to North Platte to learn from him, as well as to take video of Warren using the microscope, which Aesculap is using in mobile labs around the country to teach surgeons.

Were leading the charge in using it, Warren said.

Lisa, who is her husbands office manager, is encouraged by the progress theyve seen in the past year.
Mondays Lincoln County Board meeting will feature County Assessor Julie Stengers annual presentation of her offices plans for updating countywide taxable values.

The meeting begins at 9 a.m. in the commissioners room in the North Platte courthouse, 301 N. Jeffers St.

Stenger will review the 2021 version of the Assessors Office plan of assessment, which details which areas of the county will be next in line for general reviews by her appraisers.

State law requires that every property in a county be physically inspected at least once every six years. Taxable values also are updated when significant improvements to properties are made.

Commercial properties inside North Platte will be reviewed in 2022, Stenger said in June. Homes north of the Union Pacific tracks are set for updates in 2023 and those south of the tracks in 2024.

In other business, commissioners will:

 Hold an executive session at 10 a.m. to review collective bargaining negotiations with the countys employee unions.
Families 1st Partnership in North Platte has received $6,000 from the Nebraska Title V-Maternal & Child Health Block Grant, according to a press release.

The funds will be used to purchase diapers, baby wipes, and skin care products that will be given away at the upcoming community baby shower planned for 6 p.m. Aug. 10 at Cody Park Shelter.

Community baby showers are an initiative of United HealthCare, which partners with collaboratives across the state to help host the event in communities throughout Nebraska.

The 2021 event is the third time a community baby shower has been held in Lincoln County.

The purpose of the event is to spotlight the importance of early intervention of healthcare, education and social services for infants and toddlers, according to the press release.

The presence of local agencies at community baby showers allows families to become acquainted with area resources.

WIC/Peoples Family Health, Groovy Grannies, Womens Resource Center, Rape & Domestic Abuse Prevention, Educational Development Network and Mammoth Clothing have all helped with the planning.
The Relay for Life begins at 5 p.m. with a dinner for survivors and caregivers of pulled pork sandwiches, potato salad, baked beans, chips, cookie and water. At 6 p.m., the meal opens up to the public for a freewill donation. Participants can grab-and-go, but are encouraged to stay and participate in the relay. There will be seating at picnic tables or in the senior center. Lawn chairs are welcome.

Opening ceremonies begin at 6 p.m. with state Sen. Matt Williams of Gothenburg as guest speaker. Carter Kincheloe of Gothenburg will sing the national anthem. Music for the event will be provided by DJ Steve Clouatre of North Platte, who returns for his fifth year.

The survivor/caregiver lap will follow, led by two honorary chairpersons, Ron King of Lexington and Michelle Stevens of Kearney, a Gothenburg teacher. All cancer survivors are invited to take part in this celebration of victory over cancer and receive a gift at the survivor table. No registration is required.

A corn hole tournament will be in full swing with on-site registration. The suggested donation is $25 per team of two throwers. Prizes will be awarded.

Two Gothenburg vendors will be on site and will donate part of their sales to Relay for Life. Those attending can purchase drinks at The Coffee House trailer or check out the Mylah Rose Boutique booth.
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Summer school programs getting students on track

Courtesy of Jefferson-Morgan School District Courtesy of Jefferson-Morgan School District Local schools are offering more extensive summer school programs in order to bridge gaps in learning loss that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic. Jefferson-Morgan elementary school students participated in a summer boot camp. Courtesy of Jefferson-Morgan School District Courtesy of Jefferson-Morgan School District Jefferson-Morgan School District hosted a summer school boot camp to provide enrichment and help students address learning loss caused by COVID-19. Courtesy of Jefferson-Morgan School District Courtesy of Jefferson-Morgan School District Fourth-graders in the Jefferson-Morgan School District enjoy a day at summer boot camp. Courtesy of Jefferson-Morgan School District Courtesy of Jefferson-Morgan School District Pre-K and fourth-graders take part in the Jefferson-Morgan School Districts summer boot camp. Courtesy of Jefferson-Morgan School District Courtesy of Jefferson-Morgan School District Students enjoy the last day of summer school boot camp at Jefferson-Morgan Elementary School. The district saw an increase in participation in summer school attendance.

Following a challenging pandemic school year, students are heading to summer school, where local school districts have implemented academic programs aimed at combating pandemic-related learning loss and providing enrichment.

Local educators say that students need summer classes to help offset learning losses and higher student failure rates, but noted another benefit: summer school also provides opportunities to address kids social and emotional well-being.

This summer, students have been participating in classes to catch up academically and taking part in more engaging classes ranging from drone technology to creative writing and music.

We felt the summer was really our first opportunity to get to our kids who needed any type of extra help, so we put a lot of thought into our summer programming, said Joseph Orr, superintendent of Jefferson-Morgan School District in Greene County.

Orr said the district also wants to address the social and emotional needs of children whose school year was interrupted, and to provide them with opportunities to interact with their teachers and peers.

We all felt the stress of this whole school year, whether it was a parent, teacher or administrator, but kids, too, were dealing with it, thinking and worrying about, Is life ever going to be normal again? said Orr.

At Laurel Highlands School District in Fayette County, the summer school program was extended to eight weeks, and our summer programs absolutely were designed to bridge any gaps and deal with learning loss that was a direct result of the pandemic, said Dr. Jesse Wallace, superintendent.

We are trying to keep students who struggled this year on track and on point in all core areas so that they wont need remediation and can continue to stay on their path toward matriculation, he said. We took the bull by the horns to help get them up to speed.

School districts have plenty of money to spend to address summer school programs. The American Rescue Plan Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund is providing nearly $122 billion to states and school districts over three years to deal with COVID-related education issues.

We were able to do a whole lot more because of ESSERS funding, said Wallace. Students were the direct beneficiaries.

States are required to invest at least $1.2 billion on summer programs based on strategies shown to improve student outcomes academically and emotionally.

School districts are required to use at least $21 billion for initiatives to confront the impact of lost instructional time.

Too many students have experienced interruptions in learning and negative effects on their social and emotional well-being due to time apart from friends and community, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said earlier this year. Summer presents a key opportunity for school districts and community partners to accelerate learning and provide new avenues for students to safely engage with each other in fun activities. Lets use this moment to reimagine what fun, engaging summer programs can look like.

At Jefferson-Morgan, nearly 100 students in grades kindergarten through five participated in a newly created three-week STEM boot camp.

About 20% of the student population participated in summer programming, more than double the percentage of students who have taken summer courses in years past.

The school district also tripled the length of its Extended School Year program, which addresses students with special needs. Participation in the ESY program quadrupled this summer.

Its been phenomenal, said Orr.

School districts in Washington, Greene and Fayette counties have focused on credit recovery programs for students who were in danger of failing one or more courses.

In Trinity Area School District, more than 90 Trinity High School students participated in the credit recovery program, keeping them on course for graduation.

There was a lack of continuity throughout the school year. We had a lot of kids who failed two or more classes, and our goal was to get them back where they needed to be, said assistant high school principal Zach Zebrasky.

Combined, the students participated in more than 150 classes ranging from gym to calculus.

Zebrasky said this year, summer school is free. In past years, families had to pay for summer programs, but the district used some of its ESSERS funding to cover the cost of programming.

At Jefferson-Morgan, more than 30 students took part in the high school credit recovery program.

I cant over-emphasize the importance of credit recovery. The more behind students get, the more likely they are to drop out, said high school principal Brandon Robinson. Without it, those 30-plus students are coming back this school year behind in three, four or five classes, and they feel like theyre in too deep get out, and thats when they drop out.

Administrators said the extra summer school learning time will be especially helpful in addressing academic setbacks among low-income students and those with limited internet access.

Mental health support

There also will be an increase in mental health support for students.

Thats important, says Marianne Smith, a social worker at Washington Health Systems Childrens Therapy Center.

Its almost too soon to know what the long-term and even the short-term effects are, said Smith. One thing we know is that when kids are taken out of their social environment, as COVID did, they werent getting the cognitive and social exposure they should.

At the elementary level, school offers an opportunity to develop childrens interpersonal skills, while at the middle school and high school level, students hone their self-identity, and the COVID-19 pandemic impacted those opportunities.

Children with a lot of support will probably catch up fine. Those who come from low-income families may be lagging behind a bit more, said Smith. That doesnt mean these kids are going to be flawed. It will be easier if they have the supports in place. Those who dont have the supports might need more one-on-one assistance.

With ESSERS funding available, said Smith, it will be the responsibility of schools  as theyve done in the past  to address students encountering social and emotional issues.

We didnt have as many eyes on kids when they werent in school, said Smith. My primary concern, Id say, is the children who have been stuck in their homes 24/7, where theyre not getting support they need, might not have access to internet, might be subjected to domestic violence, abuse and neglect. Some families experienced financial instability and loss of jobs, lack of food as a result of the pandemic. Those are the kids who will need counseling.

School districts, including Laurel Highlands and J-M, plan to bolster their guidance offices and increase the number of social workers on staff.

Orr noted that, while summer school programs have been beneficial for students as they prepare for the upcoming school year, its not a permanent fix.

Wed be naive to think our summer program is one-and-done, said Orr. Weve set this up to be a continuing, ongoing program for the next few summers. Our kids arent going to be all caught up when the summer programs end, but its been a great start.

Laurel Highlands Wallace said hes optimistic about student performance in the 2021-22 school year, in part because of programming students took advantage of this summer.

I feel like well be pretty good. I feel that our students are resilient, said Wallace. Theyre looking forward to getting back to what is close to a pre-COVID environment. We are going to give them as close to normal a school year as we can.
Hello again, ONTD!



We finally reached the final part in our discovery of tormentoni, and this time we will focus on the maschi.

But before I start, I just want to repeat a point I made in the first post. Im planning on doing more posts about italian music, focusing on various genres so there will be some names that will not be under the spotlight in this post, although you might think they deserved it. But links to their songs will still be linked at the end under the highlights. So, let's start!

Cesare Cremonini - Gli Uomini e le Donne sono uguali

Here is a returning name! You might remember Cesare Cremonini as the leader of the group Lunapop from the first post. As mentioned there, after the group split he continued working right away on his first solo album, and just as Squerez. had been, Bagus was also a great album full of great singles, awarding him with four golden disks and over 250.000 sold copies. The very first single was called Gli Uomini e le Donne sono Uguali, you might see another familiar face because he continued working with Ballo, the bassist from his old group. He continued his career with great results, releasing 6 studio albums so far, 2 live albums and 3 collection albums.

Other songs: PadreMadre - Il Comico - Marmellata #25

Jovanotti - Un raggio di Sole/Per te/Lombelico del mondo

Ah, here we go back to italian hip hop. Lorenzo Cherubini aka Jovanotti started his career back in the 80s and he has been a steady part in the italian charts since then. Despite starting his career as a hip hop artist, sometimes he would also release singles with pretty and sweet melodies that sadly he rarely manages to keep up with, but he is aware of it as is pretty much everyone else. The video above features a medley of hits from the 90s but those were not even close to the amount of singles he has released or even written for other artists.

Other songs: Serenata Rap - (Tanto)3 - Il piu Grande Spettacolo dopo il Big Bang

Nek - Sei Grande

One of the names non-Italians might probably be aware of, Filippo Neviani aka Nek or as some people called him The prettiest blue eyes in Italy, started his career in a Police cover band, but he left them to focus on his solo career. He competed at the Sanremo Festival with the song Laura non ce which despite not winning became a huge success outside of Italy as well, selling over 1.5 millions copies. But just because other of his songs did not sell that much worldwide, it does not mean his songs were bad. Sei Grande was released back in 1997 and as far as I can recall, the song was pretty famous but I cant find any data about how much it sold. Still, his overall numbers are impressive since he released 15 studio albums since 1992, selling over 10 millions copies worldwide.

Other songs: Se io non avessi te - Ci sei Tu - Almeno Stavolta

Alex Britti - Mi piaci

Alex Britti is a songwriter from Rome and his beginnings are strictly connected with the blues music. In fact, he used to be the supporting act for names such as Buddy Miles and Billy Preston. As oftentimes happens, after he signed a record deal with a new label and making a switch towards pop music he suddenly found success with his first album It.Pop. He competed and won the new artist category at the 1999 Sanremo festival with the song Oggi sono io. If his first singles were more ballad-oriented, his second album was full of more upbeat songs, perfect for the summer (I mean, who would not love a song that talks about spending the whole day in the bathtub?). His following albums marked a return to more blues sounds, especially when he made a duet with Edoardo Bennato, another italian songwriter who also mainly performs blues music (yes, he will be discussed in a later post and if you watched the trailer for Luka, it featured a song by Bennato).

Other songs: Oggi sono io - La Vasca - 7000 caffe

DJ Francesco - La canzone del Capitano

And finally, the very last spotlight in the Festivalbar series, goes to Mister Francesco Facchinetti also known as DJ Francesco. Let me be blunt: he is the product of nepotism, and it shows. His father is Robi Facchinetti, a member of a legendary italian group called Pooh. Pooh had a song called Chi fermera la musica? (Who will stop the music?). The answer is... DJ Francesco. The problem is that his music was so freaking catchy, that it was so good, and La Canzone del Capitano remains the most sold italian single of the 21st century. He had a bunch of other singles, most of them hits, his albums sold a lot, with the first one called Bella di Padella selling over 100 thousand copies. He also dubbed the voice of Rodney, from the movie Robots (and yes, he also sings the OST). After releasing three albums he decided for a career switch and decided to become a host (the results are to be discussed). I wanted to finish saying that thankfully, our ears have been spared since but wiki just informed me that he apparently released a song this year to celebrate the 50th birthday of Nesquick. I dont even know.

Note: so, after writing this post I realized that I cant find any video of him performing at Festivalbar, although I know he did it (heck, there are even photos of him there), so I had to use a clip of him performing at Top Of The Pops, sorry!

Other songs: Salta - Ridere Ridere - Francesca

Other songs:

Vasco Rossi - Rewind

Luciano Ligabue - Happy hour

Gianluca Grignani - LAiuola

Daniele Silvestri - Saliro

Pino Daniele - Neve al Sole

Raf - Infinito

Neffa - Io e la mia Signorina

Luca Dirisio - Calma e Sangue Freddo

Simone Tomassini - Il mondo che non ce

Biagio Antonacci - Convivendo

Paolo Meneguzzi - Verofalso

Simone Cristicchi - Vorrei Cantare come Biagio

Pago - Parlo di te

Im pretty sure I am missing some names so people who remember the tormentoni from those years, feel free to link them below.

Also, this is the last post about the summer hits, and as I mentioned before, I have other original posts about italian music planned but I dont know when I will get around to make them - I dont even know which one I will be writing and Ill be busy in the next couple of weeks so I dont want to make any promise (or as one of my favorite tormentone says, I suffer the stress). I hope you all enjoyed this brief introduction to italian music and hopefully, Ill see you next time.

Part 1

Part 2

Sources 1 2 3 4 5 and my memories
Do I come in and choose violence with this man again or be kind?

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You know the answer to that, its in your heart.

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There is only one choice for a man this terrible

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Lmao what is this from??

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I never heard about them fighting over frozen embryos? Yikes.

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Oh, I always thought the five kids were with Tallulah but its with Justine.



Interesting, I dont think they ever had kids even though he seems to want to immediately procreate with each person hes been with long term. Whatever happened there, poor Tallulah.



I wonder if he purposely wants to populate the earth with only boys? Did Grimes do sex selection too?

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I was wondering that about having only boys too.

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It's really important for abusive and controlling men to get the woman they want to control pregnant. It gives them a level of permanent control.

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The odds of having that many boys (and not sure if it changes if it is with different couples) is like 1.5%. I 100% believe he is sex selecting. Amber Heard is 35 now, not sure why she would freeze her eggs for him in her early 30s.



Its shitty to speculate on I know, but that part scares me the most about him the most (and all the billionaires).



Edited at 2021-07-25 03:51 pm (UTC)

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He's a sociopath, I do believe he chose only to have boys.

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yaaaas here for this post, well done OP!

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Thank you!!

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That picture of Justine during their marriage I thought it was Talulah Riley until I looked at it again and read the caption .



Glad the ladies are free of him and the slit that he calls a mouth . No comment on grimes she should at least got him to fund a video



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Im still not sure thats not Talulah

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https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/talulah-riley-space-tycoon-elon-183152674.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-3084636/amp/GIRL-TOWN-PayPal-tycoon-Elon-Musk-falls-Talulah-time-tearing-divorce-papers.html

I found other pictures from that event, that is definitely talulah

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I thought I was tripping cus that second pic looks exactly like Talulah, the sharp V jawline and the eyes. Turns out it is her indeed lol, but I don't blame OP cus when you google Justine Musk you get pictures of Talulah mixed in with hers and they can kinda look alike when they're both blonde. There's not many photos of Justine at all actually, esp next to Elon.



Edited at 2021-07-25 01:20 pm (UTC)

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Yeah I def uploaded the wrong pic!!! My bad!

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the slit that he calls a mouth





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Honestly, I always find it weird when people have these exact types. I wonder what the psychology is behind it. Also, men seem to do this way more than women.

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Musk is a legit narcissist, possible sociopath so his reasons are straight up control and power.

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He jerked off the first time to a thin, blonde woman

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Need a vomit reaction emoji asap!

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His mother is a model and father sounds abusive af/apartheid supporter so I wonder how much of that led him to have some very fucked up views of women and marriage.

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It's creepy as hell when people have these exact physical types both like this when he controls them into taking the shape, but also when people go out of their way to find someone who looks exactly like all their exes, with no regard to personality.

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I mean thin blonde woman is the Official Standard so I dont think we need to dig that deep.

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I've always wanted Elon to hook up with Elizabeth Holmes.

She's blond, ambitious and a fraud. They have so much in common.

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Same. I dont think any of my former partners look anything alike

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Things allegedly did not begin to turn until their wedding day, when he whispered in her ear "I'm the alpha"





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https://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/a5380/millionaire-starter-wife/



There was a crunch of metal as her car plowed into mine, and when we skidded to a halt, my first thought wasn't, Thank God nobody's hurt. It was, My husband is going to kill me. And in my mind's eye, I could suddenly see myself: a woman who'd gotten very thin, and very blonde, stumbling out of a very expensive car with the front-left wheel smashed in.



I barely recognized myself. I had turned into a trophy wife  and I sucked at it. I wasn't detail-oriented enough to maintain a perfect house or be a perfect hostess. I could no longer hide my boredom when the men talked and the women smiled and listened. I wasn't interested in Botox or makeup or reducing the appearance of the scars from my C-sections. And no matter how many highlights I got, Elon pushed me to be blonder. "Go platinum," he kept saying, and I kept refusing.

This whole article is wild.There was a crunch of metal as her car plowed into mine, and when we skidded to a halt, my first thought wasn't, Thank God nobody's hurt. It was, My husband is going to kill me. And in my mind's eye, I could suddenly see myself: a woman who'd gotten very thin, and very blonde, stumbling out of a very expensive car with the front-left wheel smashed in.I barely recognized myself. I had turned into a trophy wife  and I sucked at it. I wasn't detail-oriented enough to maintain a perfect house or be a perfect hostess. I could no longer hide my boredom when the men talked and the women smiled and listened. I wasn't interested in Botox or makeup or reducing the appearance of the scars from my C-sections. And no matter how many highlights I got, Elon pushed me to be blonder. "Go platinum," he kept saying, and I kept refusing.

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What a great article about this relationship. Im glad she got out and no longer has to deal with his bullshit on a daily basis.



ETA: After finishing the Dirty John series about Betty Broderick, I cant stop thinking about how poorly some men handle a break up, especially with someone who supported them (emotionally and financially in some cases) before they became successful. The whole we fix this now or I divorce you ultimatum is laughable.



Edited at 2021-07-25 02:06 pm (UTC)

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Go platinum yourself if you love it so much, Elon.

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argh that's depressing af

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That poor woman. Elon is a piece of shit

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i didn't realise people said shit like that in real life

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gross and extremely corny, just like him

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That made my nipples hard

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A rat died in my bedroom ceiling one summer and I tried covering up the smell by spraying copious amounts of Ralph Lauren Romance, a delightful scent memory I am once again visiting thanks to the phrase Hot Musk Content.

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This post must be like deja vu for you, huh? I mean the similarities are uncanny.

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I love that perfume, but it sticks to you and clothes too long.

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this honestly made me laugh out loud, thank you

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While my eyes are glad this series is over, Im sad because I enjoyed it OP! Are there any other people you can make these posts about?

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Bezos 

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Yesssssss please do!!

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i had no idea about justine and hadn't seen her essay. i didn't even realise alienxy$ wasn't his first child.



i knew abotu tallulah

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They had six boys, the first one passed away from SIDS. Awful.

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I read in the article :(((

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disgusting, truly. he only wants these skinny blonde beautiful women and he looks like THAT?!

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He is a sociopath. And Im not using the term lightly.



He needs to have someone in his life this close to him to control and manipulate. He is confusing power with happiness.

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His father sounds like a sociopath as well

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His father just had a child with the daughter of his ex-girlfriend, if I'm remembered it correctly

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I read a quick article about his dad and it mentions the burglary and him shooting 3 people and getting acquitted claiming self defense.



Its interesting because Elon himself says his own dad is not a nice person and is unbearable to be around and manipulates the truth, so he obviously thinks he isnt like his dad at all. The disconnect is fascinating because somehow he convinces himself hes better than his dad, when in reality he is just as awful.

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God, he's so creepy.

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I was hoping to come here to figure out if Talulah and Justine are different people but I'm even more confused now.

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Apparently his second wife was a virgin when they met which makes the whole thing extra creepy because he was in his mid thirties when they met

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Here is the article where she talks about it: https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/talulah-riley-how-to-marry-a-billionaire-6540732.html?amp

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That's SUCH a weird article to be honest. It makes her appear super child like but also very cold/calculating at the same time. I'm not sure how I feel about that vibe. I don't know much about her as a person so I don't know that is actually her or if they made a purposefully sensational article for clicks :/

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Ugh, I had to stop reading when she started talking about sex with him



Her dad was right, Elon IS a bastard and she should've listened to him

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I know this article was like 9 years ago but the fact she goes on about not being a feminist and how she loves being a traditional wife in the same sentence rubs me the wrong way. Like of course misogynistic assholes like Elon would LOVE a girl exactly like this. The fact she was so young as well and holding these ideas, along with the creepy "i was a virgin and Elon was my first which was good. It was great, i mean it was great!" something along those lines. Wtf was going on, this girl must have honestly had a really shitty influence on her I can't really explain otherwise why she would be this much of a "pick me!!!". This explains a lot about Elon and how little he values women being their own person and not just some shiny object to cater to his every need and breed him endless children. im so disgusted by this and really wish women would stop pleasing these types of scum, you're not special for being picked by him. You'll simply be replaced once he's done with you. I wonder if Talulah has changed her views now that they're no longer together and has seen him move onto Grimes.



ok rant over

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Ah! I only saw the Daily Mail writing about that (I didn't google too much bc it felt kind of weird posting about her virginity tbh)



I hope he didn't fuck her up too much psychologically. In that rolling stone article I linked, she was still coming around to just hang out long after their second divorce ://

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Whether she has a pot or not, when I feel the goggles melting on me, I say close, she jokes.

The pieces, made of either red sonoma clay or white clay, are worth the trouble. Carbon trapping causes the markings, which range from light brown or tan to nearly black.

On one pot, a pattern resembling ferns emerged on the inside rim, as if to confirm Fischs notion about obvaras ties to nature.

She puts a glass glaze on some while theyre on the pottery wheel, and it causes surface cracks, which form interesting textures on the finished pots.

The pottery is lovely  and different  enough that a jury of peers chose her last year for membership at the Artists Cooperative Gallery in the Old Market, where she currently has a show. She also sells on her website, blazingcanyonstudio.com, and at the Tucson (Arizona) Museum of Art gift shop.

Omaha artist Margie Schimenti, who is on the membership committee at the gallery, said she thought Fisch would be an excellent addition to the cooperative when she first saw her pottery.

I really enjoyed looking at her work, Schimenti said. I enjoy the form she uses, the colors involved.
If the writing team doesn't make substantial changes, a large constituency across the state could be "looking for some heads on a platter," he said.

Hilyard said the Nebraska Department of Education is "dealing with some serious trust issues right now, and if they come back with something that's not dramatically changed, I think that could only escalate."

Nebraska Education Commissioner Matt Blomstedt, in a July 11 letter to school administrators and leaders, acknowledged that concerns over the health standards have helped fuel a "crisis of confidence in the department and across the education system in Nebraska."

Blomstedt wrote that there would be changes in a second draft. The Board of Education has discussed producing a second draft that would "remove many of the explicit examples and reframe sensitive topics," he wrote.

The second draft will "make clear that managing sensitive health related topics be thoughtfully conducted with parental input at a local level ... " he wrote.

Blomstedt also wrote that the process his department used to write the first draft, which the department has used in the past to draft other standards, "did not serve us well in this instance."
Logically, if were holding these engagement sessions, were getting feedback we want to see and be able to relay to the public that those means and ways of feedback are actually going to be listened to and possibly be implemented if needed, Casady said.

Logan said more information about what was learned at the sessions will be presented to the school board at a meeting in August.

The districts curriculum and research department is reviewing the comments from the meetings to pick out common themes to improve and augment the academies and pathways.

Susan Christopherson, secondary education director, said district officials have started to meet with staff at schools to get feedback from them because they talked about the plans with families. So far, she said, those conversations have resulted in tweaks to the plans.

Board Vice President Jane Erdenberger said she attended sessions at Northwest, Benson, South and Central. She said the sessions she went to were attended by only a few parents.

I took away from that that theres not a groundswell of concern about this, Erdenberger told district staff. Theres a desire for information, but at every one that I went to, the people were eager for information and very supportive of what youre doing.
LINCOLN  From his farm west of Davenport, Iowa, Glen Keppy has watched as a plastics factory and now an Amazon warehouse have gobbled up acres that used to produce corn, beans and wheat.

The encroachment of development, Keppy said, is one of the reasons why its so important to preserve the history of farming through efforts like a multicounty National Heritage Area, a locally governed adjunct to the National Park Service.

People come in by the busload, he said, to watch demonstrations of old-time farming with teams of horses and steam-powered tractors.

Thats what you call preserving what Iowa was made of, said Keppy, a former president of both the Iowa Pork Producers Association and the National Pork Producers Council.

He just ended a three-year stint on the board of the Silos and Smokestacks National Heritage Area, which promotes historic farms, museums, bed-and-breakfasts and tourism in a 37-county area of northeastern Iowa.

When asked if such heritage areas threaten private property rights  as has been claimed by critics of a proposed heritage area in Nebraska and Kansas focused on prairies and homesteading  Keppy said not at all.

We are not at all into forcing preservation; were just suggesting it. Were just an organization that tries to put things together, he said. Theres not an evil bone in the body of the organization, or the individuals.

Some officials at tourist attractions in south-central Nebraska and north-central Kansas express similar puzzlement.

They say they were blindsided, and disappointed, after Gov. Pete Ricketts and a coalition inspired by a retired Colorado researcher-writer whipped up a firestorm of protest over the proposed Kansas-Nebraska Heritage Area.

Heritage area opponents used labels like scam, federal overreach and conspiracy to describe what tourism officials maintain is a simple effort to increase marketing of heritage tourism to Willa Cathers hometown of Red Cloud, the Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer in Grand Island and the National Orphan Train Complex in Concordia, Kansas, among other places.

We are trying to do the right thing for the right reason, said Kim Wilson, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln architecture professor who serves as executive director of the all-volunteer Kansas-Nebraska Heritage Area Partnership, a committee of people involved in local tourism formed to pursue the idea.

Ricketts, in a statement Friday, remained unconvinced.

Federal designations, such as wilderness areas, national parks and heritage areas, give the federal government more control and oversight of private land. I have significant concerns about (that).

Now, after 38 county boards in the proposed 49-county Kansas-Nebraska Heritage Area have passed resolutions opposing the idea, what started as a no-brainer suggestion to boost economic development is in tatters after facing the same anti-government/pro-landowner rights sentiments that led Ricketts and some farm groups to condemn President Joe Bidens 30-by-30 goal to conserve more land.

Five of the Heritage Area Partnerships 13 board members have quit, fearing that their attractions might face retribution if they remain active supporters, and the partnership has suspended meetings until the fall, when it will regroup to decide if it wants to push forward.

The Willa Cather Foundation, which had asked some UNL students to study how to increase heritage tourism, has distanced itself from the now-controversial idea.

Wilson is unsure what the future holds. She said opposition seemed to explode from nothing.

Someone capitalized on fear of the unknown, without really understanding what it was all about, she said.

* * *

Norman Kincaide, 70, was a writer-researcher for the information database LexisNexis until his job was outsourced. He ended up in Rocky Ford, amid the arid plains of southeast Colorado, where he worked for the local daily newspaper.

He said he first began to believe that National Heritage Areas were a conspiracy to control private lands after serving on a county preservation board. The Otero County Historical Preservation Advisory Board was conducting several studies of historic buildings.

Kincaide said he didnt learn until later that the studies werent for local use, but were conducted in conjunction with the National Park Service to create the Canyons & Plains National Heritage Area. Local ranchers knew nothing about it.

Do you think I was angry? Yeah, Kincaide said. So I went after them with everything I had. I joined with good people who live on dirt roads ... and in seven months, we shut them down.

Kincaide eventually wrote a book about his experience called Scammed? Canyons & Plains National Heritage Area Initiative for Southeast Colorado, Degrading Private Property Rights while Subverting Local Sovereignty. That established him as a sought-after speaker by groups opposing heritage areas, including here and in Montana.

He said he learned of the Kansas-Nebraska idea from Kathy Wilmot of Beaver City, a former member of the Nebraska State Board of Education, who has written that heritage areas could force farmers to stop growing corn and convert fields to native grasses.

Kincaide went all in, launching what he calls Operation Blindside.

He sent packets of anti-heritage area talking points to county board members in the 49-county area proposed for the Kansas-Nebraska Heritage Area, urging them to pass resolutions of opposition. It said that an unelected management entity whose plans are approved by the feds and works in the shadows would be an undemocratic threat to their property rights.

He followed that up with speaking tours in March and April in 10 rural towns across the proposed Heritage Area (and has another tour scheduled for Aug. 13 to 15). On his Facebook page, Kincaide said 2,500 people have attended the meetings, and he charts the passage of every new county resolution against the proposal.

Do you want any more incompetent government? he asked in explaining how the opposition has grown. They cant control the border? They cant fund the police? Its spread like a noxious weed.

He calls heritage areas an unneeded expansion of the federal government, via adjuncts of the National Park Service, and says tourism sites are just after federal funding, which was originally supposed to be only for seed money to get heritage areas off the ground.

But when asked for specific examples of where heritage areas have affected private property rights, Kincaide is less precise. Yes, heritage area management plans are voluntary, he said, and they have no zoning power, but they can influence passage of local laws to preserve scenic views or protect prairie dogs. Kincaide couldnt cite an example of a heritage area purchasing land, but Congress has authorized the creation of two national parks, in Louisiana and Massachusetts/Rhode Island, within designated heritage areas.

Ricketts has said such a designation would require a National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) plan to be developed, which he called one of the most significant bureaucratic barriers to infrastructure projects and development.

But the Park Services national coordinator for heritage areas, Elizabeth Vehmeyer, said that whether a NEPA plan is required depends on the types of projects proposed. If a visitors center affected a wetland, yes, it would be required, she said, but a plan wouldnt be required for marketing and promotional projects.

Kincaide is unconvinced.

It wasnt really about historic preservation; it was wringing their hands about placement of cellphone towers, he said. To me, it was about controlling private property.

He dismisses critics who call him a political entrepreneur  one who profits off of a political issue. He said he received some donations when he came to Nebraska but came on his own dime, and sold only a few books.

Overall, Kincaide said you dont need help from the National Park Service or the creation of umbrella organizations to promote cultural sites, preserve history and learn about local events.

Its all on your phone, he said.

* * *

We protect private property rights in our area, it states in bright red letters on the homepage of the website of the Lawrence, Kansas-based Freedoms Frontier National Heritage Area.

Following that are a list of disclaimers, including We never interfere with private property ... We never purchase private property ... We never impose local zoning changes ...

Even though all of those restrictions are etched into federal law, some people, wrapped up in the divisive politics of today, dont believe it, according to Jim Ogle, executive director of the Freedoms Frontier group.

The Heritage Area, he said, is about highlighting the stories and sites surrounding the Bleeding Kansas era around the Civil War, the desegregation of schools via the Brown v. Board of Education ruling out of Topeka, and helping local attractions and events improve and draw more visitors.

If you dont want my help, all you have to do is tell me to go away, and I go away, Ogle said.

But in the last few months, as more and more Kansas and Nebraska counties passed resolutions against the proposed heritage area there, he posted the disclaimers on his areas website.

National Heritage Areas have been around since 1984, when the Illinois and Michigan Canal National Heritage Area was created. In signing the law, President Ronald Reagan hailed the areas as a new kind of national park.

Such areas are not owned by the federal government or managed by the National Park Service, though they do receive federal money, ranging from $150,000 to $710,000 a year, that must be matched locally. The Park Service, through an eight-member staff and a $23 million annual budget, offers technical support and guidance to the paid staff and volunteer board members who actually run the heritage areas.

The ride hasnt always been smooth, with objections based on private property rights rising in recent years.

Critics have said that National Heritage Areas are pork barrel prizes for some congressional representatives and that federal money should be devoted to maintaining federal parks, not supporting local coalitions.

But advocates say the federal money is better spent on heritage areas, which highlight important national history. An alliance of heritage areas maintains that every $1 of federal money leverages $5 in local support.

President Donald Trump had tried to defund National Heritage Areas but instead ended up signing legislation in 2019 to create six new ones. That same legislation spells out prohibitions against intruding on property rights.

There are now 54 National Heritage Areas funded across the country, from one promoting the coal-mining heritage of West Virginia to one highlighting the Civil War that covers the entire state of Tennessee. One, in southwest Pennsylvania, is inactive after its federal funding lapsed.

Anthony Schutz, a law professor at UNL who specializes in agricultural law, said heritage areas seem mostly about marketing and branding an area as having special historical significance. He compared it to Nebraskas livestock friendly county designations, which illustrate, through the passage of a resolution and placement of a roadside sign, that a county is open to livestock operations.

Schutz said he doesnt see heritage areas as a legitimate threat to private property rights, but as a wedge issue that has been used politically.

Divisive issues like this are fun stuff for politicians to play with because it gives you an audience, he said.

If Silos and Smokestacks is fine for (northeast) Iowa and one is appropriate for Kansas, why wouldnt we be interested in it? Schutz asked.

But Webster County board member TJ Vance said he didnt see how a National Heritage Area would benefit his county, except tourism in Red Cloud and at the Willa Cather sites.

The main issue for landowners is Why does my land have to be involved in this? said Vance, who attended one of the meetings featuring Kincaide. He said it appeared to him that several people were mixed up, thinking that the heritage area idea was part of Bidens 30-by-30 plan.

But Vance said he got more requests to oppose the heritage area than on any other issue. His County Board declined to vote on a resolution to oppose it because by the time they got around to it, the proposal seemed dead, he said, even though a resolution would surely pass.

Harmless or not, Vance said, people dont want to take the risk of getting the federal government involved.

* * *

The Kansas-Nebraska National Heritage Area began with a simple question: How do we increase tourism?

A group of third-year architectural students were asked by the Willa Cather Foundation four years ago to explore that question. Wilson, who led the UNL students, said a representative of a local historic site suggested exploring a National Heritage Area designation.

So a group of officials from tourism sites and economic development groups began meeting. The Kansas-Nebraska National Heritage Area Partnership finally put it to a vote. It was unanimously decided to explore the idea.

We didnt even know if we qualified, Wilson said.

Becoming a heritage area requires a feasibility study, then authorization by Congress and approval of a local management plan by the U.S. Department of the Interior. Wilson said the partnership was still considering whether to apply when the whirlwind of opposition hit this spring.

The partnership first reached out to the Ricketts administration in December. About 30 tourism and history organizations from Kansas and Nebraska signed onto a letter asking to brief officials on the idea.

The letter prompted a question from Steve Wellman, director of the Nebraska Department of Agriculture, about what exactly is a heritage area. Their white paper clearly states this will not impact land use, responded Taylor Gage, the governors chief spokesman in an email, adding, Do we anticipate any concerns from ag groups or other stakeholders?

A briefing with the Heritage Area Partnership was held in January. The next time the group heard from the Governors Office was April 6, when Ricketts released a letter saying he opposed the creation of the Kansas-Nebraska National Heritage Area. He said that it poses the risk of federal overreach in our communities and that federal designations come with unknowable and unquantifiable risks that could hinder development and growth.

Ricketts said Nebraskans had contacted him to oppose the heritage area idea, though a public records request failed to show any written contacts from opponents, including Kincaide. A Governors Office official said that conversations with Ricketts, not written emails or letters, prompted his opposition.

Ricketts, in his letter, also said that promotion of heritage tourism in Nebraska could be done locally and that federal involvement wasnt needed. But the letter gave no indication if the governor had plans to boost marketing of such tourism.

Whether the Kansas-Nebraska National Heritage Area has any life left wont be decided until this fall. Backers of the idea feel demoralized, as well as caught up in a larger political firestorm over proposals by a new president to conserve land.

This is economic development that could benefit the whole region, areas that have lost population, Wilson said. Were really proud of the state of Nebraska. This is one way to demonstrate that to the rest of the country.

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That fostered the belief that if I were to somehow trip and allow the precious cloth to swipe the floor, the Earth would split open in an outer-borough cataclysm and swallow up me, Mrs. Moss, and all my classmates, who  along with Abe Lincoln  would curse me through eternity for the unspeakable desecration.

My other source of flag respect comes from my Army sergeant father, who fought in Korea. He once told me that whenever he was in a place where that banner flew, it meant he could breathe a little easier, at least for a while.

What I tell my daughter is that I can still love the symbol of America without condoning all of its flaws. Uncle Sam is like many other family members who can do you proud and do you dirty, often in the same weekend.

Ive come to realize that, as Michael Douglas said in the film The American President, the United States puts up a fight when you try to define or classify it: America isnt easy. America is advanced citizenship.

Ultimately, for me, the flag is the embodiment of an ideal  a kind of promise, both solemn and sacred  of a country thats yet to be: the America on the horizon, the America of our dreams.
Many of the Capitol insurrectionists had a history of mental illness and related social dysfunction. We made fun of several. Eric Munchel of Nashville, Tennessee, who brought restraints police use on hands, legs and arms to the Capitol, was dubbed the zip-tie guy. Actually, Munchel had been charged with assaulting a man and woman in 2013. Recently fired from his job at a bar, he entered the Capitol costumed in paramilitary gear, his mother at his side.

Sean McHugh of Auburn, California, who attacked Capitol police with chemical spray, had accused the officers of protecting pedophiles. McHugh, it turns out, had done jail time for statutory rape of a 14-year-old girl.

It was thought at first that Rosanne Boyland had been crushed to death in the rush of stampeding vandals, but the medical examiner concluded that the Georgia resident died from an overdose of amphetamines. Boyland had a history of drug use, including a charge of felony drug possession. The pandemic cut off her in-person group meetings of addicts.
Lets say youre Joe Biden.

For entirely valid and legitimate reasons, you staked much of your presidency on getting the country vaccinated. You had a very good start, but then things started to stall right as a new, more contagious delta variant of the coronavirus was spreading.

This is a problem. I dont just mean its a political problem. (Ill get to that.) Its a public policy problem. Like national defense and law enforcement, fighting a pandemic is probably one of the few things political thinkers, conservative or progressive, in the past would have agreed was the task of government.

At least until recently. Now, to listen to many of Bidens conservative critics, getting people vaccinated is just another liberal scheme, like the Green New Deal or pushing critical race theory. Thats really the only explanation for why the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference cheered when told that the Biden administration failed to hit its vaccination targets. Its a bit like cheering when a war goes poorly because it will make the Democratic commander in chief look bad.

Then theres the political problem. And Biden, like the typical politician that he is, wants someone to blame. But who?
It was disheartening to learn that 41% of Omaha police officers have not been vaccinated against COVID-19  and further discouraging to see that the police union president is steeped in disinformation that justifies their decision.

Police officers self-declared role is to protect and serve society, but these unvaccinated officers risk endangering themselves and members of the public.

The Fire Department has done better than police, with 73% of firefighters vaccinated, but those numbers can still improve.

As much as we all dearly wish otherwise, the pandemic is not over.

It is the availability and acceptance of vaccines by a majority of Americans that has enabled society and the economy to reopen to the extent we enjoy this summer. With some exceptions, it is the often-ideological refusal of a minority that fosters a breeding ground for mutations of the virus and jeopardizes our progress.

While the general population cannot be coerced into being vaccinated, the city can and should do more to minimize the danger posed by our unvaccinated public safety employees.
Mr Ronald Gerard Strikker, the outgoing Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to Ghana, has bid farewell to Madam Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration.



Mr Strikker, a career diplomat with a background in law, was appointed Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to Ghana in 2016.



Prior to that, he served as Ambassador to the Kingdom of Morocco and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.



He has also served in various capacities as a Dutch envoy in Nairobi, Tunis, Santiago de Chile, Bangkok, and Paris.



During the meeting in Accra, the Minister congratulated Mr Strikker on the successful completion of his tour of duty in Ghana.



She acknowledged that Ghana and the Netherlands have had long-standing and fruitful bilateral relations, which date back to the 1970s.



The Minister reaffirmed Ghana's determination and her personal desire to continue to forge strong partnerships of cooperation and to consolidate as well as deepen relations between the two countries for the mutual benefit of our two peoples.



She said during Mr Strikker's tenure, relations between the two countries were characterized by the regular exchange of high-level visits, which offered the Ghanaian and Dutch leaders, an opportunity to renew their commitment to tackling issues of mutual interest.



She cited the visit to Ghana in November 2017 by Mr Mark Rutte, the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Netherlands, and that of Madam Carola Schouten, the Dutch Deputy Prime Minister in February 2019.



She also mentioned the visit to Ghana in November 2017 of Madam Sigrid Kaag, the Dutch Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation.



In addition, the Minister recalled the visit to the Netherlands by a five-member delegation from the Parliamentary Select Committee on Foreign Affairs of Ghana, led by the then Chairman of the Committee, Mr Emmanuel Bandua in August 2016.



She expressed appreciation to the Dutch Government for its firm support to Ghanas health sector over the years, including the provision of funding for the construction of five medical clinics in the Western Region.



She also mentioned the installation of 52 X-ray systems across Ghana, equipped with Computer-Aided Detection for TB (CAD4TB) and teleradiology by Dutch firms Oldelft Benelux and Universal Hospitals Group as well as the construction of a water treatment plant in Navrongo.



Madam Ayorkor Botchwey observed that the Netherlands was the lead market destination for Ghanas non-traditional exports in 2016 and underscored the need to bolster the trade relations between the two countries by leveraging on Ghanas hosting of the Secretariat of the Africa Continental Free Trade Area.



The Minister conveyed appreciation for the strong Dutch commitment and participation in the ongoing EU-Ghana Sustainable Cocoa Dialogue, which had been a great success thus far.



She expressed the hope that in the coming years the two countries could explore new areas of cooperation particularly in the areas of energy, metallurgy, and machinery, where the Netherlands had enormous expertise and comparative advantage and urged the Ambassador to suggest these areas to his successor.



She assured him that the Government would collaborate with and support his successor to ensure the further elevation of the bilateral relations between Ghana and the Netherlands.



Mr Strikker on his part said it was a great opportunity for him to serve in Ghana, which enabled him to contribute a little bit to the great relationship between the two nations; in areas such as political atmosphere, economic diplomacy, and trade agenda.



The outgoing Ambassador informed the Minister that he would be retiring from active service at the end of his duty tour of Ghana.

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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Kidnappers in Nigeria have seized a man who was sent to deliver a ransom payment to secure the release of dozens of abducted school children.



The elderly man was sent by the children's parents after they managed to raise 30m naira ($73,000; 53,000) by selling land and other possessions.



But they have been left feeling hopeless following his kidnapping.



The north of the country is in the midst of a wave of school abductions carried out by criminals for profit.



Ransoms are frequently paid, but this is a rare case where the person carrying the cash has been taken.



The kidnappers called up the school's headteacher to say that the money delivered was not the agreed sum.



The 136 students were taken from an Islamic school in Tegina, Niger state, in late May.



Gunmen riding on motorcycles stormed the town and opened fire indiscriminately killing one person and injuring another.

As people fled, the attackers went to the school and seized the children.



The parents and school administrators negotiated with the criminals and agreed to pay the ransom. They sold part of the school's land as well as other possessions.



Headteacher Malam Abubakar Alhassan told the BBC that six people were sent with the correct amount to meet the kidnappers near the forest where the children were being held.



When they arrived, the gunmen demanded that one of the group, an elderly man, follow them into the forest so that the cash could be counted.



But they later called to say the money was not sufficient.



"Parents are now resigned to fate. They say they can't raise any more money. They are now relying on God," Mr Alhassan told the BBC.

Source: BBC









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Mr Mohammed Sukparu Adams, the Member of Parliament (MP) for the Sissala West Constituency, says he has been attacked by unknown assailants on the JeffisiBullu road in the constituency.



The MP said he was attacked at about 1945 hours on Friday when he was returning to Gwollu from Jeffisi to oversee preparations towards a scheduled funeral on Saturday, July 24.



Mr Adams told the Ghana News Agency (GNA) at Buoti that "while returning around 1945 hours last night between Jeffisi and Bullu three masked men suddenly appeared from both ends of the bush holding torchlight and wielding guns. I asked my driver to stop with our windows closed, one of the assailants turned towards the driver pointing the torchlight at us in the car.



At that point, the security, on the front seat by my driver, fired through the side window of the driver, injuring the attacker in the process while the attacker from the rear was also shot at with the gun and my driver sped off towards Gwollu," he explained.



The MP commended the security officer for the swift intervention to save their lives, which he said was a sign of bravery, saying I owe my life to him apart from God for his quick action."



Mr Adams said he had since reported the incident to the Police at Gwollu, adding that the Gwollu District Police Commander said he had to call a patrol team from Tumu as their vehicle had broken down.



Later, a team of Police officers went back to the scene but couldn't find the attackers except for bloodstains on the ground," he added.



A source from the Police in Gwollu said one other person was also attacked earlier at the same place before the MP got there.



The source quoted the victim as saying that They made me lie on the ground until the MPs vehicle appeared and the subsequent shooting after which the robbers asked me to go and not watch my back. One of them sustained an injury on the shoulder.



This is the second time an MP had been attacked by unknown assailants in the Sissala West Constituency with the first being Alhaji Amin Amidu Sulemana in 2013.



He appealed for enhanced security patrols in the area to save lives.

Source: GNA









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Members of the Harmony with Jesus Ministry International have expressed disgust at the alleged murder of their founder and his wife by unknown assailants at their residence at Ayitikope in the Akatsi South Municipality of the Volta Region.



According to them, the recent development raised concerns about the security of residents in the area after similar happenings some few months ago.



Mr George Gbedema, an Elder of the Church, during a visit to the residence of the diseased on Sunday, called for calm among members.



It came as a shock. It is very disturbing. Most of our members are demoralized but we take consolation from God in these difficult times," he told the Ghana News Agency.



Apostle Augustine Gbedema and his wife, Pastor Comfort Gbedema, were allegedly murdered by unknown assailants.



Some church members as well as members of the community remained emotionally unstable due to the sad incident.



Mr Jerry Etse Agbo, the Assemblymember, said: Its time for us to ensure that the needed justice is ensured and the perpetrators are found and brought to book."



Some chiefs and elders of the community who thronged the house to commiserate with the family appealed to the police to expedite processes to unravel the mystery behind the death of the couple.



Their lifeless bodies were discovered in an advanced state of decomposition with visible deep machete wounds on the throat of the pastor and other parts of his body.



The Pastor was found lying outside their bedroom, while his wife was in a supine position in the main sitting room of their four-bedroom apartment, with machete wounds on her body.



The Police at Akatsi has conveyed the bodies to the St. Paul's Hospital morgue for autopsy.



No arrest has yet been made.



Mr Leo Nelson Adzidogah, the Akatsi South Municipal Chief Executive, who visited the crime scene on Sunday, assured residents of government's efforts in ensuring that the perpetrators were brought to book.

Source: GNA









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The Right Reverend Professor Joy Obiri Yeboah Mante, Moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana has urged young persons to desist from praying for Gods blessings and prosperity without engaging in any productive work.



Rt. Rev. Prof. Mante said no country could succeed with such characters stressing that God does not bless lazy people.

He gave the advice at the inauguration of City of Favor Estate developed by Sawer-Nanor and Sons Company Limited at Dawhenya in the Ningo-Prampram District of the Greater Accra Region.



God never blesses laziness that is why he said in the Book of Proverbs that go to the ant, you sluggard and learn its ways, this is so because the ant is never lazy, he noted, adding that work was one of the main purposes for human creation as stated in Genesis 2:15.



He said God created human beings to work and even the rich people must continue to engage in some form of work to prevent the brain from going stale.



The Moderator stressed that God created human beings to work that is why I dont like people standing at the roadside to beg.



He said when lawyers talk about basic human rights, they must know that the first among it was for people to work quoting II Thessalonians 3: 10 through which God instructed that those who do not work should not eat, meaning anyone who does not work have problem with God.



Prof. Mante reiterated that it was not enough to sit at home and pray for Gods favour and prosperity as God only blesses the work of peoples hands and multiply what one has, therefore having nothing would yield no related multiplication.

Even if you are just doing cassava farm, God will bless it, but just sitting at home and praying is wrong attitude to prayer, work hard and be sincere.



The Moderator implored young persons to appreciate gradual growth, the news of young people in Ghana going to the extent of killing their friends to sell their body parts to make quick money, while others wanted to triple jump into wealth without passing through the process was worrying.



The thing these days is that everybody is sitting at home with his phone in his hands trying to dribble everyone they want to become the richest person on their phones.



No country will prosper that way we need a country that everybody will work hard with sincerity and appreciation of gradual growth.







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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Uncontrollable tears and wailing took centre stage as mourners thronged the funeral and burial ceremony of the late Constable Emmanuel Osei.



The 26-year-old Police Officer died with a civilian on Monday, June 14, 2021 in the bullion van attack at Adedenkpo, a suburb of Jamestown.



The ceremony, spearheaded by the Ghana Police Service (GPS) was held at the Kakraba park, Kasoa after which the mortal remains of the late Officer was taken to the Nyanyano cemetery for burial.



Mourners including; family members, Police personnel, fellow Christians at Saint Raphael Catholic Church, could not control their tears as they paid their last respect to the late Constable.



In a tribute from the family, the late Emmanuel Osei was described as a peacemaker who loved everyone, while other tributes from the GPS, the Church, siblings, and friends also eulogized him as a hardworking and God-fearing individual.

Mr Ambrose Dery, Minister for Interior extended condolences on behalf of President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to the family of the late Constable and the civilian who lost her life in the same incidence.



He said the various tributes that were read were testament to the fact that the late Emmanuel Osei lived in a Godly manner, as such, he was of the firm belief that his departed soul had gone to be with his Maker.



Mr Dery said Constable Osei died as a patriot and a professional epitomizing the high standards of the GPS and effective his demise on June 14, he was promoted to the rank of Lance Corporal.



Hes dead though but still a hero and he joins the long list of heroes who have fallen in their line of duty and services, he added.



In a sermon delivered by Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCOP) Reverend Father George Arthur, Chaplain General of the GPS, he said the demise of Emmanuel Osei was a painful one and he was forced by armed robbers to hang up his life abruptly.



Emmanuel has hanged up abruptly. He was forced by armed robbers to hang up. What a painful exit 26 years on this planet and less than 12 months with the Police service. Sad story indeed. Constable Emmanuel, Damire fa due, he said.



He consoled the bereaved family by encouraging them to keep their faith unwavering in God because He alone can truly console them.



The Rev Father prayed that God would strengthen them in these trying and difficult times to move forward.

Continue to cling on to hope. If your hope is in God, He will never forsake you. May God dry away all your tears and open a new avenue unto you. May God release divine grace and let His mercy be your portion, he said.

The late Emmanuel Osei Kobby was born 27th of August 1995 at Madina to Mr Peter Kennedy Attah and Madam Margaret Abena Oforiwa.



He started schooling at Madina Bethany in the year 2002-2003 and later continued class three to class six at the Pantang Hospital Primary school.



He entered Junior High School in 2008 and wrote his Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) in 2010.

Emmanuel was baptized on April 3, 2010, at Saint Raphael Catholic Church, Pantang Hospital and had his first communion the same year.



He served as a Mass servant at Saint Raphael Catholic Church and was then confirmed at Saint Barnabas Catholic Church, Hatsoo in 2015.







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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Residents of Ayitikope in the Akatsi South Municipality of the Volta Region are yet to recover from the shock and barbaric manner in which Apostle Augustine Gbedema, founder and leader of the Harmony With Jesus Ministry International and his wife, have been reportedly murdered.



Their bodies, which were discovered in an advanced state of decomposition and in pools of blood, carry visible machete wounds.



The pastor was lying outside their room, while his wife was lying in a supine position in the sitting room.



The bodies were discovered in their private residence at Ayitikope, a farming community within Akatsi South, on Saturday morning after calls to their mobile phones returned unanswered.



Mr George Gbedema, an elder of the Church, and a nephew of Pastor Gbedema, disclosed to the Ghana News Agency (GNA) that his uncle was in his 70s, while his wife was in her late 50s.



They were last seen in public about four or five days ago.



The pastor, however, held a service on Sunday, while his nephew spoke to him the next day.



"When we got to the house, we saw the main gate locked up from outside with a padlock, and the small gate also locked with some metals," the nephew said.



"His car was also found on the compound, so we suspected something was going wrong after several attempts to reach them on had phone failed.



"We are in a state of shock, this is sad and heartbreaking!"



Mr Gbedema indicated that his uncle was a nice man, who loved many in and outside the Church.



"It's still really hard to believe that this is true at this point, this is a horrific and an awful tragedy," some church members invariably told the GNA.



Meanwhile, Chief Superintendent Joseph Atsu Dzineku, the Akatsi South Municipal Commander of Police, has since confirmed the tragedy to the GNA.



He said his outfit was yet to conduct investigations into the bizarre act, as efforts were underway to convey the bodies to the morgue for preservation and autopsy.



The couple left behind a daughter.

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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A youth advocacy group with name, Patriotic Youth Advocates (PYA) has parried off suggestions from some sections of the public and civil society groups that the Health Minister should resign from his position because he made frank presentations before the Parliamentary probe into the botched procurement of Sputnik v vaccines.



He continued that, in all his dealings with the Sheikh Maktoum group that produces Sputnik V vaccine, the health Minister was guided by the ethics of his office that is to secure the lives of Ghanaian citizens hence his bargaining for the least of the price for the drugs to the 19 dollars they arrived at.



Speaking to Peace Fm News, Asante Kwadwo, Spokesperson of PYA, said the intentions and work rate of the Health Minister bears testimony that he wished the best for Ghana in engaging in that international transaction.



He said, the Health Minister considered the health and safety of Ghanaians as priority over procedural measures.



Mr. Kwaku Agyeman Manu, the group reminded the public worked to restore the nurses training allowance which had been cancelled by the previous NDC government.



Spokesperson for Patriotic Youth Advocates, Asante Kwadwo spoke to our reporter Pious Baidoo Banson



According to Asante Kwadwo pleaded with the public to stop scolding the health minister but the rather commend him for the good work he has done.





Source: Pious Baidoo Banson/Peace News









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 DR Congo's Nyirangongo volcano has released large amounts of ash some two months after its eruption, sparking concerns for local residents' health, experts said on Sunday.

The volcano in the far east of the vast central African country first erupted on May 22, claiming 32 lives and destroying hundreds of homes.

"The ash is the result of the collapse of part of the Nyirangongo's central crater," vulcanologist Muhindo Syavulisembo said in a statement.

Syavulisembo, who heads the Goma Vulcanology Observatory (OVG), however ruled out an imminent new eruption.

"There hasn't been visible damage, but we fear respiratory and water-borne illnesses," Samson Buunda, a local civil society representative, told AFP.

The eruption of Africa's most active volcano displaced nearly 400,000 people, especially after May 27 when scientists warned of a potentially catastrophic blast underneath nearby Lake Kivu.

Explore further Hawaii's Kilauea Volcano stops erupting after months of lava

 2021 AFP
Felicity Brown, 9, uses a workbook to practice math with her parents and siblings at home in Austin, Texas, on Tuesday, July 13, 2021. After homeschooling during the pandemic, the Brown family has switched to homeschooling their kids permanently using a Catholic-based curriculum and won't be sending them back to in-person schools in the fall. Credit: AP Photo/Eric Gay

Although the pandemic disrupted family life across the U.S. since taking hold in spring 2020, some parents are grateful for one consequence: They're now opting to homeschool their children, even as schools plan to resume in-person classes.

The specific reasons vary widely. Some families who spoke with The Associated Press have children with special educational needs; others seek a faith-based curriculum or say their local schools are flawed. The common denominator: They tried homeschooling on what they thought was a temporary basis and found it beneficial to their children.

"That's one of the silver linings of the pandemicI don't think we would have chosen to homeschool otherwise," said Danielle King of Randolph, Vermont, whose 7-year-old daughter Zoe thrived with the flexible, one-on-one instruction. Her curriculum has included literature, anatomy, even archaeology, enlivened by outdoor excursions to search for fossils.

The surge has been confirmed by the U.S. Census Bureau, which reported in March that the rate of households homeschooling their children rose to 11% by September 2020, more than doubling from 5.4% just six months earlier.

Black households saw the largest jump; their homeschooling rate rose from 3.3% in the spring of 2020 to 16.1% in the fall.

Arlena Brown, center, holds her youngest child, Lucy, 9 months, as she and husband, Robert, left, lead their other children, from left, Jacoby, 11; Felicity, 9, and Riley, 10, through math practice at their home in Austin, Texas, Tuesday, July 13, 2021. "I didn't want my kids to become a statistic and not meet their full potential," said Robert, a former teacher who now does consulting. "And we wanted them to have very solid understanding of their faith." Credit: AP Photo/Eric Gay

The parents in one of those households, Arlena and Robert Brown of Austin, Texas, had three children in elementary school when the pandemic took hold. After experimenting with virtual learning, the couple opted to try homeschooling with a Catholic-oriented curriculum provided by Seton Home Study School, which serves about 16,000 students nationwide.

The Browns plan to continue homeschooling for the coming year, grateful that they can tailor the curriculum to fit their children's distinctive needs. Jacoby, 11, has been diagnosed with narcolepsy and sometimes needs naps during the day; Riley, 10, has tested as academically gifted; Felicity, 9, has a learning disability.

"I didn't want my kids to become a statistic and not meet their full potential," said Robert Brown, a former teacher who now does consulting. "And we wanted them to have very solid understanding of their faith."

Jacoby Brown, 11, left, and sister, 9, practice math at their home in Austin, Texas, Tuesday, July 13, 2021. The U.S. Census Bureau reported in March that the rate of households homeschooling their children rose to 11% by September 2020, more than doubling from 5.4% just six months earlier. Credit: AP Photo/Eric Gay

Arlena Brown, who gave birth to a fourth child 10 months ago, worked as a preschool teacher before the pandemic. Homeschooling, she says, has been a rewarding adventure.

"In the beginning, the biggest challenge was to unschool ourselves and understand that homeschooling has so much freedom," she said. "We can go as quickly or slowly as we need to."

Race played a key role in the decision by another African American family to homeschool their 12-year-old son, Dorian.

Angela Valentine said Dorian was often the only Black student in his classes at a suburban Chicago public school, was sometimes treated unfairly by administrators, and was dismayed as other children stopped playing with him.

As the pandemic eased, the family decided to keep Dorian at home and teach him there, using a curriculum provided by National Black Home Educators that provides content for each academic subject pertaining to African American history and culture.

Arlena Brown, center, holds her youngest child, Lucy, 9 months, as she leads their other children, from left, Jacoby, 11; Felicity, 9, and Riley, 10, through math practice at their home in Austin, Texas, Tuesday, July 13, 2021. Arlena worked as a preschool teacher before the pandemic. "In the beginning, the biggest challenge was to unschool ourselves and understand that homeschooling has so much freedom," she said. "We can go as quickly or slowly as we need to." Credit: AP Photo/Eric Gay

"I felt the burden of making the shift, making sure we're making the right choices," Valentine said. "But until we're really comfortable with his learning environment, we'll stay on this homeschool journey."

Charmaine Williams, who lives in the St. Louis suburb of Baldwin, also is using the National Black Home Educators curriculum as she homeschools her 10-year-old son, Justin, and 6-year-old daughter, Janel.

Williams said she and her husband tried two previous stints of homeschooling for Justin after school officials complained about his behavior. Nowwith the new curriculum and an accompanying support networkthey feel more confident about choosing it as a long-term option.

"At school, children have to follow a certain pattern, and there's bullying, belittlingcompared to being home where they're free to be themselves," Williams said.

Arlena Brown, center, holds her youngest child, Lucy, 9 months, as she and husband, Robert, left, lead their other children, from left, Jacoby, 11; Felicity, 9, and Riley, 10, through math practice at their home in Austin, Texas, Tuesday, July 13, 2021. "I didn't want my kids to become a statistic and not meet their full potential," said Robert, a former teacher who now does consulting. "And we wanted them to have very solid understanding of their faith." Credit: AP Photo/Eric Gay

"There's no turning back for us now," she added. "The pandemic has been a blessingan opportunity to take ownership of our children's education."

Joyce Burges, co-founder and program director of National Black Home Educators, said the 21-year-old organization had about 5,000 members before the pandemic and now has more than 35,000.

Many of the new families experienced difficulties, including lack of internet access, that limited their children's ability to benefit from virtual learning during the pandemic, Burges said.

"It got so they didn't trust anything but their own homes, and their children being with them," she said. "Now they're seeing the futureseeing what their children can do."

For some families, the switch to homeschooling was influenced by their children's special needs. That's the case for Jennifer Osgood of Fairfax, Vermont, whose 7-year-old daughter Lily has Down syndrome.

The family rules for homeschool are posted behind Jacoby Brown, 11, and sister Felicity, 9, as they practice math at home in Austin, Texas, Tuesday, July 13, 2021. "I didn't want my kids to become a statistic and not meet their full potential," said their father, Robert, a former teacher who now does consulting. "And we wanted them to have very solid understanding of their faith." Credit: AP Photo/Eric Gay

Having observed Lily's progress with reading and arithmetic while at home during the pandemic, Osgood is convinced homeschooling is the best option for her going forward.

She has made the same decision for her 12-year-old son Noah, who didn't like the remote classes offered by his public school in the spring of 2020, and did homeschooling throughout the 2020-21 school year. It went so well that they want to continue for at least a few more years.

"He told me he was learning so much more at home than he ever did in school,'' Osgood recalled. "He said, 'School is just so chaoticwe don't get very much done in any particular class. Here, I sit down, you tell me what to do, and minutes later I'm done.'"

Heather Pray of Phoenix, Maryland, says homeschooling has been a major success for her 7-year-old son, Jackson, who has autism. The family made the switch because Jackson was struggling with the virtual learning that his school provided during the pandemic.

Felicity Brown, 9, draws as she takes a break from math practice at her home in Austin, Texas, Tuesday, July 13, 2021. After homeschooling during the pandemic, the Brown family have switched to homeschooling their kids permanently using a Catholic-based curriculum and won't be sending them back to in-person schools this fall. Credit: AP Photo/Eric Gay

Lily Osgood, 7, who has Down syndrome, shows off her completed work with her mother, Jennifer, and brother, Noah, 12, at their home, Tuesday, July 20, 2021, in Fairfax, Vt. For some families, the switch to homeschooling was influenced by their children's special needs. Having observed Lily's progress with reading and arithmetic while at home during the pandemic, Jennifer is convinced homeschooling is the best option for her going forward. Credit: AP Photo/Charles Krupa

Noah Osgood, 12, right, works on a review sheet as his mother, Jennifer, helps his sister, Lily, at their home in Fairfax, Vt., on Tuesday, July 20, 2021. "He told me he was learning so much more at home than he ever did in school,'' Jennifer says. "He said, 'School is just so chaoticwe don't get very much done in any particular class. Here, I sit down, you tell me what to do, and minutes later I'm done.'" Credit: AP Photo/Charles Krupa

Lily Osgood, 7, selects a book to read from the family library of nearly 2,000 books she shares with her brother, Noah, Tuesday, July 20, 2021, in Fairfax, Vt. The Osgood children will continue to be homeschool this upcoming school year. As the pandemic took hold across the United States in the spring of 2020, it brought disruption and anxiety to most families. Yet some parents are grateful for one consequence: they are now opting to homeschool their children even as schools plan to resume in-person classes. Credit: AP Photo/Charles Krupa

Lily Osgood, 7, corrects a math problem while studying at her family's home, Tuesday, July 20, 2021, in Fairfax, Vt. Lily and her brother, Noah, 12, will continue to be homeschool this upcoming school year. For some families, the switch to homeschooling was influenced by their children's special needs. Having observed Lily's progress with reading and arithmetic while at home during the pandemic, her mother, Jennifer, is convinced homeschooling is the best option for her going forward. Credit: AP Photo/Charles Krupa

Jennifer Osgood, center, helps her children Lily, 7, right, and Noah, 12, left, while studying at the kitchen counter in the family's home, Tuesday, July 20, 2021, in Fairfax, Vt. The Osgood children will continue to be homeschool this upcoming school year. As the pandemic took hold across the United States in the spring of 2020, it brought disruption and anxiety to most families. Yet some parents are grateful for one consequence: they are now opting to homeschool their children even as schools plan to resume in-person classes. Credit: AP Photo/Charles Krupa

Jennifer Osgood, center, teaches her son, Noah, 12, while reviewing school work at their home in Fairfax, Vt., on Tuesday, July 20, 2021. The U.S. Census Bureau reported in March that the rate of households homeschooling their children rose to 11% by September 2020, more than doubling from 5.4% just six months earlier. Credit: AP Photo/Charles Krupa

Lily Osgood, 7, who has Down syndrome, shakes hands with brother, Noah, 12, right, after solving a problem while studying with their mother, Jennifer, at their home in Fairfax, Vt., on Tuesday, July 20, 2021. The Osgood children will continued to be homeschool this upcoming school year. As the pandemic took hold across the United States in the spring of 2020, it brought disruption and anxiety to most families. Yet some parents are grateful for one consequence: they are now opting to homeschool their children even as schools plan to resume in-person classes. Credit: AP Photo/Charles Krupa

Jennifer Osgood, center, poses with her children Lily, 7, left, and Noah, 12, right, at their home in Fairfax, Vt., on Tuesday, July 20, 2021. The Osgood children will continued to be homeschool this upcoming school year. As the pandemic took hold across the United States in the spring of 2020, it brought disruption and anxiety to most families. Yet some parents are grateful for one consequence: they are now opting to homeschool their children even as schools plan to resume in-person classes. Credit: AP Photo/Charles Krupa

"My son did great (with homeschooling), even with just two hours of schoolwork a day," Pray said. "I got him into piano lessons, taught him to read."

Pray is also homeschooling her daughter, Hayley, who's going into 7th grade and had been attending a Christian school.

"I had no idea how this was going to goI just dove in headfirst," said Pray. "I felt God was holding my hand."

The Gonzalez family from Appomattox, Virginiawho are devout Catholicsopted to homeschool their three sons, ages 9, 13 and 15, after their Catholic school in Lynchburg closed in 2020 due to falling enrollment.

They're using the Catholic-focused curriculum from Seton Home Study School, which Jennifer Gonzalez, the boys' mom, described as rigorous but well-organized.

"My kids have just excelled," she said. "We're able to be home and be together."

Explore further Black Americans homeschool for different reasons than whites

 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
It showed the Knarrs' boat going very slowly along the shore and, all of a sudden, you see this boat step up and just run right over it. And then it just shows the boat speed off, York said.

Investigators tracked down the owner of the boat using the registration and then combed through social media to identify the occupants of the boat.

York said the video alone would have showed the time of the accident, but the off-duty officers information was crucial in arresting West  which happened on July 29.

We would have never solved that case. Wed still be looking for that boat today, York said.

Investigators interviewed West's passengers, who initially tried to cover for West.

I think their story was, We didnt know anybody was hurt. We think we proved that in court that was total BS, York said. Campers in the campsite 400 yards away could hear the screaming. There was no way they wouldnt have known they hit somebody.

They all knew what the truth was. The truth was: They were out there drinking. They were having a good night. They hit a boat. They killed a little girl. And they ran away scared, York added.
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ATLANTIC CITY  The Casino Reinvestment Development Authority is trying a new approach in the way it addresses the citys vacant rooming houses.

A rooming house conversion program developed in 2020 that would allow owners to take low-interest loans to redevelop the properties  where people rent rooms for stays of varying durations  had few takers.

Now, the authority is taking matters into its own hands and purchasing vacant rooming houses to demolish or rehabilitate.

Instead of continuing with that (project) knowing its not working, weve changed focus, Matt Doherty, the CRDAs executive director, said Thursday. We are now purchasing rooming houses. We already purchased one on Tennessee Avenue, and we were approved two more on Tuesday.

In February 2020, the CRDA announced its rooming house conversion plan.

Former Atlantic City Council candidate charged with making terroristic threats ATLANTIC CITY  A city man was arrested Wednesday for allegedly threatening to kill a woman 

While being touted as a plan to clean up blight in the Tourism District, there were concerns from residents and business owners about how it would be implemented.

Residents of rooming houses were also worried about being displaced if the number of affordable living situations would be reduced. Only vacant homes were eligible for the project.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Suze DiPietro by Dennis C. Schmieder of the law offices of Eric A. Shore in Cherry Hill, Camden County, on July 1 in New Jersey Superior Court, Atlantic County. The suit names the university and Lisa Honaker, who is the dean of the School of Arts & Humanities and had supervisory powers over DiPietro.

The lawsuit that DiPietro filed against the university contends that she was Performing Arts Center executive director for four months without a raise before being placed on 90-day furlough in June last year and being laid off in October.

Before becoming Performing Arts Center director, she was told she needed to obtain a masters degree, which she did earn even though she said the man who held the position before her did not have one.

When DiPietro was furloughed, she maintains that only other women in their mid-40s to 60s were furloughed while men of a younger age were retained. After she was laid off, she learned the woman who was named interim director was 17 years younger than her and had no talent booking or marketing experience.
We all always have the hope that theres going to be a rescue, he said, even as the likelihood of finding survivors amid the crushed concrete and twisted rebar dropped. Day by day, that possibility dramatically reduces and it turns into a recovery effort.

For many, the photographs and video from the scene brought to mind the indelible images of New York City on Sept. 11, almost 20 years ago. Johnson was a high school freshman when that took place.

Retired couple, who summered in Ventnor, found among dead in Florida condo collapse The bodies of a man and woman who owned a summer home in Ventnor were found last week among 

Thats the first thing that comes to mind: This is my generations version of Sept. 11, Johnson said. Its hard to describe it.

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The recovery effort was difficult, he said, cutting carefully through concrete and steel, but the work remained meaningful. Johnson said it was worthwhile to be able to provide some sense of closure to families who lost loved ones in the collapse.

He took some time to see the makeshift memorial created along the protective fence, Johnson said, and spoke with community members who wanted to do anything they could to help out, even if that was just bringing hot meals or bottles of water to the teams working at the site.

It was amazing to see how everyone came together, he said. I feel for the families, and Im deeply saddened for their loss.
Weed legalization finds less support among Republicans, but even there the figure hovers around 50%. Further, legalization embodies two elements that are attractive to two strains of Republicans: the ones that are fond of user tax revenue and the ones who profess libertarianism.

In short, it appears that Americans want pot to be legal, and it behooves both parties to take notice as they consider their political futures.

Of course, the inevitability of marijuana legalization does not mean that its a wise or healthy move. But at least it would resolve two thorny paradoxes that weve tolerated for decades:

The first is the pesky fact that marijuana is still illegal in most states, while alcohol and tobacco  at least as dangerous and probably more so  are not, a contradiction that seems impossible to rationalize.

The second paradox is the inconsistent consequences that we apply to marijuana offenders. A person of color can spend years in prison for dabbling in marijuana; celebrities such as Willie Nelson, Cheech and Chong, Woody Harrelson and Bill Maher have made pot smoking part of their public brand with no significant consequences. Weed legalization would resolve this glaring inequity.
Cubans risked their lives fleeing to Miami through the Florida Straits with a Cuban population in the United States today of more than 1 million. The U.S. instituted a trade embargo without stopping Cubas trade with other nations.

Americans who kind of like the communist regime have submitted to propaganda through written articles or visits to Cuba with strict rules amounting to blindfolds. They speak of constantly improving living conditions; the Cuban refugees, who know the truth, speak of political imprisonment, hunger and oppression around every curve. President Barack Obama eased the embargo to the joy of a benefited military and rich power mongers, while President Donald Trump undid the deal that improved nothing for the poor.

The U.S.-Cuba history has been a fairly long one, with Teddy Roosevelt leading a charge with his Rough Riders up Cubas San Juan Hill in 1898 in the Spanish-American War. We won the war and freed the Cubans from Spain. We are for freedom now, surely one reason many of the protesters are wearing American flags. Even though Cubas president has already sent out gun-wielding police to make things worse and blames us for the bad conditions of the moment, we exported more than $175 million worth of goods, including medicine and food, to Cuba in 2020.

The question is where to go now and the heart of the answer is that we must care for these people as peacefully as possible, not with sanctions that will harm them, not with handouts to the powerful, but with serious challenges to the leadership. There are foul practices that must finally be stopped, such as political imprisonment that President Joe Biden wants eliminated. And there are steps that could lead to a robust, thriving land where people are allowed to live with inalienable rights. Some progressives seem more than a little hesitant about all of this, but Biden has also indicated we might open up the internet the Cuban government has cut off. He should act as quickly as technological know-how permits.
CHICAGO  A West Humboldt Park man accused of killing a witness set to testify in a murder case was denied bail during a hearing broadcast on YouTube on Saturday.

Andres Giler, 20, of the 4000 block of West Division Street, was charged with first-degree murder that occurred on Christmas Day 2020 in the 3300 block of 52nd Street, police said.

The victim, Sebastian Serrano, was shot multiple times and pronounced dead.

Prosecutors said Giler initially asked a 13-year-old boy to do the killing, but when he backed out, Giler did the slaying himself.

Prosecutors also said Giler is currently on parole for a felony offense and was captured on video surveillance carrying out the fatal shooting.

Giler also was conversing with the victim through Snapchat and was on the phone with the victim at the time of the shooting. Cellphone towers also placed Giler in the area at the time of the brutal crime, prosecutors said.
Feast and Field names Huyler as executive editor

Lee Enterprises, Inc., a leading provider of local news and information and a major advertising platform in 77 markets, announced this past week Korey Karnes Huyler as executive editor of Feast and Field, Lees food-focused digital magazine exploring farming, food production, culinary history and cooking.

Korey has an outstanding reputation as a leader in niche publishing, said Donna J. Bischoff, Lee vice president of key accounts and branded content and publisher of Feast and Field. She brings a deep understanding of growing audience by providing content that resonates with the reader. The Feast and Field brand is growing at a rapid pace. I am thrilled to have her energy and innovation at the helm.

Recently, Huyler was content manager for Tribune Publishings in-house agency, Studio 1847. Her career also includes positions with Hearst Magazines, the Time Out Group and Modern Luxury Media. Huyler also was the editor-in-chief of CS, a lifestyle magazine focused on local restaurants, chefs, shopping, home design and more in the Chicago area. She served as the Chicago group editor for CSs sister titles, CS Brides, Interiors Chicago, The Mens Book and NS Magazine, most of which were launched under her leadership.
IN THE NEWS

Finkenauer launches Senate campaign

Former U.S. Rep. Abby Finkenauer launched her Democratic campaign in Iowas U.S. Senate race. Nearly seven months out of office, Finkenauer said she still sees a lot to fight for. Continuing a theme from her Iowa legislative and congressional campaigns, Finkenauers Senate campaign focuses on working families who are oftentimes not heard in Washington. Longtime Republican U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley has not yet said whether hell seek an eighth term. Finkenauer is the third Democrat to join the race, with former county Supervisor Dave Muhlbauer and Glenn Hurst of Minden.

Claims denied: Two childhood friends named by defense lawyers as alternate suspects in the killing of University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts said they had nothing to do with the crime. Lawyers for Cristhian Bahena Rivera, the man convicted of killing Tibbetts, named Gavin Jones and Dalton Hansen.

Unsafe ride: A woman whose family went on an Iowa amusement ride shortly before an accident that killed an 11-year-old boy and critically injured his brother said her boat also had problems floating properly and felt unsafe.
Elsewhere in California, the Tamarack fire south of Lake Tahoe continued to burn through timber and chaparral and threatened communities on both sides of the California-Nevada state line. The fire, sparked by lightning July 4 in Alpine County, has destroyed at least 10 buildings.

Heavy smoke from that blaze and the Dixie fire lowered visibility and may at times ground aircraft providing support for fire crews. The air quality south of Lake Tahoe and across the state line into Nevada deteriorated to very unhealthy levels.

In north-central Washington, firefighters battled two blazes in Okanogan County that threatened hundreds of homes and again caused hazardous air quality conditions Saturday. And in northern Idaho, east of Spokane, Washington, a small fire near the Silverwood Theme Park prompted evacuations Friday evening at the park and in the surrounding area. The theme park was back open on Saturday with the fire half contained.

Although hot weather with afternoon winds posed a continued threat of spreading blazes, weekend forecasts also called for a chance of scattered thunderstorms in California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and other states. However, forecasters said some could be dry thunderstorms that produce little rain but a lot of lightning, which can spark new blazes.

More than 85 large wildfires were burning around the country, most of them in Western states, and they had burned over 1.4 million acres (2,135 square miles, or more than 553,000 hectares).

Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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CHICAGO  A teenager who had been gravely wounded in one of three mass shootings in six hours last week has died, according to the Cook County medical examiners office.

Davion Wright, 16, of the 3400 block of West Grenshaw Street in the Homan Square neighborhood, was pronounced dead at 5:50 p.m. Friday at Mount Sinai Medical Center, where he had been since he was one of five people shot in North Lawndale around 6 p.m. Wednesday.

Police previously have said Wright had been shot in the head, but the medical examiners office was expected to perform an autopsy Sunday to determine his cause and manner of death.

Police were called to the area of South Christiana Avenue and West Douglas Boulevard, where they located the wounded males, who ranged in age from 15 to 24 years old. The 15-year-old also had been shot in the head, and he was taken to Stroger Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. He previously had been identified as Damarion L. Benson, of the 300 block of South Campbell Avenue.
NAPERVILLE  A Naperville accountant who admitted to stealing more than $1.1 million from four clients and three banks has been sentenced to more than eight years in federal prison.

In addition to the 98-month term, Paul Eric Collins, 55, also was ordered to pay $1,159,414 in restitution to his victims by U.S. District Judge Elaine E. Bucklo, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Chicago. He pleaded guilty to wire fraud last year.

Between 2013 and 2018, Collins stole more than $1 million from four companies that employed him, writing corporate checks to himself, his wife and phony companies he created, prosecutors said. He also withdrew money from ATMs and charged personal expenses on company credit cards, according to the federal case.

In order to conceal the thefts, he made "Ponzi-type payments" to some victims, a news release said.
WASHINGTON  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sunday named a second Republican critic of Donald Trump, Rep. Adam Kinzinger, to a special committee investigating the Capitol riot and pledged that the Democratic-majority panel will "get to the truth." Kinzinger said he "humbly accepted" the appointment even as his party's leadership is boycotting the inquiry.

With the committee set to hold its first meeting, hearing from police officers who battled the rioters, Pelosi said it was imperative to learn what happened on Jan. 6, when insurrectionists disrupted the congressional certification of Joe Biden's presidential victory, and why the violent siege took place. That mission, she said, must be pursued in a bipartisan manner to ensure "such an attack can never happen again."

Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican, will bring "great patriotism to the committee's mission: to find the facts and protect our Democracy," she said in a statement.

He joins Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, as the two committee's Republicans, both selected by the leader of the opposition party. Kinzinger and Cheney were among the 10 House Republicans to vote for Trump's second impeachment. They were the only two Republicans who voted last month to form the special committee.
Cubans risked their lives fleeing to Miami through the Florida Straits with a Cuban population in the United States today of more than 1 million. The U.S. instituted a trade embargo without stopping Cubas trade with other nations.

Americans who kind of like the communist regime have submitted to propaganda through written articles or visits to Cuba with strict rules amounting to blindfolds. They speak of constantly improving living conditions; the Cuban refugees, who know the truth, speak of political imprisonment, hunger and oppression around every curve. President Barack Obama eased the embargo to the joy of a benefited military and rich power mongers, while President Donald Trump undid the deal that improved nothing for the poor.

The U.S.-Cuba history has been a fairly long one, with Teddy Roosevelt leading a charge with his Rough Riders up Cubas San Juan Hill in 1898 in the Spanish-American War. We won the war and freed the Cubans from Spain. We are for freedom now, surely one reason many of the protesters are wearing American flags. Even though Cuba's president has already sent out gun-wielding police to make things worse and blames us for the bad conditions of the moment, we exported more than $175 million worth of goods, including medicine and food, to Cuba in 2020.

The question is where to go now and the heart of the answer is that we must care for these people as peacefully as possible, not with sanctions that will harm them, not with handouts to the powerful, but with serious challenges to the leadership. There are foul practices that must finally be stopped, such as political imprisonment that President Joe Biden wants eliminated. And there are steps that could lead to a robust, thriving land where people are allowed to live lives of inalienable rights. Some progressives seem more than a little hesitant about all of this, but Biden has also indicated we might open up the internet the Cuban government has cut off. He should act as quickly as technological know-how permits.

Jay Ambrose is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service. Readers may email him at speaktojay@aol.com. This was distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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About a week ago, U.S. Reps. Cheri Bustos, D-Illinois, and Ashley Hinson, R-Iowa, announced that they had secured preliminary passage of $22.5 million to go toward a key Mississippi River lock near St. Louis.

In the grand scheme of things, it wasnt earth-shattering news. The full Congress still must approve, and the president must sign. Besides, the money, which officials say would likely be used for construction at the lock, would be just a small down payment on the $600 million likely needed to actually upgrade the lock to meet modern barge standards. And this is just one of several locks advocates say need modernizing in order to make the shipping of grain and other materials along the river more efficient.

Still, it was progress of a sort.

In the 14 years since Congress authorized an $8 billion plan (formally known by the acronym NESP) to upgrade locks and dams and fund ecosystem restoration projects on the Upper Mississippi River system, Congress has only parceled out a fraction of the money. So we understand the skepticism of Benton County farmer Lance Lillibridge, who told the The (Cedar Rapids) Gazette: "I'd love to tell you that I'm encouraged ... but we've been listening to this song-and-dance for how many years? Its been blah, blah, blah. Show me the money."
Its half and half on our clients where half are able to go in and find a home. But weve seen where some of them say, Hey lets wait until winter or lets wait until next year, Theesen said.

At the end of the day, we looked at the market and how tough it was going to be to compete with other offers, said one buyer working through Theesen. Yes, we paid more, but after losing out to individuals paying cash, we had to adapt on the offers we made.

This Sioux Falls home went well over asking, Yes, we paid more, but after losing out to individuals paying cash, we had to adapt on the offers we made, the buyer, who wished to remain anonymous, said.

As an overall trend, there are still a steady stream of homes sold now compared to the last several years during the January through mid-July season, with some 1,962 single family homes sold in 2016 compared to 2021s 2,127.

Steady sales on the whole are good, and if the lumber and homes under construction can catch up in time for all the demand, there might not be much further issues for those looking to make the biggest investment of their lives.
Marchers included far-right politicians and activists as well as others angry at President Emmanuel Macron. They were upset over a French health pass that is now required to enter museums, movie theaters and tourist sites. The bill under debate would expand the pass requirement to all restaurants and bars in France and some other venues.

To get the pass, people need to be fully vaccinated, have a recent negative test or have proof they recently recovered from the virus.

French lawmakers are divided over how far to go in imposing health passes or mandatory vaccinations but infections are rising quickly. More than 111,000 people with the virus have died in France, and the country is now seeing about 20,000 new infections a day, up from just a few thousand a day in early July.

More than 2 billion people worldwide have been vaccinated and information about COVID-19 vaccines is now widely available, but many protesters said they felt they were being rushed into something they're not ready to do.

Celine Augen, a secretary at a doctors office, is prepared to lose her job under the new measure because she doesnt want to get vaccinated.
QUESTION: I have an employee who is key to my business. She brings a skill set that is different from mine, and she has added tremendous value. As a result of her work, Ive taken the business in a new and better direction. She has asked me about letting her have 20% of the business.

I want to reward her for what she brings to the table, but I am reticent to part with equity. If the business does what I hope it will, 20% will be worth millions, perhaps tens of millions, of dollars. Do you have any advice?

ANSWER: Youre right to be reticent to part with equity. Weve seen too many small-business owners give up equity in their company only to regret it later. However, there are times when it is the right decision.

Many businesses have been hugely successful, at least in part, because the owners were willing to share the upside with employees who helped create the value. Consider the large corporations that attract, retain and motivate their people with stock option plans.

The reason for giving your employee equity is to keep her engaged and motivated. But before agreeing to give up 20% (or any amount) of your company, we suggest that you consider these four questions:
Mistake you learned the most from: Moving to another far away state, New York to California. I learned you must stay resilient to graduate from the school of hard knocks. Learn to navigate with a smile. Keep an attitude of adventure. Meditate your prayer, your faith, and research  before you make a move.

If you had to do it all over again, what would you do differently: I believe that we are predestined and that we have several predestined paths. As we evolve from youth to young adult, to middle-aged adult, to senior citizen, elements are in a defined pathway designed precisely for you  good or bad. You choose an element based on who you are at that time. What you feed your mind becomes your thoughts, and your thoughts become your actions. Your mind-actions choose a pathway of elements destined for you. You will reject or accept a destined pathway based on how your soul consciousness has evolved.
An effort by a local church to get into the restaurant business is not sitting will with its neighbors, and now it will be up to county supervisors to decide whether or not to allow the project to move forward.

On July 8, Hope Churchs plan to create a cafe-style eating establishment within their current church building, located at 12445 Patterson Ave., went before county Planning Commissioners. And while the new venture was described by pastor David Dwight as a simple, small-scale project intended to offer coffee and cafe-style fare with limited cooking, several county residents living near the church say they already feel like theyve been burned.

As detailed in the churchs request for an amendment to its original Conditional Use Permit (CUP), opening the planned cafe and coffee shop would require some renovation to the existing structure  and the installation of commercial kitchen equipment--but no modifications to the outside of the church. Kitchen renovations will not be permitted to include the installation of a hood system for ventilation, which will limit the type of cooking that can be done and also prevent any odors from impacting nearby properties.

According to the request, the church will be entering into an agreement with the owners of Toast, who also own other dining establishments in the area and are members of the church, to create and operate the coffee shop and cafe.

Dwight explained that the cafe would not be run as a for-profit enterprise, although the church leaderships goal would be to break even if possible. If necessary, Dwight said, the church would be willing to provide a reasonable amount of support to the cafe.

According to Dwight, the project would rely on microwaves and small convection ovens to reheat pre-prepared foods, and would not be expected to see numbers even close to the 75 occupants that would be allowed under the CUP. Above all, he insisted, the cafe would offer a place for people to gather together, especially after COVID, without the pressure of a commercially driven enterprise.

But while Dwight described the cafe as a ministry that welcomes people in, those living near the church have made clear the church is already beginning to wear its own welcome thin.

Several residents of the Rivergate neighborhood, which is located directly adjacent to Hope Church, said they are already dealing with significant noise issues stemming from church-related activities, including the use of what they described as bullhorns and nightclub-style thumping music.

It has made it impossible to enjoy the tranquility they had been seeking when they moved to the neighborhood, they said, adding that the problem is worse during the fall and winter when there are no leaves on the trees.

In my opinion the church is more an events space than a church, said Rob Allen, who lives directly across the street from the church. They are holding these events in their parking lot. So this restaurant may be serving inside but it may be serving inside while there are events outside that is supporting. So 75 limit? They can count the 1,000 people in the parking lot and say there is only 60 inside and they are still within compliance.

Allen said he had already called the Sheriffs Department once, and I will continue to call them when the noises are too much to bear.

Ileana Shulman told commissioners that she finds the claim that the church will be selling essentially just cookies and coffee difficult to believe, and agreed with several other residents that allowing the cafe would only exacerbate existing noise issues.

While the ultimate decision on whether to approve the churchs request rests with the Board of Supervisors, Planning Commissioners appeared to hear residents concerns loud and clear.

Obviously there is a great deal of opposition to this, said District 2 Commissioner Matt Brewer. I dont see how we could recommend approval.
Chief of staff Helge Braun told the newspaper Bild am Sonntag that he doesnt expect another coronavirus-related lockdown in Germany. But Braun said that unvaccinated people may be barred from entering venues like restaurants, movie theaters or sports stadiums because the residual risk is too high.

Braun said getting vaccinated is important to protect against severe disease and because vaccinated people will definitely have more freedoms than unvaccinated people. He said such policies would be legal because the state has the responsibility to protect the health of its citizens.

His comments fueled a debate in German politics about potential vaccination requirements. The issue has proven divisive, even within Merkels own Christian Democrats party. Its candidate to replace Merkel as Germanys leader, Armin Laschet, said he opposes any formal or informal vaccine requirements for the time being.



ISTANBUL Turkeys daily COVID-19 infections have increased, reaching 14,230 new cases in the past 24 hours.

Health ministry statistics show that the 7-day average is now 10,269, a significant increase from the average of the previous week at 6,880.
The July 16 opinion was written in response to an inquiry spurred by the case of an 18-year-old who was fatally shot by Roanoke County police officers in 2016, The Roanoke Times reported.

Del. Sam Rasoul, D-Roanoke, requested the opinion last year in a letter that invoked Kionte Spencers case. Spencers brother has been shown a compilation of video from that night but has been seeking the full, unedited footage, according to The Roanoke Times.

In his opinion, Herring wrote that under a new transparency bill lawmakers passed earlier this year, police recordings are public records and must be released once an investigation concludes unless the footage can be withheld under one of the exemptions allowed. And even where an exception applies, then release is discretionary, Herring wrote.

Effort would make bay part of U.S. park service

NORFOLK  An effort is underway to make the larger Chesapeake Bay area part of the National Park Service.

Behind the effort is a group of conservation nonprofits, community leaders and lawmakers working to draft legislation in Congress. The Virginian-Pilot reported that the area would be called the Chesapeake National Recreation Area.
Now, China has landed a rover on Mars.

Earlier this month, the idea that any of us could fly in space  if we only had a spare quarter of a million dollars or so  became reality when billionaire Richard Branson and a few of his employees rocketed 53 miles to the edge of space.

This past week, billionaire Jeff Bezos took his turn heading into space on his Blue Origin spaceship. Along for the ride was the youngest person to fly in space, 18-year-old Oliver Daemen.

While the idea of space travel for most of us still is beyond economic reality, the opportunity is there and eventually the cost will come down.

Some people have criticized Branson and Bezos for spending so much to fly in space. That money could have been used to help people on Earth.

That is true, of course, but how we spend our money is up to us. The two billionaires likely do a lot of good for a lot of people through donations and other help.

But we shouldnt begrudge their space fantasies. They are reopening the heavens for all of us, re-creating the rush to space, renewing the excitement we once felt when sending people to the moon.
We want to be as competitive as possible and offer an enticing package to all of our employees to attract the best talent to come work for us, he said.

Early in the year, Quonce said it was much harder to attract new employees, but as vaccines have become widely available and the fear of being infected is dissipating, interest has slowly risen.

Operations have not been significantly impacted by the reduced staff, but Quonce said the hotel would like to expand hours at its Regency Room restaurant and needs more people to do so.

Were so excited to see the hotel industry coming back to life, but at the same time it goes into that whole hiring situation where weve got to get the team back in, he said.

An employee market

Though the majority of Mac and Bobs employees who were laid off when the restaurant closed during the pandemic have since returned, co-owner Bob Rotanz said it has been difficult to fill vacancies, which include not only servers but also a couple of cooks, as one recently left for a new job and another for training as a welder.

Its definitely the most challenging time in my 40 years as far as getting people to apply for jobs, Rotanz said.
In response to Hicks request for specific proof of the allegations under the reprimand, Broughton in a July 1 letter to the councilwomans attorney listed the issues identified in the reprimand.

I think these requests have been fully answered, but please let me know if you disagree, Broughton wrote. We will work in good faith to provide any documents you identify.

In her July 19 letter, Hicks also referenced some conversations late last month between Wingfield and Alan Gernhardt, executive director of Virginia Freedom of Information Advisory Council. Gernhardt confirmed those conversations Friday.

The conversations were over the use of the word evidence in the request. Gernhardt, however, said Friday that the FOIA Council takes no position on the merits of Hicks recent case and instead defers to the courts to decide.

One of the incidents identified in the recent reprimand measure concerned a claim from Hicks that state Del. Nick Rush, R-Montgomery, had told her during a past discussion that bonds of over $10 million need to be put on the ballot, a point several town council members said is untrue.
Downtown Christiansburg is about to get a historic addition.

The Montgomery Museum of Art & History has announced that the institution will move from its current location on Pepper Street to the former Wells Fargo bank building on town square next year.

The collections wont be offsite anymore, and itll all be in a central location, Executive Director Casey Jenkins said. We can really enhance the public programming and exhibits that we do and have a greater draw ... in terms of people actually coming to see what we have to offer.

Established in 1983, the museum long ago outgrew the historic Charles Miller house that is its current home. Much of its artifact collection must be stored off site, and its exhibit and programming space is limited.

For the past two years, the museum Board of Directors had been planning to expand its facilities at Pepper Street, Jenkins said. But when Wells Fargos lease ended at 4 East Main St., the board began to consider the advantages of an existing structure in a more visible location.
Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Sharon Scott will be leaving the organization in 2021, the chamber announced last week.

Scott has been with the Chamber since 2011, first as a volunteer, then as the special initiatives coordinator, and she served as interim executive director when Catherine Sutton left in 2013. Scott was hired in December of 2013 as executive director following a national search, and most recently was promoted to president and CEO.

Scott helped lead the organization out of a problematic time after a former chamber leader was convicted of embezzlement.

When Scott was asked about her tenure, she said in a news release that I have joked since 2014 that I love this job 98% of the time, but the reality is  that is true. This has been the most rewarding job I have ever held because I serve our business community.

She said she remembers in her interview being asked what the biggest challenge she saw, and she said the budget.

We were still carrying $75,000 in loan debt. I was also asked how long would I stay if I was hired, and my response was 6-10 years, she said in the release.
WASHINGTON  August is the month to watch, said Estonias 44-year-old prime minster during a recent visit to Washington.

The guns of August 1914 announced the beginning of what was called the Great War until an even worse one began nine days after the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact of Aug. 23, 1939.

However, Kaja Kallas radiates serenity during lunch near Lafayette Square across from the White House.

She does not think Russias late-summer military exercises near Estonia, scheduled by the man she calls the bully next door, presage aggression. She does, however, think it prudent to consider that Vladimir Putins revanchist ambitions might not be confined to Ukraine.

Indeed. Six months after absorbing German-speaking Austria, and four days before the Sept. 30, 1938, Munich conference, Hitler vowed that Czechoslovakias Sudenten region, home of many ethnic Germans, would be his last territorial demand. Six months after he acquired the Sudetenland at Munich, he swallowed the rest of Czechoslovakia, then turned his attention to protecting ethnic Germans in Poland. He said he could not renounce the 10 million Germans living in regions contiguous to Germany. And the war came.
Dorsey tells us that for some time Ive had concerns about the statue and hoped that something would have happened. After a lot of thinking and reading, he talked to Roanoke College President Michael Maxey, then Roanoke County Administrator Dan ODonnell, who referred him to Peters. He says Peters asked for something in writing, which resulted first in that six-page letter June 23 and then the court order issued July 8.

Dorseys letter comes straight to the point: The presence of the Confederate statue on the old courthouse lawn interferes with the administration of justice in Roanoke County. He then spends the rest of the letter explaining how.

As with Judge Clark in his 2015 order, Dorsey talks about his pride in his Southern roots: I am proud of the innate stubbornness that we all tend to have on matters that are near and dear to us. But that stubbornness must yield to reason, conscience, consideration of fairness for all of us. My heritage is defined by what Im proud of, not having ancestors in the Confederate Army.
Your July 10 editorial titled Youngkin is selling himself short. Heres how refers to the teaching of critical race theory in Virginia schools as non-existent, and wonders what it would really mean if Mr. Youngkin banned the practice if elected.

Voters ought to know, your editorial asserts. What voters ought also to know is that, regardless of what label we may choose to attach to it, the politicization of social studies education in this state is not a figment of the far-right imagination. It is very real.

As a parent and social studies teacher I was sad and disappointed to find evidence of this in a draft (which appears likely to be adopted) of changes to the social studies standards of learning.

To be fair, some of these proposed changes involve adding details about the history of slavery and racism, and the contributions of African Americans to this country's history. This is a good thing. But why remove language from the Virginia Studies curriculum about northern opposition to the westward expansion of slavery? Why are sixth graders to be taught simply that the three fifths compromise perpetuated slavery when in fact this part of the constitution limited the slave-holding states ability to gain political power by using enslaved people as pawns to increase their representation in Congress?
Riot coordination means that deliberations whether to riot occurred among BLM Inc., Antifa and Democrat operatives: "when was the right time to call for moving masses of people into the street.

Because Donald Trump appeared to lose the election, they decided not to riot.

The significance here is that there was collusion regarding rioting between Democrats and rioters.

The deliberations that Larry Bechtel quotes ("Writer undercuts his own argument," July 3)  whether rioting would help or harm Trump  apply to a three-day period in November.

According to the TIME article, the left-wing coalition was formed more than a year earlier, predating the 2020 summer riots, and BLM Inc. and Antifa were a key part of the alliance.

Given that Democrats did not denounce the summer riots  despite the loss of life, injuries, and property destruction  did they tacitly approve or support them?
Vietnamese Ambassador to Russia Dang Minh Khoi (R) and Chair of the Federation Council Committee on Foreign Affairs Grigory Karasin (Photo: VNA)

Vietnamese Ambassador to Russia Dang Minh Khoi has suggested the Federation Council of Russia further promote bilateral cooperation in COVID-19 prevention and control, especially the transfer of vaccine production technology and supply of COVID-19 vaccines to Vietnam as soon as possible in the context that Vietnam is struggling with the fourth wave of infections.Khoi made the suggestion during his meeting with Chair of the Federation Council Committee on Foreign Affairs Grigory Karasin and head of the Friendship Parliamentarian Group of the Federation Council of Russian with Vietnam Victor Abramov on July 22.For his part, Karasin expressed his appreciation when Vietnam provided Russia with medicines and face masks when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in Russia. He said he was glad to known that Russia n and Vietnamese experts have worked closely and actively shared experience in preventing and controlling the pandemic.The official promised to accelerate the delivery of vaccines to Vietnam soon, affirming that Vietnam can count on the support and help of the Russian side.They had an open discussion on relations between the two countries and their legislative bodies, as well as cooperation between Vietnam and Russian at international and regional forums.They affirmed that Vietnam and Russia consider each other a reliable and priority partner in their foreign policies.Khoi highly valued the operation mechanism of the Vietnam-Russia High-level Inter-Parliamentary Cooperation Committee, affirming that this is the highest and only cooperation mechanism between the National Assembly of Vietnam and a parliament of another country.The two sides also emphasised the need to strengthen bilateral economic and trade cooperation, especially in key projects, in order to further boost two-way trade turnover in the coming time.Khoi and Karasin affirmed that the two sides are willing to jointly promote the exchange of high-level delegations when the situation allows.The Russian official said that he will create the best conditions for the Vietnam ese diplomat to fulfill his duties, helping to strengthen the comprehensive strategic partnership between Vietnam and Russia.
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Bradford pear trees are a staple in landscapes around South Carolina.

A cultivar of the Callery pear tree, they were introduced in the 1960s and became an industry standard because they are affordable and easy to grow. They are also obnoxious and smell awful.

There is no getting around it. They can ruin a spring picnic if you are parked under one in bloom, and they offer little to no ecosystem services. They were supposed to be sterile, but nature prevailed, and because of a combination of cross-pollinating multiple cultivars, Callery pear cultivars are now a topnotch noxious specimen worthy of being put on the South Carolina State Plant Pest.

In three years, they will not be available for purchase anywhere in the state.

I dont care for too many regulations, but I personally did a little dance when I was informed that the South Carolina Invasive Species Advisory Committee has moved to ban the sale of Bradford pear and all Pyrus calleryana cultivars, along with Elaeagnus shrubs Elaeagnus angustifolia, Elaeagnus pungens and Elaeagnus umbellate. However, with any new change or rule come many questions, and I want to give readers a quick heads up on what this new regulation means for us in the Pee Dee.
FLORENCE, S.C.  The Florence-Darlington County Commission for Technical Education elected new officers at its most recent meeting on June 22.

First Bank Area Executive Paul Seward was elected the chairman of the commission that oversees Florence-Darlington Technical College.

A Hartsville resident, Dr. Ershela Sims, is the commissions new vice chairwoman. She the executive director of the Women in Engineering ProActive Network, Incorporated (WEPAN).

Wanda James, a franchise owner of local McDonalds restaurants, was elected commission secretary. She is a Florence resident.

Seward, a Florence resident, said, I am honored to have the opportunity to serve as board chairman during this critical time in FDTCs history, and I will work diligently to achieve the goals our board and staff have set forth.

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I am excited to share that our quest has begun to seek our next president at FDTC. The board and staff have worked extremely hard over the last few years to get our house in order, and now is the time to move forward. We have several major renovation projects underway as we strive to serve the future workforce of the Pee Dee.

Seward said FDTC is more than just a school.
Although the current school opened in 1956, Catholic education in Florence goes back to the earliest days of the Florence parish.

The parish was established in 1871  the first Catholic Mass was celebrated one year earlier  and named after Saint Anthony of Padua.

Saint Anthony was born in Portugal in 1195 and served in the Franciscan Order as a priest from 1214 until his death in 1231. He was known for preaching, scripture knowledge and devotion to the sick and poor.

He is also known for an alleged incident in which he preached to fish after a town wouldnt listen to his words. After the town found about the man who could gather fish, the town went to the lake and began to listen to him.

In 1873, land on the corner of Irby and Palmetto streets was purchased for a church and in 1886 a wooden chapel was dedicated on the site. Father Charles Wood was appointed the second resident pastor and began a fundraising drive in 1893 for a new church building.

Wood established a mission house that included a school for Catholic children in 1900. In 1905, the school opened to non-Catholics. Records for that school do not exist after 1908.

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Construction on the new church started in 1915 and the church opened on Nov. 17, 1917.


TRUMP: There were 18,000 people who voted in Arizona in 2020 who were then purged from the rolls immediately after the election.

THE FACTS: This didn't happen. His insinuation that people were stricken from the rolls because they voted for him is baseless.

Actually, 13,320 voters were removed from the rolls in the two months after the election, not 18,000 right away, and there were routine reasons why.

Voting rolls are updated constantly as people move, die, get convicted of felonies or have their voting rights revoked because of incapacitation. Trump was repeating a claim made by Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber Ninjas, the inexperienced firm leading the state Senate Republicans audit of the 2020 election.

Maricopa County officials said their analysis of the data shows 7,916 voters were removed from the rolls because they moved out of the county or died between Nov. 3, which was Election Day, and Jan. 2. An additional 5,404 people were removed for other reasons, including felony convictions, incapacitation or the voters' own request to cancel their registration.

The county has about 2.6 million registered voters.
The United States duo of Alison Gibson and Krysta Palmer finished last in the eight-team field.



The IOC is urging Olympic medalists to curb their hugs and keep masks on while on the podium.

Medalists in some swimming events Sunday morning were hugging, sharing the podium top step for photographs and taking their masks off for a time.

Those are potential breaches of rules protecting the Olympics from COVID-19 infections.

IOC spokesman Mark Adams says we feel for the athletes (but) there are things that unfortunately we have had to make stricter.

Adams adds we would urge and ask everyone to obey the rules.

Tokyo organizers have reported 127 games-related COVID-19 cases, including 14 athletes, in Japan this month.



Olympic rowing faces more delays and schedule changes as weather forecasts predict high winds and strong gusts at the Sea Forest Waterway.
Yet, during more than a year of pandemic misery, racial reckoning, street protests and police accountability issues after the tragic recorded murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis cop, I cant help but think about the pressures facing police, most of whom do not make bad news.

As much as some people tout the defund the police slogan, I find that a lot more of us want to improve the police as well as the services they provide and, let us not forget, the services they themselves often need  including mental health services.

I think the police culture is changing. They see that they can reach out more for more help, said Carrie Steiner, a former Chicago police officer who became a licensed clinical psychologist. But I think every officer I know is burned out and not doing well.

Thats what she said last year in her First Responders Wellness Center in Lombard, which she called a first-of-its-kind practice to offer mental health services exclusively to first responders by former and current first responders.
 "The Boundary Problem of Rights Restoration" | Main | US Sentencing Commission releases more detailed "Compassionate Release Data Report" for 2020 

The New York Times has this interesting new article on capital punishment around the world under the headline "One by One, African Countries Dismantle Colonial-Era Death Penalty Laws." Here are excerpts:

Lawmakers in Sierra Leone voted unanimously on Friday to abolish the death penalty, a momentous step that made the West African country the 23rd on the continent to prohibit capital punishment.

The decision was one more step in a long-sought goal of civil society organizations and legal practitioners who see the death penalty as a vestige of Africas oppressive colonial history. This is a horrible punishment and we need to get rid of it, said Oluwatosin Popoola, a legal adviser at the rights group Amnesty International, a leading critic of capital punishment.

A vast majority of the 193 member states of the United Nations have either abolished the death penalty or do not practice it.... The vote in Sierra Leone came against the backdrop of a steady march in Africa to discard brutal laws imposed by past colonial masters. In April, Malawi ruled the death penalty unconstitutional. In May of 2020, Chad did the same. Nearly half of Africas 54 independent countries have abolished the punishment, more than double the number from less than two decades ago.

While death sentences and executions have declined globally in recent years, they do not necessarily reflect the growing number of countries that have banned capital punishment. At least some of the declines are attributable to the Covid-19 pandemic, which slowed or delayed judicial proceedings in many countries. And in some, like the United States, federal executions were ramped up in 2020.

As in previous years, China led the 2020 list of countries that execute the most people, killing thousands, according to Amnesty International, which compiles capital punishment statistics. The exact figures for China are not known, as its data remains a state secret. Next in 2020 came Iran, which executed at least 246 people, and then Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and in sixth place the United States, with 17 executions. Most of the American executions were of federal prisoners in the last six months of President Donald J. Trumps term, a turnaround after years of an informal moratorium.

The legislators in Sierra Leone on Friday replaced the death sentence with a maximum life sentence for certain crimes, including murder and treason. This means that judges will have the power to consider mitigating factors, such as whether the defendant has a mental illness. They would have had no such flexibility if the lawmakers had voted instead to replace the death penalty with a mandatory life sentence....

Sierra Leone is the first of the English-speaking West African countries to abolish the punishment. A decade ago, a commission in Ghana recommended abolition, but in recent years efforts have stalled.

In Nigeria, Africas most populous country, at least 2,700 people are on death row  the highest number by far on the African continent. Gambia had been on track to abolish the death penalty last year, when a new Constitution was drafted. But it was rejected by Parliament. Still, Gambias president has made some significant moves away from capital punishment, Mr. Popoola said. These are all countries that, like Sierra Leone, obtained independence from the Britain in the late 1950s and 1960s  around the same time as that colonial power was carrying out its own last executions.
STORM LAKE, Iowa -- Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig has been named to serve on the Buena Vista University Board of Trustees.

Naig, a Cylinder, Iowa, native, is a 2000 graduate of BVU. He became the ag secretary in 2018, and served as a deputy ag secretary for several years before that.

He joins two new members in service to the Board of Trustees: Dr. Hyun Kim, an MD who serves as chief of staff of the Mayo Health Systems in Fairmont, Minn.; and Julie Quirin, a 1987 BVU graduate who serves as chief operating officer for Saint Lukes Health System in Kansas City, Mo.

Naig chose BVU as a student based in part on the positive experiences of his older siblings, Matt, a small business owner who graduated from BVU in 1997, and Melissa Naig-Lentz, a physical therapist who graduated from BVU in 1995. Being an hour or so away from home also allowed him the opportunity to return to Cylinder each spring and fall to help with planting and harvest, a practice he continues to this day.
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP)  A popular strip club that once beckoned customers off a busy highway leading into Anchorage is now a church offering salvation  instead of temptation  thanks to a daughter of a former exotic dancer.
BEIJING  New coronavirus cases continue to grow in the major eastern Chinese city of Nanjing, with another 38 reported on Monday, bringing the total to more than 60 over recent days.
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Public health officials generally say roughly 70% of a population needs to be vaccinated in order to stop the spread of a virus like COVID-19. According to the most recent White House state report on COVID-19, 60.9% of Iowans 18 years or older are fully vaccinated and 64.6% have received at least one shot. (Some versions of the vaccine require two shots in order to be fully vaccinated.)

We look at about 70% for community immunity, Davis said, adding that roughly 64% of Polk County residents are vaccinated. So we still have a little ways to go.

The emergence of the COVID-19 Delta variant has added to public health officials consternation. The new variant appears to be even more transmissible than the original virus, and appears to be having a greater impact on young people, health and medical officials say.

With the rise in prevalence of the Delta variant, we are urging all Iowans to get vaccinated for COVID- 19 as soon as possible, Ekstrand said. Since the beginning of the vaccine campaign, our goal has always been to get as many Iowans vaccinated as quickly as possible. Vaccines continue to be a critical tool for preventing the spread of this virus and keeping all Iowans safe and healthy. We will continue to message about the importance of getting vaccinated for COVID-19 for the foreseeable future.
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP)  More than 100 people gathered outside the Iowa state Capitol Saturday to rally against mandates requiring people to get vaccinated against COVID-19, such as the ones some Iowa hospitals have issued.

One of the speakers at the rally, Republican state Rep. Jeff Shipley, called vaccine mandates a crime against humanity. People in the crowd held signs that said stop vax bullying and mandates belong in socialist countries.

The event was organized by a group called Informed Choice Iowa that opposes mandatory coronavirus vaccinations and vaccine passports. Brei Johnson with that group told the Des Moines Register that she believes vaccinations should be discussed between a health professional and patient, not made a condition of employment.

You can take off a mask but you cant undo a vaccine. Thats a slippery slope to what comes next, Johnson said.
The proposal has faced strong opposition from Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts, who has no direct influence over the state board, and large crowds have attended state education board meetings.

State Education Commissioner Matt Blomstedt told school districts in a letter earlier this month that there would be changes in the second draft of the standards. He said that next draft will remove many of the explicit examples and make clear that discussions of sensitive health-related topics should be thoughtfully conducted with parental input at a local level.

This is unfortunate as it has created a still escalating concern, and the board and I are committed to bringing that to a resolution, he wrote.

Supporters of the standards say children should be taught scientifically accurate information to help ensure that students and families with different gender identities and sexual orientations will be more accepted and less vulnerable to depression and suicide.

Abbi Swatsworth with OutNebraska said the inclusive health standards could be lifesaving. OutNebraska is a nonprofit that advocates for Nebraskans who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer.

Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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JERUSALEM (AP)  Two Israeli airlines launched their first commercial flights between Israel and Morocco on Sunday, less than a year after the countries officially normalized relations.

Israir's flight departed Tel Aviv for Marrakech with around 100 Israeli tourists, the company said, hours before Israeli national carrier El Al dispatched its first direct flight to the same destination.

Israeli Tourism Minister Yoel Razvozov said the new direct flights would help advance fruitful tourism, trade and economic cooperation and diplomatic agreements between the two countries.

Israel and Morocco agreed to normalize relations in late 2020 as part of the U.S.-brokered Abraham Accords. Morocco was among four Arab nations, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan, to establish diplomatic relations with Israel.

As part of the deal, the United States agreed to recognize Moroccos claim to the long-disputed Western Sahara region, however the Biden administration said it will review this decision. Moroccos 1975 annexation of Western Sahara is not recognized by the United Nations.

Many Israeli Jews have lineage that traces back to Morocco, which is still home to a small Jewish community of several thousand.
Cuba trades with much of the rest of the world, so the islands problems cant be all, or even mostly, Americas fault.

Should human suffering not include the number of people imprisoned by Castro and his successors? As one might expect, Cuba does not publish information about the number of humans suffering in their prisons, but in 2012, Reuters reported that Cuban authorities acknowledged 57, 337 of its 11.2 million population were incarcerated. The Cuban Prisoners Defenders group, based in Madrid, estimates the number is far higher  123,000, which would make it first in the global ranking of prison populations per capita.

For years the Hollywood left, liberal clergy and some American politicians have touted the supposed greatness of Cubas literacy program and free health care.
On behalf of the Iowa Conservative Energy Forum, I am writing to commend the Woodbury County Board of Supervisors on their commonsense wind ordinance that recently was approved and adopted. This ordinance balances the rights of individual property owners to make the decisions on whats best for their own land and families, while also maintaining guard rails to ensure projects are built within certain specifications for the community.

This ordinance can serve as a best practice for other counties considering ordinances because it protects the rights of community members, while also ensuring the county stays open for business and economic opportunity. Wind energy is a drought-proof crop and a critical source of revenue for Iowa farmers, paying $69 million annually in land lease payments across the state.

While the ordinance sets some parameters, the county still has the opportunity to further discuss specific projects through building permits and applications, which ensures each project receives individual attention.

These checks and balances are the foundation of good public policy. We look forward to watching the success in Woodbury County. -- Nick Boeyink, Bondurant, Iowa

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Care and Feeding is Slates parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here or post it in the Slate Parenting Facebook group.

Dear Care and Feeding,

I have a 15-year-old daughter who is gender fluid. This transformation has been coming for a long time, but it has picked up in the last year. With the COVID lockdowns and school online, weve spent a lot (possibly too much) time together and on all of our screens (definitely way too much). I love my daughter with all my heart, but I am currently struggling with accepting the changes they demand. They will only accept they/them pronouns. Fine. Im adapting and practicing, but after 15 years of she/her, its taking some time to relearn my vocabulary. Now they have decided to change their name because the name I picked out is too feminine. I love the name they were born with. I spent months trying to pick the perfect one. Now, its always a source of argument. They glare at me whenever I use their dead name and get mad at me when I fill out any kind of form using their old name. Deep down, I know its only a name and its nothing more than the sound I make to get their attention. But I feel like theyre trying to invent a whole new person because the person Ive spent the last 15 years watching grow into an amazing young adult isnt good enough. They swear up and down that they are still the same personbut if thats true, why do I need to call them something different?

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Another thing: Every one of their friends has decided to change their names also (Ive known these kids since they were small, and now if I call them by their actual name, the one Ive known them by for 10 years, Im the horrible, nonaccepting cis mom). So I understand that some of this may be the desire to fit in with their friends, but Im worried that in my childs pursuit to find their true self they may lose their core self. Any time I try to talk to them about it, I am told that I just dont understand the LGBTQ+ community or that I am transphobic. Every time they call me this it hurts. I am not transphobic. I have always been inclusive and accepting of everyone and whatever they want to be. So why cant I accept this name change? Why do I hit an internal roadblock every time I try and use it?

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Stuck in Silverton

Dear Stuck,

You cant accept it because its a metaphor. Your child is growing up and changingboth of which are inevitable, neither of which are easy for a parent. And when a child discards the name that was picked out so carefully, and that the parent loves, it feels like a terrible rejection. But you know very well (deep down, as you say) that this is not really about the name qua name. For your child, the new name is a declaration of selfhood: This is who I am; this is how I want the world to see me. That declaration of selfhood can be hard for a parent to hear.

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Can you try your damnedest to not make this about you? It has nothing to do with you (this in itself is hard for a parent, I know!). And it is neither here nor there that all your childs friends are also choosing new names. When a child tells a parent, This is who I amplease see me for who I am, it behooves the parent to respect that. Do your very best to use the pronouns your child has asked you to use. When you slip, apologize (quickly) and move on. Your child doesnt need to hear about how difficult this is for you. (I know it is difficult. Talk to others about that.) All your child needs from you is your wholehearted support and love.

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 If you missed Fridays Care and Feeding column, read it here.

 Discuss this column in the Slate Parenting Facebook group!

Dear Care and Feeding,

My husband and I are friends with another couple. We dont have kids, but their 12-year-old daughter is very close to us. Shes a great kid with a strong sense of self, but this past winter, she asked me if she looked fat in her outfit. This didnt surprise me. Her mom talks about her weight constantly. Dinner together is always uncomfortablethe topic is usually how many carbs are in the meal, what her weight loss goals are, and how terrible she looks. I know she says things to her daughter about being strong and healthy, but she cant seem to see how damaging it is to talk about herself that way in front of her. I try to respond with statements like a body that works is a good body and I have more important things to think about than my pants size, but she doesnt get the hint. In the past, I have told her directly to zip it; in response, shes made excuses and kept at it. This isnt my kid, so should I keep my mouth shut or try again? Im really concerned about this young woman and the impact this has already had on her.

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Weighty Conversations

Dear WC,

Theres no point in trying again to get your friend to cut it out. It will not do any good: She cannot or will not do that. But that doesnt mean you cant help her daughter. Dont underestimate the role you play in her life, or how much impact you can have as a role model, if the two of you are close. Having an adult in her life who spontaneously models a different way of thinking about food and her body is a big deal. If you talk about these things differently than her mother doesif you talk to her differently than her mother doesand your behavior matches what you say, then, at the very least, youre offering her another way through this thicket. Its a crucial thing for a child to have that. And I know from experience, as the adult who modeled ways of thinking and behaving (not about food/bodies, but about other important subjects about which children I knew were being indoctrinated toxically), that nonparents who have a close relationship to a child and are respected and admired by them can make a huge difference in their lives.

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Help! How can I support Slate so I can keep reading all the advice from Dear Prudence, Care and Feeding, Ask a Teacher, and How to Do It? Answer: Join Slate Plus.

Dear Care and Feeding,

My 5-year-old daughter is a happy, loving little kid. However, she seems to have developed an obsession/fear of death in the last year or so. It usually comes up at night in the midst of a normal conversation while getting ready for bed. Shell suddenly say she doesnt want to die, or she doesnt want me to die. I have no clue where this has come from. She has never experienced the death of anyone she knows, not even a pet. And while she does play video games with us, they are not violent and are very much age-appropriate. Im concerned about this developing further, and I have tried talking to her about it, telling her its not something she needs to worry about, shes in good health and so am I, and assuring her that we will be around for a while. But this doesnt seem to help. Others have suggested I tell her we will be together forever, since for little kids forever can mean a day or so. But I dont like that idea, as I work hard not to lie to her about the facts of life. I always try to put things in terms she understands and keep it to her level, but this has me stumped. Do you have any suggestions for how I can help her to move past this, and not let it consume her?

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Gravely Worried

Dear GW,

At this age, a lot of children have begun to figure out that everyone dies. Some become more preoccupied with this fact than others, and an extremely sensitivefor better and for worsechild like yours may not be able to let it go. But lets face it: Everyone has to figure out a way to deal with and live with this knowledge. For a 5- or 6-year-old, who has just come to it for the first time and doesnt have any of the resources adults do, it can be enormously challenging.

It sounds like you are saying and doing all the right things: steadily reassuring her, reminding her of all the things one needs to be reminded of at such moments. Keep doing that, every time she brings it up. Do your best, when you have these conversations with her, not to let her know youre worried (she wont read your worrying as about her; she is more likely to interpret it as your own fear of death, which will further alarm herand probably provoke her to dig even deeper).

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A helpful New York Times piece about talking to kids about death describes the four subconcepts of death, as described by Sally Beville Hunter, Ph.D., a clinical associate professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville: nonfunctionality (your body doesnt work anymore), universality (all living things die), irreversibility (once you die, you cant come back to life), and inevitability (you cant avoid death). The article also notesand I mention this in response to your wondering where on earth this obsession came fromthat adults often dont realize, because were so inured to it, that children are surrounded by death. There is death in fairy tales, in cartoons and movies (The Lion King and The Land Before Timetwo of my daughters favorites when she was youngare shadowed nearly from the start by death). The leaves on the trees die every autumn; bugs die every day.

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Beville Hunter suggests not getting into too much detail when answering kids questions and yet being truthful: When a child asks, When are you going to die? you can tell them you take good care of yourself and you are very careful, that you plan to live a long timeuntil you are very, very old. And then do your best to redirect to another subject: the evening bedtime story, or what tomorrow will be like, or something your child is looking forward to. If she cant be redirectedeven if this is only happening at bedtimeit may be time to talk to your pediatrician about consulting a pediatric psychotherapist. (The general rule is that if a childs anxiety is affecting their daily life, thats when its time to check in with a therapist. But in practice it can sometimes be hard to identify where that line is.)

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I want to add one more note about this, based on my experience and on my research (because I too had a child who thought about death more than seemed to me normalwhatever normal means). At this age most children dont connect death to themselves (and many dont connect it to their parents yet, either). Theyve figured out that everybody dies, but they exempt themselves: Death is for other people, or its an abstract concept. Its only at 9 or 10 that they first begin to understand fully that death is irreversible and that they too will die someday. (Although I will say that years ago, while teaching an undergraduate class, on a day when we were discussing Tolstoys novella The Death of Ivan Ilyichwhich is concerned with the question of what the inevitability of death poses for our understanding of life: If we must die, what is the point of living?I mentioned my young daughters then-recent revelation that she would die someday. I asked the class if everyone remembered when they had experienced that visceral understanding for the first time, and one 19-year-old put her head down on her desk and said, Uh  I think Im having it now.)

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If your daughter has already had this revelation at 5, her precocity may be challenging her ability to process this shocking newsin other words, theres a disconnect between what she is able to grasp intellectually and what she can handle emotionally: a developmental gap. This gap will close naturally as she gets older, but it can be highly challenging in the meantime. Therapy may be helpful for this, too.

Dear Care and Feeding,

Can I stop pretending to be interested when every time I meet up with my friend Amy (which is three or four times a month), she forces me to look at an over-the-top amount of pictures and videos of her 2-year-old niece? Were not talking a few pics and a cute 10-second video. Were talking 2030 pictures at a time (almost all of the same thing), and videos that are at least a minute long of completely mundane activities, like her niece singing the ABCs for the 100th time, or playing with her stuffed animals. I know I sound awful, but its way too much!

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I Get It, Shes Cute

Dear IGISC,

Sure, stop pretending. Look at two or three pictures, pronounce the kid adorable, then talk about something else. If she keeps showing you more pictures, keep talking about something else. Shell get the hint.

Or she wont. If she is so besotted with the child she simply cant imagine that everyone else isnt, you have a decision to make. My calculation of the time spent looking at 2030 pictures and, say, even 10 10-second videos is still under five minutes, total. If that five minutes, four times a month, is so irritating to you that you cant forgive or tolerate it, its time to cool this friendship. Nobody is making you get together with Amy four times a month. The one thing you should not do is make her feel bad about her fascination with her niece. Do not have a talk with her about it. Do not scold her. If a gentle hintmaybe three times in a row?doesnt do the trick, then let it go.

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I guess the thing to think about is whether the sacrifice of indulging herobviously, it gives her pleasure to share her delight in her niece with youis worth making. Are there enough joys in this friendship to counterbalance this annoyance? Do you love her enough to indulge her? Maybe not. Then dont.

Michelle

More Advice From Slate

Over a decade ago, my husband had an affair that produced a son. Every adult in the situation, including me, hails from a highly dysfunctional family. I mention this detail because even now, my husbands family still tries to pressure him to leave me for her so that my stepson can have his parents together. I have spent years trying to work through the anger and resentment I have for how badly I have been treated in this dynamic, including what I had against my husband, who spent years choosing to stay silent as his parents disrespected my place as his wife and favored his son, often at the expense of the children we have since had together. How do I move forward?
As COVID-19 cases continue to increase, guidelines on masks for vaccinated Americans could soon change. Recommending that those who are already vaccinated wear masks is under active consideration, Anthony Fauci said on Sunday, adding that he is taking part in those discussions. Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said vaccinated people can forget about masks some local officials are choosing to require masks for everyone. And the two are not incompatible, Fauci said on CNNs State of the Union, noting that the CDC gives a lot of discretion to the locals.

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Local officials in Los Angeles County and St Louis, Missouri, have recently reinstated indoor mask mandates and others are analyzing whether to follow suit. What is clear from the infection data is that the United States is going in the wrong direction, Fauci said, adding that he is very frustrated that the country finds itself in this unnecessary predicament of seeing rising cases at a time when, unlike most other places in the world, the United States has vaccines to spare.

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Dr. Anthony Fauci says US is "going in the wrong direction" as the number of Covid-19 cases continues to rise, particularly among unvaccinated Americans. https://t.co/BtMUrX2WfD #CNNSOTU pic.twitter.com/QxPOQ3d2J3  State of the Union (@CNNSotu) July 25, 2021

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If you look at the inflection of the curve of new cases and, as you said in the run-in to this interview, that it is among the unvaccinated. And since we have 50 percent of the country is not fully vaccinated, thats a problem, Fauci said. Now it has really become a pandemic among the unvaccinated and thats why were out there, practically pleading with the unvaccinated people to go out and get vaccinated. Fauci went on to note it was particularly important for local leaders to push people to get vaccinated. What I would really like to see is more and more of the leaders in those areas that are not vaccinating to get out and speak out and encourage people to get vaccinated, Fauci said. He also said that a booster shot might likely happen and the priority would be the most vulnerable, including transplant and cancer patients.

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Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said on CBS Face the Nation that wearing masks could still be helpful for vaccinated people in areas where theres high transmission of the virus. If youre around vulnerable people, if youre taking care of a newborn or an elderly patient and youre vaccinated and if you dont feel well, you should probably get yourself checked out and not assume youre impervious to any kind of infection even if youre vaccinated, Gottlieb said. He also emphasized the quality of the masks is important. If you can get your hands on a KN95 mask or an N95 mask, thats going to afford you a lot more protection, he said.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi named Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger to serve on a select committee that is investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Kinzinger brings great patriotism to the Committees mission: to find the facts and protect our Democracy, Pelosi said in a statement on Sunday. Kinzinger quickly released his own statement saying he humbly accepted the offer to join the panel. I will work diligently to ensure we get to the truth and hold those responsible for the attack fully accountable, he said. It remains unclear whether Pelosi will be appointing other Republicans to the panel.

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Earlier in the day, Pelosi said she was likely to appoint the lawmaker from Illinois as part of an effort to increase the presence of GOP lawmakers on the committee investigating the Capitol riot. Asked by ABCs This Week anchor George Stephanopoulos whether she planned to appoint more Republicans to the committee, like Congressman Adam Kinzinger, Pelosi answered: That would be my plan.

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Kinzinger is a rare Republican critic of former President Donald Trump and was one of 10 House Republicans to vote in favor of his second impeachment. Before the appointment, Kinzinger had been telling people close to him hed accept the slot in the committee if it were offered. He is joining Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who was the only Republican officially in the new select committee. Pelosi characterized Cheney, also a notable Trump critic, on Sunday as a very courageous member of Congress. Once the No. 3 Republican in the House, Cheney was removed from the leadership position in May after she criticized the former president.

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The House speaker spoke about her plans for the committee mere days after House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy pulled the names of the five GOP lawmakers he had put forward for the panel after Pelosi rejected two of them. Pelosi said she objected to Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana and Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio because of their previous statements on the Jan. 6 probe that she said suggested their only goal would be to derail the investigation to focus on Democrats rather than Trump. The two that I would not appoint are people who would jeopardize the integrity of the investigation, and theres no way I would tolerate their antics as we seek the truth, Pelosi said. Maybe the Republicans cant handle the truth, but we have a responsibility to seek it, she added.

Banks accused Pelosi on Sunday of having a predetermined narrative that she wanted to pursue in the investigation. Its clear that Pelosi only wants members on this committee who will stick to her talking points and stick to her narrative, Banks said on Fox News Sunday. Thats why shes picked the group that shes already picked, and anyone that she asks to be on this committee from this point moving forward will be stuck to her narrative, to her point of view. There wont be another side.
A conservative radio host in Tennessee who was openly skeptical about COVID-19 vaccines has been hospitalized and is now in critical care with the disease. Phil Valentine, who hosts a show on Nashvilles WWTN-FM, was diagnosed with the coronavirus and is now in very serious condition as he battles pneumonia, his family said in a statement posted to the radio stations Twitter account. Although he needs help breathing, Valentine is not on a ventilator, his family said, while making clear that the experience has changed his stance on vaccination.

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Phil would like for his listeners to know that while he has never been an anti-vaxer he regrets not being more vehemently Pro-Vaccine, and looks forward to being able to more vigorously advocate that position as soon as he is back on the air, which we all hope will be soon, Valentines family said. Please continue to pray for his recovery and PLEASE GO GET VACCINATED!

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Our thoughts and prayers are with @ValentineShow and his family, and we appreciate the support from YOU our WTN Family during this trying time. As the family provides updates we will share those with you. #prayersforphil pic.twitter.com/fTzABpiSWk  SuperTalk 99.7 WTN (@997wtn) July 23, 2021

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Over the past few months, Valentine has encouraged his listeners to be skeptical of the vaccine and to think twice about getting the shot if they arent at high risk of dying from COVID-19. After he was diagnosed, Valentine publicly said that was the reason he had chosen not to get vaccinated. He explained his stance in a blog post in December:

Im not an anti-vaxxer. Im just using common sense. What are my odds of getting COVID? Theyre pretty low. What are my odds of dying from COVID if I do get it? Probably way less than one percent. Im doing what everyone should do and thats my own personal health risk assessment. If you have underlying health issues you probably need to get the vaccine. If youre not at high risk of dying from COVID then youre probably safer not getting it.

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Shortly after he was diagnosed, Valentine was very cavalier about the diagnosis, writing on Facebook that there are some very effective alternatives to the vaccine and saying he was doing his patriotic duty for natural herd immunity.

It seems the radio hosts brother, Mark Valentine, had followed his brothers advice. But he changed his mind after the hospitalization. Many of you know that my brother Phil is in the hospital with Covid related pneumonia. He is fighting for his life, which has persuaded me to get vaccinated when I was previously not inclined to do so, Mark Valentine wrote on Facebook. Mark Valentine also spoke to WWTN-FM about his brothers condition. First of all, hes regretful that he wasnt a more vocal advocate of the vaccination, Mark Valentine said of his brother. For those listening, I know if he were able to tell you this, he would tell you, Go get vaccinated. Quit worrying about the politics. Quit worrying about all the conspiracy theories.

Tennessee has one of the countrys lowest vaccination rates as less than 40 percent of the states residents are fully vaccinated.
The Ohio Harness Horsemens Association (OHHA) will continue its coverage of the 2021 Ohio County Fair racing season with live streaming coverage from the Union County Fairgrounds in Marysville, Ohio, Sunday and Monday (July 25-26).

Coverage of the seven-race card will be hosted by Ohio Harness Horsemens Association Brand Ambassador Roger Huston and OHHA Events Coordinator Susan Schroeder.

Sundays coverage will be hosted by Thom Pye, The Harness Guy.

First race post time for both cards is 11 a.m.

Programs for both race cards will be available at OHHA.com one hour prior to post time.

Replays of the races will be available on the Trot and Pace Marketing website, trotandpaceracing.com, following the completion of racing.

The OHHA is scheduled to live stream over 125 race cards from 65 county and independent fairs this summer.

A complete Ohio county fair racing schedule is available at HarnessRacingOhio.com.

(Ohio Harness Horsemen's Association)
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A document to the eventual founding of the United States of America is the Declaration of Independence. It establishes that among the rights of the people are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These rights are granted by the Creator, and governments are instituted to secure these rights to the people.

Those who understand and acknowledge the imperfection of America and yet believe in its greatness as well, and who benefit from it most, must insist that all American citizens deserve and be afforded the best of that which America offers. And the best of that which Statesville offers.

The governments and the representatives elected by the residents of the Southside have miserably failed to protect the lives, the liberties and the happiness of those which they serve and to which they have this obligation.

The politicians are reacting to yet another tragic random shooting death in Statesville  a young child  with calls for community meetings with grief counselors. Sadly, our elected representatives are a day late and a life short. How did they not notice the daily and nightly gunshots echoing throughout the streets of the Southside and in years prior? Did they not know about the many murders previous to the recent loss of lives? Why now are they awakened by yet another tragic death?
That side of the blaze also had burned into an area blackened by a previous fire, creating gaps in the fuel and reducing the spread of flames through grass, shrub and timber, Gracey said.

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a state of emergency for four northern counties because of wildfires that he said were causing conditions of extreme peril to the safety of persons and property." The proclamation opens the way for more state support.

The Tamarack Fire south of Lake Tahoe has now burned more than 92 square miles (238 square kilometers) of timber and head-high chaparral of mostly national forest land, fire officials said Friday.

The fire, sparked by lightning July 4 in Alpine County, has destroyed at least 10 buildings and forced the evacuation of more than 2,400 homes. That includes about 1,300 that were ordered evacuated for the first time Thursday when blowing embers ignited a new spot fire that jumped U.S. Highway 395 north of Topaz Lake on the California-Nevada line.

Pat Seekins, operations section chief for the Rocky Mountain Incident Management Team that was called in to manage the fire, said Friday they were shifting significant resources to its eastern flank along the state line. More than 1,300 firefighters were battling the overall fire, and more resources were on their way.
Apple iPhone 13 is one of the most anticipated high-end devices of the year due to the splendid specs that it may be packing. Recent leaks have suggested the company could launch its upcoming smartphones with ProMotion displays (with high refresh rates) larger batteries and a smaller notch. Now, according to a recent leak, it looks like the Cupertino-based company is also likely to boost the charging speeds of the soon-to-be-launched iPhone 13.

According to a report by MacRumors, the Apple iPhone 13 could support charging speeds of up to 25W with a power adapter, which is a step up from iPhone 12's current capability, which was first reported by Chinese website MyDrivers. As of now, Apples iPhone 12 models can all charge at a maximum of 20W with Apples own power adapter. Even if you do connect a much faster charger, say a 45W one, the iPhone will only manage to draw 20W.

Also read: Looking for a smartphone? Check Mobile Finder here.

However, this is likely to change with the arrival of the iPhone 13, according to the new rumour that suggests the upcoming device could draw a maximum of 25W from an adapter that Apple could be planning on launching later this year.

While this isnt a large increase in charging speeds, the rumour of Apple switching to faster charging is a good sign in the long run.

Does the fastest charging Apple iPhone have mean that Android smartphones have been out to shame? Hardly. Devices like the Samsung Galaxy A71 charge at 27W, while some Chinese smartphones can already charge at 45W and 65W  We have also recently reported that Xiaomi is already working on bringing a whopping 200W charger to its smartphones in the future.

Another feature iPhone 13 is rumoured to have is stronger MagSafe magnet on the rear of the device that could possibly allow for reverse charging and faster wireless charging. However, one must take these claims with a pinch of salt as we will only gain official confirmation of any rumoured features once Apple finally launches these devices in the coming months.
Facebook vs Apple iPhone row: Facebook recently released a cloud streaming service for games that can be accessed by users who are running Apple iOS devices via their browser. The cloud games service will allow users to play games from within their browser without the need to download any content to their device. The web app route was taken by the social networking giant after it clashed with Apple over its streaming policy and cloud-based gaming on iPhones.

Apples cloud gaming policy states that games that can be streamed must be submitted to the App Store for review. This is in contrast to how cloud games work, where the content is served from the companys servers to the users devices. Facebook is hardly the first company to use this technique of streaming games via a web app to bypass the App Store  both Amazon and Microsoft have done the same for their cloud gaming services.

Also read: Looking for a smartphone? Check Mobile Finder here.

Facebook users can take advantage of basic games like Solitaire and stream more high profile games like Assassins Creed: Rebellion and the free-to-play Asphalt 9. Those gamers looking to try out the new Facebook gaming via the web app can follow these instructions on their iOS device.

Step 1) Open Safari on your iPhone, then tap on the address bar.

Step 2) Now type fb.gg/play and hit Go. You should see the Facebook Games service load in the browser.

Step 3) You can now access the entire Facebook Cloud streaming service using the web app.

Step 4) If you want to get rid of the address bar and want to go full screen (to make the service feel less like a website) you can tap the share button and then tap Add to Home Screen'.

If you find that you can only see HTML5 games in the browser and none of the high-end titles, thats because Facebook Gamings game streaming service isnt available in all regions yet  but the company says the serving is expanding cloud games to other regions. For now, only the US, parts of Canada and Mexico can access the service, while users in other regions can play HTML5 games in the meanwhile, the company explained in a tweet.
There was not an additional step to securing the scholarship, she said. Once she was named a National Merit finalist earlier this year, she was eligible for the scholarship from the school as long as she listed UT-Dallas as her top-choice university.

As she looks ahead to college, Sawyer said, she is excited for the opportunities she will have in the UT-Dallas honors program as she pursues a degree in economics.

Taylor, who received a college-sponsored scholarship from Texas A&M, said the scholarship led to cascade of other scholarships and opportunities, including a second merit-based scholarship from the university and an engineering-specific Brown Foundation scholarship.

Taylors grandparents had ensured he had money to attend a four-year in-state university, but the National Merit scholarship and other scholarships it led to has allowed him to put some of that money toward professional school. He is interested in Texas A&Ms EnMed program where he can explore engineering and medicine and perform research.

He appreciates the National Merit-based scholarships, he said, because they are not based on a particular major. His only requirement is to maintain a certain grade point average and meet other academic requirements.
Officials in some of Texas largest counties are asking residents  even those vaccinated against the coronavirus  to again wear masks in public as the highly contagious delta variant continues to spread across the state. And some officials are urging unvaccinated people to limit their trips outside the home.

The updated suggestions came as Harris, Dallas and Travis counties raised their local coronavirus threat levels or precautionary guidelines in recent days.

Travis County officials made the announcement in a virtual news conference Friday morning. Under Stage 4, Austin and Travis officials want residents  vaccinated and unvaccinated  to wear masks at all times in public, and for unvaccinated people to only leave their homes for essential trips.

I know this transition back to Stage 4 may be difficult, but we must follow our local health authoritys recommendations to once again flatten the curve and to ensure we continue to protect ourselves and our most vulnerable, Travis County Judge Andy Brown said in a press release.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been dropping not-so-subtle hints that she may retire at the end of her term in early January 2023.

Good.

In fact, she would do everyone a favor by stepping aside as speaker and letting someone more willing to deal fairly with Republicans become speaker.

Of course, Republicans are hoping the 2022 midterm elections will answer the question of who the new speaker would be, whether Pelosi retires or not.

Pelosi says she wants to include everyone on both sides of the aisle in deciding which bills pass, but she doesnt. She clearly doesnt want to work with Republicans.

To be sure, Republicans arent eager to work with her, either, but as leader of the House, it is up to Pelosi to make necessary accommodations to bring both parties together on the big issues the country is depending on Congress to pass.

The tone she takes and the choices she makes trickle down to every member of the House of Representatives.

Take, for instance, her farce select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol  and then-President Donald Trumps role in the riot.
After working in Omaha, she returned to central Nebraska in 2019. She had grown up on a family farm north of Amherst.

Oertwig said she worked in hospital medicine. While in that role, she said, she recognized the unfilled need for outpatient palliative care in the area.

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As a palliative care nurse practitioner, Oertwig said, her role will be to work as a liaison to help with any care coordination gaps, such as Home Health Agency on Aging assistance referrals, communication between palliative care providers and specialty providers.

She said education is also an important part of her job, especially on disease progression, what this will look like to both the patient and family, and beginning conversations on what care needs may be.

As a palliative care nurse practitioner, Oertwig said, her job will be to facilitate conservations between patients, family and other stakeholders in a patients care on their wants, what is important to them, and how to make the most of the time they have while continuing to pursue aggressive treatments for the chronic disease/illness condition.

She schedules visits every four weeks with each patient and family and updates other provider groups.
KEARNEY  Gov. Pete Ricketts, the Nebraska Department of Economic Development and the Nebraska Department of Agriculture will host the Governors Ag and Economic Development Summit on Aug. 4 at the Younes Conference Center in Kearney.

Former U.S. Ambassador to China Terry Branstad will give the keynote address.

Nebraska has emerged from the pandemic in a strong position due to the resilience of our people and our top industries, including agriculture and manufacturing, Ricketts said. This years summit will convene leaders from across the state to explore ways to build on that momentum and keep Nebraska growing. We look forward to hosting former Iowa governor and ambassador Terry Branstad as this years keynote speaker.

The summit will add an agricultural focus, with co-sponsor NDA to host a number of industry-related sessions. Discussion tracks will include building the states broadband infrastructure, growing ag-related exports, supporting entrepreneurship, growing the workforce and much more.

Branstad is scheduled to provide remarks during lunch. A former governor of Iowa and Iowa House member, Branstad served as ambassador to China from 2017-2020 after being appointed by President Donald Trump.
Nebraska Extension will host a land management meeting on Tuesday, Aug. 3, at the Hall County Extension office in Grand Island.

The workshop will run from 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m and includes lunch. It will cover current trends in cash rental rates, land values and lease provisions, in addition to crop and grazing land considerations.

Registration is required to ensure an accurate count for lunch. Call the Extension office at 308-385-5088.

For more information, contact Extension Educators Jim Jansen at 402-584-2261 or jjansen4@unl.edu; or Allan Vyhnalek at 402-472-1771 or avyhnalek2@unl.edu.

Soybean Management Field Days

Soybean Management Field Days will be kicking off across the state starting Aug. 10.

Nebraska Extension, the Nebraska Soybean Board, and the Soybean Checkoff are teaming up to provide research-based information on growing soybeans while maximizing productivity and profitability.
School will be starting soon!

What does that mean in the library world? Well, for us at the library, a big sigh after the summer reading programming, of course. But what about everyone else? Well, when thinking about your back-to-school list, dont forget to put a library card at the top of the list.

Yes. A library card! This card is important to have in place for yourself, children and family. If you are an educator, run an agency, day care, etc., this is the card to have in your wallet. I always remind people, if you should lose it, report it lost to the library.

We call the library card a smart card because it is your key to getting not only materials in the library, but also online. We really do encourage people of all ages, from birth  yes, babies love books  to adult, to come to the library. Anyone who lives in Hall County can get a library card for free. If you live outside Hall County, then you would pay a $40 nonresident fee to get a card unless your area library takes part in the Nebraskard reciprocal borrowing program.

For more information visit http://nlc.nebraska.gov/nebraskard/
We just went to the Buffalo County Fair today, she said Thursday.

Every day, Vaughn likes seeing the smiles of the people she works with.

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One of the people in her care calls her Darcy. She doesnt know why. He just comes in every morning with a smile on his face and says, Hi Darcy.

I have many different names. Im not always Theresa, she said, laughing.

Normally, Vaughn has three people in her group. Oftentimes, two or three groups go together.

They live with supported living providers, or host homes.

Mosaic provided this information from Vaughns nomination:

A man with developmental disabilities that Theresa supports wanted to learn to drive, so she helped him learn the skills needed to pass the test. Hes now well on his way to earning his drivers license, which will help him to be better positioned to take advantage of employment opportunities in the community. This commitment makes it no wonder that her colleagues say that Theresa embodies the quote, If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.
ORD  Four Ord Public School FFA members will test their ecological wits against peers from 35 states, Canada and China in the 2021 National Conservation Foundation Envirothon.

Ord students Vickie Ference, Tye Bruha, Alex Flessner, Brodie Darnell and Treaven Scheideler will represent Nebraska in the environmental knowledge and problem-solving challenge, vying for scholarships and prizes.

More than 25,000 students in grades 9-12 are involved in NCF Envirothon during the course of several competitions. The NCF Envirothon program teaches STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) principles using hands-on, outdoor field experiences and other forms of experiential learning. Classroom curriculum is also used.

Envirothon competitors use problem solving, team building and leadership experience. Topics covered include aquatic ecology, forestry, soils and land use, wildlife and environmental current events.

Ord agricultural education teacher and team co-adviser Dave Ference said reaching this point is more than a scorecard.

We are so proud of our dedicated and intelligent students, Ference said. Each and every one of these students understands the importance of conserving our natural resources.
LEXINGTON  Two area veterans received Quilts of Valor during the Dawson County Fair this year, with an evening presentation last week.

Dawson County Fair Board member, MJ Hart, said they wanted to present Quilts of Valor to veterans who had been associated with the Dawson County Fair. The two recipients this year were retired Dawson County Sheriff Gary Reiber and Dale Biehl.

Reiber served in the United State Marine Corps from 1968 to 1972, spending part of that time in Vietnam. Reiber served the county as sheriff for 41 years; he retired from office in January 2019.

Biehl was surprised with his quilt by his granddaughter, Abbie Owens, daughter of Toby and Amy Biehl-Owens, revealed a secret. Owens had told her grandfather the quilt she was working on was for Gary Reiber, but in reality it was for him.

Glenda Parker did the quilting, while Owens put on the binding.

Biehl was drafted in 1963 and reported for basic training in 1964. He served in the Army Special Weapons Service and still cannot talk about specific details to this day, as records are still classified.

He was discharged and came home in December 1965.
During the pandemic lockdowns, she said, she surveyed more than 600 people in the U.K. about how they were experiencing time. Only 20% felt time was passing normally. Of the rest, 40% said time was passing faster, and 40% felt it was passing slower.

Those who had satisfying social contacts tended to report time passing more quickly than those with unsatisfying social lives. But why have some of us lost track of time altogether?

Ogden said the pandemic has robbed us of what she describes as our temporal markers.

If you are working at home, you can eat lunch or go to bed whenever you want, she said. All the normal things that separate each day from another and hold us in time are gone. The thing that made Saturday Saturday was that you werent going to work, you could lie in, you didnt have to leave the house.

Now, every day blurs into the next, a phenomenon that some have dubbed Blursday.

Ogden was on maternity leave with her third child when the pandemic first hit. Understandably, her sense of time shifted.

It was hell, basically, she told me by phone Thursday morning. I could not believe there were only 24 hours in a day. It felt waaay longer.
When they were young children, their parents had them vaccinated against such deadly diseases as polio and measles. Their parents knew from experience how big a threat those diseases were before the vaccines were developed. But now, when they need to follow their parents example and get themselves and their children vaccinated against another deadly disease, theyre opting out.

This does not make sense.

We know the coronavirus is deadly.

There is clear evidence that the COVID-19 vaccines available in the United States are effective. The small percentage of vaccinated people who do contract the virus have mild cases. Almost everyone who is being hospitalized now or even dying because of the virus is unvaccinated.

I think part of the reason were seeing younger folks become positive and be hospitalized is because theyre simply choosing not to be vaccinated, CDHDs Anderson said last week.

In addition to health clinics and local pharmacies, the COVID-19 vaccine is provided at no cost to patients at the Central District Health Department from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, with Thursday clinics running until 8 p.m. You must be 12 years old or older to receive the vaccine and those 12 to 18 years old must be accompanied by an adult.
Schools are soon to start back in session just as Covid-19 cases are rising in the Red River Valley. The rise is due to the delta variant, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says is as contagious as chickenpox and four to nine times more infectious than previous Covid-19 strains. The majority of cases are being seen in unvaccinated people, a group that includes school-age children. The back to school guidance from local and national medical groups includes having mask requirements in place, however, Gov. Greg Abbott has prohibited schools from taking such action. Should schools be allowed to require masks?

You voted:
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Right now, our research initiative is to look at genetics and environmental conditions because with the hemp research, one of the things that farmers are still struggling with is which areas are best for which varieties and if those varieties can thrive in different states, Anoruo said. Were also looking at which varieties are best for CBD oil and varieties for fiber.

The research program is also evaluating different growing conditions and new trends for hemp. This research is just the beginning of the initiative. Once they complete their research, the program plans to send that data to local farmers to determine which varieties are best suited for the states climate.

Right now, our research is strictly based on looking at environmental conditions that would give maximum production of CBD, which is what a lot of people are looking for, Anoruo said.

A part of the initiative is studying the fiber produced from hemp. Anoruo gave various examples of how the fiber can be used in many different sectors including the textile and automotive industries. As society leans toward an eco-friendly economy, the 1890 industrial hemp research program is looking for ways to substitute certain materials used for construction with hemp fiber.
Alabama Republican Gov. Kay Ivey on Thursday called out "the unvaccinated folks" for the rise in Covid-19 cases in her state, a remarkable plea at a time when many GOP leaders are refusing to urge people to get vaccinated even as Covid-19 cases surge in many parts of the country.

"Folks are supposed to have common sense. But it's time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks, not the regular folks. It's the unvaccinated folks that are letting us down," Ivey told reporters in Birmingham.

Alabama is the least vaccinated state in the country, with roughly 33.9% of residents fully vaccinated, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Average daily Covid-19 cases in Alabama are nearly double what they were a week ago, and more than four times higher than they were two weeks ago.
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ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP)  A popular strip club that once beckoned customers off a busy highway leading into Anchorage is now a church offering salvation  instead of temptation  thanks to a daughter of a former exotic dancer.

Linda Dunegan believes divine intervention played a hand in transforming the building that housed Fantasies on 5th into the start-up Open Door Baptist Church, turning the show floor into a sanctuary and trading the dancers pole with a pulpit.

"This church came about because I prayed for five years, said Dunegan, who tried to buy the building before but walked away  for good, she thought  when she and the owner couldnt come to terms. Then the owner gave a real estate agent a week to sell it and suggested the agent call Dunegan. This time, the deal went through.

God has been very good to me," Dunegan said, to give me a family, a wonderful husband, food on the table, a place to live.

The journey to savvy real estate investor with 19 properties in three states seems implausible for a girl barely surviving on a daily bowl of rice in her native Vietnam.

Dunegan grew up in a small village near the Cambodian border, where most homes were on stilts and the surrounding water was everyones fishing grounds  and toilets.
Rarely has there been a meeting of the minds like this  two of the strongest women on Capitol Hill, partisans at opposite ends of the political divide  bonding over a shared belief that the truth about the insurrection should come out and those responsible held accountable. They believe no less than the functioning of Americas democracy is on the line.

Nothing draws politicians together like a shared enemy, said John Pitney, a former Republican staffer and professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College.

The committee will hold its first hearing next week, and the stakes of the Pelosi-Cheney alliance have never been higher. The panel will hear testimony from police officers who battled the Trump supporters that day at the Capitol. The officers have portrayed the hours-long siege as hardly a gathering of peaceful demonstrators, as some Republicans claim, but rather a violent mob trying to stop Congress from certifying Joe Bidens election.

As their new partnership unfolds, the risks and rewards have an uneven flow. Pelosi benefits more politically from drawing Cheney to her side, giving the committees investigation the big-name bipartisan stamp it needs to avoid being viewed as a strictly political exercise.
Editor:

I consider the reorganization plan for the University of Wyoming, whereby science programs are incorporated into the colleges of Engineering or Agriculture to be an intellectually bankrupt move that completely belies the values of a traditional university.

It is important to understand why traditionally science programs are incorporated into the college of arts and sciences. The arts and humanities appear to be so different from the sciences that it seems that taking the sciences out of that traditional association is a benign move.

However, it most decidedly is not. Sciences are located within the college of arts and sciences, because the core of both the arts and the sciences is creativity. The best scientist is not the person who makes the most detailed measurement of the best observation, but the person who can take a series of apparently unrelated observations and come up with an explanation of how they are related. The core value of the sciences is to explore the wonders of the natural world and to find ways to explain how and why they are related. It is true that findings of the sciences, physics, chemistry, biology and geology, result in important economic developments.
MASSY Group president Gervase Warner says the issue of whether Caribbean countries should have a fixed or floating exchange rate is a bit of a red herring.

But he told a conference organised by the Central Bank of Barbados last week that one of the reasons the group has applied to cross-list its shares on the Jamaica Stock Exchange is because of T&Ts foreign exchange regime.

Warner was one of the panellists at the keynote discussion of the Central Bank of Barbados 41st Annual Review Seminar last Tuesday on Rebuilding Economies for the Future: Opportunities for Resilience through Diversification. The other panellists were Ian Durant, director of economics department of the Caribbean Development Bank; and Michelle Doyle, adviser to the Governor, Central Bank of Barbados.

Responding to a question on whether resilient and competitive economies can be built in the Caribbean with fixed exchange rate regimes, I think yes, we can build resilient economies. Fixed or floating foreign exchange; thats a bit of a red herring. It very much depends on the structure of each economy.

We should be much more focused on the things that can make us more efficient and more competitive. Unfortunately, some of those things are often not popular.

Earlier in his response to the question, Warner said: I dont know that fixing a foreign exchange rate or floating an exchange rate is really the determinant to the economic success and growth of our economies; whether it makes us more or less resilient.

It is the fundamental, underlying performance of our economies is really what matters. If you are going to be an export earner and are blessed with some natural resourcewhether it is sunny beaches and beautiful waters or petroleum or other mineralsyou are going to have to work for it. You are going to have to find a way to make yourself efficient.

Trying to get efficiencies just by adjusting a foreign exchange rate, you are always going to be in a race to the bottom, as opposed to building strong institutions and strong enterprises.

I am much more in favour of having greater competitiveness by developing economies of scale in operations.

He said that involves looking beyond individual island markets and treating the entire Caricom region as a domestic market.

Warner advocated making the entire Caricom region accessible as a domestic market to any and every one of us individually.

He said the Caricom Single Market and Economy (CSME) is not delivering on the promise and vision of 20 or 40 years ago.

Why Massy is cross-listing

On the question of whether the Massy Groups proposed listing on the Jamaica Stock Exchange would improve its competitiveness and resilience, Warner said: We have found, partly driven by the foreign exchange regime in Trinidad and Tobago, that the Trinidad and Tobago Stock Exchange is not as attractive as it has been in the past for international investors.

Warner added: You are very familiar with international investors being unable to repatriate the proceeds of a sale of locally listed shares in Trinidad and Tobago. This is a great nuisance to any sophisticated financial institution that is moving money back and forth.

Warner said the inability of international investors to repatriate the proceeds from share sales is a good example of a breakdown that makes Trinidad and Tobago less competitive.

In a notice to shareholders on May 9, 2021, Massy advised that its board took a decision to apply to cross-list the companys shares on the Jamaica Stock Exchange. The group said: The board considered the market sophistication and growth opportunities evident in the Jamaican securities market, which has become increasingly more dynamic over the past few years.

The Massy Group president said the Jamaica Stock Exchange is attractive to international investors like the Trinidad and Tobago Stock Exchange once was.

He said the Massy Group sees the Jamaica Stock Exchange as a place that we see we can invite more shareholders, more institutional investors, more traders to participate in the Massy Holdings share.

For us, it represents another step in this integration of the Caribbean in the mindset of what we created in Caricom.

The Massy Group president said all publicly traded entities that operate in multiple jurisdictions across the region would prefer to have one stock exchange where the shares of these companies could all be traded with economies of scale on a platform that is more robust than the multiple, small stock exchanges across the region.

If you were to ask any of us would we like to have one financial services regulator for banks and insurance companies, (the answer would be) absolutely. It is a great nuisance to deal with 14 different regulators, particularly with all of the new regulations that are coming out that are internationally driven and affect us as small entities.

Warner said: Small entities having to manage relationships with multiple regulators is a cost, which then makes us uncompetitive. And we do not understand that there is a reason that we make ourselves uncompetitive.

Thats why the Canadian banks are withdrawing from the Caribbean because it is just not worth it to operate in all of these small, little islands with different regulators. It just does not make a lot of sense.

Massy in Jamaica

In its 2020 annual report, Massy Holdings Ltd stated that it received seven per cent of its profit before tax and four per cent of its revenue from its Jamaican operations. The group indicated it operates two businesses in Jamaica: Massy Gas Products (Jamaica) and Massy Distribution (Jamaica).

Massy Gas Products (Jamaica) is the market leader of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) distribution in Jamaica which is used as a fuel source for cooking, heating, power generation and manufacturing. MGPJ imports and markets its product under the brand name Gas Pro and supplies LPG to both the commercial (bulk) and domestic (packed) markets, according to the annual report.

As part of a strategy to focus on three main portfolios of businessintegrated retail, motors and machines and gas productsMassy Holdings divested Massy Technologies to a Jamaican company last year for about US$50 million.

The combined businesses will have over US$250 million of annual revenue, operate in 19 countries, and have over 2,100 information technology professionals, according to the annual report.

The 2020 annual report indicates that Massy received about US$50 million for the sale of the companies.

Groups shareholders

Massys single largest shareholder is the National Insurance Board of T&T, according to the groups 2020 annual report. NIBTT owned 19,801,051 million of the 98,342,382 shares issued by Massy, accounting for 20.13 per cent of the company, as at September 30, 2020.

Other significant shareholders of Massy Holdings include:

 RBC/RBTT Nominee Services Ltd

10,246,075;

 RBC/RBTT Trust Ltd

9,410,305

 Republic Financial Holdings Ltd

7,198,348

 Barbados Central Securities

Depositary5,909,175

Of the directors and senior officers of the company, Massy Holdings chairman Robert Bermudez holds the largest block. As at September 30, 2020, Bermudez owned 14,820 shares in his name and 1,901,393 shares in what is described in the annual report as associates shareholdings. This suggests that a shareholder associated with Bermudez acquired 1,111,489 Massy Holdings shares between October 1, 2019, and September 30, 2020.

The Massy share price closed at $80.50 a share on Friday, putting its market capitalisation at $7.91 billion. On the day after the Massy board decided to cross-list the companys shares on the Jamaica Stock Exchange, May 7, Massy traded at $65 a share.
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Emancipation Day commemorates the abolition of slavery across the British Empire on August 1. On that historic day in 1834, the Slavery Abolition Act came into effect, freeing more than 800,000 people of African descent in Canada and throughout the British Empire.
There have been no changes to the existing Covid-19 restrictions, as Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley says the focus now is on getting the population to accept the Covid-19 vaccine and to have the country in a state that would allow children to resume face-to-face classes in September.
As I sit and observe scientists, doctors, members of Parliament from both sides, and even the Honourable Prime Minister, emotionally pleading with members of the population to listen to science and become vaccinated, it became apparent to me that vaccine hesitancy is due to either lack of or the mass circulation of erroneous information.
The bureaus Chris Cutler said that as the water level in the reservoir gets too close to the level of the intake structures for the dams turbines, it starts to create a whirlpool-like vortex of water that sucks in air and debris such as equipment or even fish that can be very damaging to the turbines.

Nobody knows for sure at what water level such cavitation can occur, Kuhn and Cutler said. Cutler manages the water and power services division for the bureaus Upper Basin office in Salt Lake City.

The purpose of keeping Powell at 3,525 has been to maintain a cushion above 3,490 to prevent cavitation, said Kuhn, retired general manager of the Colorado River District in Glenwood Springs.

No one knows how turbines will perform at 3,490. My understanding is there is a small risk of cavitation. Even a small risk is something very, very serious, Kuhn said.

Cutler said a slim possibility exists of cavitation if the lake falls somewhere below 3,525 but above 3,490 because there is always a chance of some, unforeseen vortex problem due to new equipment weve installed in the turbines. But he stressed that the 3,525 level is 35 feet above the level where they are most worried about a vortex of air entering the turbines and causing cavitation.
Whos keeping the

youngest safe?

Transmission of COVID-19 within schools has been low, but Superintendent Gabriel Trujillo says their most powerful strategies have been masking, social distancing and the flexibility and autonomy that the board had to respond to local conditions.

We're not operating with that anymore, he said at the board meeting. We're going into classrooms where our distancing ability is going to be significantly compromised, especially in those younger grades, younger than 12, which is what I'm personally concerned about. More than anything else, you're going to have half the students with masks and some of them won't have any masks.

Melissa Rynders, an Amphitheater mom who has one child in elementary school and one in middle school, mostly worries more about her younger son since her older one is vaccinated. She will be sending him to school wearing a mask and hopes other parents will do the same.

With our youngest we've been talking a lot about even if other people don't do it, we're doing it because we want to keep everyone safe, she says.
Laura Douglas, the Arizona Department of Transportation spokeswoman on the project, framed it this way when I spoke with her Friday. The fact that the Avra Valley route is one of two alternatives is a change from when the draft impact study came out in 2019. At that time, Avra Valley was the sole recommended route.

"We got a lot of comments," Douglas said. "We listened, and people did not want us to put that corridor through that western section," meaning Avra Valley.

That continues to be the strong drift of opinion as reflected in the current environmental impact study. It's a "Tier 1" study, which means that a "Tier 2" study has to take place on any section of the project before it is built.

The fact that it's still there on paper, though, means the project is possible, even if most people seem to dislike it.

Among the thousands of citizen comments included in the current study, those opposing the Avra Valley route are among the most numerous. In more recent comments, the federal agencies, too, either oppose or highly question the Avra Valley route.
There is no evidence that the lawmakers decision was influenced by the restriction, the judge said, saying all Brnovich offered were conjectural and hypothetical injuries.

Humetewa was no more impressed by arguments that the conditions for getting the money  including the ban on using it directly or indirectly for tax cuts  were too ambiguous to be enforced.

Congress is not required to make known every way in which states may violate a condition on the receipt of the funds, the judge wrote. She said the only requirement is that the statute provide clear notice to states that they, by accepting funds under the Act, would indeed be obligated to comply with the conditions.

Theres also the practical side, she said. Explaining every possible way in which a condition might be violated  would prove too onerous, and perhaps, impossible.

But in this case, Humetewa said, there was no gray area.

Congress  made the existence of the condition upon which Arizona could accept funds explicitly obvious, she said. That Arizona was unsure of every factual instance of possible noncompliance does not amount to a violation of Congress duty.
PHOENIX (AP)  Scorching summer heat in Phoenix has been replaced by rain, lightning, flooding and cool temperatures because of monsoon thunderstorms.

Scattered storms that began Thursday continued through Friday, with about 60% of metro Phoenix reporting received measurable rainfall, the Arizona Republic reported.

By evening, flash flooding was reported in New River and parts of the northern metro area that received 2.6 inches (6.6 centimeters) of rain. The National Weather Service issued a flood warning for Maricopa County until Saturday morning near Lake Pleasant and New River Anthem.

Forecasts called for more of the same into the weekend.

Sky Harbor International Airport received just over 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) of rain during the storm, topping the amount of rain during the entire monsoon season last year.

The high temperature for the day was 83 degrees Fahrenheit (28 Celsius) at the airport, well below the average 106 F (41 C) for the date.
OPINION: "Legislators in Arizona and Texas saw value in using CRT  much like bans on transgender athletes or allegations of voter fraud - as a cudgel to attack opponents and rally their base, even though few if any public schools actually taught it," writes University of Arizona history professor emeritus Michael Schaller.
The SunLink streetcar is offering free rides through the end of the year. Make the most of this deal by ditching the car for a hassle-free night out at one of these Tucson restaurants or bars.
Data breaches are on the rise, and small businesses need to be thinking about how to protect themselves.

According to a report by the National Cyber Security Alliance, small businesses have seen a 400%-plus increase in cyberattacks over the last two years. Ironically, this same report said that 60% of the small businesses surveyed felt they were an unlikely target of cybercriminals.

Make no mistake: Cybercriminals dont care how big your company is or what kind of business youre operating. They purposely target and exploit this lack of concern by many companies; if theres data to be stolen or ransomed, you can be sure the bad guys will try, at some point, to breach your network.

It could be argued that small businesses are especially vulnerable because they have fewer resources to deploy in response to an attack. But you still need to fight back if you dont want to become another statistic.

Even though you may not have the financial resources of an enterprise-class company, there are some things you can do to make your business a more difficult target for attackers.

Make sure you have security software in place
This project will save Oklahomans and other customers in the region millions of dollars in the coming years, Transource Director Todd Burns said in a statement. We look forward to working with communities to develop the project.

Company officials expect construction to begin in 2024 and conclude in late 2025. According to SPP, the project increases consumer access to more affordable power in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Texas and Louisiana while providing $16.8 million in congestion savings during the first year and $465.6 million over the next 40 years.

The public comment period runs through Aug. 31. Transource representatives havent identified a final route for the project but are presenting potential study segments for consideration and will receive public input on them before deciding where to build the new power line.

Both online and in-person open houses are planned in August to solicit feedback on potential study segments and provide information about the project.

Community outreach is scheduled Aug. 19 at the Case Community Center in Sand Springs and on Aug. 18 at Baughs Country View in Drumright. Another public meeting is scheduled Aug. 17 at the Noble County Fairgrounds (womens building) in Perry. All of the meetings are scheduled from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.
There were a lot of speeches, Battles said. When youre considered your partys final candidate, you have to do a whistle stop tour, which means visits to every county and have ask me anything time for 10 minutes. It was challenging but fun.

Battles was elected lieutenant governor at Girls State, while Plank was elected mayor of one of the fictional cities at Boys State.

Plank also ran for governor, but after multiple ties, lost his primary election on a coin toss, prompting him to regroup and refocus his energies.

I learned a lot of leadership skills in the position, he said. It was challenging, but when the American Legion representative announced my selection, he talked about that coin toss.

Two students are selected at each state level event to participate at the national level. Along with visits with elected officials and a tour of the White House, student delegates, or senators, will caucus at the beginning of the session, then organize into committees and conduct hearings on legislation submitted by the students themselves.

Inspired by a recent foreign policy workshop he attended hosted by Harvard, Plank said he will be introducing legislation for the United States to have a permanent embassy in Taiwan.
Posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, the nations highest military award, Evans was recognized for leading his ship in an engagement to protect an American landing force attempting to liberate the Philippines.

Facing a group of much larger Japanese vessels, the Johnston was heavily damaged by enemy shells, and Evans himself was seriously wounded.

But he continued to command the ship, fighting on until it was too damaged to go on.

Of the 327 on board when the Johnston went down, 186 died including Evans, 34.

I call him an extraordinary hero, Reagan said. But there were a lot of heroes that day.

Reagan has learned much in his research.

Evans family was poor and moved around, he said, living in Shawnee and Okmulgee before settling in Muskogee.

Evans, who went on to graduate from Muskogee Central High School before joining the Navy, was so impressive, Reagan said.

He had a lot of drive, a lot of ambition. He was smart.

Although Evans was inducted into the Oklahoma Military Hall of Fame in 2009, its time he was recognized in his former home, too, Reagan said.
Again, it kept them out of the hospital; they didnt die of the disease, Bratzler said. But it is possible to get infected even if you are fully vaccinated, particularly with this more contagious strain.

Bratzler said the true level of spread is much higher than confirmed cases that are reported because individuals with minimal to no symptoms generally arent being tested.

Dr. Aaron Wendelboe, an epidemiologist and University of Oklahoma College of Public Health professor, said in general his model estimates there are about four times as many cases in the community than what are being diagnosed.

Wendelboe said his model estimates there are about 18,000 to 21,000 active cases in the state, whereas as active cases confirmed by the state were 7,302 as of Friday.

He said he suspects people dont want to get tested because for mild cases there isnt a personal benefit that affects treatment, as well as the result could lead to their own isolation, quarantine of family and friends, stigma or loss of work.

Therefore there is essentially very little incentive for people to take the time and find a place to get tested, Wendelboe said.
GOP meeting: Reports leaking out of the July 17 closed-door Republican State Committee meeting indicates that the vote against censuring U.S. Senators Jim Inhofe and James Lankford was not exactly a ringing endorsement for either of them, especially Lankford, who is up for re-election next year.

Several of those who spoke against the resolution said they disagreed and were even angry at Lankford for not holding up certification of last years presidential election, but thought the matter should be settled in the GOP primary.

Concern that Democrats would exploit the resolution, not acknowledgement that Lankford and Inhofe acted correctly, predominated the discussion.

Several of those in attendance gave impassioned speeches about election fraud and treason, including a claim that the majority of votes cast for Democrat Joe Biden came from China.

In fact, no allegations of substantial election wrongdoing have been proved and most have been debunked.

At one point during the meeting, it was discovered that the number of votes cast on a preliminary motion on the censure resolution did not match the number authorized.
That would be a tragedy for these young adults and for the country. Ive known Dreamers all my life and currently support them throughout the state as an immigration lawyer. I know how valuable they are. Oklahomas more than 10,000 Dreamers pay some $43 million in federal, state and local taxes. But the pandemic has also shown us how much we depend on them.

More than 500,000 Dreamers are essential workers, according to New American Economy. In Oklahoma, an estimated 1,600 young immigrant adults with DACA permits proved their willingness to sacrifice for the country they love during the bleakest parts of the pandemic by working as nurses, home health care aides, teachers, grocery clerks and agricultural workers. In the months ahead, theyll be even more important as our state faces critical labor shortages.

They answered the call to step up during our states most difficult moments. Now I urge Congress to relieve some of their suffering. You cant imagine what its like to live each day with chronic stress and anxiety, never knowing if youll be allowed to stay in your home, continue to work and remain with your friends and family. Oklahomans got a taste of what it feels like to live in isolation during the pandemic. Thats how Dreamers have been living most of their lives  wishing desperately to belong to a country that has kept us at arms length.
Here are todays leading news stories:

Politics

-- United States Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin will pay an official visit to Vietnam on July 28 and 29 at the invitation of Vietnamese Minister of National Defense Phan Van Giang, the Vietnam News Agency reported.

-- The first session of Vietnams 15th National Assembly will be shortened by an additional three days and is expected to conclude on July 28 due to the serious COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19 Updates

-- The Ministry of Health confirmed 3,973 local COVID-19 cases, including 2,328 cases in Ho Chi Minh City, on Sunday morning, raising the countrys tally to 94,913, with 17,583 recoveries and 370 deaths.

-- Three million Moderna COVID-19 vaccine doses donated by the U.S. via the COVAX scheme arrived in Vietnam early on Sunday morning. Another two million of the shots have been allocated to 53 provinces and cities for pandemic response.

-- A total of 21 people from the Mekong Delta province of Vinh Long have tested positive for the novel coronavirus after attending a COVID-19 patient's funeral, the provincial Department of Health confirmed on Saturday, adding that four hamlets with over 5,400 people had been locked down to control the infection cluster.

Society

-- Officers in Da Lat City, located in the Central Highlands province of Lam Dong, on Saturday afternoon detected two tractor-trailers carrying 29 metric tons of potatoes that were imported from China without legitimate documents.

-- Thousands of people were still traveling to the Central Highlands from southern provinces on Saturday night following the implementation of extensive social distancing measures, resulting in severe congestion at COVID-19 checkpoints.

-- A woman in Hanoi has been fined VND2 million (US$87) for going outside without a proper reason after she took her dog out for a walk on Saturday.

Sports

-- Vietnam is scheduled to compete in rowing, Judo, weightlifting, boxing, and badminton at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics on Sunday. The competitions are aired on VTV6 and VTV9 channels.

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Police in Da Lat City under Vietnam's Lam Dong Province has impounded many metric tons of potatoes without certificates of origin on their way to reach wholesale depots this weekend.

At midday on Saturday, Da Lat officials and police officers detected 29 metric tons of potatoes of ambiguous origin on a trailer truck on National Expressway No. 20.

A subsequent inspection revealed the shipment owner to be Le Thi Nhung, 47, from Dak Lak Province, while Le Anh Nhat, 32, who hails from the same province, is the truck driver.

The potato freight had entered Vietnam's Lao Cai Province from China, and was on its way to wholesale depots in Da Lat before being intercepted.

During the inspection, both the driver and cargo owner failed to present any proof of purchase for the freight.

Later on, the driver was escorted to a local COVID-19 quarantine center, as the negative result he obtained after a quick coronavirus test was no longer valid.

As per Lam Dongs regulations on coronavirus control and prevention, inter-provincial drivers must present negative COVID-19 test results before they enter the province.

The province only accepts rapid test results issued within three days earlier, whereas real-time RT-PCR tests can stay valid for up to five days after issuance.

Trailer trucks are pulled over for inspection in Da Lat City, Lam Dong Province, Vietnam. Photo: Dam Trong / Tuoi Tre

Da Lat police also scrutinized a vehicle that accompanied Nhats truck, but they did not find anything suspicious as it was carrying onions with legitimate certificates of origin.

The potato freight has been seized for further inspection on its origin and food safety.

In recent years, Vietnam has discovered an increasing quantity of potato smuggled to Da Lat, one of the countrys biggest grocery hubs, from China.

The contraband will then be distributed to surrounding provinces and Ho Chi Minh City under the guise of authentic Da Lat crops.

The smuggling is particularly prevalent from June to November, which is the downtime for potato production in Da Lat.

Pesticide residues have been found in the majority of Chinese potato products sneaked into Da Lat.

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A woman has been fined for taking her dog outside for a walk during a strict social distancing period in Hanoi.

Police in Hang Trong Ward, Hoan Kiem District confirmed on Saturday they had imposed a VND2 million (US$87) fine on L.H.H. for leaving her house without a proper reason.

H. was walking her dog along a street in Hang Trong Ward earlier the same day when she was approached by an officer.

During a working session at the police station, the woman stated she was not aware of current social distancing regulations in the capital.

Police in Hoan Kiem District also booked seven other people for going outside without appropriate reasons on Saturday.

Each of them was fined VND2 million ($87).

Six residents in the district were fined a combined VND12 million ($522) for failure to wear face masks in public.

Hanoi chairman Chu Ngoc Anh decided to enforce extensive social distancing measures under the prime ministers Directive No. 16 for 15 days from 6:00 am on Saturday over rising new local infections.

People are required to stay home and only go outside for food, medicine, hospital treatment, COVID-19 vaccination, and working at offices and businesses that are allowed to open.

Vietnam had documented 94,913 COVID-19 cases as of Sunday morning, with 17,583 recoveries and 370 deaths, according to the Ministry of Health.

The country has recorded 91,165 local infections in 62 provinces and cities, including 899 cases in Hanoi, since the fourth outbreak began on April 27.

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People in Ho Chi Minh City will be banned from going outdoors from 6:00 pm to 6:00 am the next day from Monday until further notice as part of the citys restrictions to reduce surging COVID-19 infections, according to chairman Nguyen Thanh Phong.

Chairman Phong declared the travel restrictions at a meeting on Sunday evening.

All activities in the city will be suspended, save for emergencies and pandemic missions, the official underlined.

The municipal administration will issue an official document to detail the implementation of the new restrictions on Monday, Phan Van Mai, standing deputy secretary of the municipal Party Committee, said in another meeting earlier on Sunday.

On July 23, along with its extension of social distancing measures, introduced in late May, from Saturday until August 1, the administration also decided to tighten restrictions.

Such restrictions will be applied together with other epidemic control rules under the prime ministers Directive 16, including the closure of non-essential businesses and services, a stay-home order, a ban on gatherings larger than two people, and the suspension of public transport.

Accordingly, residents are completely prohibited from going out, except for seeking medical treatment and buying food at designated points.

In high-risk areas, all households are required not to go out for food purchase as the local government will supply necessities to each of them.

Ho Chi Minh City has spent 55 days implementing social distancing at various levels since May 31 but the Delta variant proves too stubborn, Mai said.

Infections have shown no signs of slowing down in Vietnam, with 7,525 locally-infected patients logged nationwide on Sunday after a record was set at 9,225 domestic infections on Saturday, according to the Ministry of Healths data.

Ho Chi Minh City accounted for 4,555 of the latest cases, followed by Binh Duong Province with 1,249 and Tay Ninh Province with 313.

Since the fourth COVID-19 wave began in Vietnam on April 27, Vietnam has registered 94,717 domestic cases in 62 out of its 63 provinces and cities. Ho Chi Minh City is on top with 60,425 patients, followed by Binh Duong Province with 8,010, Bac Giang Province with 5,735, Long An Province with 3,856, Dong Nai Province with 2,216, Dong Thap Province with 1,959, and Bac Ninh Province with 1,719.

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.

The health ministry reported 1,755 recoveries on Sunday, bringing the total to 19,342 recovered patients. The death toll remains at 370.

The nation has overall recorded 96,287 domestic and 2,178 imported cases since the COVID-19 pandemic first hit it on January 23, 2020.

More than 4.5 million vaccine shots have been administered to medical workers, teachers, factory workers, and other frontline staff since Vietnam rolled out inoculation on March 8.

About 372,000 people have been fully vaccinated.

The Vietnamese government expects to obtain 175 million shots of various vaccines, including 51 million Pfizer-BioNTech jabs, by early 2022.

It set a target of immunizing two-thirds of a population of nearly 98 million people against COVID-19 by the first quarter of next year.

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The Ho Chi Minh City administration will set out time frames for residents to go out during the one-week extension of the citys social distancing measures amid rising COVID-19 cases.

On Monday, authorities will issue a regulation on those who are allowed to work outside their homes, what they are permitted to do, and when they can travel outdoors, during the extension, Phan Van Mai, standing deputy secretary of the municipal Party Committee, said at a meeting held on Sunday on the COVID-19 fight.

For example, there may be a stipulation on what are prohibited in public places after 6:00 pm every day, Mai said.

On July 23, along with its decision to extend social distancing measures from Saturday until August 1, the municipal administration also decided to tighten restrictions.

Such restrictions will be applied along with other epidemic control rules under the prime ministers Directive 16, including a stay-home order, a ban on gatherings larger than two people, and the suspension of public transport.

Accordingly, locals are completely prohibited from going out, except for seeking medical treatment and buying food at designated points.

In high-risk areas, all households must not go out for food purchase as the local government will supply necessities to each of them.

People in quarantine facilities must strictly follow relevant regulations and must not leave their rooms or have direct contact with others, except for emergencies.

COVID-19 patients or their direct contacts who are placed in home quarantine must not leave their places, unless in emergencies, and local authorities will provide essential items directly to their home.

These social distancing measures must be strictly obeyed until August 1, but they may be applied for two weeks to ensure the efficiency of the steps taken so we can curb the virus spread, Mai said.

Ho Chi Minh City has spent 55 days implementing social distancing at various levels since May 31 but the Delta variant proves too stubborn, said the Party official.

He blamed residents for not strictly adhering to guidelines and government agencies for failing to closely monitor the measures taken.

Everything should be rectified or the situation will get worse, Mai warned, requesting that everybody and every agency strictly comply with epidemic prevention and control regulations.

By Sunday afternoon, Vietnam had confirmed 3,979 new coronavirus infections, of which 2,328 were detected in Ho Chi Minh City, the Ministry of Health reported.

The latest cases have taken the national caseload to 94,913 patients, including 17,583 recoveries, as recorded since early 2020.

Since April 27, when the pandemics fourth wave erupted in the country, the city has documented nearly 58,200 transmissions, accounting for 64 percent of the national tally of 91,165 cases.

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The U.S. government has delivered its second donation of over three million Moderna vaccine jabs to Vietnam, two weeks after the first shipment, amid rising COVID-19 cases in the Southeast Asian country.

Among this batch of 3,000,060 doses of Moderna vaccine, 1,499,960 shots were delivered to Ho Chi Minh City on Saturday and the rest arrived in Hanoi on Sunday morning, the Ministry of Health reported.

The U.S. has so far donated to Vietnam five million Moderna vaccine shots, with the first two million jabs delivered to the country on July 10.

The vaccine, developed by U.S.-based Moderna Inc., was approved by the World Health Organization for emergency use on April 30.

Such donations are part of the 80 million doses that the U.S. government has committed to gift 92 countries and territories, including Vietnam, to help curb the COVID-19 spread.

All the vaccine doses have been delivered through COVAX Facility, which is co-led by the World Health Organization (WHO), Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovations (CEPI), GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, and UNICEF as the key delivery partner.

To date, Vietnam has received 7,493,300 doses of COVID-19 vaccines in four shipments through the COVAX Facility, including 5,000,100 doses of Moderna vaccine from the U.S. government and 2,493,200 shots of AstraZeneca, UNICEF said in a press release.

According to research by American scientists, Moderna vaccine, also known as Spikevax, is highly effective against the highly contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus, which has currently dominant among infections in Vietnam, including Ho Chi Minh City.

Vietnam has also obtained vaccine donations from other countries, including nearly two million AstraZeneca doses from Japan, 1,000 Sputnik V shots from Russia, and 500,000 jabs of Sinopharm from China.

Australia has promised to provide Vietnam with AU$13.5 million (US$10 million) through the UNICEF for vaccine purchase, and with a donation of 1.5 million doses of AstraZeneca from now to the end of this year.

Vietnam has set a target of securing 150 million vaccine doses to vaccinate two-thirds of its population of about 98 million people by the first quarter of next year to reach herd immunity.

The nation has received about 14 million vaccine jabs from various sources, and nearly 4.6 million shots have been administered nationwide as of Sunday, the COVID-19 Vaccination Portal said.

The numbers of people getting the first and second doses had amounted to over 4.16 million and more than 372,000, respectively, by Sunday morning, said the health ministry.

The ministry confirmed 3,979 new coronavirus infections on Saturday morning, including 3,973 domestically-acquired and six imported cases, of which 2,328 were detected in Ho Chi Minh City.

The latest patients have taken Vietnams tally to 94,913, including 17,583 recoveries and 370 deaths, as recorded since early 2020.

Since April 27, when the pandemics fourth wave erupted in the country, 91,165 infections have been documented in 62 out of 63 provinces and cities.

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HANOI -- Vietnams health ministry reported 7,968 coronavirus infections on Saturday, a record daily increase and up from Fridays record of 7,307.

More than two-thirds of the cases are in Ho Chi Minh City, the ministry said in a statement.

After successfully containing the virus for much of the pandemic, the Southeast Asian country has been facing a renewed outbreak of the virus, with southern business hub Ho Chi Minh City and surrounding provinces accounting for most new infections.

The ministry on Friday said it would extend a lockdown in the city until Aug. 1 and impose stricter restriction measures in the capital Hanoi from Saturday.

The measures include a stay-home order, a ban on gatherings larger than two people and the suspension of public transport.

The capital city on Saturday also suspended motorbike delivery services, including by companies such as ride-hailing firms Grab and GoJek, adding to its existing restriction measures.

The National Assembly, the countrys lawmaking body, decided to cut short its meeting in Hanoi by three days to end on July 28, due to the outbreak.

Vietnam has so far recorded 90,934 coronavirus infections and at least 370 deaths.
At least 30 COVID-19 cases have been traced to a cluster at the funeral of a resident in Vinh Long Province, located in Vietnams Mekong Delta.

Van Cong Minh, director of the provincial Department of Health, told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper on Sunday morning that the funeral was organized in Tan Loc Commune, Tam Binh District.

The deceased person was an elderly woman who died of a chronic illness, Minh added.

The official stated that the number of infections related to this cluster may be higher as epidemiological investigation is still ongoing.

The report of Tan Loc Communes administration showed that the funeral was held from July 10 to 12, and the family had asked for permission from authorities.

Local officials required the family to limit the number of attendees to 30, and all people had to wear face masks, sanitize their hands, and keep a safe distance from each other.

Visitors to the funeral were relatives of the deceased woman and some neighbors.

Two of her grandchildren, who were among the attendees, underwent rapid COVID-19 tests at Xuyen A Hospital in Vinh Long on July 18, and the results came back positive.

Their real-time RT-PCR tests later returned the same results.

Twenty-eight of their direct contacts have also been confirmed positive for the pathogen.

Following the detection of the cluster, four hamlets with more than 5,400 people in Tan Loc have been locked down.

Local authorities have quarantined 20 direct contacts and 46 indirect contacts associated with this cluster.

Vietnam had documented 94,913 COVID-19 cases as of Sunday afternoon, with 17,583 recoveries and 370 deaths, according to the Ministry of Health.

The country has recorded 91,165 local infections in 62 out of its 63 provinces and cities since the fourth outbreak began on April 27.

Vinh Long has detected 586 cases in this bout.

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A decade ago when TV Tonight compared current affairs shows their stories ranged from pizza taste tests and car park fines to Christmas Island inquests and News Corp trouble in the UK.

10 years on, COVID-19 story dominate current editions of The Project, A Current Affair and 7:30.

But there are inherent differences in their approaches and presentation.

While The Project finds some levity in a COVID-thunk, 7:30 takes things very seriously indeed. On A Current Affair journos even reported pieces to camera wearing masks. All three had host interviews with talent. On ACA and 7:30 these were conducted by anchors, while on The Project it is a shared discussion. Epidemiologists were on Zoom interviews everywhere.in the background were everything from books to guitars and Yoda dolls. Random.

Both The Project & 7:30 now incorporate traditional place names on screen. ACA included re-enactments and had supplied drone content, while The Project had one sponsored segment and offered a daily counter on cases / vaccines.

7:30, hosted all week by Laura Tingle, also noted ABC had sought interviews with PM Scott Morrison on Wednesday & Thursday, but he wasnt available. Josh Frydenberg also did not answer questions for a story on Thursday.

The Project hit its 12th birthday, while A Current Affair paid tribute to its founding producer, John Cornell.

Lastly, while all three have different playouts (Project: Sun  Fri / ACA: Mon  Sat / 7:30: Mon  Thu) for the purposes of this comparison, shows were tracked from Monday  Friday.

Heres how the week panned out, with host interviews noted:

Monday

The Project

Waleed Aly, Carrie Bickmore, Pete Helliar, Vyom Sharma

News headlines.

The politics of COVID: Sarah Martin The Guardian chief political reporter.

News headlines incl latest Arts industry campaign.

International news.

News headlines.

Abandoning Our Allies: Stuart McCarthy, Afghanistan war veteran.

Delta Danger: Prof. Katherine Bennett, Deakin Uni.

News headlines.

Freedom Day (UK): Lucy McDonald UK correspondent.

A TikTok Tale.

A Current Affair

Tracy Grimshaw

NSW gym owner defies lockdown rules.

COVID interview: Prof. Peter Collignon.

Sydney apartment block adjacent to new lockdown hotel.

Good samaritans offering free food.

Coming Up promo: Families struggling with home schooling.

7:30

Laura Tingle

Audit of Urban Congestion Fund. St Kilda Car Park development: Paul Fletcher interview.

Melbourne lockdown extension.

Katie Hopkins deported.

NSW Labor ministers Eddie Obeid and Ian Macdonald found guilty: interview Kate McClymont.

Tuesday

The Project: 12th birthday

Carrie Bickmore, Peter Helliar, Steve Price, Georgie Tunny

Headlines.

Vaccinating Kids: Dr Andrew Miller, AMA WA spokesperson.

Headlines.

Chinas Cyber Activities: Prof. Rana Mitter, Oxford University.

Tassie Dads (Change Makers sponsored by Dell) narrated by Waleed Aly.

Australia vs Delta: Prof. Tony Blakely epidemiologist.

Work Life Balance and mental health: Mike Cannon-Brookes Atlassian CEO.

Headlines.

COVID Passcode vaccine passports.

Urzila Carlson: parenting tips.

A Current Affair

Tracy Grimshaw

Construction industry hit by NSW ban.

Parents grappling with home schooling: 5 x video diaries.

Abandoned Qld resorts Capricorn Resort and Laguna Keys (footage Luke Barnes, We Fish CQ, CStrac02, Drone Tech Media) / China Bloom Keswick Island update on foreign ownership.

Tokyo 2020: Aussie expats say the Games have divided Japan.

Coming Up promo: slave held captive.

7:30

Laura Tingle

Delta lockdown: Prof. Mary-Louise Mclaws UNSW epidemiologist, Juliette OBrien data journalist.

Aged care staff vaccination rates.

Former wallaby Quade Cooper rejected for citizenship.

China accused of hacking: Alastair MacGibbon Chief Strategy Officer, CyberCX.

Profile of Table tennis champion Melissa Tapper.

Wednesday

The Project

Waleed Aly, Carrie Bickmore, Peter Helliar, Rachel Corbett (Sydney)

Tokyo: Brisbane 2032 win.

Headlines.

International headlines.

Australian Survivor: Gavin Wanganeen.

Outbreak outlook: Dr. Norman Swan ABC coronacast co-host.

Brisbane Olympics economic impact.

State leaders discussion.

Viral Vednesday: Peter Helliar.

The Bachelor: Jimmy Nicholson.

A Current Affair

Deborah Knight

Should border hoppers be named and shamed?

Farmer Sam facing domestic violence charges.

Brisbane wins 2032 Olympics.

Maid kept as slave in Melbourne (re-enactment).

Coming up promo: Ugg boot maker fight with foreign company.

7:30

Laura Tingle

Has Scott Morrison taken responsibility?

Can the virus be brought under control in NSW? Interview: Jane Halton, Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness.

Medical Nightmare: patients detail surgery complications in Canberra.

Brisbane wins 2032 Olympics. interview: Tracey Holmes.

Thursday:

The Project

Carrie Bickmore, Peter Helliar, Jo Stanley, Lisa Wilkinson (Sydney)

Lockdown update.

Headlines.

Global headlines.

Headlines.

Customers Generous Tip: Kritika Sami, Brew & Bite.

Headlines.

Sydneys Covid Crisis: Bill Bowtell, UNSW Strategic Health Consultant.

Headlines.

Panel discussion an Anastasia Palazsac subjected to mansplaining by John Coates.

Headlines.

The Bachelor recap.

Power of Play, kids put tech aside in Woodridge Qld (Logan Together).

A Current Affair

Tracy Grimshaw

Parents of 4 year old with leukemia seeking exemption to attend hospital together

Older patients want Pfizer not AZ: Dr. Kean-Seng Lim, general practitioner

7 year old girl gives TED Talk (Minderoo Foundation)

Ugg Boot manufacturers battle with US corporate giant

Coming Up: Freebie incentives with vaccines

7:30

Laura Tingle

Scott Morrison says Sorry. Dr. Chris Moy AMA Vice President.

Turnover increased for some companies on Jobkeeper.

Performing arts industry left in limbo again.

Frontline workers need better PPE against infections.

Racism in sport: interview with former West Indies cricketer Michael Holding.

Friday:

The Project

Sydney: Lisa Wilkinson, Peter van Onselen, Susie Youssef, Rove McManus

Covid crisis / National Cabinet talks: Amy Remeikis, Guardian Australia.

Headlines.

International Headlines.

Jeff Bezos not an astronaut.

Comedian Daniel Connell has a new tour: Daniel Connell.

Headlines.

NSW Vaccine Pleas: Prof. Nancy Baxter, Uni. of Melbourne.

Headlines.

Teacher Burnout: Carrie Bickmore report.

Brisbane 2032 mascot the bin chicken?

Horse healers, animals helping mental health, The Healing documentary.

A Current Affair

Tracy Grimshaw

Not enough Pfizer vaccines.

Will parents have kids vaccinated? Zoom panel.

Vale John Cornell.

Questions over small business owner who received GoFundMe monies.

Coming Up promo: Truckie demands pit stop toilets.

Chris Bendall, Executive Producer, The Project:

What was your best story this week and why?

CB: The only story that matters this week is the same the country has faced every week for the past 18 months: Australias handling of COVID-19. The Projects commitment to viewers is to cover the pandemic from as broad a suite of angles as possible and this week was no exception. From topics of national significance like hotel quarantine and vaccination passports, to the struggles of small business owners and workers mental health  we ensured viewers had a comprehensive awareness of how the virus is impacting individuals, communities, and the country.

What is your point of difference from others in the genre?

CB: The Projects strength is its diversity. Diversity of opinion, diversity of voice and diversity of style. Every night we tackle a broader range of topics than any other current affairs show, and we do so with some of the countrys best journalists, commentators, and comedians. Viewers know when we cover a topic it will sit outside the box of conventional news programs, but it will be covered with integrity and humanity. They also know they can rely on us to bring humour and levity whenever possible. The Project also offers a truly national outlook. Broadcasting the show from both Sydney and Melbourne every week, ensures we arent pigeonholed to a single citys perspective.

Fiona Dear, Executive Producer, A Current Affair:

What was your best story this week and why?

FD: Best  what does that mean, highest rating, most colourful, most informative? For A Current Affair, a terrific story is when we can help someone. People come to us when they have lost hope or dont know where to go for help. This week we were approached by a family desperate for help; their daughter was diagnosed with cancer and due to COVID restrictions the family was separated, two children left in Orange in lockdown, one child airlifted to a Sydney hospital and the parents separated by COVID rules and unable to comfort their daughter and each other in hospital. COVID restrictions are no doubt tough, but sometimes one rule doesnt suit everyone. ACA approached NSW Health and the Health Minister, and by the end of the day both parents could be with their daughter as she came out of surgery. Perhaps this story made the rule makers think twice about the one-rule-fits-all scenario. Thats ACA in a nutshell  helping people, and thats the best story we can do.

What is your point of difference from others in the genre?

FD: Simple, Tracy Grimshaw, she is the best in the business. Tracy asks the questions the viewers want answered. She doesnt yell, she doesnt scream, shes respectful, she thoroughly researches her topics and her aim is to get the answers the viewers want. We never take our audience for granted and always strive to make the next story even better.

Justin Stevens, Executive Producer 7.30:

What was your best story this week and why?

JS: I wont nominate a best story because the philosophy driving our team is that every item is as important as the other  no matter the story or where its placed in the rundown, they all play an important role.Were proud of the work the whole team does, in front of and behind the camera, because every team member has an important role in doing the best for our audience.At the moment the COVID pandemic is obviously a critically important story for us to tell and to help make sense of for the public, including scrutinising and interrogating the decisions being taken by our leaders on our behalf. The team does a remarkable job day after day to perform that crucial role in an original, authoritative and informative way.

What is your point of difference from others in the genre?

JS: We have a great deal of respect for the other current affairs teams inside and outside the ABC. We all have a similar ambition to land strong original stories that set the agenda, tell them in a compelling way and take them beyond what people have already heard in their daily news. The stronger current affairs programs are across the board, the better off the public is. As all ABC programs do, we set the editorial bar extremely high for being fair and accurate in the way we do our journalism. Our ongoing objectives are in line with the rich history of the program: to do accurate, hard-hitting public interest journalism, including breaking original investigations; to keep our focus on political interviews and analysis; to secure the newsmakers for their major interviews  for example, Christine Holgate and Julia Banks; to keep agile to the days news events and seek to move the story along; and to maintain our high production values.

And finally, outside of COVID related stories, in my opinion the best story of the week was an 18 min. 7:30 report by Anne Connolly. Medical Nightmare heard from three women whose operations were performed by the same doctor at some of Canberras public & private hospitals. This was confronting stuff and drew upon investigative skills. Its not easy digging this deep into journalism in daily current affairs.

You can watch that here.
Covid-19

centerpiece

Smith County health authority: 'We need to increase our guard' as COVID-19 diagnoses rise in East Texas

Zak Wellerman/ Tyler Morning Telegraph Daphne Warren, of Larue, receives a COVID-19 vaccine at St. Louis Baptist Church in Tyler on March 16. Smith County Health Authority Michael Cavazos Sharon Bolls receives a COVID-19 vaccine from Logan Ledkins of the Longview Fire Department, on Saturday January 30, 2021, during a vaccine clinic at the Longview Exhibit Center. (Michael Cavazos/ News-Journal Photo)

Doubling hospitalizations and a more contagious variant of COVID-19 are reasons Smith County residents should increase their guard, even if they are vaccinated, Smith County Health Authority Dr. Paul McGaha said regarding rising area coronavirus diagnoses.

As of July 19, there have been 2,267 confirmed and probable cases and there have been 300 virus-related deaths in Smith County.

(COVID-19 case numbers have) remained low since the spring and into the summer, but we are seeing an uptick in cases and hospitalizations over the last two to three weeks, McGaha said.

According to the Northeast Texas Public Health District, the number of new COVID-19 cases within the seven counties covered by the NET Health Disease Surveillance Division has increased in recent weeks.

The seven counties NET Health serves include Smith, Gregg, Henderson, Van Zandt, Rains, Wood and Anderson.

Additionally, the number of East Texas patients receiving treatment for COVID-19 in Tyler hospitals nearly doubled from 45 on July 8 to 85 on July 15.

Both Christus and UT Health hospital systems have reported increased hospitalizations, at least doubling within the last two to three weeks, McGaha said.

Thats cause for concern and the primary reason we believe this is happening is because of the Delta variant, he said.

The seven-day rolling rate of infection in Smith County shows the community spread level is considered moderate at this time. The seven-day rolling rate is the average number of all positive cases from the previous seven days divided by the population of the county and then multiplied by 100,000.

According to NET Health, moderate community spread levels are defined as sustained transmission with confirmed exposure within congregate settings and potential for rapid increase in cases and begin when the county begins to see more than 10 cases per 100,000 persons over seven days.

In the case that Smith County begins to see 35 cases per a seven-day rolling rate, community spread levels could move into the substantial spread, also known as large-scale, uncontrolled community transmission.

McGaha said the Delta variant is a mutation of the COVID-19 coronavirus. Per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the variant is now causing 83% of the cases in the United States.

Do we have precise, laboratory evidence that it is in East Texas? No, because that process takes a while to sequence the genome of the virus, but we are sure that its here if its a predominant variant in the United States, McGaha said.

McGaha said the Delta variant is more contagious than the original form of the virus, and it can cause more severe illness than the original virus.

The good news is that the vaccine offers good protection against the Delta variant, especially related to serious illness and hospitalizations, McGaha said.

When vaccination rates in counties are less than 30%, McGaha said cases can rise and can rise rapidly.

Smith Countys vaccination rates

According to the Texas State Department of Health Services, 39% of people over the age of 12 in Smith County are fully vaccinated and 71% of individuals over 65 are fully vaccinated.

With Smith County just above the 30% recommended vaccination rate per county, McGaha said he doesnt foresee a high number of individuals on ventilators like in January. He added the virus can cause significant and serious illness in those who are unvaccinated.

Were seeing that in the East Texas area and Smith County, he said.

The average age for COVID-19 cases is shifting downward, McGaha added, noting the vaccination rates among the age groups.

Thats a decent number, but we would definitely like to see that go up, he said. In rural areas, McGaha added vaccination rates may be lower.

The key takeaway message is one, we have the Delta variant in our area that is more contagious and can cause more serious illness. And importantly, two, we have a very effective vaccine thats readily available in health departments, pharmacies, hospitals, other venues, where people can receive it, McGaha said. If they take that vaccine, it can definitely prevent severe illness, hospitalization, and death.

Why are we spiking in cases now?

Thats cause for concern and the primary reason we believe this is happening is because of the Delta variant, McGaha said.

President Joe Bidens vaccination plan was to distribute millions of vaccines around the country and have 70% of the country fully vaccinated. The U.S. fell short of Bidens goal with 67% of the population fully vaccinated.

The CDC director said this is primarily a pandemic of the unvaccinated, and certainly, those who are unvaccinated, and with the increase in the Delta variant, need to be careful, McGaha said.

McGaha recommended those unvaccinated individuals should consider wearing a mask or avoiding situations of being in enclosed, confined quarters with other unvaccinated persons.

Wherever a person who is unvaccinated goes where they can mingle and mix with other unvaccinated people who may be carrying the Delta virus, they are susceptible to infection, McGaha said.

He also added we can expect to see breakthrough cases, also known as people who are fully vaccinated, and will still test positive for COVID-19.

The good thing about that is the disease is usually much, much milder and will not result in severe illness or hospitalization, McGaha said, adding that people need to increase their guard, even if we are vaccinated.

Although NET Health has closed its vaccination hub since June, McGaha said the vaccine is still widely available at local pharmacies, clinics and health departments.

He said mask mandates are not possible in Texas per Gov. Greg Abbotts mandate blocking that.

If we see an identified area where we can provide a focus, targeted vaccination effort, well proceed with that, and NET Health is doing that now in several areas, McGaha said, adding that the vaccination supply has improved compared to past months.

McGaha said Missouri and Arkansas are two states that are currently seeing the most cases in the Delta variant.

We border Arkansas, so we will need to remain vigilant in monitoring the cases, he said.

Vaccine myths and vaccine hesitancy

McGaha said data since vaccinations began back in December point toward vaccine effectiveness and safety.

I think its resoundingly positive. I understand some people dont think its been tested enough or are monitoring unreliable sources that state theres unusual side effects from the vaccine, he said. But in our scientific opinion, its a very safe and effective vaccine and side effects are very rare if you look at the big picture.

The COVID-19 vaccines do not give you COVID-19, and the vaccines dont alter a persons DNA as they dont enter the nucleus of the cell, McGaha said. He added the vaccine serves as a blueprint for protection via the immune response, and the vaccine does not contain microchips or any other questionable substances heard from time to time.

McGaha also noted that the CDC has reported the life expectancy has fallen by a year and a half since the COVID-19 pandemic. Life expectancy is now 77.3 years, the lowest its been since 2003.

Its a strong consideration to go ahead and receive that vaccine, he said.

Christus Health continues to schedule vaccines through its website at vaccinate.christushealth.org.

NET Health offers vaccines at its clinic, located at 815 N. Broadway Ave., by appointment. To make an appointment, visit NETHealthCOVID19.org.

Vaccines can also be scheduled using the National Vaccine Finder at vaccines.gov or at the Texas Public Health Vaccine Scheduler at getthevaccine.dshs.texas.gov/.
"Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says."
(Getty Images)

Lizzie Deignans hopes of third time lucky at an Olympics were dashed as Austrias Anna Kiesenhofer won a surprise gold as part of a five-woman breakaway that dominated the race.

But in a bizarre finish, silver medallist Annemiek van Vleuten thought she had won the gold while Deignan also later admitted the chasing pack didnt realise there was another rider up the road.

Kiesenhofer, who has a maths PhD from Cambridge University, attacked almost from the offset and was allowed to go well clear by the leading favourites, among them Deignan and a star-studded Dutch including the past two Olympic champions in Marianne Vos and Anne van der Breggen.

That leading group was whittled down to just three, including Israels Omer Shapira and Anna Plichta, of Poland, but the latter duo were caught just a few kilometres from the line.

After breaking clear to finish second, Dutch rider van Vleuten raised her arms aloft as though she had won the gold, unaware that Kiesenhofer had already crossed the line some way ahead of here.

From about 10kilometres out, it had become abundantly clear that the longtime leader was not going to get reeled in as the main group of favourites failed to put together a cohesive chase at Fuji International Speedway until late on.

For Deignan, it was another sour end to her Olympics. At London 2012, she was denied gold by Vos coming down The Mall, while her build-up to the 2016 race was overshadowed by controversy where she faced a potential ban for three whereabouts failures with anti-doping officials.

She was later cleared of any wrongdoing but went on to finish outside the medals, as she did again in Tokyo, a race that could yet prove her Olympic swansong.

For 30-year-old Kiesenhofer, who was never talked about as a potential favourite and does not even have a professional contract with a team in the sport, it proved comfortably the biggest win of her career.

Van Vleuten launched a late attack to take a silver she initially thought was gold with the bronze going to Elisa Longo Borghini.

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National University Hospital at Lower Kent Ridge Road. (Yahoo News Singapore file photo)

SINGAPORE  An 83-year-old Singaporean woman died of COVID-19 infection on Saturday (24 July), the Ministry of Health (MOH) said in its daily COVID-19 report.

The woman, who had a history of hypertension and high cholesterol, was linked to the 121 Bukit Merah View cluster, which has 94 cases to date.

The resident of Bukit Merah View developed symptoms on 16 June but did not seek medical attention until she was conveyed to National University Hospital on 18 June. She had not been vaccinated against COVID-19.

In total, 37 individuals have died of COVID-19 infection in Singapore.

On the same day, MOH reported 130 new cases of COVID-19 infection in Singapore, taking the country's total case count to 64,054.

There are 127 new locally transmitted infections within the community, of which 75 are linked to the Jurong Fishery Port Cluster while five are linked to the KTV cluster.

Stay in the know on-the-go: Join Yahoo Singapore's Telegram channel at http://t.me/YahooSingapore

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The women's double sculls advanced to the final, while the women's single sculls, women's pair and lightweight women's double sculls advanced to the semifinals, highlighting Sunday's racing at the Sea Forest Waterway at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020.In the women's double sculls, three-time Olympian Gevvie Stone (Newton, Mass/Princeton University) and Kristi Wagner (Weston, Mass./Yale University) will get a chance to race for the medals on Wednesday thanks to a third-place finish in today's semifinals. With three to advance, Stone and Wagner got off the line in sixth position but were able to close the gap by the midway point of the race. In the third 500 meters, the U.S. duo moved into a qualifying position and tried to close the gap on the two leading crews."I think one thing that we did improve on from our heat to today was the second 250," Wagner said. "I think we lost a lot in that, especially to New Zealand in the heat, and I think today we started moving a little bit sooner. It still wasn't quite as much as we wanted, but we came into the middle 1,000 in a little bit of a better spot than Friday."The Netherlands and Canada battled each other at the head of the field, with the Dutch boat taking an early lead before the Canadians held the top spot through the middle 1,000 meters. In the final sprint, The Netherlands was able to chase down Canada to earn the victory. The Dutch crew won the race with a time of 7:08.09, followed by Canada in a 7:09.44. The U.S finished with a time of 7:11.14."You have to place top three to race for the medals," Stone said. "We did that. That is the first priority. One of the guys I row with wrote us an email and said the semifinal is like the Wednesday of the work week. It's kind of true. It's really hard, and it's not the most fun race. But, we have to get through it to get to the fun part. We went out there, and we knew that we had to be tough in the headwind and that's exactly where we were. It wasn't the prettiest of starts, but we were tough through that base rhythm and enjoyed every gust of headwind we got."Stone and Wagner will take on The Netherlands, Lithuania, Canada, Romania and New Zealand in the final.In the women's single sculls, two-time Olympian Kara Kohler (Clayton, Calif./University of California, Berkeley) finished second in her quarterfinal to advance to Thursday's semifinals. With three to advance, Kohler took the lead over Serbia's Jovana Arsic in the opening quarter of the race, with Ireland's Sanita Puspure sitting in third and China's Yan Jiang in fourth. Kohler continued to lead by just about a second as the scullers hit the midway point of the race, with Jiang moving into second and Puspure holding the third position. The defending world champion from Ireland began to close the gap on Kohler during the third quarter of the race, pulling up nearly even with just 500 meters to go. Puspure was able to maintain that momentum over the final stretch to claim the victory in a 7:58.30. Kohler finished just over a second behind in a 7:59.39, with Jiang taking the final qualification spot in an 8:00.01."I was certainly very nervous," Kohler said. "I'll probably be very nervous for every race here, but my plan was to race for the full 2k and see how that went, so that's what I did. I don't know what they're doing (in terms of rating.) I'm just sensing them on the course. I didn't know that Sanita was rating higher. I guess I could've assumed that considering I was rating pretty low. That's something I want to improve on for the next race."Kohler will take on scullers from Iran, Austria, New Zealand, Canada and Great Britain in the second of two semifinals on Thursday.Racing in the first of two repechages of the lightweight women's double sculls, the U.S. duo of Michelle Sechser (Folsom, Calif./University of Tulsa) and Molly Reckford (Short Hills, N.J./Dartmouth College) dominated their race, winning by nearly six seconds to advance to Wednesday's semifinals. With three to advance, the U.S. took an early lead on Japan in the first 500 meters and then made a strong move to pull away from the field in the second 500 meters. Sechser and Reckford extended their lead to more than two lengths of open water with 500 meters to go and cruised to the easy victory. The U.S. finished with a time of 7:21.25, with Belarus crossing in a 7:26.99. Japan took the third qualifying spot in a 7:34.45."We knew that (it was) not ideal to be in the rep," Sechser said. "While we were confident that we (would be) able to show up and get the job done in the race this morning, there's still a lot on the line. One more mistake or not getting the right rhythm or clipping the buoys they have on the course could end the dream for us a lot sooner than expected  Getting a second run down the track for Molly and I is still a really good thing. This still is a new crew. We haven't put together an international campaign yet, so staying really positive about what we can learn each trip down the course is really going to help us."Sechser and Reckford will take on Russia, Canada, Romania, Italy and Japan in the second of two semifinals on Wednesday.In the women's pair, the U.S. duo of Megan Kalmoe (St. Croix Falls, Wis./University of Washington) and Tracy Eisser (Fair Lawn, N.J./Cornell University) finished second in their repechage to advance to the semifinals. With three to advance, Kalmoe and Eisser got off the line in fourth position before moving into third place in the second 500 meters. Ireland held a slight lead at the 500-meter mark before Greece moved into the top spot. The U.S. boat overtook Ireland just after the midway point, closing the gap on the leaders, but Greece was able to withstand the challenge over the final 500 meters to claim the victory. Greece clocked a 7:28.00 to finish 1.87 seconds ahead of the U.S., which clocked a 7:29.87.Kalmoe and Eisser will take on Italy, Romania, New Zealand, Russia and Spain in the second of two semifinals on Wednesday.The women's four of Grace Luczak (Ann Arbor, Mich./Stanford University), Kendall Chase (Evergreen, Colo./University of California, Berkeley), Claire Collins (McLean, Va./Princeton University) and Madeleine Wanamaker (Neenah, Wis./University of Wisconsin) finished fifth in their repechage and now will race in the B final for places 7-10. With two to advance to the final, the U.S. boat got off the line in third position behind Poland and Great Britain. During the second quarter of the race, the British crew took the lead, with the Polish crew in second and Romania moving into third. The Romanians tried to chase down the leading crews over the back half of the race, but Great Britain and Poland were able to hold on to advance to the final. Great Britain finished with a time of 6:46.20, with Poland crossing in a 6:46.57. Romania finished third, less than a second behind. The U.S. finished with a time of 6:53.26 and will take on Romania, Canada and Denmark in the B final.The women's quadruple sculls crew of Ellen Tomek (Flushing, Mich./University of Michigan), Meghan O'Leary (Baton Rouge, La./University of Virginia), Alie Rusher (West Bend, Wis./Stanford University), and Cicely Madden (Weston, Mass./Brown University) finished sixth in their repechage and also will race in the B final for places 7-10. Australia led a tight, four-way race, through the midway point before Italy pulled ahead in the third 500 meters. However, the Australian crew was able to respond and retook the lead in the final 250 meters, winning the race in a 6:36.67. Italy took the second spot to also qualify for the final, finishing less than a second behind Australia. The U.S. finished with a time of 6:50.74 and will race New Zealand, Great Britain, and France in the B final.Racing will resume on Wednesday at 8:10 a.m. local time (7:10 p.m. EDT on Tuesday). Racing originally scheduled for Monday was pushed up to today due to incoming weather. Tuesday's racing also has been postponed. Tuesday's originally scheduled medal races for the men's and women's quadruple sculls have been moved to Wednesday, while the semifinals in the men's and women's pairs and lightweight double sculls also have been moved to Wednesday. The semifinals in the men's and women's single sculls have been moved from Wednesday to Thursday. Click here for the most up-to-date schedule on the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 website.The U.S. will have seven crews racing on Wednesday. The women's double sculls and men's four will be racing for medals, while the lightweight women's double sculls and women's pair will be racing in semifinals. The men's eight will be racing in the repechage, while the women's four and women's quadruple sculls will be racing in B finals.NBC's broadcast schedule and links to NBC's live streaming are available on USRowing's Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 coverage page , and click here for USRowing's Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 coverage page for athlete bios, articles, photos and more.
Provided that the coronavirus cabinets decision is approved by the full government, starting next Friday (July 30), the UK, Turkey, Cyprus and Georgia will be added to the list of countries officially labeled as a destination with highest COVID-19 risk, sometimes also described as red and effectively under a travel ban. As The Jerusalem Post reports, Israelis are prohibited from visiting those countries unless they obtain permission from the governmental Exceptions Committee. How does Israel determine which nations to place into this category, as well as the ones classified as a destination with COVID-19 travel warning (orange) or a destination with COVID-19 travel notice (yellow)?

The health authorities look at both the number of cases registered locally and the number of virus carriers entering Israel from that country. A country is considered to be at highest risk when within 30 days, either at least 50 travelers returning from it test positive for coronavirus, or more than 10 do, but the rate is higher than 0.5% of the total number of travelers entering Israel from that nation.

Alternatively, a country can be considered to be at highest risk in light of its high level of morbidity, measured using the epidemiological models developed by Imperial College London and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

As of last Friday, that list included Argentina, Belarus, Brazil, India, Kyrgyzstan, Mexico, Russia, Spain, South Africa and Uzbekistan.

A destination with COVID-19 travel warning does not yet meet the criteria to be placed under a travel ban, but it is predicted to do so within two weeks.

As of last Friday, that list included Cambodia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Fiji, Georgia, Great Britain, Guatemala, Honduras, Kenya, Liberia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Namibia, Panama, Paraguay, Seychelles, Turkey, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Travelers who enter Israel from those countries are required to self-isolate even if they are vaccinated or recovered.

Countries that are classified as a destination with COVID-19 travel notice have more than 500 new cases per million residents, or their ratio of positive cases per total travelers entering Israel is higher than 0.3%, or they have other indicators that suggest that notice.

As of last Friday, that list included Angola, Armenia, Bahamas, Bahrain, Belize, Bolivia, Botswana, Central African Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Eritrea, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Dominican Republic, Guinea, Greece, Holland, Jordan, Lesotho, Malawi, Maldives, Morocco, Mozambique, Nepal, Peru, Philippines, Portugal, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Currently, that classification does not bear any practical consequence. But it is meant to warn people who are planning on traveling to those countries that the situation might deteriorate. In general, the Health Ministry is recommending that all Israelis avoid nonessential travel abroad.
The China-Europe Railway Express, which runs across the Eurasian continent, has experienced considerable progress during the past 10 years, and will continue to see strong momentum in the future, said a Turkish official. Turkey's ambassador to China, Abdulkadir Emin Onen, said the China-Europe Railway Express marks a significant phase in Eurasian rail transport development. "The railway connection between the two continents became even more vital in the pandemic era when the freight trains played a crucial role in stabilizing the international logistics supply chain, due to limited air and maritime transport options," Onen said, China Daily reports.

"As part of the Belt and Road Initiative, which Turkey has supported from the beginning, this route has experienced remarkable progress over the past 10 years and will continue to develop."

Data from China State Railway Group Co Ltd showed about 7,377 freight trains of the China-Europe Railway Express operated in the first half, up 43 percent year-on-year.

In the January-June period, about 707,000 twenty-foot equivalent units of containers were delivered, up 52 percent on a yearly basis.

Since the first China-Europe freight train departed from Chongqing in March 2011, the China-Europe freight train service has recorded more than 40,000 trips, reaching more than 160 cities in 22 European countries. And transported goods were valued at over $200 billion, said the group.

According to Onen, the China-Europe Railway Express has also benefited from Turkey's ongoing construction and improvement of railways, facilities and services.

The initiation of direct freight train services between Turkey and China in December 2020 is the most recent and substantial example of such development. The train follows the Trans-Caspian East-West-Middle Corridor via the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway. Its route covers almost 8,700 kilometers, passing through two continents, two seas, five countries and forwarding its freight from Istanbul to Xi'an in less than two weeks.

More trains followed the first one in recent months and there are plans to make a regular and more frequent schedule of freight trains between Turkey and China, he said.

"The shift of economic gravity toward the East generates a continuous growth in the transport of goods between Asia and Europe. The pandemic did not alter this trend; it has even strengthened it," Onen said.

Official data showed bilateral trade between Turkey and China reached $26 billion in 2020 despite the coronavirus impact, marking one of the highest figures for any bilateral commerce between European and Asian countries.

Moreover, Onen said ongoing commercial, financial and investment contacts between Turkey and China suggest that it is very possible to surpass $50 billion in the coming years.

He said further use of the railway connection between Turkey and China will accelerate economic activities across Eurasia and this in turn will be beneficial for the two sides' bilateral economic relations.

"Turkish and Chinese products will be more easily delivered via the freight trains," Onen said. "Highly qualified Turkish brands and products, which are well sought-after in many parts of the world, will become more available in the vast Chinese market. Particularly, they will be integrated into e-commerce platforms in China. We therefore encourage Turkish and Chinese businesspeople to make better use of Turkey-China freight trains, which opened up as a new commercial gateway between the two countries."

Turkey, thanks to its unique geographical location, historically played a significant role in connecting Europe and Asia. This is manifested by the well-known Silk Road, and other cross-regional trade routes such as the Spice Road. Turkey's strategic position at the intersection of Europe, Asia and the Middle East still paves the way for its role as the regional transportation hub, which has gained noticeable momentum in recent years.

Onen said massive infrastructure projects in Turkey, including high-speed railways, have greatly contributed to achieving Eurasian connectivity.

For instance, Turkey is constructing the Edirne-Kars High Speed Network, which will enable faster and cheaper transport between China, and Central Asia and Europe.

"There is now a special focus on transforming high-speed railways in the country, with the goal of constructing an additional 5,500 km of high-speed railway and rapid lines by 2023. With the aim of taking advantage of the railways in carrying goods and products as well, various logistics centers are being constructed across the country," Onen said.

Turkey has been one of the earliest supporters of the BRI. In 2015, Turkey and China signed a memorandum of understanding on aligning the Belt and Road Initiative and the Middle Corridor Initiative.

According to Onen, the two nations have similar outlooks for deepening regional economic cooperation on the vast Eurasian landmass via transport corridors, and relevant Turkish and Chinese authorities are planning a high-level meeting soon on this topic.

"The rapid global transformation is marked by the rise of the Asian continent and the connectivity projects. The deepening Turkish-Chinese cooperation in transportation and logistics sectors will surely result in more prosperity and stability across Eurasia," he added. "The recent initiation of direct freight trains between Turkey and China was one of the most successful examples of this cooperation. Broader opportunities of collaboration lie in front of us as long as we continue to galvanize our joint efforts," he added.
The United States views upcoming high-level meetings between American and Chinese diplomats as an opportunity to prevent growing bilateral tensions devolving into misunderstandings and even conflict, senior US officials said on Saturday, SCMP reports.

Following visits to allies in East Asia, US deputy secretary of state Wendy Sherman will arrive in Tianjin on Sunday for talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and foreign vice-minister Xie Feng.

Officials in the administration of US President Joe Biden are casting the meetings not as an opportunity to haggle over specific points of friction, but to set broad parameters for the relationship at large.
Iran on Saturday dismissed as meddling in its internal affairs criticism by the United Nations' human rights boss of the shooting deaths of protesters during demonstrations over water shortages, Reuters reports.

Meanwhile, rallies in support of the protests in the southwestern province of Khuzestan spread to the northwest of the country on Saturday, according to videos posted on social media.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet on Friday expressed concern about deaths and injuries and widespread detentions over the past week in oil-rich Khuzestan.

Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said in a statement carried by Iranian media that Bachelet's "interventionist" and "non-expert and biased comments on the management of the country's water resources were not within the scope of commissioner's responsibilities".

In addition to the drought, Khatibzadeh said U.S. sanctions had "prevented the transfer of technology to and investment in Khuzestan's water sector".
Two Turkish soldiers have been killed and two wounded in an attack on their armoured vehicle in northern Syria, Turkeys defence ministry said on Saturday, Al Jazeera reported.

The ministry said Turkish forces immediately launched retaliatory fire.

Our punitive fire against terrorist positions is continuing, a statement shared on Twitter said.

It said the attack was in the region where Turkey launched a cross-border operation, Euphrates Shield, in 2016 to drive away ISIL (ISIS) fighters and the Syrian Kurdish Peoples Protection Units (YPG).

Media reports said the attack was in the al-Bab area.
Vietnams history before the Doi Moi (renovation) period has proven that many experiments and reforms appeared from the grassroots, and now, during the Covid-19 epidemic, experiments and reforms have begun from Ho Chi Minh City.

People gather in front of a hospital in Ho Chi Minh City waiting for a rapid test. Photo: Thanh Tung/VietNamNet

Quarantine at home

Vietnam's anti-epidemic motto has long been "early detection, tracing, isolation, zoning and effective treatment", recently added with "5K + vaccine" (5k = Khau trang (facemask)- Khu khuan (disinfection) - Khoang cach (distance) - Khong tu tap (no gathering)  Khai bao y te (health declaration).

Accordingly, F0 cases (Covid-19 patients) and F1 cases (those who have contacts with F0) will be screened and be sent to concentrated quarantine centers to prevent the disease from spreading to the community.

However, this strategy has been inappropriate to the new situation when the number of cases has rocketed along with the appearance of the Delta variant.

The local media recently reported that Nha Be district, Ho Chi Minh City was the first place that allowed four F1 cases of a family in Nhon Duc commune to quarantine themselves at home.

Ms. Le Thi Anh Thu, Vice Chair of Nha Be District, was quoted as saying that at that time the local authorities did not have a policy to allow F1 to be under home quarantine. However, one of the F1 cases, an old man who suffered a stroke, was weak and he needed someone to take care of him, so Nha Be district made the decision. After 21 days of self-quarantine at home, the four F1 cases tested negative to nCoV and the family recently returned to a normal life.

Concentrated quarantine centers in HCM City have been overloaded in recent days. Doctors, nurses and logistics staff have been very tired because of the increasing number of F0 and F1 cases. Cross-infection inside these sites has occurred.

On July 17, HCM City Chairman Nguyen Thanh Phong said that in just one day, the Center for Disease Control of Ho Chi Minh City recorded more than 2,800 infection cases, most of them inside quarantine centers and locked down areas, accounting for more than 81.34% of the total new cases on the day.

HCM City proposed piloting home quarantine for F0 and F1 cases and it was cautiously given the green light by the Ministry of Health.

On July 21, Chairman Phong signed a document allowing newly detected cases who show no clinical symptoms, with RT-PCR test results showing a low viral load, and who meet other conditions should be considered for home quarantine, in parallel with maintaining concentrated isolation sites for F0s.

Deputy Health Minister Nguyen Truong Son explained the new move: This model (early detection, tracing, isolation, zoning and effective treatment) has been very successful in the previous waves of epidemic, and in some provinces when the number of cases was relatively small. But now when the epidemic is exploding like fireflies everywhere, for example Ho Chi Minh City with 21,000 cases of F0 cases but only 42,000 F1 cases, it is not completely suitable."

Son hopes that with new changes in strategy such as reducing the quarantine time for F0 and F1 cases and allowing home quarantine, the pressure on the healthcare system and quarantine centers will be relieved.

To date, allowing F0 and F1 cases to be quarantined at home is still controversial. It is hoped that experience will be learned soon from Ho Chi Minh City.

Supply chain disruption

People queue in front of a supermarket in Ho Chi Minh City. Photo: VietNamNet

When Ho Chi Minh City imposed strict social distancing rules to fight the epidemic, wholesale markets and two-thirds of wet markets were closed. Most grocery stores were also shut down because there was little or no supply of goods and they were not selling essential goods.

The supply chain through wholesale markets, wet markets, and family stores, which played a particularly important role in Ho Chi Minh City has been broken.

The burden of food supply rests on supermarkets and convenience stores.

Meanwhile, supermarkets can only serve 30% of food needs. Some supermarkets have set up mobile stalls to sell food on the sidewalk. In this situation, Saigonese had to buy food at closed supermarkets, where the risk of infection is high. The city authorities, meanwhile, could not explain why supermarkets were allowed to sell goods on the sidewalk while the people could not.

People started to buy and hoard food, causing shortages, which led to an increase in prices, which urged people to hoard more goods.

Thus, the internal supply chain has broken.

It is similar outside.

A truck driver who transported food from a southwest province to Ho Chi Minh City said that after he delivered the food to employees of the People's Committee of a ward in HCM City, he returned home and was required to be quarantined for 21 days in accordance with the Ministry of Healths regulations. He had to choose an alternative option: asking his family to deliver food to him and eating on the truck so that he could do several more trips without being interrupted for 21 days after each trip. In that situation, who dares to drive to transport goods to the city?

The regulations that Ho Chi Minh City residents traveling to other provinces must be quarantined has contributed to a serious shortage of goods, especially food, although the surrounding resources of goods and food are abundant.

Moreover, Ho Chi Minh City is both a place of goods consumption and a place to supply goods to many regions in the country. If the city is isolated, the supply chain between the city and other locations is disrupted, affecting the lives of residents.

More importantly, a large number of workers have to stay at home. Associated with them are their relatives, including the elderly and children.

This situation, if prolonged, will seriously affect people's lives, disrupt social security, and may lead to social instability and seriously threaten the foundation of economic development.

Ho Chi Minh City has the lowest percentage of people living on the state budget, perhaps the lowest in the country. Ho Chi Minh City is also a city of over 10 million people, including migrants, which is the size of a large city by world standards  so it is impossible to apply the same measures as with a small city.

It is hoped that the inadequacies in anti-epidemic measures in Ho Chi Minh City will be solved.

Tu Giang  Vu Minh

New Covid-19 situation, new behavior In the new situation, social distancing may cover almost the whole country, affecting tens of millions of people and hundreds of thousands of businesses, and the supply chain of the whole country or at least a large economic area will be broken.
In the world today, there is no rice variety that reaches all 545 quality criteria like Quang Tri organic rice. Two compounds found in this variety are considered highly valuable.

One day in early summer 2019, holding in his hands the test results of an organic rice variety grown in the central province of Quang Tri, Associate Professor Tran Dang Xuan, head of Laboratory of Plant Physiology and Biochemistry at Japans Hiroshima University, was very surprised.

A month before, when receiving a bag of rice from Dai Nam Company, which had worked with farmers in Quang Tri to test an organic rice variety, Xuan had thought that Quang Tri was heavily affected in the war and local farmers had used too much pesticides and chemical fertilizers, so it could not produce organic rice.

He was surprised to see the test results. The dead field in the land that was heavily contaminated with dioxin in the war had been miraculously revived.

The organic rice variety produced from this field was not only organic but super organic, as it met all 545 quality criteria.

Furthermore, two compounds Momilactone A and Momilactone B (MA and MB) found in this rice variety are effective in fighting diabetes, obesity, and gout.

We are conducting further research on many valuable characteristics of these two compounds, which have been published in many international biological journals. These compounds are found in the organic rice from Quang Tri, Xuan said, adding that these two compounds are 30,000 times more precious and expensive than gold.

Eating a certain amount of this rice daily can help reduce the risk of getting these diseases. This conclusion changes the conventional thought that eating rice increases the risk of having diabetes.

According to Xuan, these compounds have also been found in Japanese rice, but Quang Tri organic rice has much higher concentrations. Based on the analysis, he said that the rice is very organic. He said Vietnam should encourage the development of the business-farmer model to create high-value rice products and strengthen Vietnam's rice position in the world.

The founder of the Quang Tri organic rice production chain model, Tran Ngoc Nam - General Director of Dai Nam Production and Trading Co., Ltd.  told VietNamNet that the day he decided to develop this model in Quang Tri, his friends and family all told him to not invest in this project. They said that field was a dead and infertile land, which was unsuitable to grow rice, let alone organic rice.

Nam has proven that they are all wrong. So far, local farmers have harvested five crops of organic rice, with increasing output and earnings.

Nam has cooperated with farmers in many provinces to produce organic coffee, organic pepper, organic fruit... but Quang Tri was the place with the most unfavorable conditions.

After a period of struggling, I decided to try to do something to change this land. I accepted the Quang Tri officials invitation to bring the technology I had studied for decades to this land to help local farmers change their lives," said Nam.

In recent years, in many large granaries across the country, farmers have not planted rice and turned to fruit trees for higher profit. So it is difficult for Quang Tri authorities to persuade farmers to grow rice, said Ha Sy Dong, Vice Chairman of Quang Tri Provincial People's Committee.

After five successful crops, local farmers are now very eager to plant organic rice.

The area of organic rice in Quang Tri has increased to 158,224 hectares. The organic rice farming model has been implemented in 11 cooperatives in five districts and towns. The dead fields have been revived. Farmers can make a profit of up to 40 million VND per hectare, plus income from selling fish caught in the field.

"In the past, earnings from rice farming were just enough to cover daily life expenses. I never thought that there would be a day when I would get as much profit as now," said Cao Dinh Lap, a farmer in Vinh Thuy commune, Vinh Linh district. His family earned a profit of nearly VND100 million (nearly $5,000) in the last crop.

After three years of growing organic rice, from the dead field, farmers have created the Quang Tri organic rice brand. This product has been sold throughout the country and will be exported to the US and Japan.

Quang Tris Vice Chair Ha Van Dong told VietNamNet that in the near future, the area of organic rice will increase to about 10,000 hectares. Moreover, in early July, the construction of an organic agricultural product processing factory commenced in Quang Tri.

This VND100 billion (nearly $5 million) factory will process organic agricultural products such as rice, coffee, peanuts, corn... in a closed circle for domestic consumption and export.

Quang Tri organic rice chain has become a model for many provinces and cities to learn from.

Bao Phuong - Thanh Nam

ST25 is a generic rice variety, not a brand: NOIP The National Office of Intellectual Property (NOIP) says the ST25 rice variety has been granted a Protective Certificate No 21.VN.2020 under Decision No 45/QD-TT-VPBH dated March 6, 2020 by the director of the Department of Crop Production.
Expectations to transform business households into companies have been unsuccessful as most households did not want to officially become companies. The goal to have 1 million businesses by the end of 2020, thus, was not met.

The Governments Resolution 35/NQ-CP dated May 16, 2016 set a target to have 1 million businesses by 2020, including large-scale ones with strong resources.

In 2015, nearly 443,000 enterprises were in the country. In order to achieve the target, the average number of newly established enterprises each year had to increase by 17.7%, which was an ambitious goal.

At that time, there were about 3.5 million business households, including many households with enterprise scale. The authorities hoped that these households would be a great source for forming the local business force. However, the results were not as expected because most household business establishments did not want to become companies.

Hanoi is a typical example. In 2019, 27,000 new firms were established in the city, up 8% compared to 2018. However, only 48 of these firms were upgraded from the household business model. According to statistics, Hanoi had up to 300,000 business households at that time.

A survey conducted in 2018 by the Central Institute for Economic Management (CIEM) of 400 large business households across the country, which are the same size as small firms, showed that only about 8.7% of business households with capital from VND1 to VND5 billion thought of upgrading themselves into companies. The percentage of business households with more than 10 employees that wanted to become companies was only about 5.63%.

Lawyer Truong Thanh Duc, from the Basico Law Firm, said that the current Enterprise Law has been opened to the fullest extent, as it allows people to set up their companies and be directors of their firms even without houses, without capital, without qualifications, etc. But many business households that operate professionally, with annual revenue of several tens of billion dong, still refuse to "upgrade" themselves into companies.

Why? According to Duc, as a business household, people only have to pay certain taxes, and do not have to obey strict rules on accounting, invoices etc. Meanwhile, a company has to pay income tax, have a salary fund, pay social insurance for employees, and must have a clear financial accounting regime. Because the rules for business households are too loose, this type of business establishment has flourished to more than 5 million units, half of which are at company scale.

Experts say that, in the current situation, it is a good choice for individual business households to not become companies. Doing business aims at profit so what can help them reduce costs, they will fully exploit it. Becoming a company, business households will have to operate under a transparent regime, which requires higher costs for changing the accounting regime, hiring employees and building a management system. Moreover, they will be inspected very often by tax and customs agencies, and others.

While the government failed to fulfil its goal, the private sector accounted for 32% of GDP. But most of them operate on a small scale, without brands, and with low competitiveness. This sectors tax contributions to the budget is also below expectation.

The Hanoi Tax Department said that the activities of business households in the capital city are very "spontaneous". It is difficult to control their activities, resulting in tax dodging and wrong use of invoices and other problems, affecting the business environment, causing losses for the state budget.

Experts say that the government should have incentive policies to encourage business households to transform into companies.

Tran Thuy
The Biden Administration is considering donating additional COVID-19 vaccines to Vietnam besides the allocated 5 million doses, according to Ha Kim Ngoc, Ambassador of Vietnam to the US.

Ambassador Ha Kim Ngoc says the US is considering delivering additional COVID-19 vaccines to Vietnam through COVAX

Ngoc told a Washington-based VOV correspondent that the second US-donated shipment of 3 million doses of the Moderna vaccine has arrived in Vietnam, with about 1.5 million doses transferred to Ho Chi Minh City on July 24 and the remainder expected to arrive in Hanoi the following day.

The US has supplied Vietnam with 5 million doses out of a total of 23 million doses that the Biden administration has committed to 20 countries and territories in Asia.

As far as I know the US is considering donating additional vaccines to Vietnam in the coming time, he revealed.

This is timely and significant sharing and assistance for Vietnam, said Ngoc, citing the fact that the US considers vaccines a matter of national security while many countries have a high demand for COVID-19 vaccines from the US.

The diplomat said the Vietnamese Embassy in the US has worked hard in recent times to seek and lobby for the supply of vaccines as well as medical equipment to the COVID-19 fight back in the country.

He said the embassy has received strong support and close coordination from the American business community in Vietnam, as well as many Vietnamese individuals and organizations in the US.

The US side is currently discussing with Vietnam to complete the procedure for shipping to the country Cue COVID-19 test kits and 75 cold storage devices for vaccines in the near future", the ambassador added.

Source: VOV
Vietnam welcomes the USs latest decision not to take any trade action against the nation concerning the Vietnam Currency Section 301 investigation.

Vietnamese spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Vietnam Le Thi Thu Hang

Le Thi Thu Hang, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Vietnam, made the statement on July 24 after the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) issued a formal determination in the Vietnam Currency Section 301 investigation one day earlier.

The USTR concluded that no trade action is warranted at this time and that the move reflects the agreement reached earlier this week between the US Department of the Treasury and the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV).

This is a positive step following the agreement reached on July 19 between the State Bank of Vietnam and the US Department of the Treasury, Hang said.

This is also the result of constructive dialogue and goodwill of both sides to resolve problems in bilateral economic relations, towards building a stable and sustainable relationship that benefits both countries in the spirit of a Comprehensive Partnership, she added.

Source: VOV
Three million doses of Moderna COVID-19 vaccine supplied by the US via the COVAX Facility will arrive in Vietnam on July 25, unveiled Foreign Ministry spokesperson Le Thi Thu Hang during the ministrys regular press conference yesterday.

A batch of over 2 million doses of Moderna COVID-19 vaccine arrived at Noi Bai airport in early July. (Photo: VNA)

Responding to a query on the Moderna vaccine batch and outcomes of Vietnams vaccine diplomacy, the spokesperson said that considering access to various sources of vaccine and quick and large-scale vaccination an important and urgent solution, the vaccine diplomacy work has been rolled out in a drastic and urgent manner under the instruction and direct engagement of leaders of the Party, State, Government and National Assembly, along with efforts of numerous ministries and sectors, towards the target of inoculating about 70 percent of Vietnamese population and reaching herd immunity this year.

Hang cited the Ministry of Health as saying that countries, international organisations and partners have to date committed 150 million doses of vaccine for Vietnam through purchase negotiations and assistance.

So far, Vietnam has received over eight million vaccine doses, including about 4.5 million doses through COVAX, 2 million doses from the US via the COVAX Facility, three million doses from Japan, 500,000 doses from China and 1,000 doses from Russia.

In the coming time, COVAX is to supply over 1 million more doses and the US will provide an additional three million doses through COVAX, the spokesperson said, adding that Romania will also give 100,000 doses and Australia 1.5 million doses to Vietnam.

Besides, several countries including India, the UK, Australia, Cuba and Germany have made specific commitments to providing Vietnam with aid and technology transfer.

Vietnam also receives aid in the form of medical supplies, equipment and other resources from UNICEF and countries like Laos, Cambodia, Japan and the Republic of Korea, and more, the spokesperson said.

Along with efforts made in vaccine diplomacy, Vietnam also seeks cooperation in research and technology transfer in vaccine development and production in an attempt to ensure long-term domestic supply and become self-reliant in terms of COVID-19 vaccine.

The Foreign Ministry is closely working with the Health Ministry in the negotiations and cooperation with potential partners from the US, Japan, Russia, Cuba, Israel, the UK and Germany in technology transfer in the production of COVID-19 vaccine and medicine.

Vietnam highly appreciates and sincerely thanks partners, countries and international organisations for their timely and practical support, the spokesperson said.

Source: VNA

One million Moderna vaccine doses delivered to COVID-19-hit HCM City Half of the two million doses of Moderna COVID-19 vaccine assisted by the US have been funneled to Ho Chi Minh City to help the southern hotspot stamp out the worst outbreak upon the request of the Health Ministry.
The construction work is part of a $341 million expansion and reconstruction that stretches from 12th Street to north Loop 340.

The work is still on track to wrap up in 2023, said Jake Smith, spokesperson for the Waco district office of the Texas Department of Transportation. As of June, 76% of the funding for the project had been spent, and only 56% of the contract term has passed.

When you compare those numbers, you can see its not just TxDOT saying were making great progress, Smith said.

Still, he acknowledged the inconvenience to motorists as they are blocked or detoured and to businesses whose access is crimped. He suggested that travelers in the area check out the real-time traffic information at waco4bmap.org before venturing to the I-35 corridor.

We want to encourage folks to pay attention and drive carefully in the area and certainly give themselves and fellow travelers time to adjust to the new configuration, he said.

Mike Mungello, a supervisor at Collin Street Bakery in Bellmead, said the bakery has weathered the construction well so far and is fortunate that Exit 338A, near the store, will remain open during this phase of work.
TSTC, considered a state agency unlike MCC, is subject to stricter limits in Abbotts executive order on encouraging masks or vaccination, spokesperson Kristina Campos-Davis said. There will be no limits on in-person classes, Campos-Davis said. Some employees will be able to continue working from home, depending on their job duties, she said.

MCC also will lift limits on in-person classes, and it will resume normal food service operations, Patterson said.

It is something that a lot of students want, he said.

However, Patterson said everything is subject to change depending on how the pandemic plays out.

The college also will continue cleaning practices implemented in response to the virus, including misting rooms and bathrooms with a disinfectant and making hand sanitizer available.

Plexiglass and signs will also be placed across campus in areas where there is a lot of interaction between individuals, Patterson said.

While it is encouraging everyone who steps foot on campus to get vaccinated, MCC is not collecting information about who has been vaccinated, he said.

Hopefully people will take personal responsibility for their health, Patterson said.
When Waco resident Mike Blaskiewicz, 73, was growing up, he was aware that both his parents served during World War II. His mother was a naval WAVE (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) and his father was a Navy torpedoman who saw action in the South Pacific.

Despite that, Chicago native Blaskiewicz said it didnt influence his choice to join the U.S. Navy. All he knew of his mother was that she was desk-bound and served in two locations in the U.S. As for his father, it took him years to get the full story on him and what combat did to him.

Now in Waco by this time (they arrived the year after the 1953 tornado), Blaskiewicz graduated from Richfield High School and joined the Navy straight away in June 1966.

I was not in a position to go to college, and I didnt want to get drafted, Blaskiewicz said. I wanted to choose where I would go. If I got killed, I got killed.

Blaskiewicz likes to joke he served aboard the USS Neversail, meaning he served his time on dry land. He never did sail. Still, just like his father, after his basic training in electronics in San Diego, he went on to torpedo school, but discovered they had no use for someone who was claustrophobic aboard a submarine.
District governor visits Rotary Club

Waco Rotary Club meets at noon Monday at the Baylor Club inside McLane Stadium, 1001 S. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.

Lunch is $20. Reservations required by phoning 776-2115.

Beverly Luedke, district governor for Rotary District 5870, will speak.

Blood drive Tuesday at stadium

Baylor University Pi Kappa Phi is hosting a blood drive from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday at 1001 S. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard on the Carter BloodCare bus. To receive more information or to schedule an appointment, contact Randy Wood at 717-1471.

Medicare enrollment class ThursdayA free Medicare information class is Thursday from 9:30-10:30 a.m. at the Heart of Texas Council on Government office, 1514 S. New Road.

The class is designed to answer questions for anyone approaching the Medicare eligibility age of 65 and assist in the process of enrollment.

Call 292-1843 for more information.

Back-to-school picnic
After 24 years, Manning is retiring with plans to rock grandbabies and watch more T-ball games. Shes proud to be leaving behind an organization that is humming with purpose.

When youve worked this long and hard, to leave things in good condition is rewarding. We have a great staff and passionate volunteers. Last year with COVID was definitely hard, but I feel good about how we spent our time developing the tools needed to move forward, Manning said.

An open house is planned from 4 to 6:30 p.m. Thursday at the Cedar Falls Tourism and Visitors Center. It is open to the public.

Its a tough decision, and there are so many people and exciting projects in the works that Im going to miss. I want to be able to look back and be proud of what Ive accomplished. My work has been fun, and Ive been exposed to so many new things. But I feel confident that it is the right time to retire.

Manning joined the bureau in 1997 and became director in 2000 when Jan Andersen retired. A 1976 graduate of Waterloo West High School, Manning attended the American Institute of Business and worked at Control-o-Fax for 20 years before changing careers.
The weapons were found on the window sill of Casteel's 12th floor hotel room with a view of Ohio Street Beach and Navy Pier, a major tourist attraction.

Why didnt you leave your firearms at home? a responding officer asks Casteel in police footage.

Casteel replies that he forgot to remove all the firearms from his gun range bag because he packed in a rush after his son was injured and hospitalized the night before he left with his girlfriend and children for Chicago.

He said he removed the guns and ammunition from the bag and left them in the hotel room so that he could use the bag at the beach.

I didnt expect anything to happen. I just left them there for the day. Went to the beach. Came back. Went shopping, Casteel tells officers, also adding that he planned to propose to his girlfriend.

Its my fault. I didnt mean to startle anyone. I understand 100% why Im here. But like I said, its an honest to God accident, Casteel said.

Casteel was released on $10,000 bond after a judge reminded him that gun laws in Chicago are different than in Iowa. Once he was released from the police station, he proposed.

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 Book of Matthew, Jesus is asked: Master, which is the great commandment in the law? He answers: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. But the second admonition, Jesus adds, is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Think about that. All the law, Jesus says. All his teachings flow from two simple ideals: Loving your Lord and loving your neighbor.

That is why the current battle over getting vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus is so critical  and so confounding. If you really love Jesus, if you really live by his laws, then your choice is clear. Get the shot, not just for yourself, but out of love for others  your family, your friends, your neighbors.

And yet the reddest areas of the country, which also tend to be the most religious, lag far behind the bluer and more secular regions in terms of vaccination rates. Have all those churchgoers stopped reading their Bibles lately? Did they miss the love thy neighbor part? Or have they let politics and partisanship overshadow their religious values?
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http://www.citipedia.info/city/general/Russia__Rjazan_Zarya+Svobody_id_821579

Link above is a page that gives basic information and the whereabouts of the Tiny Russian Village I live in

The Russian Orthodox Monastery in Sunrise to Freedom

Sunrise to freedom the village in Russia

Our Monastery at the Village called Sunrise to Freedom

Sunrise To Freedom: The beautiful Russian Village

The Russian Village: Sunrise to Freedom was perfect and very beautiful

Our Russian Village  Called Sunrise to Freedom

Boza and I walk the Tiny Russian Village world

-20 below Celsius and dropping in the Tiny Russian Village

Just a photo day. Tiny Russian Village

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Old images of the Tiny Russian Village. I get images sent to me and I decided to post them today. They are not large and as per era of taking them, mostly by an old cell phone, they are still good but small. The village has changed a lot and I live in the shell of what was. The Tiny Russian Village was thriving at one time and now there are just three of us living here

 : ,  ,    Baykin Monastery, Sarayevsky District  right image in pink color

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarayevsky_District

Just thought that for the record, I would post some information about the place I live. Its location, old images and whatever

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Coffee is great this morning. I just finished my second cup and Boza and I walked twice already. I went to the Big Village yesterday and it was fun. The people on the bus all know me now and they are tickled that this American lives as they do. In Russia the bus is the mainstay of the Tiny Russian Villages to allow people to get to resources. There are a bunch of villages like the one I live in and they all are literally located on goat trails

Then I realized why Russians are thin for the most part. They walk and walk and walk

Now in a city like Moscow and such, you see much heavier people, but in the Tiny Russian Villages; the people are lean and tough. Now occasionally you see what you might think is a heavy babushka. They are not very often, but they are layered with clothes, twelve layers deep. I have noticed that there are a handful of guys in the Big Village who have huge bellies. This is prone to being beer drinkers and not vodka drinkers

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I myself have thinned down even more. I am still too heavy, but I have reached around 100 kilos and while that is good, it is still too heavy. That is about 220 pounds. I figure that this summer I will get to about 200 pounds, I hope. Then I will stop at that

Yesterday I carried at least 30 kilos on me and never had an issue, except my feet do hurt today. 30 kilos is deceiving to an America. We think in pounds. Thus, while 30 is not that formidable sounding, it becomes interesting when you convert it from kilos to pounds. That 30 becomes 66 + pounds. Oops it got heavy fast as I bought things to bring home. I am lucky; I was carrying what I have lost in weight and if I weighed what I did two years ago. I could have never carried what I did. Makes me feel good

It is a different quality of life to be able to walk kilometers and kilometers and go places. Rain, snow, sleet or shine. Last winter I was still in too rough shape to be able to walk out of the Tiny Russian Village. I did one time and thought it would kill me. This year, I have been regularly walking out and the weather has been much worse than last year

This week I will walk to a medium size village called Mozhary

Villages to walk too are;Mozhary, Borets, Sysoi (Medium Villages) and ride a bus to Sarai (Big Village)..

This summer! I will walk to the bus and go to the Big Village for food. Saves gas, saves wear and tear on the car and will help keep me in shape

As Svetochka would say, That is just right!

WtR
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Dont fall for a fake text message that appears to come from the states Motor Vehicle Division asking people to validate their drivers licenses.

The texts started going out earlier this month, according to the agency, and are nothing more than an effort to vacuum up Social Security numbers and other personal information. They do that by including a link that people are supposed to follow to see details and make the validation.

The texts are not coming from MVD, and the agency is encouraging people not to click on the link.

The messages appear to be a scam known as smishing, similar to the email scam known as phishing but which instead uses texting (SMS) to lure in victims, according to a scam alert.

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The messages come from a 972 area code and say, New Mexico Motor Vehicle Division (MVD) Driver License Waiver Validation. Validate Your Details Below.

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A sneaky Southwest Airlines scam has been hitting local residents in the past few months via Google ads that misrepresent an affiliation with the air carrier.

The fraudsters pretend to book new reservations or modify existing ones, taking the customers credit cards and information such as name, address and date of birth.

One woman got scammed when she instructed Siri to call Southwest Airlines and was connected to one of the bogus entities. (Siri is the Apple voicemail assistant.)

Southwest spokesman Dan Landson adds that some of these Google ads appear on mobile devices, with a link to call phone number that takes customers to the scammers.

Landson says this problem appears to be hitting other airlines as well,and that Southwest is part of an industry-wide discussion with Google about solutions to the problem of these sponsored ads.

The correct website address for Southwest Airlines is southwest.com

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Heres another example of fraud-related texting, aimed at getting access to financial information and personal accounts.

Scammers are sending texts to potential victims, asking if they made a particular investment purchase.

When the recipient responds with a no, the trickster follows up with a phone call, claiming to be from where the supposed purchase was made or from the persons financial institution and asks for personal information to track the supposed investment.

The criminals are doing their homework, says Kara Suro, vice president of fraud surveillance and investigations at Charles Schwab. They continue to find ways to trick people into providing information via phone or text.

Keep these things in mind:

 It is especially important to create unique and hard-to-guess passwords for financial accounts.

 Most financial institutions will never ask for your password over the phone.

 Contact your bank or investment broker using a published phone number or website, so you can be sure youre reaching a legitimate source. Links or phone numbers in texts can take you to something fraudulent.

Contact Ellen Marks at emarks@abqjournal.com or 505-823-3842 if you are aware of what sounds like a scam. To report a scam to law enforcement, contact the New Mexico Consumer Protection Division toll-free at 1-888-255-9210 or file a complaint at www.nmag.gov/file-a-complaint.aspx.
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Copyright  2021 Albuquerque Journal

Edward Gonzales is a master of his medium.

Yet, he finds new ways to push himself with new pieces.

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The artist will have at least a dozen pieces of work in his annual show at Acosta Strong Fine Art on Canyon Road through Aug. 31.

Ive been doing this show during Spanish Market week, he says. Its a one-man show that Ive done for the last five years.

Gonzales is known for his figurative work with acrylics. A lot of his imagery comes from being rooted in New Mexico and Mexico, and depicts Hispanic and Southwest cultures.

My interest is creating artwork that motivates an appreciation of the cultures of the Southwest, expresses the human spirit and celebrates the beauty of Nature, he says. I have followed this path of exploration as a professional fine artist for 40 years.

Art has always been a force in Gonzales life. From the age of four, his grandmother handed him crayons and paper to keep him occupied. It was then that his imagination would run wild, often turning to his own life to draw.

My family on my mothers side arrived in the United States from Mexico about 1908 and settled in southern New Mexico, he explains. My fathers family came to Nuevo Mexico in 1598. My observations of their cultural differences and similarities began when I was very young, and became part of my understanding of who I am as a person and as an artist.

Gonzales says being a full-time artist has been fulfilling, but not easy. Its why he turns to his upbringing to inspiration.

Ive always had a sense of exploring my identity as a Hispano and Mestizo, he says. Its been quite a journey because, when I first started, I was beginning to understand who I was. Lately, finding my family tree from relatives has changed my outlook.

Gonzales says he is 51% Indigenous and learning about this part of his heritage has opened more of an understanding of who he is.

These revelations have contributed to my art, he says.
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Copyright  2021 Albuquerque Journal

The work of Lara Blanchard weaves a world of whimsy and wonder into an alchemy of nature.

Her path to engraving, embroidery and watercolor imagery of floral-bedecked animals, figures and chimeras began with photography. The artist lives and works in St. Jean dAulps/The French Alps, France, and shows her work at Santa Fes Keep Contemporary.

From 1990, Blanchard studied plastic arts in Strasbourg, France, training in film techniques through experimenting and manipulating the products and papers. She preferred fibrous and thick textures.

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I have always sought to develop a photograph that would not only be image, but texture, thickness and object, she wrote in an email. Blanchard lived in Ireland for a few years, connecting with creators and craftsmen. When she returned to France, she felt naturally led to blending photography and textiles, as well as engravings and drawings. She was inspired by the botany, zoology and anatomy that had formed her graphic vocabulary since childhood.

Ive always collected, observed and drawn nature, she stated. As a child, the forest, nature, was my shelter and gave me answers to questions I asked myself about the world, humanity and the living.

Blanchard says her arrival to the Ad Lucem series of sculptures and masks came magically.

Before the spring of 2017, she had never imagined shifting to volume, masks and ornaments, mixing clay modelling, felting and the assembly of natural materials.

It was with immense joy that I realized my first volumes, the artist wrote. The project is growing, growing. I imagine it arborescent, tree-like.

She imagines expanding the project with choreographic collaboration and

theater. She even created a soundtrack recorded in nature to accompany her installation with musician David Piget.

The natural, ecru hues imposed themselves on her creations, she writes.

It was the light that would create the shadows, the hollows and the full ones, she stated. White not as not-color, but as all colors.

Instinct drives her creativity.

It is by soliciting, in my turn, what I call the universal magic that I advance and discover what comes through me, she writes.

Blanchard returned to drawing 10 years ago. Creating her Animal Souls series was like rediscovering a long-lost friend. Drawing first led her to engraving. But the longing for thread lingered. Blanchard began printing her engraving plates on textiles. Linens and cotton were her canvases.

First, she placed a few touches of colored threads onto her work. These transformed into embroidery and a new artistic language. Producing no more than 10 prints per etching plate, she realized the needlework allowed her to make each piece unique.

Blanchards background fueled her artistry. Her mother was a nurse, leading to her love for anatomy.

When I was a little girl  I loved to open her medical encyclopedias whenever she didnt see me, she wrote. I saw trees in the pictures of lungs, small creatures in the drawings of cells and viruses, roads in veins and arteries  it was a fascinating world.

Hers was a solitary childhood. She and her mother moved frequently.

Actually, I had really few friends, Blanchard said. I drew a lot, I collected a lot of treasures found during my walks. I loved nature. I loved observing salamanders, fishes in the rivers, birds and their singing, flowers.

I was always interested in how things were made, she continued. Nature gave me answers to my questions. Drawing became a language to express these questions and answers.
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T.S. Last wrote the July 18 Journal North article Caught in the Middle about Mora County rancher Richard Fresquez and the neighboring Acequia de los Vallecitos Association, run by three locals, Carla Gomez, Rey Villa and Wendy Capek. They diverted the water from Richards land in Encinal Canyon, stopping the water both to Richard and to families down-canyon who have relied on this water flowing continuously for countless generations, without interference.

Last tells us that a Mora County record filed in 1938 establishes the legality of the acequia water rights on Richards land. Last also states that, for over a century, this acequia has been used for irrigation by families below Richards property, as well. The document further shows his senior water rights.

When both Gomez and Villa purchased large land parcels a few years ago, they formed their acequia association for their ditch, along with Wendy Capek. As Richard was quoted in Lasts article,  the majority of the board is made up of former business/romantic partners of Fresquez who have filed lawsuits against him in the past.

This reads more like a vendetta against a man by two spurned women, but there is another nefarious bite. These covert asset-stripping actions  robbing and controlling water, thereby devaluing land and forcing people to leave  are age-old and used extensively today during COVID.

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Many folks do not understand that the acequias are based on a people-controlled water distribution system with their own bylaws, developed by the Spaniards 200 years ago, and the state has no governance over their structuring of the use, amount or delegation of the water. It has no legal authority over the distribution of water through the acequia associations. Period.

When people involve the State Engineers Office in their local disputes, they give away their power to govern themselves locally.

The water association is based on cooperation, mutual respect and fairness, which Richard demonstrates. Gomez claims, but does the opposite. She says, Especially in times of drought like this, it needs to be shared, erroneously implying that Richard uses all the water, while she takes it all.

Additionally, no association has any jurisdiction over another. As Last writes, The Acequia de los Vallecitos association filled in a diversion channel that used to direct water to the property of Richard Fresquez because of a dispute over fees the association says he owes. This is an aggressive act based on nothing other than bullying and force. There is nothing legal about these actions. They have no authority to claim such governance.

Even Paula Garcia, executive director of the New Mexico Acequia Association, explains, Her (private) organization isnt a regulatory agency and, while they work with acequia associations throughout the state, they dont get involved with their internal affairs. In other words, each local acequia association is intended to work cooperatively with others who share head waters, with respect, and honoring the importance of equality and birth rights.

El agua es la vida. We also understand that there are those who think that they can take whatever they want but, thankfully, folks like Richard Fresquez understand what a working community is about and he fights to uphold others rights, as well as his own.

Kathleen Dudley lives in Ocate.
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By SUSAN GORDON, lARRY KING AND LINDA EVERS

This time next July, we are going to lose a key federal program, and you hardly even hear about it. The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) will come to an end on July 11, 2022. We need our elected representatives in Congress to extend and expand that program before it runs out.

Congress first passed RECA in 1990. The idea was to help cover health costs for many of the communities exposed to nuclear radiation through the U.S. nuclear weapons programs. Those programs began in the 1940s, most notably here in New Mexico, with the first nuclear test in 1945. Above-ground nuclear tests would continue until 1962 an,d to support the thousands of new nuclear weapons being built, an expansive uranium mining and processing program began in our state and elsewhere.

RECA provides a one-time benefit payment to people who have likely developed cancer or other specified diseases after exposure to radiation from this nuclear project. That exposure could have come through uranium mining, milling or transport, or from radioactive fallout from atomic weapons testing in certain areas of Utah, Nevada, and Arizona.

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The program was expanded by law in 2000. It now offers compensation to some additional groups of uranium workers and civilians who were also exposed to radiation. But not everyone. Uranium workers from after 1971 were not included.

Most of the uranium mining production happened after 1971, yet most uranium workers have been excluded from RECA. There were no safety improvements for miners at that time.

Recent research conducted at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center suggests there is no difference in exposure and illnesses between the pre-1971 uranium workers and the post-1971 uranium workers. All uranium workers should be compensated for their illnesses due to radiation exposure.

We need New Mexicos congressional representatives, and Senators Lujan and Heinrich to end that arbitrary distinction and to extend the program so everyone can benefit from it. Broadly, this looks like:

 Extending RECA for an additional 23 years (through 2045)

 Increasing compensation for all claimants to $150,000

 Expanding eligibility to ALL uranium workers who were active from 1972-1990

 Expanding the geographical eligibility for compensation from exposure to atmospheric atomic testing to cover all of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada and Utah

 Expanding the geographical eligibility to cover persons present in Guam during atmospheric testing in the Pacific, and making veterans who participated in the cleanup of Enewetak Atoll eligible for compensation.

We cannot roll back the clock on what happened. But we can prevent it from happening again and take care of those who were most affected. If we dont, we are dishonoring their sacrifices and abandoning them.

Susan Gordon is coordinator of the Multicultural Alliance For A Safe Environment. Larry King is president of the Church Rock Chapter, Navajo Nation, and a former uranium worker. Linda Evers is president of the Post 71 Uranium Workers Committee and a former uranium worker.
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Copyright  2021 Albuquerque Journal

Residents of the small Rio Arriba County community of La Madera were rocked in June 2017 by the arrest of one of their neighbors, who police said had gone on a shooting rampage that left five people dead.

Damian Herrera, 25, is slated to go on trial this week for four of those homicides, including those of his brother, mother and stepfather, and a fourth killing in Abiquiu.

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Jury selection is scheduled to begin Monday in 1st Judicial District Court in Santa Fe. He is charged with four counts of first-degree murder, unlawful taking of a motor vehicle, a fourth-degree felony, and other charges. The trial is scheduled to last through Aug. 20.

Herrera allegedly shot his mother in the head while she held her hands up and pleaded for her life, a witness told an investigator on the day of the killings.

The five-hour rampage began about 3 p.m. Jan. 15, 2017, at the familys home in La Madera, prosecutors allege.

There, Herrera allegedly shot his mother, Maria Rosita Gallegos, known as Brenda, 49; Max Trujillo Sr., 55, Herreras stepfather; and his brother, Brendon Herrera, 20, a student at University of New Mexico Taos.

Trujillo and Brendon Herrera died at the scene. Gallegos died of her injuries the following day.

Scuffling for a gun

Herreras sister, Carissa Herrera, told an investigator the day of the killings that she came out of the familys home after she heard three or four gunshots outside, according to a criminal complaint filed by a Rio Arriba County Sheriffs deputy.

She saw Trujillo lying on the ground with wounds to his chest, the complaint said.

She then saw her brothers, Brendon and Damian Herrera, scuffling over a handgun in the moments before Brendon was shot in the neck, it said.

Damian Herreras mother was the third victim.

Carissa Herrera said she told the investigator she saw Damian Herrera shoot their mother in the head while she was coming up from the ground with both her hands up  and pleading for Damian not to shoot her, the complaint said.

Fearing for her own life, Carissa Herrera left the scene, according to the complaint.

Herrera fled La Madera in a Toyota pickup until it ran out of gas near Tierra Amarilla, police said.

The fourth shooting victim was a man who police say offered Herrera a ride.

Michael Alan Kyte, 61, an archaeologist who had recently retired from the U.S. Forest Service, was found shot to death about 5:15 p.m. on Forest Road 222 in far western Taos County, according to court filings.

Herrera drove Kytes 2012 Chevrolet Silverado on a round-about route to Abiquiu where prosecutors allege he shot and killed a fifth person  Manuel Serrano, 59, who was found dead about 8:15 p.m. at Bodes Gas Station in Abiquiu.

Weapon recovered

Officers apprehended Herrera after he crashed during a police chase on U.S. 84 north of Espanola the night of the killings. A .38-caliber revolver was found in the vehicle, police said.

None of the victims had a chance, then-State Police Chief Pete Kassetas said in a news conference in Espanola the following day.

The accused will be tried separately in connection with Kytes killing in Taos County. Herrera is charged in 8th Judicial District Court with one count of first-degree murder and the unlawful taking of a motor vehicle. No trial date has been scheduled in that case.

The 1st Judicial District Court trial comes more than four years after the killings due to a variety of delays.

Herreras defense attorney, Michael Rosenfield, said that Herreras trial, initially scheduled for January 2019, was canceled when 1st Judicial District Judge Jason Lidyard ordered a change of venue from Rio Arriba County to Santa Fe in November 2018.

Herreras attorneys had argued that he couldnt get a fair trial in Rio Arriba County due to public excitement about the case, court records show.

A trial scheduled in July 2019 was canceled after Lidyard found that Herrera was not competent to stand trial. The judge committed Herrera to the New Mexico Behavioral Health Institute in Las Vegas.

In January 2020, officials at the Behavioral Health Institute issued a report finding that Herrera was competent to stand trial, according to news reports.

A trial scheduled in September 2020 was canceled due to COVID-19 restrictions, Rosenfield said.
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Copyright  2021 Albuquerque Journal

SANTA FE  Underneath a St. Francis Drive overpass, a group of people were making their home in an arroyo. Their tents huddled near the back wall of the overpass, sheltered by nearby bushes and cardboard stacked against concrete pillars.

The people were living in the arroyo for about a month before being asked to leave because police suspected them of vandalism in the vicinity. But, instead of being shuffled from place to place, the citys Alternative Response Unit offered help.

The unit is a partnership between the Santa Fe Police Department and the Santa Fe Fire Department. It screens dispatch calls to see where it can provide services that extend beyond a typical police response. The unit, which comprises a caseworker, a paramedic and a police officer, and aims to help people in a variety of issues stemming from mental health to homelessness, went live in May.

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Its really sort of what this big evolution of health care is looking toward  how to get out of the brick-and-mortar institutions, and take care to where people are, said Andres Mercado, mobile integrated health officer with the Santa Fe Fire Department.

The purpose of the unit is to help handle the calls that straddle the intersection between public health and public safety, Mercado said. Currently, the unit runs three days a week, with plans to move up to four days a week.

In addition, due to the units success, the departments are interviewing candidates for a second unit.

The unit costs about $400,000 to run and the whole program costs about $2 million, just on the fire departments side, according to Assistant Fire Chief Brian Moya. The program also includes caseworkers in the office who do not go out with the unit.

Despite the programs cost, it still saves the city money. Mayor Alan Webber said about two years ago that the city was spending $3.4 million a year chasing encampments across the city. Now, the unit can help get to the root of issues to help prevent homelessness from occurring in the first place.

This is really a more systematic approach to getting different outcomes, Webber said. And so, dollar for dollar, youre getting a very different approach and a different series of results.

In 2015, Mercado said, about 18% of the fire departments calls for service included the same 250 people. These people often needed help with their mental health, health care and finding a place to live. Of Santa Fes 80,000 residents, these calls comprised less than 1% of the citys population.

Back under the overpass, Emergency Medical Services Capt. William Brunson asked the individuals if they needed help finding a new place to live. One of the men said he had been homeless for over three years, and came to Santa Fe from New York.

In his tent, his three dogs barked at the paramedics as they made their way through the encampment, checking on people and offering their services. A sharps container sat on the ground next to the mans tent and Brunson offered to get him a new one, but the man declined.

Brunson spoke with him some more and handed him a card with a caseworkers contact information to help get him housed.

For Brunson and Mobile Integrated Health paramedic Ramos Tsosie, this was a typical day at work. The two worked together to help the people under the overpass gain access to community services so they wouldnt be left without a place to go after being told to leave.

Most of the homeless people Brunson and Tsosie help are people theyve met before. This knowledge, and relationships the paramedics build with people, helps them on the job. Knowing a persons situation and backstory helps the two fully address their needs.

But they dont just help the citys homeless people. The two said theyve also de-escalated fights in hotel rooms and peoples houses, as well as gone on welfare checks. In a recent call, the two helped a woman who was lying on the floor of her home, unresponsive from a stroke.

Its their response, which can save someones life or give someone a place to live, that is helping the city get to the root of problems instead of treating symptoms, Mercado and Webber said. Whether its walking into a hotel room, parking lot or arroyo, Brunson and Tsosie provide an alternative way to make a difference in the city different.
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The expansive sky, the sudden storms and the looming New Mexico mountains tumble into landscapes across Judith Rodericks silk canvas.

That was a piece of white silk when I started, the artist said, of a composition hanging in her Placitas home studio. Thats often how I do things. I love that blank canvas.

Roderick has been depicting her high desert surroundings in fiber since 1982, when she was one of the original owners of the Albuquerque yarn store Village Wools.

She followed a trajectory from oils, watercolors, acrylics and lithography before she discovered the vibrant palette of silk dyes.

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I always came back to fiber, Roderick said. I started sewing as a child. I learned so I could make my own clothes so I didnt have to wear what (my mother) made.

Roderick grew up in Pittsburgh near Carnegie Mellon University, where she won a scholarship so I didnt have to be a secretary like my mother told me I would be.

She married a plasma physicist and followed him to the University of Michigan, where she earned her degree in lithography.

Two children followed and Roderick moved to Alamogordo, which offered something like culture shock. Printmaking was unavailable, so she turned to batik, finding someone who raised bees for the beeswax used in the wax-resist technique. Next she bought a loom and began to weave.

Its the tactile quality of it, she said of the magnetic pull to fiber. In every culture, Im fascinated by the fiber work.

She stitched her first quilt for her then-6-year-old daughter, teaching herself from a book. She was soon transitioning to wall hangings.

She began working with silk dye the moment it became available at Village Wools, eventually teaching it in the shop.

She began making silk painted clothing, which soon expanded into a second business, thanks to the wearable art trend.

I was in galleries all over the country, Roderick said. I had four seamstresses working for me. I could paint a coat in a day. I could sew a coat in a day. I had a studio the size of a warehouse.

Another turning point occurred when she spotted a Northwest Coast Native American coat with buttons at an art exhibition.

Its like, yes this is what I want to do, she said, both arms upraised.

Roderick continued producing clothing for eight years, until the galleries began closing and she was frazzled.

I thought, I am making clothes that I and my friends cannot afford and its no fun anymore. 

She sold Village Wools in 1992 and dropped out of the art world for a while. She began making her silk quilts in 2008.

This is my joy  silk, Roderick said, petting a snow white rectangle. It all starts as white silk that can be anything at all. I love being the creator.

Her transparent hues flow like watercolor, shading and melting into natural forms  rocks, cliffs, trees and clouds. She sometimes adds buttons for texture and whimsy, quickly becoming the person receiving grandmothers button tins from admiring women during the Placitas Art Tours.

Roderick was the featured artist at the 2015 Albuquerque Fiber Arts Fiesta.

Her output slowed during the pandemic because she was caring for her dying sister. The darkness of the time surfaced in the resulting pieces. She made a series of One Race: Human quilts inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement and a tribute quilt to the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The Supreme Court justice wears an old doily around her neck, pearls orbit her face.

Its sort of the way I can deal with whats going on in the world and feel a little better, she explained.

This is so deeply satisfying, she continued. The only thing you can really control in the world is what you create. Its such a joy.

Rodericks work will hang in Placitas Wild Hearts Gallery from until Aug. 1.

If you go

WHAT: Judith Roderick, Rainscapes

WHERE: Wild Hearts Gallery, 221-B, N.M. 165, Placitas

WHEN: Through Aug. 1

CONTACT: wildheartsgallery-nm.com, 505-361-2710
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ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.  Denise Herrera found her passion years ago, but it wasnt until recently that it created a path back home to New Mexico.

In May, the Con Alma Health Foundation, based out of Santa Fe, announced that it had hired Herrera to replace its outgoing executive director Dolores E. Roybal, who had been with the organization for 15 years. The Con Alma Health Foundation aims to level the playing field when it comes to accessing and getting quality health care.

I really like philanthropy because it feels like something bigger than myself, Herrera said. I believe all people have a right to a healthful life. Health care should be for everybody.

Herrera said she has been careful not to come in and try to change everything. Instead she wants to improve upon the work of her predecessor and use what is already in place.

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I want to let communities tell their own stories and come up with their own solutions, she said. Thats important.

Herrera grew up in the South Valley, which she said made her very aware of lifes inequities. She herself came from a loving home with parents who provided for her and made sure she had access to good schools and adequate health care. She started the Herrera Internship Endowment at the National Hispanic Cultural Center to honor her parents Yolanda and Fred Herrera. The endowment provides scholarships to Hispanic female students who complete an internship at the center.

Not everyone around her had the same experience.

My motivation comes from really not everybody had the same access to what I did, she said. Health care is so important. If you are not healthy, you cant work. If you cant work, you cant have adequate housing.

Herrera began her career working for the New Mexico Department of Health and went on to work for the University of New Mexico and the University of Texas-Austin before landing at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in Princeton, New Jersey. She left that job in 2017 to work for the St. Davids Foundation before returning to New Mexico.

One thing that brought me back to New Mexico is Im hoping I can apply what Ive learned in other states that are doing well, she said.

The foundation conducted a nationwide search. Deborah Walker, chairwoman of the search committee and president of the foundations board of trustees, said Herrera is charismatic, bright and driven, and was the ideal candidate. She said the search committee wanted to find someone with foundation experience who would continue the work started by Roybal. They also wanted someone with a knowledge and appreciation of New Mexico.

We didnt want someone to use this job as a stepping stone, Walker said. Denise was looking for a path back.

Greg Webb knew Herrera when she worked for the states health department. He said he has followed her career and knew she would eventually return home.

Im so glad she is back in the state, he said. Shes bringing a broad understanding from a national level, but she is also a native. Shes coming from a unique perspective.

Herrera said she hopes to continue building on the relationships established by Roybal and help all New Mexicans, regardless of where they live, their background or financial situation, access quality health care.

This is my lifes work, Herrera said. And I will always strive toward a healthier, more equitable and just world.
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Book of the week

Alex Richards feels right at home writing fiction for young adult readers.

Even before I was a teenager, I always liked to read (the YA genre) and I have felt its the most comfortable voice for me (as a writer) and on which I would have the most impact, Richards said in a phone interview.

In her 20s, she started writing young adult stories. It felt right for me. It still does, she said. Richards new young adult novel, which officially launches Tuesday, July 27 is When We Were Strangers.

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In it, Richards explores how 17-year-old Evie Parker, who lives in Santa Fe, deals with the grief over the loss of her father who dies of a sudden heart attack.

On the same day of his death, Evie finds more upsetting news: Her father had packed his bags and was planning to leave home.

Evie must also wrap her head around the shock that her dad was fleeing to take up with Bree, the 22-year-old receptionist in his accounting office. Evie wants to hide that secret from her already distraught mom. As if that isnt enough emotional disruption for Evie, she soon learns that Bree is pregnant. The novel builds to an unexpected conclusion and reconfigures what family is.

Richards writing sparkles. The liveliness shows in her smooth blend of vocabulary and imagery in the narrative. In one scene the reader observes Evies good friend Juana whose hair is windswept and stormy when she pulls back in through the window 

Heres another descriptive passage. Its the first day of Evies summer-long photography workshop. Shes looking at her teacher, Georgina Georgy Denton, who reminds me of a long-tailed widowbird I used to see in Dads bird-watching books as a kid. Just like that widowbird, she seems to soar toward me, with arms full of dragon tattoos and a firm, yet delicate, handshake.

Richards effectively uses metaphors. Heres a notable, inventive one. Evie is chatting with her mom, just home after a bad day at work.

As soon as shes in the other room, Billy Joel starts up. Like an obedient dog, hes been waiting for her on the stereo all day. And in another scene, Juana gives Evie a buddys candid opinion of her abilities at the same time consoling her.

Juana says Evie is sort of sweet, plus smart, talented and brave. And dont forget these are tough times for you so, its OK to wallow and be selfish, Juana notes, hinting that shed make an awesome photographer.

Youre all kind of angsty to begin with  imagine how good youd be, working through your grief and suffering like some kind of two-eyebrowed Frida Kahlo.

Sensing the value of Juanas friendly advice, Evie furthers the light mood. I do have great eyebrows, she says.

Richards, born in New York, moved with her family to Santa Fe when she was 4. She attended Rio Grande Elementary, Santa Fe Prep and in 1997 graduated from Santa Fe High.

In high school, she developed a love of photography, studying at Santa Fe Workshops and with photographer Steve Northup. Richards also took a strong interest in creative writing, thanks to the storytelling advice she received from Natalie Goldberg, a renowned Santa Fe writing teacher. Goldberg was actually Richards sisters teacher. Richards received a Bachelor of Arts in photography from Bard College. She worked in film and television for a few years before pursuing writing full-time. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Richards previous YA novel was the 2020 Accidental, which is about family secrets and rolls in such social issues as gun violence and bullying.

I do plan to continue writing about Santa Fe  she said. I feel New Mexico is such a beautiful and unique place and is underrepresented in fiction, and especially young adult fiction.

Richards also enjoys enfolding New Mexico in her fiction to present a different setting in a different landscape  the altitude, the food and the colors. And because she grew up in the state, shes pleased to represent it in her fiction.
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Copyright  2021 Albuquerque Journal

Back in 2006, Albuquerque City Councilor Don Harris held a press conference, calling for the demolition of an old McDonalds restaurant at Central and Tramway NE as part of a push for rejuvenation of East Central Avenue.

East Central has been a run-down place, but its not going to be that way anymore. It is going to be vibrant, he said at the time. Were trying to upgrade the entire area.

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Fast forward to today.

Over the past three months, Albuquerque police have responded to two homicides and the discovery of a body found off Tramway and Interstate 40, the gateway to the old Route 66 and Four Hills neighborhood.

Two blocks west of Tramway, a far East Central trailer park was the scene of a recent FBI search of a purported gang leaders stash house where agents seized seven firearms, including two shotguns and an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.

From Tramway to Eubank, the two-mile stretch of far East Central Avenue is peppered with closed businesses, sometimes aggressive transients, open displays of illegal drug use, mental illness, vandalism and trash, area residents say.

The McDonalds that stands today is one of the corridors cleanest properties. Its patrolled by a private security guard who is quick to escort loiterers out the door or, as reported recently, respond to a woman who was taking off her clothes outside in broad daylight.

Travelers on the TripAdvisor website give dismal reviews of some of the area motels, with one reporting checking into a room, only to pack up and leave within hours because of all kinds of shady stuff going on all night long.

Im seeing people walking down the streets with actual swords, and thats a scary thing, said Vance Kabella, an Albuquerque Realtor who grew up near the area. These are mentally unstable people walking down the streets  heavily armed and very dangerous. Along with 20- and 30-year-old vagrants, theyre really running the streets.

APD limited unless crime in progress

Members of the Foothills Area Community Policing Council have concluded Albuquerque police can only do so much to fight the chronic crime in the East Central corridor. The volunteer council says other city agencies need to step up to improve public safety.

Police are very limited in what they can do unless there is actually a violent crime in progress, said Robert Carleton, chair of the Foothills community policing council, one of six such volunteer councils set up around the city under its 2014 police reform settlement agreement with the U.S. Justice Department.

The Foothills council has stirred controversy with its conclusion that crime in the corridor is being exacerbated in part by a city-funded voucher program intended to provide temporary housing to people living in several motels west of Tramway on Central.

Businesses, residents and motel residents have expressed concern of the extreme danger (highest # of calls per week in any concentrated area in both the city and the state) at Tramway/Central motels. We are told these vouchers are issued at-will with NO oversight or monitoring. These vouchers are not tracked or coordinated among agencies. As a result, many of these vouchers are issued to non-vetted repeat offenders, says a report and recommendations unanimously approved by the policing council on June 14.

The objective reality is that conditions along East Central, and the situational, preventable crime ridden motels have become a serious problem for the businesses in the area, the report says.

In addition to draining police resources that could be used to answer calls to the rest of the Foothills Command, crime at or near the motels presents an unfortunate spectacle to tourists and travelers passing through Albuquerque, the council stated.

The policing council recommends tighter controls over the voucher program and urges more aggressive code enforcement of nuisance properties along the corridor.

The recommendations, which were submitted to APDs administration, havent gone over well.

Some say the council is off-base and unfair to the homeless and the housing program. Others question whether the council is operating out of its lane.

First, the CPCs are supposed to focus on issues related to the DOJ and reform process, not make recommendations about crime trends, APD spokesman Gilbert Gallegos said in an email.That said, we are aware of the challenges in the  area, which pre-date the issuance of vouchers, Gallegos stated.

The Foothills Area Command has continuously worked with neighborhoods and business owners to develop operations to address crime in the area. We do the same thing in all six area commands, and all have areas with specific challenges.

Calls for service are high in these areas across the city, he said, not just at Tramway and Central.

Journal requests to interview police officials at the Foothills Area Command werent granted.

The citys website describes the mission of the community policing councils this way: The goal of each Community Policing Council is to engage in candid, detailed and meaningful dialogue between Albuquerque Police and the citizens they serve. Councils are independent from the City and Department. They are encouraged to formally recommend changes to Albuquerque Police Department policies and procedures. They are also asked to make recommendations and identify concerns, problems, successes and opportunities within each area command and for the department as a whole.

Voucher program provides shelter

The city spends about $225,000 a year providing temporary vouchers to 26 motels around the city through contracts with four nonprofit groups. To be eligible, a family or individual must be experiencing homelessness. One contractor services those who are recovering from illness or injury and families.

The program funded through the Department of Family and Community Services provides shelter to about 45 households a month for a maximum of seven to 14 nights.

DFCS monitors all contracts to verify contractual obligations are followed, including length of time a voucher is provided for, the department told the Journal in an email. Unfortunately, just like weve seen in other cities since the pandemic, there have been challenges with criminal activity at some motels. Although troubling, it is unfair and inaccurate to pin those issues on a program that helps people experiencing homelessness.

No motel manager interviewed by the Journal reported problems with their customers on city vouchers. Some did say it can be difficult to persuade a voucher recipient to leave after the temporary stay.

When people are hanging out at gas stations, begging for money, under the freeways, stuff like that, thats whats contributing to the crime. Not the voucher program, said a manager at a Rodeway Inn on East Central who gave only his first name, Daniel. The people with vouchers are just homeless; they have families, and theyre trying to get on their feet.

He said his motel is very strict and hires a private security firm to keep the peace.

And that is another remedy that could help ease crime in the area, said Craig Michaelis, chief financial officer at Duke City Security, which patrols the Sprouts Farmers Market in the shopping center at the southwest corner of Tramway and Central.

Really its just having security guards in general or police, Michaelis said last week. That whole area, because of the foot traffic and theres transients that go through there, as long as theres visible deterrents, that will help reduce the crime.

Recently, his security team encountered an individual with a firearm. The team secured the weapon and called APD to follow up.

Were really not allowed to secure anything farther than 16 feet away from front door of Sprouts, he said. Our guards will tell us around the area, theres incidents that happen all the time, but we can only do so much out there.

We are not going to put up with this

Kabella is one of the newest members of the Foothills Council. Each council appoints its own voting members who must live or have businesses in their respective areas. Members serve two-year terms.

A Four Hills resident, Kabella says his job takes him into the Tramway and Central area many times a day.

In the past, hed see the same faces of those loitering, but I would say in the last 30 days, I would see 100 different individuals, and thats considerable, running the street corners, Kabella said. These are my streets that Im concerned about.

Recently, he said, a female friend was accosted as she was pumping gas at the Smiths off Tramway, near Central, and phoned him.

A gentleman walked up to her as her back was turned and put his hands on her demanding money. She was totally freaked out and jumped in her vehicle, Kabella said.

That friend was in her 30s and physically in good shape, Kabella said. My concern is the seniors, theyre the ones taking the brunt. They feel they better hand it over or theres going to be repercussions.

Kabella said because of short staffing, police are doing the best they can.

Over the past year, the council has also recommended ways to curb street racing and increase public safety at the Singing Arrow Park, south of Central, by having city parks employees trim trees and shrubs to provide better sightlines for APD surveillance.

Meanwhile, Harris isnt running for reelection this fall to the District 9 council seat he has held since 2005.

During a news conference about the old McDonalds in 2006, he noted that the closed restaurant has been burned out for months.

There are homeless people who have broken in here and used it to sleep. They have built fires.  We need to send a message to people and businesses  everybody in this part of town  that we are not going to put up with this, he said.

Asked for an interview last week, Harris through a spokeswoman said he wasnt available.

But the city last month launched a new campaign, approved by the City Council last year, to promote Central Avenue.

A marketing firm will receive up to $500,000 to devise strategies for a 14-mile stretch of Central Avenue between Unser Boulevard on the west and Tramway Boulevard on the east to attract businesses, local residents and visitors to the corridor, according to a city request for a proposal.

The proposal said the campaign is aimed at promoting a safe, economic recovery period, but also reversing negative public perception of Central Avenue.

Key recommendations

The Foothills Area Community Policing Council recommendations include:

 Requiring the city Family and Community Services agency to track police calls involving voucher users. Ensuring that people who receive the temporary motel vouchers who are disruptive to the extent of needing police invention wont be eligible to receive them again.

 Mandating that motels accepting vouchers be certified in crime prevention through APD.

 Improving city regulation and enforcement of time limits on temporary motel vouchers.

 Developing criteria that clearly stipulate when nuisance properties must be deemed a nuisance.
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ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.  Albuquerque police are investigating a shooting that left a person dead at a Northeast Albuquerque apartment complex early Sunday morning.

Gilbert Gallegos, a police spokesman, said that officers were called to Sierra Meadows Apartment Homes, on the 4200 block of Eubank NE, at 3 a.m. on a reported shooting.

A deceased person was found at the complex, he said.

Police havent released additional details about the shooting, including any information about a suspect.

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Instagram Movie

The 'Sister Act' actress has been announced to join the cast and serve as one of the producers for the upcoming true-story film about Emmett Till's killing by white men in 1955.

Jul 25, 2021

AceShowbiz - Whoopi Goldberg has joined the cast of "Till".

The actress will star as Emmett Till's grandmother Alma Carthan in the upcoming movie, which centres on the story of Till's mother and her fight for justice.

Danielle Deadwyler has been cast as Mamie Till-Mobley, who seeks justice for her son after he's killed by a white mob.

Whoopi is also producing the project alongside Keith Beauchamp, Barbara Broccoli, Thomas K. Levine, Michael JP Reilly and Frederick Zollo.

The film is being directed and written by Chinonye Chukwu, and production work is poised to start later this year.

Whoopi told Variety, "We have waited a very long time to bring this historically necessary important film to people. And as we watch the repression of American History when it comes to people of colour it makes it even that more important. I couldn't be with better people: Fred, Barbara, Chinonye, Keith, Michael and Danielle."

It's not the only onscreen project about Emmett Till.

Jay-Z and Will Smith also join forces to produce a stirring mini-series called "Women of the Movement" about the 1955 incident. The series was originally set to air on HBO but has since moved to ABC and received the go-ahead from the bosses at the Alphabet.

In 2019, Taraji P. Henson additionally confirmed a feature film where she's set to play Mamie Till-Mobley.

"I can already tell that the hardest one (film) I'll ever do is playing Emmett Till's mother, and I haven't even finished reading the script yet," she said back then. "John Singleton wrote it, and it's just brutal. Every page is making me ugly-face cry."
WENN TV

The 'True Detective' actress will take on a double role in the new mystery show while the Tony-nominated star is set to reprise her role back on Broadway for 'Tina'.

Jul 25, 2021

AceShowbiz - Michelle Monaghan is set to play identical twins in the limited psychological TV series "Echoes".

The "True Detective" star will portray both Leni and Gina, who have secretly been swapping places their entire life, even as they marry and raise children.

Leni is the more settled sister while Gina is rebellious. No one realises the charade until one of the twins goes missing.

The series was created and written for Netflix by Australian writer-producer Vanessa Gazy, whose previous series, "Eden", was also about a woman's mysterious disappearance.

Monaghan's past projects include TV series "The Path" and a recurring role opposite Tom Cruise in the "Mission: Impossible" film series.

She also starred in supernatural horror "The Craft: Legacy" last year and psychological thriller "Every Breath You Take" earlier this year.

She will next appear in "Spinning Gold", a long-gestating biopic about disco music mogul Neil Bogart. She's additionally tapped for another thriller caller "Blood" and scary film titled "Nanny".

Meanwhile, in separate news, Tony and Olivier Award nominee Adrienne Warren is set to return to Broadway's "Tina - The Tina Turner Musical" when the show reopens in October (21).

Warren originated the leading role in the West End production of the musical and took the show to New York, scoring critical acclaim along the way.

Her Broadway performance is nominated for a Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role/Musical Tony Award. The honours will be presented at the 74th Annual Tonys on 26 September (21).
BARABOO, Wis.  Aron and Laura McReynolds and their family five years ago opened New Life Lavender and Cherry Farm near Baraboo. In every one 
https://www.aish.com/jw/s/X-Troop-The-Top-Secret-Jewish-Commandos-of-WWII.html

A new book sheds light on a secret unit drawn from refugees whose deep-rooted hatred of Hitler would ensure they were a passionate fighting force.

Every chapter of the book should have been a film, notes Dr. Leah Garrett, whose new book X Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandos of World War II tells the remarkable story of a top-secret troop of Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe. She recently spoke with Aish.com about her book and the powerful impact it made on her life.

The Director of the Jewish Studies Center and Director of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Hunter College in New York, Dr. Garrett was moved to research Jews contributions to the Allied victory in World War II by her own family history. My grandfather and great uncle served in World War II, she explains. In the course of writing a previous book about Jewish soldiers during World War II, Dr. Garrett had heard a rumor that there was this secret commando unit made up of Jewish refugees. She began researching this crack fighting troop and tracking down surviving members and their families.

Fleeing Antisemitism in Europe

With Hitlers election to the Chancellorship of Germany in 1933, German Jews became targets of popular hatred and official anti-Jewish laws. Manfred Gans was eleven when Hitler came to power. By the time of his bar mitzvah he was already showing signs of the resistance and bravery that would soon make him one of the X Troops heroes.

Manfred and his family had returned home from synagogue one Shabbat in 1935. Hed chanted his bar mitzvah portion beautifully and his family was hosting a houseful of guests in celebration. Manfred gave a stirring bar mitzvah speech. The Nazis are calling us the enemy. To them we are vermin, less than human They are accusing us of all possible evils. What they dont understand is that our religion, our Torah, does not allow this. Our Torah and the Jewish books teach us to be ethical and forthright. That is who we really are. The Nazis are completely wrong about us.

Manfred Gans

Manfreds parents looked on in horror. If someone would report his speech to the Nazi authorities the consequences would be severe. The family remained safe for the moment, but three years later Manfreds parents sent him alone on a kindertransport, a refugee resettlement program for children in England.

In the last months of peace before World War II broke out, nearly 10,000 Jewish children fled Germany and Austria for safety in Holland and Britain on the kindertransports.

Another child who fled was Claus Ascher. When the Nazis came to power, Claus supported them, until his father Curt told him a deeply guarded secret: Curt was a Jew. Claus entire world view suddenly shifted. He became anti-Nazi. When Adolph Hitler visited Claus school for a special assembly, Claus recalled being unimpressed: Here was one of the most powerful leaders in Europe, but to me he seemed like a peasant in a Sunday suit.

One day in 1937, when Claus was 15, he and his father were sitting in a beer hall when Curt got into an argument with some local men. The Nazis are helping General Franco (of Spain) against a democratically elected government! Curt declared. Within moments two policemen entered the hall and arrested Curt. Claus made his way home.

Within two weeks, a Gestapo officer told his stunned family that Curt had died of circulation failure in prison. After Kristallnacht, when crowds rampaged through the streets of German and Austrian towns on Nov. 9, 1938, beating and killing Jews and destroying their property with impunity, Claus mother sent him on a kindertransport to Holland, then eventually to Britain.

Both these men, as well as 85 other refugees, would soon find themselves on the cutting edge of Britains elite forces, helping battle Nazis and win World War II.

Proving themselves in Britain

Life for refugees in Britain was difficult. One young Austrian Jewish refugee  who would later be known as Peter Masters and serve in X Troop  managed to get work on a farm. The farm owner hated him, berating him as a no-good city kid.

One day, as Peter labored on the farm, he was amazed to see a man who looked just like his father, Rudolf, walking towards him. It was indeed his father; he had managed to escape Vienna by hiding in a pile of coal being transported to Britain on a ship. Once in England, he tracked down his son.

Even though he was a Jewish refugee, Peter was categorized as a dangerous alien and put in a concentration camp in England.

Their happiness was short-lived. The next day, Rudolph was arrested and interned as an enemy alien. In June of 1940, Peter was also arrested. Even though he was a Jewish refugee, Peter  like many other refugees  was categorized as a dangerous alien and put in a concentration camp in England. Some refugees were shipped off to often brutal enemy alien camps in Canada and Australia, as well. Peter remembered a corporal screaming at him that first day, I have the right to shoot you. You have no rights at all!

Paul Hornig, another Jewish refugee, managed to get out of Nazi Austria and studied at Cambridge. He was arrested as an enemy alien and sent to an internment camp in Canada. The ship transporting him and 1,306 other internees was overpacked. The refugees were made to sleep on the ground in the dirty hold of the ship, while 1,345 German POWs also being transported were given the cabins.

Hans Julius Guttman, another future X Troop fighter, was shipped to an internment camp in the Australian outback. He and 2,732 internees were crammed into a ship that had an official capacity of 1,600, locked into a stifling hot hold without access to food, water or toilets for most of the day. The ship also held 244 German POWs who were given preferential treatment.

Some of the Jewish refugees had managed to save photographs and personal possessions. Some had even managed to salvage Torah scrolls and other Jewish ritual items. Gilbert recalled that the British soldiers threw most of these precious items overboard. Jewish refugees were routinely beaten. One refugee named Jakob Weiss took his own life on the ship after British soldiers took away his visa to South America.

The Pioneer Corps

These enemy alien refugees began a letter writing campaign to British and Australian Parliaments, detailing their mistreatments and pointing out that they were being treated worse than German POWs. Eventually, their letters paid off. In 1942, many of the alien refugees were given a choice: they could return to Britain and be freed if they volunteered for the Royal Pioneer Corps.

Started in 1939, the Pioneer Corps was designed to provide backup labor for the British army. Duties included clearing roads, packing trucks, and other mundane jobs. In 1942, it was the only unit in the British army in which enemy aliens could serve. Many of them leapt at the chance, flooding the Pioneer Corps with Jewish refugees and other refugees from Nazi Europe. A special unit designated A for Alien was created for them.

Immediately, some of these refugees distinguished themselves. A few were constantly getting in touch with the head of their units, saying please let me fight, observes Dr. Garrett. The message boards in Pioneer Corps units included flyers looking for men who would volunteer for hazardous duty. Many Jewish refugees eagerly asked to serve.

Creating X Troop

In 1942, the war was going terribly. Britain and the Soviet Union were both on the retreat. Even though the US had finally entered the war, Germany was ascendant. Winston Churchill was desperate for new and creative ways to fight.

87 men, at least 82 of whom were Jews, made it through basic training and were selected to form the top-secret unit.

Inspiration came from Lord Mountbatten, a member of Britains royal family and a senior military commander whod been directing special forces as they battled the Nazis. Mountbatten suggested that Britain create a completely new unit drawn from refugees whose deep-rooted hatred of Hitler would ensure they were a passionate fighting force. Moreover, the knowledge of local mores and language that refugees had would ensure that they could be used for undercover intelligence work and for interrogating Nazi troops, as well as for fighting.

Churchill gave the new unit its name. Because they will be unknown warriors... they must perforce be considered an unknown quantity. Since the algebraic symbol for the unknown is X, let us call them X Troop. In the end, 87 men, at least 82 of whom were Jews, made it through basic training and were selected to form the top-secret unit.

New Identities

The X Troop soldiers trained intensely in Scotland and Wales, becoming crack commandos. Their commander, Captain Bryan Hilton-Jones, realized that as Jews, they would face particular danger if they were captured by Nazi troops.

On the first day of training, Cptn. Hilton-Jones turned to one man and asked What is your name, soldier? The soldier said, Hans Furth.

No its not! Cptn. Hilton-Jones declared. After you leave here, Private Furth will cease to exist. Every one of you will invent yourself a new British-sounding name and a new cover story to go along with it. You have 15 minutes

X Troops capturing German soldiers

The men looked at each other in disbelief, but they had no choice but to comply. Within minutes, they each had taken on a new name. Paul Hornig became Paul Streeten. Hans Julius Guttman became Ron Gilbert. Many of the men used these names, invented out of thin air so hastily, for the rest of their lives.

They also had to destroy every personal letter and piece of paper with their birth name on it, and concoct cover stories. Some X Troop soldiers who fell in battle were memorialized with Christian crosses on their graves, known to posterity only by their English names.

Operation Tarbrush

X Troop soldiers fought in crucial battles and theatres of World War II, lending their bravery and expertise to other units. X Troop soldiers were instrumental in aiding the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943, and helped Allied troops fight up the Italian coast to Syracuse and Messina.

One of the most momentous X Troop operations was Operation Tarbrush, a secret April, 1944 intelligence mission to find out whether the Nazis had a powerful new anti-personnel mine that they were ready to deploy on Frances Normandy coast. With the D-Day Landings scheduled for June, it was crucial that the allies had this information.

Hungarian-born Jewish Lieutenant George Lane (born Lanyi Gyorgy) was selected for the mission, along with a British Captain. After relaying information back to the Allies, Lt. Lane and his comrade were captured by Nazi soldiers. In his cell, Lt. Lane was told to wash up because he was going to be interrogated by an important person. To his utter shock, Lt. Lane was taken into a room containing Field Marshal Rommel, Commander of Germanys Wehrmacht. You realize that you are in a very tricky situation here, Lt. Lane? the senior Nazi asked him.

Sir, how can the British and Germans fight side by side considering what we know about what the Nazis are doing to the Jews?

Lt. Lane kept his composure as Field Marshal Rommel spoke with him at length. Britain and Germany should be fighting on the same side, Rommel suggested. Communist Russia was a natural enemy to both countries.

Risking death, Lane could no longer keep quiet. Sir, how can the British and Germans fight side by side considering what we know about what the Nazis are doing to the Jews? No Englishman could ever tolerate such a thing. After some more strained conversation, Lt. Lane was released. Later on, he managed to give the Allies crucial information about the location of Rommels office, materially helping the Allies in their D-Day plans.

Fighting at D-Day

X Troop provided key fighters on D-Day, the Allies assault on Nazi-controlled France, which was designed to give the Allies a toehold in northern Europe and help turn the tide of the War. It was the largest amphibious assault in military history.

In all, 43 X Troop members were placed with eight commando units on D-Day. Before the invasion, Brigadier Simon Fraser, one of Britains most distinguished military figures, addressed the X Troop men. You will shortly be embarking on ships for the invasion of France, Fraser said. You are the tip of the spear, the fine cutting edge of the British Expeditionary Force. You men should expect a physical encounter in which you have had no equal. You know your job and I know that you will not fail. Remember the bigger the challenge, the better we play. History will tell that in our age there were giants who walked the Earth and by God we are going to prove that tomorrow!

Landing on D-Day

X Troop member Peter Masters recalled that for him and his fellow soldiers, the war felt deeply personal. You were praying for war. Not because you were bloodthirsty, but because if you didnt fight, then you and all those you loved would be killed.

Dr. Garrett notes that among the X Troop soldiers, All of them saw the clock on the wall. They thought, Maybe the Germans took my mom away but maybe, just maybe, if I fight enough, maybe it will stop the war in time for my mother to be rescued or my sister to be rescued or my brother They were all willing to sacrifice themselves.

The contribution of X Troop was central to D-Day. Manfred Gans accepted the surrender of 25 German soldiers and led his men through heavy fire to safety. Along with fellow X Troop soldier Harry Nomburg, hed also conveyed intelligence about Nazi minefields to Allied commanders. Geroge Saunders killed and captured large numbers of Nazi troops. He and Peter Masters had helped capture a German machine gun nest by drawing its fire. Peter Masters had also helped capture a crucial bridge. Though D-Day was a success, the war would continue to drag on for another year.

Finding Their Families

In some cases, X Troop members were able to reunite with their families. As he penetrated deeper into Europe, Mansfred Gans was driven to find his family. Alerted that his parents were in Theresienstadt Concentration Camp in Czechoslovakia, he got permission to drive a jeep to the camp that was occupied by Soviet forces.

The next minutes are indescribable, he later wrote in his diary. I suddenly find myself in their arms. They are both crying wildly. It sounds like the crying of despair. I look at Father and in spite of having prepared myself for a lot, I have to bite my teeth together not to show my shock. He is hardly recognizable. Completely starved and wrecked.

Peter Masters

As the war drew to a close, X Troop member Colin Anson, whose father had been Jewish, was assigned to work in the Field Intelligence Agency Technical in Frankfurt; the unit was meant to gather German scientific and technology advances for postwar purposes and also document evidence of war crimes. Anson also used his time in Frankfurt to find his mother, whod been left behind in the city. As a Gentile, she was relatively safe.

He later recalled, I started up the stairs and called her name and heard my mother coming down from the top floor...I rushed up and embraced her. And she said Nanu (Good Lord! Whats all this!). At first she didnt recognize her own son. Sobbing, she told him how his father had been murdered in Dachau and how shed been ostracized for not divorcing her Jewish husband after his arrest.

Many X Troop soldiers interrogated Nazis. For many, it was incredibly difficult to hear the stories of how their families and friends had been murdered. X Troop member Fred Jackson (born Peter Levy) was tasked with interrogating Nazi war criminal Rudolf Hoss, the commander of Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, where Jacksons mother had been killed. After interrogating Hoss, Jackson recalled, I got drunk for a week. I just could not live with myself. He was the man who had killed my mother.

Jews fought back.

In the aftermath of the war, some of the X Troop soldiers embraced their Jewishness once more. Manfred Gans arranged for Judaica items to be sent to the destitute survivors at Theresienstadt. He also began to reclaim his Jewish identity and his Jewish name. Other X Troop members never spoke about their Jewish identity.

Writing X Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandos of World War II helped Dr. Garrett to strengthen her own Jewish identity. Writing this book has made me more willing to fight, to be on the front lines against antisemitism. Jews have to be loud and strong, and when necessary and able, fight back.
Lake Charles, Louisiana (70615)

Today

Partly cloudy this evening then becoming cloudy with periods of light rain after midnight. Low near 75F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 60%..

Tonight

Partly cloudy this evening then becoming cloudy with periods of light rain after midnight. Low near 75F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 60%.
Caligula once proclaimed that he wished that all of Rome had but one neck. Recent events have proven that even a deranged Roman emperor can sometimes be right  figuratively, it must be emphasized, in this case. When your enemies gather everything they have in an untenable position like rats in a barrel, you can inflict upon them a decisive public relations catastrophe. More than a hundred left-wing academic departments around the world have just presented supporters of the Middle East's only democracy with one collective ideological neck by spewing anti-Israel hate propaganda while using the names of their universities and professional organizations, and without any disclaimers I can see. American Thinker readers can help encourage the organizations to repudiate and disown this propaganda to give the entire anti-Israel and Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement a lasting black eye.

Recall that "cancel culture," for which there should be zero tolerance to the extent that cancelers should themselves be unemployable risks to organizational cohesion and performance, relates to pressuring an employer to take action against an employee for things the latter says or publishes while not representing the employer. Employers do, however, have the absolute right to control what employees say while representing the employer. The University of California's policy says this, for example, with regard to political statements, "In such circumstances it is the responsibility of the employee to issue an appropriate disclaimer concurrent with the use of the University name declaring in substance that the University is not involved in the particular activity or program." Recall that the Franklin and Marshall faculty who signed their names to an anti-Israel tirade stipulated that they were speaking for themselves and not F&M.

"Gender Studies Departments In Solidarity With Palestinian Feminist Collective" is endorsed, in contrast, by "Department of Feminist Studies, University of California Santa Cruz"; "Department of Gender and Women's Studies, University of California Berkeley"; "Department of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara"; and several others with links going directly to university websites such as feministstudies.ucsc.edu, and no apparent disclaimer. The statement elaborates, "As gender studies departments in the United States ...," from which I infer that they are speaking on behalf of their departments as opposed to as individuals. The same principle probably carries over to all the other universities and professional organizations listed such as Rutgers, U. Minnesota, U. Mass, the American Association of Geographers, and so on.

The web page adds, "Please tweet and post the solidarity statement from your department social media accounts"  i.e., asks readers to use university resources, as opposed to personal social media accounts, to propagate this material.

Gender and Feminist Studies Departments for Domestic Violence, Misogyny, and Rape

"Gender Studies Departments In Solidarity With Palestinian Feminist Collective" spews typical, and often unintelligible, "woke" left-wing gibberish such as "[w]e center global social justice in our intersectional teaching, scholarship, and organizing," whatever the hell that means, although it contains all the right buzzwords like "intersectional" and "social justice." The ill-informed and dishonest content of this publication, as endorsed by roughly 100 such programs, meanwhile speaks poorly of the entire field of "Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies" and similar programs.

Students should indeed learn the important roles played by the female half of the human species since time immemorial. These roles are denied systematically to women in uncivilized countries, where they are harassed or even assaulted for trying to go to school. Hamas-infested Gaza treats women, and also LGBT people, like dirt. The IDF points out, "Significantly, there is no law in Gaza that prohibits violence against women within the family, sexual violence [AKA rape] included." Amnesty International adds that LGBT people in "Palestine" can get up to ten years in prison. This is what "Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies"; "Department of Feminist Studies"; and so on appear to tolerate while they bash Israel: domestic violence, rape, honor killings, and discrimination. The role of women in Israel speaks for itself as does the status of LGBT people.

Ill-Informed, Dishonest, or Both

"Gender Studies Departments In Solidarity With Palestinian Feminist Collective" is also uninformed, dishonest, or both. The kind of people who write something like this would also probably tell us, for example, that the Poles started the Second World War.

"[T]he indiscriminate bombing of Gaza" is an outright lie because the Israelis aimed their weapons, and often expensive precision-guided ones, only at military targets such as Qassam rocket launchers. It also omits entirely the context of Hamas's criminal use of these rockets against Israel ("telling of a partial truth," which the USMA's Honor Code defines as a lie), and I see no reason to construe this omission as anything but willful because the rocket attacks are universally known. This makes the web page "Gender Studies Departments In Solidarity With Palestinian Feminist Collective" dishonest along with everybody else who has similarly accused Israel of indiscriminate use of violence while ignoring what Hamas did to make the violence necessary.

Gender Studies Departments for a Judenrein Middle East

The statement continues, "In solidarity, we call for the end of Israel's military occupation of Palestine and for the Palestinian right to return to their homes." The agenda of the so-called right of return is to destroy Israel. If these people do not know this, then they failed to exercise rudimentary diligence. If they do know, their intention is to help Hamas make the region Judenrein.

This conclusion is reinforced here: "May 15th marked the 73rd anniversary of the Nakba, an ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine[.]" May 15 is Israel's Independence Day. The Anti-Defamation League reports, "Some Palestinian politicians, writers, and commentators use Nakba Day to insinuate that the very existence of Israel is a catastrophe and to question the legitimacy of Israel as the Jewish national homeland." It is also to be noted that the Arab nations that attacked Israel in 1948, with the openly expressed goal of committing ethnic cleansing if not actual genocide, were responsible for the displacement of Palestinian Arabs. "But once the Palestinians started a genocidal war, the inevitable consequence was the creation of refugees." None of this stops Hamas's stooges and dupes from blaming the Jews.

The anti-Israel tantrum adds, "Palestinians have been resisting settler colonialism for more than one hundred years," as if life under the Ottoman Empire's boot heel constituted self-rule or autonomy. As Crocodile Dundee might have put it, "That ain't an occupation, mate; this is an occupation."

One Neck

It is futile to try to persuade left-wing Israel-bashers that de facto denial of Israel's right to exist and libel of Israel's acts of lawful self-defense is wrong and that they should change their ways. We must emulate Lord Clifford in King Henry VI instead; "I will not bandy with thee word for word / But buckle with thee blows, twice two for one." Now we can put this into practice as follows. I encourage American Thinker's readers to bring "Gender Studies Departments In Solidarity With Palestinian Feminist Collective" to the attention of the ethics and compliance departments of every single university and professional organization named on this page. There are a lot of organizations, so just pick a few at random to do your bit. This should induce the institutions to disown the web page "Gender Studies Departments In Solidarity With Palestinian Feminist Collective" and thus humiliate and embarrass the entire anti-Israel movement.

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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Earlier this year, I added a new English word to my vocabulary. This word has been repeated many times by President Biden: "recalibration." This word became the focal point for the U.S. administration's policy with Riyadh. After I translated this word using Google Translate, I realized the immediate importance of recalibrating relations between Riyadh and Washington, especially since the ruling Democratic Party did not have the opportunity to see the new Saudi Arabia through an impartial lens. This is largely due to their preoccupation with domestic political battles with former president Trump over the past four years. This recalibration should not be viewed as a negative thing at all, as an objective re-evaluation of all facets of the historic Saudi-U.S. relationship can yield a positive path forward for both countries.

With this sense of objectivity in mind, the recent visit of Saudi deputy defense minister Prince Khalid bin Salman to Washington was described by many observers as a success, as he met secretary of state Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, and defense secretary Lloyd Austin. The discussions focused on the issues of Iran, Yemen, and human rights, with Prince Khalid describing the talks as phenomenal.

While it is important to discuss the country's role with regard to facing these pressing issues, it is also important to view the new Saudi Arabia in light of its "Vision 2030" under the leadership of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The Kingdom has undertaken tremendous economic, administrative, and social reforms, reducing its dependence on oil from 92% to 70% in just five years. In addition, Saudi Arabia received a host of accolades from both private and governmental institutions over the past year alone, with the World Bank ranking the Kingdom in its 2020 report as the most reformed country in the world when it comes to women's rights and public relations firm Edelman reporting that the government of Saudi Arabia is one of the most trusted governments in the world, according to its 2021 Trust Barometer report. The U.S. State Department also praised the Kingdom in its annual Trafficking in Persons report, citing significant improvements in combating human trafficking. In terms of its commitment to bolstering its cyber-security capabilities to a globally competitive level, the Kingdom ranked second in the world after the United States, according to a report by the United Nations International Telecommunication Union. The Kingdom also took strident steps to combat corruption locally and globally, signing a $10-million agreement with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) to support a global operational network of anti-corruption law enforcement.

No matter how numerous the Kingdom's achievements have been so far, its most important achievement is its zero-tolerance policy toward extremist ideology, locally and globally. Maintaining this unwavering policy while enacting sweeping and exhaustive reforms at such a rapid pace will undoubtedly cause the Kingdom to run into some bumps in the road, much like any other country in the world. Saudi Arabia is going through a major transformational stage, and ensuring that this transformation is successful requires strict policies that are sometimes harsh. Still, this does not excuse the Kingdom from correcting its mistakes, both old and new.

The golden rule of Saudi-U.S. relations was referred to as "Oil for Security." The relationship has evolved rapidly over the past decade, as the rule has now become "Trade and Security for Trade and Security." The Kingdom is the largest trading partner of the United States in the Middle East and North Africa region, coming in as the twelfth largest global trading partner of the United States.

As a regional heavyweight, the Kingdom has also established itself as the global "central bank" for energy, in addition to establishing itself as the spiritual center of the Islamic world. I had the honor of meeting the secretary-general of the Muslim World League, Dr. Muhammad Al-Issa, a few days ago in Riyadh, where I asked him about his opinion of the United States. He emphatically told me that "the United States of America is the greatest friend of Muslims and the Islamic world."

With this sense of positivity and optimism that Dr. Al-Issa expressed, I would argue that it is time to set aside the pressures of mainstream media and reset the expectations of this important relationship, moving forward as partners in confronting regional and global challenges.

Salman Al-Ansari is an Independent Saudi political analyst and businessman and the Founder of the Washington, D.C.-based SAPRAC Inc.

Image: apriltan18 via Pixabay, Pixabay License.

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Japan started recording derelict North Korean fishing vessels washing ashore in 2011, according to reporting by CNNs Hilary Whiteman and Mairi Mackay. Since then, 63 on average of the "ghost ships" have annually come ashore. Most are empty, but some contain dead bodies and occasionally a skeletal crew. Generally, the ships are old, underpowered, and lacking GPS.

YouTube screengrab

Initially, authorities assumed the vessels belonged to crews who were trying to defect from North Korea. Or "climate change" had caused the squids to move away from North Korean shores forcing the fishermen to travel dangerously far out to sea, where they died from exposure.

But by using satellite data, a team of researchers from the conservation group Global Fishing Watch pieced together the most likely explanation, as reported in last year's NBC article "Ghost Ships":

China is sending a previously invisible armada of industrial boats to illegally fish in North Korean waters, violently displacing smaller North Korean boats and spearheading a decline in once-abundant squid stocks of more than 70 percent.

In March 2020, the United Nations received anonymous reports from two separate nations alerting them to illegal Chinese fishing within North Korea's exclusive economic zone. The statements included testimonies from a Chinese crew confirming their government knew of the illegal fishing in North Korean waters.

The Chinese fleet operating in those waters became known as the "Dark Fleet" because they often turned off their transponders when entering North Korean waters, hiding them from land-based authorities for months.

Once Global Fishing Watch learned of the illegal ships, they began screening satellite images of the area and discovered the vessels were Chinese by their bright lights. Chinese ships deploy anywhere from 180 to 700 light bulbs mounted on long poles overhanging the water to attract squid, whereas the typical North Korean ship employs five to twenty bulbs. Seven hundred bulbs are the equivalent of the lights of an outdoor stadium.

More than 800 Chinese fishing vessels were recorded fishing in 2019 in waters off North Korea's coast, violating United Nations sanctions forbidding foreign ships in those waters. Global Fishing Watch believes these fishing vessels are likely "Chinese-owned vessels operating without official Chinese authority, with no registration, flag, or license ... and likely paying licensing fees to Pyongyang [the government of North Korea]." The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded to the accusations: "China has consistently and conscientiously enforced the resolutions of the Security Council relating to North Korea." But the fishing has continued sending the Korean fishermen into Russian and Japanese waters in search of squid.

YouTube screengrab

The reported number of incidents of illegal fishing by Chinese ships has skyrocketed. Especially disturbing were the 340 Chinese vessels fishing near the environmentally fragile Galapagos Islands.

Blake Herzinger reported for Foreign Policy about the Chinese fishing practices:

Globally, economic losses from illegal fishing are difficult to quantify, but there is little disagreement that the overall economic loss totals tens of billions of dollars yearly, encompassing lost tax revenue, onshore fishing industry jobs, and depletion of food supplies. Much of that illegal catch comes from the exclusive economic zones of states such as Guinea, the Philippines, and North Korea that are impoverished and cannot exercise sufficient control of their maritime areas  the same states that Chinese fishermen often end up targeting. Fishery collapse due to overfishing in those areas poses a very real risk of food insecurity for millions in the developing world.

After years of overfishing, the Chinese have depleted the fish from their home waters, causing the government to subsidize its fleet for a planetary hunt for sea life and is devastating the livelihoods of fishermen worldwide by overfishing their seas. A study released last summer conducted by the University of British Columbia, the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, and the University of Western Australia concluded that 82 percent of the 1,300 commercial species of fish and marine invertebrates analyzed are suffering from overfishing.

Despite better technology, fisheries report lower yields yearly. According to Global Fishing Watch, over three billion people rely on seafood, making overfishing an international concern.

China dwarfs the other nations guilty of overfishing. The U.N. Fisheries Agency lists seven big countries that together capture almost 50 percent of the total number of fish caught worldwide. Of those seven, "China accounted for about 15 percent of total global fishing captures, more than the total captures of the second-and third-ranked countries combined."

The Yale School of the Environment reported: "Estimates of the total size of China's global fishing fleet vary widely. However, by some calculations, China has anywhere from 200,000 to 800,000 fishing boats, accounting for nearly half of the world's fishing activity."

The Barrel of the Gun

Chinese fishing vessels are an extension of geopolitical power for China, and according to the Maritime Awareness Project, many of the "fishermen" are members of the Chinese Maritime Militia:

The Chinese maritime militia (CMM) is an offshoot of China's national militia created in 2013 to support the People's Liberation Army (PLA). Trained by the PLA Navy, the CMM drills with both the navy and coast guard and [is] directed by the People's Armed Forces Departments (PAFD). The CMM acts "to undertake the duties related to preparations against war, defend the frontiers and maintain public order; and be always ready to join the armed forces to take part in war, resist aggression and defend the motherland." While the CMM is not officially part of Chinese maritime law enforcement, it is often used in place of the military when enforcing the nine-dash line claim in the South China Sea to avoid allegations of use of force. This tactic of coercive gradualism seeks to intimidate smaller states by first using fishing vessels crewed by CMM members to harass foreign fishermen from their traditional fishing grounds. Should the countries defend these fishermen with their coast guards or navies, the PLA Navy soon shows up to escalate the situation into an international dispute. The Chinese successfully employed this tactic during the 1962 and 1974 Paracel Island conflicts, also the 1995 Mischief Reef and 2012 Scarborough Shoal incidents. The CMM often use fishing boats with reinforced hulls and water cannons for sinking foreign fishing vessels.

To help the CMM expand their territory in the heavily disputed South China Sea, China has built a series of artificial islands on reefs and shoals, followed by aircraft landing strips, harbors, and radar facilities. Once created, swarms of Chinese fishing boats overwhelm the foreign competition, as happened in 2018 at the Philippines-held Thitu Island. After the Philippine government initiated modest upgrades on the island's infrastructure, more than 90 Chinese fishing ships dropped anchor around the island to intimidate the Philippines. China is also in a quasi-war with Japan over the Senkaku Islands.

That China intends to exert its influence over the world is now obvious. For example, China has just signed an agreement with the Papua New Guinea government to build "a $200 million 'comprehensive multi-functional fishery industrial park' on the island of Daru," according to Jeff Wall in the Strategist. But he added: "A $200 million 'fishery' investment in an area not known for an abundance of fisheries but strategically as close to Australia as you can get surely raises questions about the real agenda," which is increasingly resembling world domination.

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July 28, 2021, will mark the 34th anniversary of the death of James Burnham, one of the great American thinkers of the 20th century  or, for that matter, any century. Burnham was the author of seminal books on global sociopolitical developments, geopolitics, the Cold War, liberalism, and the power relationships that underlay the American republic. He wrote a regular column for National Review from 1955 to 1978, which one admirer called the "best column on international affairs in contemporary English journalism." Unfortunately, Burnham is largely unknown among younger conservatives. That is something that needs to be remedied.

Burnham studied at Princeton (graduating first in his class) and Balliol College, Oxford, and taught at New York University from 1929 to 1954. In the 1930s, he was a member of the Trotskyite Worker's Party and wrote for The Symposium, The New International, and other left-wing and Marxist journals. He broke with Marxism in 1940 and began writing for Partisan Review, a leading journal of the non-communist left.

In the early 1940s, he wrote two major sociopolitical works  The Managerial Revolution (1941) and The Machiavellians (1943). Young conservatives can learn much from both of these books about how oligarchies and ruling classes wield political power in all countries, including the United States. Burnham's description in The Managerial Revolution of the rising "managerial class" of the 1930s and 1940s is eerily similar to today's ruling class of governmental, corporate, scientific, and Big Tech elites. And his crafting of a "science of power" in The Machiavellians will intellectually arm young conservatives to resist centralized power and those political elites who seek to acquire greater power to rule on behalf of the people.

During the Second World War, Burnham worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), where he wrote an analysis of Soviet postwar goals that anticipated the Cold War. After the war, he wrote a Cold War trilogy  The Struggle for the World (1947), The Coming Defeat of Communism (1950), and Containment or Liberation? (1952)  that combined an understanding of the goals and methods of communist elites with an analysis of the East-West struggle in its geopolitical and ideological aspects. Today, when the U.S. and the West face another challenge from a Eurasian-based communist giant (China), Burnham's Cold War trilogy offers still relevant geopolitical and ideological analyses that can inform America's strategy for dealing with that threat.

Burnham understood that the communist threat is two-pronged. Communist great powers engage in external aggression but also seek to weaken their adversaries from within. In 1954, Burnham wrote The Web of Subversion, a book that detailed communist infiltration of the United States government in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. This last book, and Burnham's refusal to unequivocally condemn Senator Joseph McCarthy's investigations of domestic communists, led to Burnham's final break with American liberals.

Burnham became a founding editor of William F. Buckley, Jr.'s new conservative journal National Review, which debuted in the fall of 1955. He described his regular column  first entitled "The Third World War" and later changed to "The Protracted Conflict"  as "a notebook of running commentary on the events, problems, methods and prospects of the war we are in." In these columns, Burnham analyzed changes in communist leadership, revolts against communism in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the arms race and efforts at arms control, communist goals and advances in the Third World, the war in Southeast Asia, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Nixon's opening to China, the Middle East conflicts, and so much more.

In 1959, Burnham wrote Congress and the American Tradition. The book is largely forgotten today, but it should be read by all Americans who want to understand the founding principles of our constitutional republic.

Then in 1964, Burnham wrote his last book  Suicide of the West, a brilliant dissection of American liberalism, which Burnham called "the ideology of Western suicide." Burnham did not blame liberalism for what he viewed as America's and the West's global decline  that was caused, he wrote, by the decline of religion and the corrupting effects of affluence. But, Burnham wrote, liberalism served to accompany the West to its decline  it rationalized it, even promoted it. And liberalism was ill-equipped to reverse the decline because it scorned the notion of the superiority of Western civilization. Sound familiar?

It behooves a new generation of conservatives to familiarize itself with Burnham's ideas. The best way to do that is to read Burnham's books and National Review columns (some were collected in 1967 in a book entitled The War We Are In; others can be accessed in libraries). Other sources include Daniel Kelly's excellent biography James Burnham and the Struggle for the World, John Patrick Diggins's Up From Communism, Samuel T. Francis' Power and History, and Kevin Smant's How Great the Triumph. After Burnham's death, National Review devoted an entire issue to his life and work (September 11, 1987 issue). Shorter articles include Brian Crozier's "The Political Thought of James Burnham" in the April 15, 1983 issue of National Review, John O'Sullivan's "Present Before The Creation" in the November 1990 issue of National Review, and my own article "The First Cold Warrior" in the online journal American Diplomacy.

Americans today face an external communist threat from China and a domestic power-grab from a ruling class that seeks to fundamentally transform our society and restrict our fundamental liberties all in the name of "progress" and protecting our health. The elites who promote "defunding" the police, Critical Race Theory, and "wokeism" in our military and other institutions are the new "managerial class." And the Chinese Communist Party presents a geopolitical and ideological threat similar to the one examined in Burnham's Cold War trilogy.

Read Burnham. Read about Burnham. And understand.

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Antisemitism is a unique form of hatred. It has existed for millennia and manifested itself in the form of slavery, pogroms, torture, banishment, exterminations, terrorism, boycotts, and discrimination of the Jewish people the world over. Frighteningly, in the 21st century, antisemitism is on the rise in numbers that should be a wake-up call for all moral people, yet it is not.

FBI statistics indicate that at over 60%, hate crimes against Jews far outweigh attacks against any other religious group. The Anti-Defamation League documents that antisemitism increased tremendously over the past year, including a 75% increase in May alone.

Antisemitism has reared its ugly head in our print and televised news outlets, K12 classrooms, and college campuses. It exists in the mainstream media and social media, the halls of Congress, and corporate boardrooms. And in the age of cancel culture, the double standards today that permit antisemitism while prohibiting every other form of hate speech reveal that Jews are once again facing a dangerous onslaught reserved solely for us. Never Again was a phrase born out of the Shoah. Seventy-five years later, it has lost all meaning as antisemitic campus youth groups, boycott movements, and old-fashioned Jew-hatred are once again mainstreamed.

Jews cannot safely walk on the streets of our cities or college campuses, pray in our synagogues, or wear visibly Jewish symbols without fear of being physically assaulted or spat upon. Phrases such as "go back to the ovens," "Hitler was right," and "Zionist Israel = Nazi Germany" can be heard on streets from Boca Raton and Miami to San Francisco and Seattle  and everywhere in between.

Since the founding of the State of Israel, traditional antisemitism  replete with swastikas, blood libels, and conspiracy theories of Jews controlling the world  has expanded. Today's antisemitism certainly includes the painting of swastikas on synagogues, gravestones, businesses, and homes. It includes extremists perpetuating blood libels about Jews drinking the blood of Muslim children and withholding life-saving medications from Arabs.

Today's antisemitism also manifests itself in anti-Zionism. It is this new antisemitism that is becoming the most dangerous for Jews across the world who find themselves in the crosshairs of ignorant haters who know nothing about the history of the Jewish homeland or the magnificent culture of the Jewish people. Anti-Zionism, an attempt at masking Jew-hatred, is flourishing, and it must be stopped lest we find ourselves repeating history once again.

In the face of Ben & Jerry's recent announcement that it is pulling its ice cream from what it ignorantly labeled "Occupied Palestinian Territory," we are reminded of the boycotts of Jewish businesses in Germany just prior to the owners of those businesses being hauled off in cattle cars to the concentration camps at which six million Jews were systematically murdered. And while the outrage at the B&J announcement has been swift and loud from Jews across the world, like B&J's Jewish progressive owners, the usual suspects of far-left, anti-Zionist organizations and individuals are unsurprisingly, yet abhorrently, defending the policy.

There are steps that federal, state, and local governments and other American institutions can take to help protect Jewish citizens and prevent the scourge of hate from expanding in even more dangerous and insidious ways. And yet, our lawmakers, corporate executives, and college administrators continue to disregard their moral responsibilities. That must change immediately.

Congress should pass the Antisemitism Awareness Act, held up by Democrats, which codifies the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of antisemitism and which has been adopted by the State Department, thirty countries, and over 450 global entities. Colleges, corporations, states, and municipalities should do the same. In order to fight this scourge, we must understand what it is.

Democrats in Congress have also prevented the passage of anti-BDS legislation. Thirty-five states have passed such laws and are currently being encouraged to begin their enforcement against B&J's and its parent company, Unilever. It is time for the federal government to do the same.

The Biden administration should restate the Trump administration's declaration that the BDS movement is antisemitic and that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. And it should enforce Trump's Title VI Executive Order designed to protect Jewish students on college campuses. Biden's nominee to the Education Department's Office of Civil Rights should not receive Senate confirmation unless she commits to enforcing this critically important order.

These measures are just a start, but they will send a message to all Jew-haters that antisemitism, and its modern manifestation, anti-Zionism, are not acceptable in civilized society, whether in corporate boardrooms, the academy and media, or the halls of Congress. Humanity should never forget that what begins with the Jews never ends with the Jews. With the help of people of good conscience, we may finally begin to eradicate the ancient sickness of antisemitism.

Lauri B. Regan is the New York chapter president and board member of the Endowment for Middle East Truth and treasurer and board member of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. She currently serves as the chair of the American Zionist Movement's Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and Holocaust Denial Project.

Image: hendricjabs via Pixabay, Pixabay License.

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A new book, I Alone Can Fix It, reports that chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley feared that former president Trump would stage a coup in the aftermath of the 2020 election. Apparently, he feared that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act. He referred to pro-Trump participants in a rally as equivalent to Nazi brownshirts and said this whole period was a Reichstag moment.

There are legitimate comparisons to current events with the Nazi reaction to the 1933 Reichstag fire, but the analysis the book attributes to General Milley is backward. The more accurate analogy is not brownshirts and Trump supporters, but Hitler and Biden.

When the Reichstag burned, Hitler had become Chancellor, but Germany was terribly divided, and his authority was not secure. Because a demented Dutch communist was accused of setting the fire, Hitler manufactured what would be termed today an existential national crisis. The Nazis termed the fire a prelude to an uprising or insurrection. He arrested many communists and managed to get enacted emergency powers. A law titled the Enabling Act gave him new powers of suppression with authority to pass laws by executive order, without involving legislative bodies. Ultimately, he manipulated the existential crisis to suppress all opposition, including the communists and social democrats.

Biden assumed the presidency of a deeply divided nation. Some 75 million Americans had voted for Trump, the Senate was split 50-50, and the Democrats had lost many seats in the House, barely retaining a majority. The Biden administration's reaction to the January 6 Capitol riot has similarities to the Nazi reaction to the Reichstag fire in three ways.

First, the administration exaggerated the extent of the threat to the nation. There are many, many examples, but here are a few. Senior officials equated the incident with Pearl Harbor and 911. Attorney General Merrick Garland testified before Congress that January 6 was the most dangerous threat to our democracy. The National Guard deployed thousands of troops to protect the Capitol, and they were kept in place for months.

Second, in the same way that the Nazis made the Reichstag fire a broad conspiracy, the administration has broadened the incident itself to suggest a widespread violent white supremacists conspiracy. There were reports of white supremacy in the military, and numerous news reports claimed veteran and active-duty military involvement in the riot. However, CBS, citing acting deputy attorney general John Carter at the end of February, reported that of the over 280 riot participants arrested (with files opened on around 540), 23 were veterans, with two active Army Reserve and one active National Guard. The number of arrests has risen to over 500. This is hardly evidence of a massive conspiracy in the military. Still, secretary of defense Lloyd Austin ordered a one-day stand-down of the military to purge the ranks of extremists. Thirty-four of the 280 were connected to groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.

Third, there has been an attempt to widen the definition of extremist to include anyone the administration chooses. General Milley's equation of participants at a Trump rally to Nazi brownshirts is part of this effort. A consistent storyline on CNN, MSNBC, and many others is that Trump continues to radicalize his supporters with the big lie about the stolen election and that large numbers of those supporters buy into the lie. In other words, supporting Trump makes you a potential extremist.

Hitler (and Stalin with his purges after the Kirov murder) moved more quickly and violently. The United States has a developed democracy, which makes such blatant and violent maneuvers more difficult. But broad outlines for suppression of opposing thought in the Biden administration's utilization of the Capitol riot are there. Biden is taking a page from Hitler's Reichstag fire book.

F. Charles Parker IV is a retired U.S. Army colonel. One of his jobs in the Army was speechwriter for General John Vessey, who was at that time vice chief of staff of the Army. He later became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Parker has a Ph.D. in history from Georgetown University and is the author of a 1989 book titled Vietnam: Strategy for a Stalemate. He worked on the International Staff at NATO after retirement from the Army in 1996. He lives in Belgium.

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

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With a border surge now setting records, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have admonished illegal border crossers not to enter the U.S. "Do not come, do not come," as Harris said in Guatemala. Joe has said similar things.

Republicans have complained about the warnings not being sincere. Now, a Senate Republican report shows there's proof positive of it.

According to Fox News:

A new report by Republicans on a Senate subcommittee has concluded that the Biden administration is spending a minimum of approximately $2 billion to suspend construction of the wall at the southern border, even amid a continuing migrant crisis. The report by the minority staff of the Government Operations and Border Management Subcommittee of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee found that efforts to suspend or terminate wall construction projects at the Defense Department have cost between $1.8 billion to $2 billion and the administration is spending $3 million every day. "These interim findings show that the Biden administrations efforts to stop border wall construction constitute significant waste of taxpayer resources," the report says. "As of the drafting of this report the Biden administration has paid border wall contractors at least $2 billion and counting to not build the border wall."

The report, by ranking member Sen. Jim Lankford, is here.

Which is pretty disgusting when you think about it. The cash was appropriated and the contracts doled out. But rather than let these items reach completion, Biden prefers to pay contract workers for doing nothing. And $2 billion is no small amount, except to a Democrat.

It also comes at an atrocious time, with illegal migrants surging the border. They're surging all right, and forcing Border Patrol agents to spend time changing diapers, while the real prize for the cartels - the transmission and distribution of illegal drugs -- has nobody watching them. Wouldn't a wall be rather useful for the Border Patrol which can't stop the human waves otherwise?

That Joe Biden would rather waste money than do anything to secure the border, such as build a wall, pretty well tells us he has no problem wasting taxpayer money in the name of Getting Trump. The double harm of a border surge and flushing money down the toilet tells us all we need to know about his sincerity of his claim to want to get control of the border. He obviously doesn't.

Public disapproval of his handling of the border is very much a reality. That would explain his lip service to border enforcement, even as the border surges. But that he would actively work to obstruct the border, even at high cost to his administration, suggests something more sinister.

Image: Screen shot. Newsreporter, via YouTube video

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Those 60 or so Texas Democrats that fled the Lone Star State to prevent passage of a voting integrity bill are looking for a way out of the disaster it has become. It has backfired so badly that behind their self-congratulatory rhetoric they obviously are getting worried.

It has been a fiasco from the very beginning, posting photos to social media revealing a case of Miller Lite accompanying them on their bus to the airport, and the maskless smiling doofuses on their private jet smiling as they flouted the annoying air travel mask requirements forced on everyone else.

Then the outbreak of Covid cases that infected White House staff and a Pelosi aide (really, just positive PCR tests, but they are trapped by the fear porn rhetoric they and the agitprop media employ to scare people into imagining dire illness from every case) cemented their maskless flights reputation as reckless. Those smiles on the private jet make them look like idiots in retrospect, and certainly dont help them claim a serious purpose.

Now, after marinating in mockery, they are starting to complain about a lack of support from the White House. From the Dallas Morning News (hat tip: Red State)

Im at the point where Im pissed off that Joe Biden, our president, not only wont meet with us  hes not gonna meet with us, hes gonna use COVID as an excuse not to meet with us  but he wont even Zoom, Rep. Richard Raymond of Laredo said Thursday during a virtual meeting with U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Austin.

Thats a definite sign that they are being cut loose and are becoming toxic. Rhetoric like this doesnt help their case, either:

Texas Democrat Richard Raymond absurdly compares himself to Abraham Lincoln and voter integrity to child abuse pic.twitter.com/o9JaveWIAd  RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 16, 2021

Naturally, their unity is starting to crumble, as the brighter ones among them start to try to figure out a way out of their dead-end. Jack Phillips reports for the Epoch Times:

A Texas state Democrat lawmaker who left the Lone Star State as part of an effort to prevent the passage of a Republican-backed voting measure said hes returning to the state to engage in negotiations over the legislation. Rep. Philip Cortez, who was one of about 60 state lawmakers who traveled to Washington from Texas this month, said he was asked by other Democrats to return to Texas to work on improving the measure. Republicans have argued the bill is necessary to safeguard future elections and restore the publics confidence in them, while Democrats say the measure would place unfair restrictions on minority groups when they cast their ballots. I proudly stood with my Democratic colleagues and left Texas to ensure House Bill 3 would not be approved as introduced. A small working group of Democrats decided to begin active discussions here in Austin on improving HB 3 and asked that I return to establish open communication lines, Cortez said in a statement on July 22. I returned to Texas to try to engage in good-faith dialogue about the aspects of the bill that I, and others, think are harmful.

Are they going to compromise on Jim Crow on steroids? Why, isnt that absolute evil?

Apparently not.

Separately:

Another Texas Democrat, Rep. Harold Dutton, returned to Texas due to family reasons, the Dallas Morning News reported. Dutton said that he wasnt approached by the Texas Department of Public Safety after House Speaker Dade Phelan and other Republicans voted last week to ask the chambers sergeant-at-arms to locate the missing Democrats.

Presuming that a genuine family emergency caused the trip back, not arresting him is a good move to avoid being pilloried as heartless. But will Rep. Dutton return to DC when the family situation is resolved? Or will he show up in Austin to do his job, as I presume Cortez is doing to avoid arrest.

Try though they and their media allies might, there is no way to read this as anything but their effort crumbling.

Idiot grins (Twitter via the NY Post)

By the way, we still don't know who paid for the two private jets that flew them to DC. That would seem to indicate they are hiding something.

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At the beginning of June, we brought news to you about the 3,166% increase in the number of sex offenders caught on Americas southern border. Keep in mind that the more than three-thousand percent increase represented just those illegal aliens the border patrol was able to catch as hundreds of thousands of people from around the world have been pouring into America since Biden blatantly broke American law and opened the border. North Carolina is one of the states that posts peoples immigration status as part of reporting arrests, and July has been another impressive month.

As I noted above, the border patrol cant apprehend all (or even most) of the illegal aliens flooding into America. Look at this dashboard footage of what happened when a border patrol officer was able to stop an SUV filled with illegal aliens. The border patrol caught the vehicle, but illegal aliens  mostly young men  ran out like clowns from a little clown car at the circus:

NEW: Wild dash cam footage from Texas DPS shows a trooper in a recent pursuit of a human smuggler here in Del Rio. The smuggler bails, and at least a dozen illegal immigrants spill out and flee. Trooper focused on driver & caught him. Some of the passengers got away. @FoxNews pic.twitter.com/yfppLYQEuy  Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) July 23, 2021

Every one of these illegal aliens is an outlaw  and the thing about outlaws is that, once you start down that road, why stop? Youve already abandoned societal norms  and, if youre from some remote region in Mexico, Guatemala, or Africa, your norms may well be very different, especially when it comes to a mans right to have sexual congress with any boy, girl, or animal that catches his eye.

As of July 15, North Carolina already had 72 child sexual assault charges on the books. And again, thats just the ones who were caught. At that rate, the state will see 150 child sexual assault charges against illegal aliens. Whats really horrifying is that 150 is an average number in North Carolina according to North Carolinians For Immigration Reform and Enforcement.

Because these illegal aliens have no business in America, every child assaulted is a crime that would not have happened but for our governments refusal to enforce immigration laws. Its only going to get worse as more illegal aliens flood the border. Even the ones caught at the border are being shipped into Americas interior, where they promptly vanish.

And of course, the only sexual predators identified are the ones who were previously caught. Its anyones guess how many of the people flooding in are predators who have operated freely in their own countries and have no record in ours.

Meanwhile, just to give you some perspective, heres a video showing you how our government is treating Americans who trespassed into the Capitol building, a building that is, ironically enough, the peoples house:

The best thing that can happen to America is a veto-proof Republican-majority Congress after the 2022 election, followed by a budget that summarily cuts off every single bit of welfare we Americans are handling out to the illegal aliens coming in from all four corners. Then, its time to impeach Biden for breaking the border laws and, if hes even somewhat compos mentis, lodging criminal charges against him.

IMAGE: A car full of potential sexual predators Twitter screen grab.

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So Kamala Harris is set to campaign for embattled California Gov. Gavin Newsom, to keep him from losing office. The latter, of course, is facing a voter recall.

According to the Washington Examiner:

Vice President Kamala Harris vowed to campaign for Gov. Gavin Newsom as he faces a recall effort in California. When asked whether she would back the Democratic governor, the longtime associate of Newsom answered, "Yes." Harris, a former California attorney general and senator, did not elaborate further as she departed the Capitol. Harris previously voiced support for Newsom, saying she backed him "100%" in a video message before officials announced the recall effort attracted enough verified signatures to proceed in late June.

The pair go way back, to the glittering old-money society parties of Pacific Heights back in their salad days.

Newsom campaigned for Harris as she was running for president in her failed presidential election campaign in 2019. Now Harris is returning the favor.

Three things, though, stand out that suggest this might not work out the way they think it will.

One, Harris is miserably unpopular in her own right with voters, with polls showing that her ratings are underwater. Just yesterday the New York Post ran this headline:

Kamala Harris under water in latest polling amid surging border crisis and veep office gripes

A normal pol in trouble gets a more popular pol to do some endorsing for him. Not Newsom. He chooses the least-liked politician in America, one who won't do her job, either on the border or on voting rights, to vouch for him to voters.

Sound like that will work?

Actually, sounds like he's desperate.

Two, the pair of them campaigning together can only serve to remind voters of all the cronyism in California politics.

They shared ties with Willie Brown who "made" both of them, handing each a big-dollar little-work commission appointment as his political children.

They also shared ties to Gordon Getty, who was Newsom's moneybags patron, and in time, became Harris's, too. Newsom, in fact, is a major influence who introduced Harris to all the San Francisco moneybag donors. The two of them even shared a political consultant/campaign manager.

They also seem to have shared some trouble with Newsom's ex, Kimberly Guilfoyle: Guilfoyle, before she dumped Newsom, complained that Harris was mean to her. With Newsom becoming Guilfoyle's bitter ex, it seems that Newsom and Harris could have an additional reason to bond.

Newsom has always been a godsend to Harris, what with his connections to the Gettys, the House of Pelosi, and the House of Brown (not Willie, but Pat and Jerry Brown). Here's a chart of all the inbred royalty around him, from CalMatters.

Here's a Vanity Fair story showing how Newsom roused the moneybags to troubled Harris in 2019.

Meanwhile, according to Politico, here are Harris's Brown ties:

Its hard to think honestly about the origins of the rise of Harris without grappling with the reality of the role of Brown. He helped her. He put her on a pair of state boards that required not much work and paid her more than $400,000 across five years on top of her salary as a prosecutor. He gave her a BMW. He helped her, too, though, in a way that was less immediately material but arguably far more enduringly important. Brown, of course, was the darling of the well-to-do set, if you will, veteran political consultant Jack Davis, who managed Browns mayoral campaign, told me. And she was the girlfriend, and so she met, you know, everybody whos anybody, as a result of being his girl. I met her through Willie, John Burton, the former San Francisco congressman and chairman of the California Democratic Party, said in an interview. I would think its fair to say that most of the people in San Francisco met her through Willie.

Harris, in turn, "served" as Willie Brown's mistress.

There also was this with Politico, with the glittery parties Newsom and Harris would go to:

Few women, gushed the Gazette, are more involved than (equally glamorous) attorney Kamala Harris. In the outlet distributed specifically to the neighborhoods of the rich, she was featured in a fashion spread, shown wearing $565 boots, a $975 skirt and a $1,095 coat, all made by Burberry. In the descriptions of P.J. Corkery of the Examinerwho also ghost-wrote Browns bookHarris was super-chic and super-smart and drop-dead elegant and very visible. She was seen at Harry Dentons Starlight Room. She was seen at Jeannette Etheredges Tosca. She went to a ball to benefit local arts museums at which celebrity event planner Stanlee Gattis elaborate set-up incorporated centerpieces of large balls of iceand was spotted sometime around midnight trying to bowl the frosty orbs with Gavin Newsom, who was then a city supervisor as well as a friend and business partner of the Gettys. She went to the 25th anniversary showing of San Franciscos Beach Blanket Babylon and was spotted slipping out of the afterparty for a dinner at Jardiniere with Willie Brown and high society grande dame Denise Hale. She went to a Ricky Martin concert in a limo with Hale and Denton and scenester Harry de Wildt. She went to the parties of haute couture clothier Wilkes Bashford. She went to ladies luncheons at Pacific Heights homes. She had Sunday dinners with the Gettys.

...and this, with Newsom's moneybags ties:

Because three years after the Getty wedding, in mid-2002, Harris called Mark Buell. She knew him because Harris was friends with his stepdaughter, Summer Tompkins Walker, the daughter of Susie Tompkins Buell, the major Democratic donor. Harris told him she wanted to run for district attorney. At first, Buell was skeptical, he said recently when we got together for dinner at an old Union Square haunt called Sams; he considered Harris a socialite with a law degree, he explained over salmon and sauvignon blanc. The more Harris talked, though, the more impressed he became. By the end of their conversation, Buell offered to be her finance chair. His first piece of advice: To knock off an incumbent in what would be a nasty, three-candidate fight, Harris was going to need to raise an early, eye-popping amount of money. Buell saw her friends, people he knew, too, as an asset to deploy. So we put together a finance committee that primarily was young socialite ladies, he told me. The group included Vanessa Getty, by then one of Harris closest pals, and Susan Swighead-turning surnames in the citys choicest circles. Buells directive: I said, No one has ever raised more than $150,000 for a D.A.s race, totally. I want this group to raise $100,000 by the first reporting period. Outfitted in sharp designer suits and strands of bright pearls, Harris kickstarted her drive to become San Franciscos top copin its ritziest, most prestigious locale. Predominantly white Pacific Heightshills upon hills, gobsmacking views of the Golden Gate strait, mansions built and bought with both new tech money and old gold rush cashis home to Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Gavin Newsom and others, one of the countrys foremost concentrations of politicians and their patrons.

The two were so close, in fact, that the Desert Sun reported this:

Newsom and Harris have shared campaign managers for many years and have long had an informal understanding never to oppose each others ambitions.

So in other words, they had a pact to preserve the political monopoly.

Which doesn't sound too promising for Newsom as word of their political elite "friendship" gets out. Harris there right beside Newsom is bound to lead to some clucking about both of their rises to the top.

A recall election, after all, is a rebellion, against the political establishment, so Harris's ties to Newsom -- set against the background of her being promoted above her level of competence to vice president, based on political connections, pretty well reminds votes of Newsom, too, and what they don't like about California politics.

There was a single report of that fraying in the Desert Sun:

Until Harris Latin American trip, Newsom had never uttered a critical word about the vice president, who  like Newsom  got her start in San Francisco politics, winning two terms as district attorney before becoming Californias attorney general and then a senator. But Harris no sooner returned to Washington, D.C.. from her trip than Newsom checked in on the side of left-wing Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who earlier blasted Harris for her anti-immigration remarks. In a press conference just after Harris return, Newsom observed that California has long had a different approach to immigration, a more inclusive approach. He added that he has consulted with other federal officials about how California can be more supportive in terms of the needs of asylum seekers.

But set against the rest of the huge history the pair of them have, which includes money, it sounds like window dressing to me.

The third factor as to why this won't work is Harris's tendency toward political gaffes. She's got a tin ear politically, and actually, so does Newsom, the man of French Laundry COVID dining who advised California residents to put on their masks between bites of dinner. Everyone knows he's going to make some gaffes and weird videos, but does anyone imagine she won't make even more gaffes, too, as she hits the campaign trail for Newsom? Campaigning together, they'll be the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of California politics.

The pair were raised politically as hothouse flowers in a one-party state, cultivated and nurtured by billionaires. Neither of them ever learned to politick the way others learn to politic, which involves give and take, they both just waited their turn until they could be put into place by the big guys out there. Now Harris, with all her low political capital, capital so low that even the Joe Biden camp is apparently leaking bad stories about her to the press, is coming to "help" Newsom by campaigning for him...

What could go wrong?

Image: Elex Michaelson, video screen shot, via YouTube

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Ive made no secret of my support for Larry Elder. If I were still in California, Id vote for him in a heartbeat. Hes intelligent and deeply principled, and California is in very bad shape. The good news is that Im not the only one who likes Larry. It turns out that a lot of Californians are relieved that Bruce Caitlyn Jenner isnt the only alternative to Gavin Newsom.

According to an Emerson College/Nexstar Media poll, theres bad news for Newsom and good news for Elder. With the election coming up in September, currently, 43% of voters want to recall Newsom, while 48% want to keep him in office. If Newsom continues to re-lockdown the state, those numbers can be expected to get much closer  and the 9% of undecided voters will follow the trend.

Even more damaging for Newsom is the fact that, while a lot of voters arent enthused about kicking him out early, a large majority (58%) wouldnt vote for him when he runs for reelection in 2022. Moreover, a plurality of voters gave Newsom a grade of poor on key issues: COVID, droughts, wildfires, and the homeless. If Newsom cherished any ideas of jumping from California to the White House, hed better put those dreams aside.

And what about Larry Elder? Its clear that those voters who want to get Newsom out, to the extent theyre thinking ahead, are most excited at the prospect of getting Larry in:

On the question of who they would vote for if Newsom was recalled, a majority (53%) of voters are undecided on a candidate. Within the field of candidates that currently have support, conservative talk radio host Larry Elder leads at 16%, followed by businessman John Cox, at 6%, and former San Diego mayor Kevin Faulconer, at 6%. California State Assemblyman Kevin Kiley, and former Olympian and television personality Caitlyn Jenner are at 4% each. Social media influencer Kevin Paffrath is at 2%, with the remaining 8% of voters opting to vote for someone else.

The big question to ask about Elder at this point is What can he do if he gets into office? The current legislature is, as it has been for a long time, a Democrat supermajority, which means that, if all the Democrats vote together, they are veto-proof.

Elder will certainly be able to roll back Newsoms draconian lockdown policies but, when it comes to other matters. he may find himself mostly cheerleading conservative policies in the state, along with vetoing the occasional bill that isnt veto-proof for some reason or other. He may also have some sway as a voting member of the Regents of the University of California.

And of course, Elder has the power to affect the humongous bureaucracy in California. Appointments to lead those agencies could result in significant policy changes that benefit California. However, Arnold Schwarzenegger thought he could change the bureaucracy, but it changed him, turning him from a soft Republican into a RINO. This time around, I believe Elder is made of stronger stuff and has firmer principles.

In the meantime, its time to think up a campaign slogan. Dwight Eisenhower scored hugely with Irving Berlins simple three-world slogan: I like Ike. While theres nothing good to rhyme with Larry, I like Larry has a great alliterative quality. Im going for it!

IMAGE: I like Larry button by Andrea Widburg

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Granted, the man was no poster child for fidelity, maybe. We never met so many women who, when we dropped the name Jackie Mason -- as opposed to other known female appreciators -- would confide airily, Yeah, he asked me out, too. Even though he was reputedly, and in the memorial squibs on Google and everywhere else, married since the early 1990s.

It was always sort ofhazy. After all, here he was, asking them out. Maybe he was, as the furphy had it, separated?

Jackie Mason in 2006 (Photo credit: Carl Lender CC BY 2.0 license)

He hung out in our neighborhood, particularly one favorite patisserie, the now-closed, Au Bon Pain. We went with him to a couple more favorite hangouts, where the wait-staff, particularly the women, knew him by his first name, knew his likely orders, knew him well enough to ask solicitously if the table was to his liking, his chair comfortable, the table setting acceptable. He asked me if I had a cell phone. Of course, one answered. Could I make a call?" he asked. Sure, (Who wouldnt say that?)

But every fellow comic who wandered by, and there were at least three, in my own earshot, got the same question/request.

Jackie, we asked, why dont you GET a cell phone, instead of asking everyone and the waitress to use theirs, we asked, maybe a tad impertinently, but pertinently.

Why should I? he shot back. I dont need one.

This was a really funny person, a former rabbi, scion of a family of rabbanim. His elder brother officiated at a wedding we were quite close to. Anyone who frequented Broadway for the past 30-odd years, however, would tell you how screamingly hilarious were Masons one-man nonstop laughter-packed extravaganzas over the years. It didnt matter either whether you knew his shtiks. You still ended up roaring so hard your stomach hurt from rolling, gasping laughter.

Didnt matter, either, whether you were Jewish, his favorite go-to on many a topic, or Gentile, another vein of hilarity to mine for all observational nuggets of comedic gold. Everyone convulsed with his rat-a-tat fast, heavily accented or feigned delivery, sometimes in false Hindu, or British tones, sometimes in condescending haute social-climber modes.

When you walked with him on the New York street, and youd meet up with a friend or associate, hed assess the person with an appraisers eye for beauty or whatever trait, then ask his usual, You Jewish? You gotta be Jewish --which he meant as an intro to some further ethnic infra-dig joke the person usually laughed with.

He pilloried OJ Simpsons Not guilty travesty verdict. You could no longer think Simpson innocent once you underwent Masons blood-spattered spiel onstage on the gore that drenched The Juice on the subject of the murder of Ron Goldman and Simpsons nearly beheaded lovely wife, Nicole Brown.

Mason was equally devastatingly on point about the Israeli-Palestinian situation, the Vietnam War, Iraq/Iran, Bubba Clinton, and Monica, the string of Presidents and their foibles and fair ladies hed observed during his long (not long enough) tenure on this earthly coil.

Once, I ordered a plate of food in his company. He ordered a black-and-white cookie. As I forked in some food, he picked noncommittally at my food. Quite a bit. I asked why he didnt order a plateful for himself. Im not hungry, he responded neutrally. He then gave me the cookie. But, I protested, dont you want this cookie? You ordered it? He looked penetratingly at me, Do you think for one minute I would give you this cookie if I wanted it? My digestion was interrupted time and again to laugh and chortle, as he never stopped being deadpan hilarious. Even when he chided me for being five minutes late, wounding him, apparently, to the quick. Never have I been upbraided so scaldingly as by his razor tongue barbs. Oy, vey.

On the phone, he was always in a hurry to set up appointments but wouldnt settle to a proper conversation. Wait a minute, Jackie, I commented once, whats your hurry already? Moment of silence. Not long. At these prices--?

You couldnt get through three minutes without a fast comeback, a retort, a multi-language (Yiddish or a dash of slang, or some foreign-sounding made-up word) riposte, reducing the recipient to a gale of giggles.

Somehow, as with Rush Limbaugh, recently gone from our midst, I never considered the possibility -- even though I know that death does, in the end, claim all of us -- his passing, at the age of 93 (who knew? Id have guessed he was in his 70s, or at the most, 80s, but Im a notorious bad guesser), was, frankly, sudden. And unfair.

Frankly, its hard to say Boruch dayan emes in respect of the going-away of this masterful, magical joker, this stocky tummler of tummlers . His disappearance from the scene, without a caustic doubt, makes the world less tolerable, does the opposite of amplifying our lives, lightening our leaden or litigable load.

You wont see it, because this appears in regular print, but in his honor, it was scripted in the typeface known as Jokerman. The least I could do.

Jackie Mason, born Maza, a one-time rabbi -- a forever comedian -- is now Missing. Sadder for us all that he wont be here to comment on the latest government outrage and shanda.

Well miss him, Borscht Belt or no, he was the funniest, keenest, sharpest. most evocative natural comic Ive ever been blessed to have spent time with. And thats no gelachter.

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The Lancet was founded in England in 1823 and was recently considered to be second only to The New England Journal of Medicine when it comes to the magazines impact in the medical field. Whether its reputation will survive its conduct relative to COVID remains questionable. In 2020, it led the charge to insist that it was a conspiracy theory to blame the Wuhan lab for COVID. Now, its emerged that The Lancet was complicit with China in suppressing early information showing that COVID could be spread by human-to-human transmission and was already moving beyond Wuhan.

In early June, Vanity Fair, of all publications, published a long story exploding the wet market theory that leftists (and, especially, Anthony Fauci) insisted was the COVID-origin story. Those people, like Tom Cotton and Donald Trump, were dismissed as delusional conspiracy theorists for suggesting that it was much more likely that the virus originated in the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology, an institution affiliated with the Chinese military, that was known to conduct gain-of-function research on bat viruses.

The leader in insisting on the wet market origin story was The Lancet. Thus, the cover-up protecting the Wuhan lab began on February 19, 2020, when The Lancet published a statement that 27 scientists signed, claiming that the Wuhan lab theory was a conspiracy theory. Significantly, the person who organized and signed the statement was Peter Daszak, the one who packaged the U.S. taxpayer funds that Fauci was sending to the Wuhan lab. (If you dont want to read the whole Vanity Fair report, you can read my summary here.)

Its now emerged that The Lancet had an even bigger role in covering up Chinas (and Faucis) role in creating a virus that brought the world to a halt. (Michael Thau credibly argues that halting the world was a deliberate, planned strategy on Chinas part.) Sir Jeremy Farrar, who directs the Wellcome Trust, a global charity that is decidedly not conservative in its leanings, has written a new book in which he accuses the journal of failing to publish important information in an expeditious fashion. Thus, The Lancet sat on data it had about COVIDs jump from zoonotic transmission (animal to human) to human-to-human transmission, as well as its spread outside of Wuhan, something that could have led to travel prohibitions on China much sooner.

From the Daily Mail:

Sir Jeremy, a member of the Governments Sage committee, has disclosed how he was contacted in alarm by Thijs Kuiken, a Dutch professor and government adviser, over a scientific research paper that he was sent by The Lancet to review on January 16, 2020. In a new book on the pandemic he has written with science journalist Anjana Ahuja, Sir Jeremy describes the papers contents as one of the standout moments in the whole epidemic, the reddest in a constellation of red flags. For the research reported that a family from the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen who had travelled to Wuhan to stay with relatives over New Year showed that the virus was consistent with person-to-person transmission. The family had not been to Wuhans infamous seafood market, then being falsely blamed as the source of the outbreak, but two of them had visited a hospital. Another member, who had not travelled to Wuhan, fell ill when the rest of the group returned home. Prof Kuiken instantly realised this was crucial information amid an unfolding world health crisis  but his role as a confidential reviewer precluded him from sharing details. So he sent in his review the next day to The Lancet, expecting it to be published immediately. He told Sir Jeremy that he contacted The Lancet to say the information should be made public because it was the first scientific proof that the virus was spreading human to human. They either would not or could not do it.

The Lancet also stonewalled Sir Jeremy. It was only when Sir Jeremy tipped off the World Health Organization that China admitted the diseases person-to-person transmission, although it lied about COVIDs scope within China.

The Lancet is a journal driven as much by politics as by science. Last month, says the Daily Mail, it emerged that the magazine refused to publish an article critical of China's horrifying repression of Uighurs as it might cause problems for staff at its Beijing office. And I certainly remember the deeply flawed studies The Lancet produced in 2004 and 2006 grossly overestimating the number of Iraqis who died in the first phase of the Iraq War.

At this point, it seems that people are taking their lives in their hands if they trust The Lancet without carefully verifying that its information isnt corrupted by political bias.

IMAGE: A March 3, 1827, edition of The Lancet (1827), when the science may have been primitive but it wasnt corrupt. Public domain in the Wellcome Collection.

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Australian authorities are stringently pursuing the wrong policies to deal with the highly transmissible but less lethal COVID variants that are spreading, choosing severe lockdowns in the most populous states of New South Wales (capital: Sydney) and Victoria (capital: Melbourne). The political leadership of the country, specifically including the Liberal Party (which is the conservative alternative to Labor), is committed to the hopeless task of preventing human contact until the virus simply disappears.

The enormous cost to mental health, to medical examination and treatment of other maladies, to the survival of small businesses, and to the education of children is totally ignored, trying to suppress a virus that has a survival rate above 99%. Moreover, the experience of Sweden demonstrates that lockdowns are unnecessary, and that building herd immunity ultimately saves lives.

So insane are the power-mad politicians that a Queensland woman was arrested for arranging delivery of cigarettes via drone while in a hotel quarantine, even though we now know that transmission of the virus by touching a surface rarely occurs.

It is unsurprising that citizens of Sydney erupted in a large-scale protest yesterday, with a police official placing the number of demonstrators at three and a half thousand, while others estimated a far larger figure. This video scans part of the crowd:

Australias second-largest city saw similar protests, as the AP reports:

In Melbourne, thousands of protesters without masks turned out downtown chanting freedom." Some of them lit flares as they gathered outside Victoria states Parliament House.

Unfortunately, some demonstrators became violent. Global News reports:

[P]rotesters threw potted plants, paint and water bottles at police officers and media, while others physically assaulted police horses. At least 57 people were arrested at Sydney's protest, with many more expected to come, while in neighbouring state, Victoria, local media reported at least half a dozen demonstrators were arrested in the city of Melbourne.

David Elliott, Police Minister for New South Wales (in Australia, states manage the police) chillingly seemed to promise arrest for all who protested, stating that police would work at identifying as many people as possible who attended todays incident and have them charged.

His colleague in the New South Wales state government supplied the rationale for criminalizing protest itself:

We live in a democracy and normally I am certainly one who supports peoples rights to protest ... but at the present time weve got cases going through the roof and we have people thinking thats OK to get out there and possibly be close to each other at a demonstration," said state Health Minister Brad Hazzard.

Keep in mind that a case represents a positive PCR test not necessarily someone sick in bed or even feeling the slightest bit ill. With the use of ivermectin or the hydroxychloroquine regimen early on, nearly all of these cases that develop symptoms can be cured.

Viral infections spread virally. That is their nature. If you isolate or lockdown, you just delay the spread and delay herd immunity. Nobody has prevented the common cold or the flu from plaguing mankind despite their long history of harming us. The best we can do is seek and use the best therapies available to alleviate the harm. As COVID mutates, it seems to be following the familiar pattern of viruses increasing in transmissibility as they decline in lethality.

How much more of a price will Australians pay for their political leaderships mistaken embrace of a cure that is worse than the disease?

Photo credit: YouTube screengrab

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One of the most perplexingand sneakily vitalquestions of our time is: Why are so many so-called intellectuals so astoundingly ignorant and unwise?

This is a question that must be honestly addressed if the West has any chance of pulling out of the downward spiral in which it now finds itself.

A major reason is that intellectuals aren't really intellectuals, they're pseudo-intellectuals and tend to be impressed with themselves, believing they know best how to run everybody elses lives. So, as members of an elite, a chosen few, a nomenklatura, they have a strong proclivity towards tyranny.

Many disdain patriotism, believing that an enlightened mind should endlessly search for the good in societies other than their own. Many like to appear smart. Many like to appear as if they care about the big picture (globalism, etc.).

In reality, they dont give a rats ass about anything outside of their own insular, safe, homogenous communities. And their own station and power. If virtue-signaling was an Olympic sport, wealthy progressive Americans would own the medal count in perpetuity. Nearly all of those the media brands as intellectuals or experts are leftists, and the vast majority favor big government and lean towards socialism or even Marxism. The notion that economiesor anything else-- could work better without their active intervention and planning is anathema to them.

Many intellectuals have spent nearly all their lives in the ivory towers of academia and are almost completely devoid of real-world experienceand therefore common sense. A keen observer once noted that an intellectual is someone who so prefers theory over experience that he would sit down on a red-hot stove, twice.

The many decades of radical indoctrination at Americas colleges and universities, with radical leftists teaching their progressive-leaning students, has led to a near-total lack of diversity of thought, opinion, and independence amongst the elites that eventually matriculate from these citadels of higher education into corporate boardrooms, mainstream media outlets, and government offices. Those that dont themselves become educators that is.

Tragically, this has produced an inbred mindset just as damaged and deformed as is often the case with the physical result of incest. The same elites that are so focused on the benefits of diversity of gender and kink, so PROUD! of every alternative lifestyle, and so welcoming and tolerant of other cultures traditions, quirks and nuances, from paganism to female genital mutilation, lack the courage to challengeor even discuss-- the Orwellian groupthink that has overtaken them. Virtually none of them would risk being seen as different in this regard, as there are too many repercussions to come out of this closet.

Thanks to our intellectuals, we are reaching Orwellian levels of groupthink and newspeak. We are heading into Third Reich, Soviet Union, North Korea, and Peoples Republic of ____________________ (fill in the blank) territory.

Charles Bukowski once stated, The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid ones are full of confidence. I would suggest that the truly intelligent people realize how little they know, unlike the intelligentsia, while the stupid ones are often arrogant. In fact, there is an almost perfectly inverse relationship between how smart one believes oneself to be and the non-trivial knowledge or wisdom one possesses.

William Butler Yeats once stated what amounts to a corollary to Bukowskis assertion: The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. (See also RINOs versus AOC, Ilhan Omar, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, et. al.)

That seems to me to be the most accurate way to explain what has recently transpired in the United Statesand several other Western nations.

Too many of our so-called intellectuals are full of passionate intensity. And too many of our so-called Republicans or conservatives appearwhen push comes to shoveto lack all conviction.

Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License

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Many historians are apparently more interested in spinning their personal political views than in objectively evaluating past Presidents of the United States. Do not trust the various rankings of presidents that you may see.

Ninety-one people filled out a survey form sponsored by C-SPAN and ranked the Presidents. Lincoln and Washington were placed at the top; Donald Trump was placed near the bottom, below a President who died after 32 days in office, so didnt really serve. It validates the bias of much of the media and 90% of academia  a judgment meant to throw Donald Trump into the dustbin of history and send a message of contempt to his supporters.

As eager as historians are to evaluate political leaders, they must wait about one hundred years to thoroughly know a President and the effect on the nation of that Presidents policies. It takes this long to uncover what has been deliberately concealed or to discover documents and threads of information thought lost.

What, then, should the criteria be for evaluating American Presidents?

The criteria for evaluation are expressly written in the 4-corners of the Constitution itself. Additionally, fiscal responsibility in partnership with Congress is strongly implied but not expressly stated. Did a President adhere to what was promised in taking the Oath of Office? Did a President preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and faithfully execute the Laws of the United States?

Article II, Section 1:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. George Washington added, So help me God.

Article II, Section 2:

[H]e shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed

The Constitution is a restraining document. Any President promises not to overreach  to respect the other co-equal branches of the federal government (Congress and the Supreme Court) and the rights and powers of the People who are the ultimate Sovereign. Among other things, the President submits to the Senate for approval any agreement that binds or entangles the nation. The President also defends the nations borders and its territories from invasion. Executive power, yes, but with Constitutional oversight from the other branches of government and the public through a free and fair press.

Article IV, Section 4:

The United States shall protect each [State] against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened), against domestic Violence.

The Presidency is not a permission slip to transform the country into some notion or another through Executive Orders or ignoring federal law. The softer issues such a personality and vision are vetted in the election itself. Once a President is elected, and the Oath of Office taken, stewardship is a Presidents primary duty  one of three federal caretakers of our nation and of our People. A custodian, with integrity, who sees the Office of the Presidency as both an honor and a sacred public trust; whose vision, supported by an election, nevertheless remains within Constitutional boundaries.

We now know of all the presidents, George Washington was the most faithful to the Oath of Office. His personal copy of the Constitution was recently discovered with his personal notes in the margins. The nation under his stewardship steadied itself after the difficult American Revolution. The attempt, in 1812, by the British to re-colonize America failed in part because of Washingtons early leadership. Washington never attempted to bypass Congress where he had a duty to include them. Theodore Roosevelt, on the other hand, in 1905, deliberately negotiated a secret treaty with Japan outside of his constitutional duty to submit such a treaty to the Senate for approval. The treaty gave Korea to Japan. Millions of Koreans died or were enslaved. He was deemed the fourth-best President on the C-SPAN survey.

TRs cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, recognized the Soviet Union in 1933 and supported Stalins ambitions in Eastern Europe and in China. He handed over to Stalin American secrets regarding the development of the atom bomb. We now know the facts because Soviet files were released to the public in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union. Roosevelt was a very popular president but his breach of duty to the Constitution led to millions of deaths and to the rise of Communism in the Soviet Union and in China that has cost America so many lives and so much treasure. He was deemed the third-best President on the survey.

The bottom line is we dont know the whole story, now, about modern Presidents so evaluating them by survey is impossible. All we can do as citizens is weigh the impact of Presidential policy on our nation and try to assess which Presidents have honored their Oath of Office to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States and the integrity of our National Sovereignty.

Photo credit: James Trotter CC BY-SA 4.0 license

M. E. Boyds Apples of Gold  Voices From the Past that Speak to Us Now is available at Amazon.com using both the title and subtitle. You may also visit her at www.missconstitution.com.

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Bombay Bicycle Club frontman Jack Steadman has said he could see everyones excitement at the return of live music at Latitude Festival.

The musician opened the festival, which is among the first to go ahead since coronavirus restrictions were lifted in England, with his new outfit Mr Jukes & Barney Artist.

Bombay Bicycle Club will also be among the last acts to play at the festival on Sunday night.

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Steadman told the PA news agency that performing was an amazing experience, adding: You could really see everyones excitement and that gave us a real boost.

The funny thing about musicians is it needs to be reciprocal sometimes.

We have all been trying to make music in the last year-and-a-half and do all these projects, but without these experiences where you are like, Wow, these people are enjoying this, its been quite difficult.

We all have our insecurities in that way, I think all artists do really.

And so to come back and see people sing along and cheer, I think we are all going to leave here feeling really inspired.

Crowds at Latitude Festival (Jacob King/PA)

He added that performing on Sunday night will be quite emotional.

I really hope this isnt the last time we can do this this summer, he added.

We do have some more dates booked, so fingers crossed.

Latitude Festival, which is taking place at Henham Park estate near the Suffolk coast, has been attended by around 40,000 people.

It is part of the Governments Events Research Programme.

The Chemical Brothers, Wolf Alice and Bastille were among the headliners for the event.
Game Of Thrones star Jacob Anderson is to join the cast of Doctor Who.

The actor will join the BBC sci-fi programme later this year.

He will play Vinder, a recurring character who will join forces with the Doctor and her companions Yaz and Dan.

Jacob Anderson (Liam McBurney/PA)

Anderson said: The Doctor has been a part of my life forever, from watching and rewatching the serials on VHS as a kid and being terrified, to unexpectedly finding my eyes watering when the Tenth Doctor said, I dont want to go, I always wanted to live in the Whoniverse.

Not only has a lifelong dream of mine now been fulfilled, but to be playing a character as fun, adventurous and dynamic as Vinder is the cherry on top. This is very cool.

Anderson has also starred in Broadchurch and Skins, and has also appeared in theatre productions including King Lear at the Young Vic and War Horse at the National Theatre.

The Doctor Who cast announcement came during an Comic-Con event.

Anderson told viewers that starring in the programme is one of the ultimate highlights of my career.

Its been an honour to play Vinder and I cant wait for you all to see and meet him, the actor said.

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The BBC also released a trailed for the upcoming 13th series of the programme, which will air later this year.

It says the Doctor will be returning for her biggest adventure yet.
Thunderstorms bringing lightning and torrential rain to the south are set to continue until Monday, forecasters have said.

The Met Office has issued an amber warning for storms covering London and some of the Home Counties where homes and businesses are at risk of flooding, lasting until 7pm on Sunday.

A yellow warning for storms which could cause travel and power disruption also covers a wider area of the south from Norwich to Plymouth, and lasts until midnight.

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Met Office meteorologist Steven Keates said parts of the south between south Suffolk and the Isle of Wight could be deluged by 100mm of rain in just a few hours on Sunday evening.

Theres torrential thunderstorms around yet again, he said.

Into the evening, from Norfolk to Bournemouth we are going to see some pretty lively showers.

Torrential downpours, thunder and lightning and potentially some hailstones are settling in the south.

Mr Keates said the storms are being caused by a convergence of air currents, due to warmth in the earths surface from the recent heatwave rising into cooler air in the atmosphere.

It comes after lightning set fire to houses in Andover, Hampshire, on Saturday morning, forcing residents to leave.

Neighbours heard an enormous bang as the strike set two homes ablaze on Mercia Avenue, and a 70-year-old woman was assessed by paramedics.

The scene on Mercia Avenue in Andover after a house was hit by lightning as a weekend of thunderstorms across England began on Saturday (Barrie Austen/PA)

Kingston Police, who oversee a borough in the amber zone for storms, warned motorists to drive carefully and remember they are not driving a submarine.

The force said in a tweet: Please remember to drive carefully.

Also remember that youre not driving a submarine.

Do not enter what could possibly be deep water.

Watch your speed and distance as stopping distances will be greater.

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The rain brought an end to the heatwave earlier this week, potentially disappointing anyone who hoped for a dry, sunny trip to the coast.

The rest of the country was forecast to experience a cloudy, more settled end to the week while sunshine is expected in Scotland.

Temperatures are set to rise in most places again on Monday as the storms clear, with the mercury predicted to reach 26C in London, 25C in Edinburgh, 24C in Cardiff, and 22C in Belfast.

The Met Office has predicted early cloud in some northern and eastern parts which will move up to Scotland, and sunny spells and scattered showers in most places throughout the day.
Workers at Latitude Festival have felt absolute unadulterated joy after being able to return to their jobs, the founder of the event has said.

Melvin Benn said he has never seen so many grown men crying as he has at the festival.

Latitude Festival, which has been attended by around 40,000 people, is coming to an end on Sunday.

Around 40,000 people attended Latitude Festival (Jacob King/PA)

Benn told the PA news agency the reaction of workers at the festival has been joy, absolute unadulterated joy, mixed with a massive emotional release.

I dont think I have ever seen so many grown men crying and just literally people standing on stage and not being able to communicate because they are in tears.

Front of house managers, builders, scaffolders etcetera just suddenly realising that this is the life that they were living and that they had lost.

Some of them really thought they would never get it back and I think we have managed to get it back.

Melvin Benn (Brian Lawless/PA)

He said the event, which is taking place at Henham Park estate near the Suffolk coast, has gone to plan.

Its very much as anticipated so Im feeling relaxed, he said.

It was a huge pressure trying to put it together with what was very little time.

Benn said he expected more acts to pull out than the few that did, including Arlo Parks after she tested positive for coronavirus.

In the main acts are younger people and the proliferation of the Delta variant at the moment, theres a lot of it around younger people, so just on the law of averages, we would have said that there would have been more, he said.

But actually what a lot of the acts have been doing is self-isolating and bubbling before the performances, because they were so keen to get out here and perform.
The wife of a terminally ill man is planning to say her final farewell to her husband by shaving her head to raise money for a cancer charity.

Mick Maguire, 57, who was diagnosed with terminal cancer in April, is helping wife Fiona, 60, to organise his funeral and hopes for a party to send him off.

The sci-fi fan, from Ormskirk, Lancashire, plans to be buried in a red Star Trek top, as worn in the first series of the TV classic by characters who did not last to the end of their episode.

And he has chosen Spirit In The Sky by Norman Greenbaum to be played when he is cremated  after he was talked out of his first choice song, Disco Inferno by The Trammps.

During his wake, Mrs Maguire will be filmed on a livestream when she takes part in Brave The Shave for Macmillan Cancer Support.

She said she came up with the idea after she saw an advert on television.

She told the PA news agency: I asked Mick how he would feel if I shaved my head for Macmillan and he said: Id be made up.

Then I asked how he would feel if I did it at his wake and he said: I think that would be fantastic.

Mr Maguire said the experience of planning his own funeral had been bizarre but he wanted to ensure his friends and family had something to celebrate.

He said: There is no way on Gods green earth my funeral is going to be a morbid experience.

Its going to be a party, there are no two ways about it.

Ive left instructions with my will that at the end of the service I want everybody on their feet clapping and dancing.

Fiona and Mick Maguire who are planning Mr Maguires funeral and how to raise money for Macmillan Cancer Support together after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer (Macmillan Cancer Support/PA)

The computer games enthusiasts, who are both medically retired, married nine years ago after meeting by chance the year before and say every day of their decade together has been filled with laughter.

Money raised from Mrs Maguires head shave will go to Macmillan Cancer Support, who have helped her husband, and Queenscourt Hospice in Southport.

Her hair will go to the Little Princess Trust, which creates wigs for children and young people who lose theirs.

Mrs Maguire said: Hair is not important, it will grow back

I want to raise money to say thank you to those people who come out day in and day out and answer my calls whenever I need them.

I want to raise awareness of the help that the charities need as well.

Mr Maguire added: Were faced with the possibility of what can only be described as one of the worst situations to go through in a life experience, and if theres something we can do that would change that to say here is a benefit that comes out of it, here is a positive, then we have won.

It ceases to be a miserable, maudlin event and becomes something to celebrate.

Nicole McIlveen, senior fundraising manager at Macmillan, said: Mick and Fiona are clearly such a brave couple.

Their positivity in the face of adversity is remarkable and were so grateful that Fiona has decided to Brave The Shave for Macmillan.

To find out more about Brave The Shave go to bravetheshave.macmillan.org.uk.
Pressing pause! Emma Slater and Sasha Farber arent yet ready to start a family.

Read article

Im a baby myself a lot, the England native, 32, exclusively told Us Weekly on Friday, July 23, while promoting Dancing With the Stars. I feel like Im 32, so definitely I could be thinking about it, but I just still feel like Im not quite that age yet. Theres a lot of women that feel like that. I dont know if its just [because] Im so involved in my career.

Emma Slater Says Its Not Quite the Right Time to Have Baby With Sasha Farber

The Burn the Floor star noted that her husband, 37, was probably  ready to conceive.

Read article

If he could carry the baby, that would be zero problem, Slater told Us. I just feel that its not quite the right time. But babies are great.

The choreographer initially felt selfish with her decision to delay pregnancy and has struggled with that mindset.

Nowadays, women have a long period of time where they want to just enjoy their life, Slater explained to Us. I really thought that I would  have kids by the time I [was] 26. It just didnt work out for me, didnt pan out. I still find myself saying, Oh, I want to do more.

In May 2019, the Mamma Mia! star exclusively told Us that she and the Russia native were definitely thinking about baby No. 1.

I think a family is something that is high priority and were at the point now where you kind of shift things around based on, OK, so this is kind of the time that we want to get pregnant, Slater told Us at the time. I know that that can be difficult. Its not as easy as just, you know, getting pregnant. But its definitely something that were going to make happen.

Read article

Farber was also more ready to become a dad then. I definitely think about child-free time, probably more so than Sasha. We want to travel to certain places before we do have a child, his wife added. He cant get his hands off [of our dog], Ruby, a little too much! He cradles her. Im like, Come on, shes a chihuahua!

The dancers got married in March 2018 in Los Angeles, two years after their engagement. The ABC personalities started dating in 2011, briefly breaking up in 2014 before reuniting the following year.

With reporting by Joe Drake
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...AIR QUALITY ADVISORY ISSUED FOR DOUGLAS, BAYFIELD, ASHLAND, IRON, BURNETT, WASHBURN, SAWYER, AND PRICE COUNTIES... The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources has issued an Air Quality Advisory for Particle Pollution which will remain in effect until 12:00 PM CDT Tuesday, August 3. This advisory affects people in Douglas, Bayfield, Ashland, Iron, Burnett, Washburn, Sawyer, and Price counties. Smoke from wildfire activity in Canada is currently impacting northwestern Wisconsin counties and is anticipated to slowly spread east- southeast today into Tuesday morning. Elevated fine particulate matter (PM2.5) concentrations are anticipated to result in air quality index (AQI) values in the UNHEALTHY FOR SENSITIVE GROUPS level over this period. Sensitive groups include children, elderly people, individuals with respiratory and cardiac problems, and anyone engaged in strenuous outdoor activities for a prolonged period of time. For more information on current air quality, please see: https://airquality.wi.gov
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YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 7, ARMENPRESS. The Swiss investor first of all needs a good partner in Armenia, Hayk Hovhannisyan - Armenia's Trade Representative to Switzerland, official representative of the Development Foundation of Armenia (DFA), told Armenpress.

I assure that everything else, such as the legislation field, property rights, all institutional mechanisms that should protect the investor, exist and function perfectly in Armenia. Yes, of course, there can be some shortcomings of business in this or that stage, but they exist in all countries. I think the first precondition is to have a good partner here, he said.

The Armenian-Swiss commercial relations are satisfactory, and although last year the two countries have recorded quite a big growth in trade turnover volumes, Hayk Hovhannisyan believes that there is a greater potential for further boosting the bilateral trade.

I see many similarities and commonalities between the two countries. As our Swiss counterperts say, the two countries are very similar, both have a small population, do not have sea, are surrounded by quite big neighbors, but at the same time they are creative, smart and good friends at the international arena, Hayk Hovhannisyan said.

According to him, Armenias membership to the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) is quite attractive for the European investor. The cooperation with Iran is also an important factor.

THe foreign policy of Armenia has allowed to develop open, transparent and predictable relations all partners. While talking to the Swiss businessmen, it is noticed that they are focused on this factor: the EAEU is very good, and also with Iran is even better, he stated.

Hayk Hovhannisyan also touched upon the great cooperation prospects in the fields of tourism, IT and infrastructure development. He informed that at the moment the project of constructing small reservoirs in Armenia is at the examination stage.

This is an opportunity to store water during the abundant season and solve many issues for a lot of communities during the irrigation season. At the same time it will have a certain energy potential. The Swiss-Armenian investor and philanthropist Vartan Sirmakes is championing this project along with several others all over our motherland, he said.

Hayk Hovhannisyan added that on the state level Armenia has undertaken all the necessary steps and at the moment the ball is in the field of the Armenian private sector. The Armenian businessman has to open up to the world, find partners, create a reliable image for him and his home country.

Syuzi Muradyan
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 6, ARMENPRESS. The US House of Representatives has approved funding for US government operations through March 23, RT reports.

The measure is unlikely to get approval in the Senate, threatening another government shutdown.

There are concerns that the resolution will not be approved by the Senate, however, as the Republican-drafted measure boosts military funding without a corresponding increase in civilian expenditures.

The most recent government shutdown was on January 20, after Senate Democrats filibustered the continuing resolution over the issue of immigrants brought into the US illegally as children, recipients of the Obama administration's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

The shutdown ended by the morning of January 23, after Republicans promised a debate on immigration.

Earlier on Tuesday, Trump said he would be willing to have a government shutdown if Democrats are unwilling to work with him on immigration reform.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 7, ARMENPRESS. The European Union is concerned over the Turkish military operations in Syrias north, Federica Mogherini  EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, said during the session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, TASS reports.

We are deeply concerned over the appearance of new military fronts in Syrias north, Mogherini said. The opening of new military fronts is not a solution to the issue, and this will not make Turkey more secure.

Mogherini said stable security can be reached only based on the political settlement, through negotiations.

The High Representative said all military operations should concentrate on fight against terrorist organizations that are included in the UNs respective list, rather than against someone else. According to her, the EU is committed to Syrias unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 7, ARMENPRESS. During his tours renowned Armenian composer Aram Khachaturyan met with the leaders of countries, received interesting offers, as well as valuable gifts from them.

ARMENPRESS this time presents the composers meetings with the Royal families.

The composer was on tour in Belgium in 1960. Queen Elizabeth was unable to attend his concert due to health problems, but after the concert people approached Khachaturyan and conveyed the Queens invitation to meet. Accepting the invitation with pleasure, the next day the renowned composer and his wife were hosted at the Queens Palace. They had a very warm and interesting meeting. The Queen Elizabeth had a great contribution in the art world the evidence of which is the international contest named after her. She also played violin and has been taught by renowned violinist Eugene Ysaye. This is the reason that the Armenian composer and the Queen talked about the art, the innovations in the music art, the composers creative path and the Brussels Symphonic Orchestra. They have also talked about people they know among whom were world-renowned musicians, director of the Aram Khachaturyan House-Museum Armine Grigoryan said.

The Queen also had a little knowledge of Russian the evidence of which is her note written on a photograph. The photos of this meeting are still kept in the Museum.

In 1973 the composer was invited to France where his 70th anniversary was celebrated with a great event. During this tour he decided to visit Monaco. During this period the Monaco Prince and his wife, world-renowned star Grace Kelly, were outside the country, but being informed about the composers visit, they returned from London cutting short their tour and immediately arrived in the house where Khachaturyan stopped. The Prince as well was very fond of art and he organized different contests and festivals in his country every two years dedicated to the composer art. In 1974 he not only invited the composer to the contest-festival, but also asked to write a new work to be performed at the opening ceremony of the festival.

Again on a concert tour in Iran in 1965, the Persian Shah showed his sympathy to the composer by providing one of his personal vehicles to the composer for touring the country. The Persian Shah and his wife also attended Khachaturyans concert. Usually, after the completion of the concert the Shah left the concert hall, but this case differed from the remaining ones. The Shah and his wife applauded the maestro as a result of which he again performed his works.

Then the Shah and his wife went to the backstage to meet with the renowned composer the evidence of which is the photo still maintained. The Persian Shah handed over many gifts to the composer, among which was quite a valuable Persian blue carpet. Khachatruyan brought it to Moscow to decorate his apartment.

In 1961 during the trip in Egypt, President Gamal Abdel Nasser welcomed him at the airport. The Egyptian President also attended the composers concert. He handed over one of the highest certificates of the country to Aram Khachaturyan for the great contribution in the field of art. During the same tour Khachaturyan also met with President of Yugoslavia Josip Broz Tito.

Anna Grigoryan

Photo  courtesy of Aram Khachaturyan House Museum
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 7, ARMENPRESS. US President Donald Trump has asked for a military parade and the Pentagon is reviewing potential dates, Pentagon spokesman Charlie Summers said Tuesday, CNN reports.

The spokesman described the planning process as being in its "infancy."

In response to the news, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement that Trump had asked the Defense Department to "explore" the idea.

"President Trump is incredibly supportive of America's great servicemembers who risk their lives every day to keep our country safe. He has asked the Department of Defense to explore a celebration at which all Americans can show their appreciation," Sanders said.

Trump was French President Emmanuel Macron's guest on Bastille Day last year, and later called the French military parade he witnessed "one of the greatest parades" he had ever seen.

He said last September in a conversation with Macron that when he came back from France he wanted a military parade on the Fourth of July in Washington.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 7, ARMENPRESS. U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, during Congressional testimony today before the U.S. House Financial Services Committee, agreed  in response to direct questioning by Representative Brad Sherman (D-CA)  to commit Treasury Department officials to pursue a new U.S.-Armenia Double Tax Treaty, a long-overdue bilateral accord that will remove barriers to the growth of U.S.-Armenia economic relations, reported the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA).

Rep. Sherman was joined by Rep. David Valadao (R-CA) in collecting the Congressional signatures of their House colleagues on a letter to Secretary Mnuchin in support of the Tax Treaty. He referenced the legislators in his question to the Secretary, asking whether, in response to their calls to action, the Treasury Department would dedicate 28 hours (the number of Congressional signatures collected to date) to negotiating this agreement. Secretary Mnuchin replied in the affirmative, noting: Yes, I can commit the 28 hours.

We are grateful for Congressman Shermans policy expertise and persistence in securing the support of Secretary Mnuchin for a mutually-beneficial U.S.-Armenia Double Tax Treaty, said ANCA Chairman Raffi Hamparian.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 7, ARMENPRESS. The Armenian parliament adopted the judicial code constitutional law upon second hearing.

72 MPs voted in favor, 12 were against and 12 others abstained.

Edmon Marukyan from the opposition Yelk faction said that overall there are positive regulations in the bill. However I have presented more than a dozen proposals during the period of the first to second hearing and they havent been accepted, he said.

The judicial code regulates the relations related to forming of the judicial authority and organizing of its activity.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 7, ARMENPRESS. Armenias Ambassador to Romania Sergey Minasyan on February 6 met with Romanian national defense minister Mihai-Viorel Fifor, the Armenian foreign ministry told Armenpress.

Welcoming the Ambassador, minister Fifor said after the formation of the new government in Romania and his re-appointment as the national defense minister this is his first meeting with a foreign Ambassador, adding that this meeting is first of all with the Armenian Ambassador.

Ambassador Minasyan said the Armenia-EU Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement signed in November 2017 creates a favorable environment for deepening the cooperation at bilateral and multilateral formats. The Ambassador also highlighted the importance of international military and military-political cooperation for Armenia under the process of modernization and development of the Armenian Armed Forces. The Ambassador stated that the bilateral contacts will contribute to outlining possible directions for defense cooperation.

The Romanian minister welcomed the idea of promoting dialogue and forming a bilateral agenda which can include the military and defense education, military medicine and other spheres.

The officials also touched upon the Karabakh conflict, noting that the conflict should be settled exclusively through negotiations and dialogue within the frames of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairmanship as the only format having an international mandate for the conflict settlement.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 7, ARMENPRESS. Artsakh Republic President Bako Sahakyan chaired the first session of the Cabinet of 2018, the Artsakh Presidential Office told Armenpress.

Representatives of concerned agencies presented corresponding reports on the issues included in the session's agenda.

President Sahakyan gave instructions towards proper realization of the discussed tasks with a special focus on the Agriculture Development Doctrine and the 2018 State Capital Investment Program, pointing out that the issues were of crucial importance for the further socioeconomic development of the country, adding that their solution would require active and purposeful work implementation both by corresponding structures and other state government bodies and economic entities.

Speaking about the Agriculture Development Doctrine the President noted that it would become the most significant guarantee for the proportionate and intensive development of all the sectors of the sphere over the medium and long-term outlook.

"The doctrine's implementation will result in a dynamically developing agriculture ensuring economic stability and predictability, rising self-sufficiency level in the country and tangible increase of the international competitiveness degree", highlighted in his speech the Head of the State, adding that all the concerned agencies and circles must do the utmost to support within their mandate the successful implementation of this pivotal program.

Touching upon the 2018 State Capital Investment Program the President noted that the activities carried out in the sphere would be mostly directed towards housing construction, improvement of building conditions of educational institutions, the construction and reconstruction of cultural centers, healthcare facilities, municipal construction, road construction and repairing, their maintenance and exploitation, as well as securing drinking water supply to various settlements.

"Projects envisaged for the year of 2018 in the municipal engineering sphere are extensive enough, however they are absolutely realistic and necessitate active and organized work first of all by the ministry of municipal engineering and all the concerned bodies and structures. No efforts must be spared to solve those tasks", the Artsakh President noted.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 7, ARMENPRESS. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have liberated Sheikh Khoruz, a village in Afrin, from pro-Turkish militants after heavy battles.

The liberation operation began on February 4 and was completed in the evening of February 6, SDF said in a statement.

SDF said that many militants were killed, and two were captured.

Mentioning theyve captured a tank, the SDF said they discovered documents of Turkish soldiers inside.

In January 2018, the Turkish military began an operation in the Kurdish-majority Afrin Canton and the Tel Rifaat Area of Shahba Canton in Northern Syria. Turkey code-named the operation as Operation Olive Branch. In the pretext of fighting terror, Turkey is actually targeting the Kurdish population.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 7, ARMENPRESS. Tehran has designed response scenarios in case the US violates the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action JCPA, aka the Iran nuclear deal. Iran has already notified Russia on this, Tehrans Ambassador to Moscow Mehdi Sana told RIA Novosti.

Iran, certainly, will strive to cooperate with Russia, China, as well as European countries, will strive to maintain the JCPA. But if it were to be violated, then certainly Iran has its scenarios of actions.Iran has specific response actions, the Ambassador said.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 7, ARMENPRESS. Ara Saghatelyan, secretary general of the Armenian Parliament, met with Philippe Schwab, secretary general of the Federal Assembly of Switzerland, president of the Association of the Secretaries General of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, who is in Armenia among the delegation members of the Swiss National Council, the Armenian Parliament told Armenpress.

The Armenian Parliaments secretary general said the imperative of making reforms in the staff is conditioned with the necessity to develop expert and analytical capacities and parliamentary control mechanisms over which respective actions are already being taken. Ara Saghatelyan presented to the Swiss counterpart the ongoing works within the frames of the Open Parliament initiative.

Philippe Schwab highlighted the leading experience of Switzerland in parliamentary control and expressed readiness to exchange experience.

The officials discussed the long-term cooperation prospects between the staffs of the two parliaments.

Ara Saghatelyan informed that the Armenian Parliaments staff has submitted an application for membership to the Association of the Secretaries General of the Inter-Parliamentary Union the discussion of which is scheduled on the March 26 session of the Associations executive committee in Geneva.

Philippe Schwab welcomed this initiative and said he will carefully examine Armenias membership application.

At the end of the meeting the officials expressed readiness to continue the working contacts at different levels and to develop the cooperation.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 7, ARMENPRESS. The terming which the interior ministry of Turkey used regarding the elected patriarchal locum tenens Archbishop Garegin Bekchian in a letter sent to Istanbuls Armenian Patriarchate has caused serious discontent among the local Armenian community.

Columnist of the Istanbul-based Agos newspaper Ohannes Klcdag published an article about the letter and namely the terming Turkish authorities used  So-called patriarchal locum tenens.

The columnist reminded that the interior ministry said that as long as Mesrop Mutafyan is Patriarch and the seat is not vacant new elections cannot be held.

In addition, the letter said that Patriarchal Vicar Archbishop Aram Ateshyan continues to remain the only official representative in these conditions. While Bekchians election and all decisions made after it are invalid.

The letter also contained a terming  so-called patriarchal locum tenens. In Turkey, the term so-called is primarily used when referred to the Armenian Genocide.

Those who think that this term was used by accident are wrong. Armenians of Turkey know this term very well. For many years it has become a tool of symbolic pressure on them. However, if there is a position worthy of being labeled so-called, then it is the position of patriarchal vicar. This is a totally made up position created for Ateshyan, he said, adding that Ateshyan is guilty for the current situation.

Commenting on the interior ministrys remarks on Mutafyans health, the Agos writer says that health issues are the most clear and practical reasons of considering a position vacant.

The ministry is in a situation which denies the absolute and logical truth. In particular, this is about a serious neurological illness and unfortunately Mesrop Mutafyan is in a coma for many years. How can they say that this situation isnt a reason for declaring the seat vacant?

The author also emphasizes, that if there is a problem in this condition, then why was Turkey in favor of the patriarchal vicar position, which Ateshyan assumed.

If practically the patriarchal seat isnt vacant, then theres no need for a vicar. But if it is, then it must be occupied only through the peoples vote. It turns out that the ministrys letter itself says that Mutafyan has stopped leading the patriarchate, Agos said.

On February 7, Armenian community members are invited to the Istanbul Governors Office to a meeting, which the interior minister himself might attend.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 7, ARMENPRESS. The United States is preparing a new package of economic sanctions against North Korea aimed at stopping its nuclear program, Vice President Mike Pence said on February 7.

The US will soon release the harshest and most aggressive economic sanctions against North Korea. We will continue isolating it as long as it hasnt abandoned its nuclear weapon and ballistic missile programs, he said.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 7, ARMENPRESS. Newly appointed Ambassador of Malta to Armenia Natasha Meli Daudey (residence in Warsaw) on February 7 presented her credentials to Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan, the Presidential Office told Armenpress.

The President congratulated the Ambassador on appointment and wished her success in conducting a diplomatic mission in Armenia.

President Sargsyan warmly remembered his visit to Malta last year on the sidelines of the EPP summit and reaffirmed Armenias desire to deepen the relations with the Republic of Malta. Serzh Sargsyan stated that the great cooperation potential existing in the bilateral inter-state relations has not been fully utilized over the past 25 years. The President expressed hope that the Ambassador, as well as Armenias Ambassador to Malta will be able to fill that gap through their activities.

Ambassador Natasha Meli Daudey thanked the Armenian President for the reception and assured that she will do everything possible to develop the inter-state ties both at bilateral and multilateral platforms.

The sides attached importance to the high-level mutual visits which significantly contribute to expanding the cooperation at different sectors and boosting the relations.

President Sargsyan highlighted holding regular political consultations between the two foreign ministries, as well as expanding the legal framework which, according to him, will give major impetus for deepening the economic cooperation.

The sides attached great importance to the role of parliamentary diplomacy on strengthening the inter-state relations. The President said the Armenia-Malta parliamentary friendship group already operates and expressed hope that a new parliamentary group will be formed in Malta in the future.

During the meeting importance was also attached to the deepening and strengthening of the mutual partnership between Armenia and Malta as an EU member state.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 7, ARMENPRESS. Armenias minister of agriculture held a meeting on February 7 with Ambassador of Netherlands H.E. Johannes Douma to discuss prospects of cooperation between the countries.

During the meeting the Armenian minister presented the vision of developing the sector in Armenia.

Emphasizing that investments and modern equipment are necessary for achieving results, the minister suggested the Netherlands Ambassador to study the possibility of attracting investments in this field.

The minister proposed to discuss the possibility of jointly designing and realizing a PPP (Public Sector-Private Sector Partnership) format program.

The sides discussed a wide range of issues, and reached an agreement to study the local dairy market to present potential investors with opportunities of launching businesses in Armenia.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 7, ARMENPRESS. Armenian Prime Minister Karen Karapetyan on February 7 received Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Russia to Armenia Ivan Volynkin, the government told Armenpress.

The officials exchanged views on the current agenda of the Armenian-Russian economic relations and the prospects to expand them. They also touched upon the preparation works of the upcoming session of the Armenian-Russian intergovernmental commission in Yerevan.

The opportunities to develop the cooperation within the Meghri Free Economic Zone, as well as to boost the business ties in air communication, small aviation, infrastructures, agriculture and tourism fields were discussed during the meeting.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 7, ARMENPRESS. The meeting of Tsarukyan faction MPs with Armen Sarkissian, candidate for the President of Armenia nominated by the Republican Party, will be held in the coming days, Tsarukyan faction MP Iveta Tonoyan told reporters in the Parliament, reports Armenpress.

As for the question whether Gagik Tsarukyan will attend the meeting or not, I urge everyone to allow us to make our own decision on who will take part in that meeting and in which format it will be held, Tonoyan said.

She added that the meeting will be attended by the lawmakers of the Tsarukyan faction. She stated that a lot of issues concern the lawmakers.

Recently the Tsarukyan faction MPs had a working discussion led by faction head Gagik Tsarukyan dedicated to the factions working agenda. In addition to other issues, we also discussed Armen Sarkissians candidacy. The lawmakers expressed their views and positions, but we will express our final position after the meeting with Armen Sarkissian, she said.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 7, ARMENPRESS. Armenian justice minister Davit Harutyunyan on February 7 received the Venice Commission and OSCE/ODIHR representatives, the ministry told Armenpress.

The minister highlighted the usefulness and importance of such regular meetings and discussed with the guests a number of issues relating to the draft law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organizations.

The minister answered the questions of the guests, thoroughly introduced the regulations proposed by the draft law and the proposals of the expert group on them.

At the end of the meeting the justice minister thanked the representatives of international structures for the productive cooperation in the preparation works of drafts laws.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 7, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister Karen Karapetyan held a meeting with Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Turkmenistan to Armenia Muhammetniyaz Mashalov, the government told Armenpress.

The officials discussed issues relating to further developing and expanding the Armenian-Turkmen economic relations, stating that there is a great potential in this sphere which is still not utilized. The PM and the Ambassador touched upon the implementation process of agreements reached between the two governments and expressed confidence that their implementation will give new impetus to the increase of bilateral trade turnover volumes.

During the meeting the officials attached great importance to the operation of Ashgabat-Yerevan-Frankfurt flights. The Ambassador informed that at the moment the possibility to increase their weekly number is being discussed. In this context the PM proposed the Turkmen side to consider the opportunity to organize flights at other directions from Yerevans Zvartnots airport.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 7, ARMENPRESS. Delaying the resolution of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict for more than 20 years is a long period, Bridget Brink, Deputy Assistance Secretary of State of the US said in Baku, APA reports.

The U.S. fully supports a peaceful solution to the conflict and will continue to make efforts to achieve this goal, she said.

She reminded that the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs are on a visit to Azerbaijan for negotiations over settlement of the conflict.

On February 8, the co-chairs will visit Armenia, and then Artsakh.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 7, ARMENPRESS. An information center of eco-tourism support will be opened in the museum of nature of Armenia, deputy minister of nature preservation Khachik Hakobyan said during a press conference.

It will enable tourists to be informed on the entire eco-tourism potential and routes in one place, he said

There will be an online payment system, facilitating the process for tourists.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 7, ARMENPRESS. Armenian Prime Minister Karen Karapetyan held a meeting on February 7 with the delegation led by Germanys Ambassador Matthias Kiesler.

The delegation included representatives from the KfW  the German Development Bank, MF Strategy, MicroInsurance Centre and AgroConsulting consultants, Swiss Re and Agroinsurance International.

A consortium comprised of the three abovementioned organizations has been selected as result of a tender announced by KfW, with which the agriculture ministry of Armenia and the Central Bank will jointly prepare pilot programs of agricultural insurance.

The Armenian PM thanked the German government for supporting the introduction of an insurance system in the agriculture field and expressed willingness to expand partnership in other branches also.

The Ambassador said the insurance program is innovative, promising, and the German government is ready to continue supporting the Armenian government to develop cooperation.

As part of the pilot program, the KfW will provide 5 million Euros in grant and another 5 million will be co-financed from the state budget for subsidization.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 7, ARMENPRESS. Aram Ananyan, director of ARMENPRESS news agency, Suren Danielyan, director of the Diaspora center of Armenias State Pedagogical University and Sevak Hakobyan, editor-in-chief of the Beirut-based Zartonk Daily were hosted in the Ararad Daily HQ in the Lebanese capital on February 5, as part of a visit on the occasion of Zartonk Dailys 80th anniversary celebration.

During the meeting the sides talked about issues relating to the development of media and the future, different opinions were voiced and the upcoming 100th anniversary of the establishment of ARMENPRESS was touched upon.

Mr. Ananyan spoke about the specificities of the news agencys work, mentioning that this year ARMENPRESS is preparing to realize multilingual programs in numerous directions. He emphasized that ARMENPRESS is always ready for partnership  by combining common work projects.

The guests welcomed the 80th anniversary of establishment of Ararad, congratulated the executives and wished success.

Ararad Daily was established in 1937.
YEREVAN, 7 FEBUARY, ARMENPRESS. The Central Bank of Armenia informs Armenpress that today, 7 February, USD exchange rate up by 0.37 drams to 482.35 drams. EUR exchange rate down by 2.15 drams to 595.70 drams. Russian Ruble exchange rate stood at 8.44 drams. GBP exchange rate down by 3.05 drams to 671.38 drams.

The Central Bank has set the following prices for precious metals.

Gold price down by 18.26 drams to 20647.23 drams. Silver price down by 0.89 drams to 260.61 drams. Platinum price down by 112.23 drams to 15306.31 drams.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 7, ARMENPRESS. The Institute for Reporters Freedom and Safety (IRFS) strongly condemns the call by Azerbaijan's President Aliyev for an early presidential election for 11 April 2018. Serious electoral flaws and ongoing human rights abuses by the Azerbaijani government undermine any meaningful prospect of free and fair elections, ARMENPRESS reports the organisation said.

IRFS believes that President Aliyev, who has been in office since 2003, has intentionally abused his official powers to secure an absolute advantage for himself or his potential successor. The ruling New Azerbaijan Party earlier declared it would nominate Aliyev for the presidency again, potentially extending his rule to 2025. The election was previously scheduled for 17 October. By giving the country eight weeks warning in a threatening environment hostile to free speech and genuine political participation, President Aliyev created an uneven playing filed for candidates and made vibrant political discourse almost impossible. .

"The monitoring of pluralism in traditional broadcast media shows that all television and radio broadcasters, whether state-run or private, are invariably under the full control of the authorities and serve as a propaganda mouthpiece for the ruling regime by shaping the public opinion in favour of the government among nearly 75 percent of the total population of the country," IRFS CEO Emin Huseynov said.

"In an environment where there is no single independent print media in the country, most of the independent news websites are subjected to judicial and extrajudicial blocking, the handful of independent online publications are under the risk of closure, and leading government critics are behind bars for exercising their fundamental right to freedom of expression, This vote would be neither free nor fair.. It would not reflect the will of the Azerbaijani people, and should be seen as undemocratic and illegitimate in the eyes of the international community.," the head of IRFS concluded.

IRFS believes that the President of Azerbaijan has called the unjustified snap election by capitalising on an anti-democratic provision that he has introduced to the Azerbaijani Constitution through the 2016 constitutional referendum, which he himself had initiated and which was questionable in terms of democratic standards and wascriticised by the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe. It was in 2016 that Ilham Aliyev managed to tailor all provisions of the Constitution to fit his personal interests through a totally rigged nationwide referendum and eliminate the already fragile balance between the branches of power in Azerbaijan.

As cautiously anticipated by the critics of the 2016 constitutional amendments, Ilham Aliyev appointed his spouse Mehriban Aliyeva to the newly established post of the first vice-president of Azerbaijan in February of 2017 and himself acquired an absolute right - unseen in any other country around the world - to call early presidential elections without providing any reasons or explanations.

Given that the 2016 constitutional changes extended the president"s term of office from 5 to 7 years and removed the minimum age limit for presidential candidates and that the two-term limit for presidency had earlier been abolished through similar dubious constitutional changes in 2009, Ilham Aliyev could become a de-facto permanent ruler similar to an absolute monarch in a de-jure unitary state with a presidential form of government.

In its review of the changes, the Council of Europe's Venice Commission was "particularly worried" by the introduction of the figure of unelected Vice-Presidents, who may at some moment govern the country, and the President"s prerogative to declare early presidential elections at his/her convenience.

"Under the circumstances, there is no way the election can be free and fair, and no chance that a deeply flawed and rushed electoral process will help Azerbaijan either establish democracy or bring an end to grave human rights abuses by the ruling establishment. We therefore believe that the election should be postponed", Emin Huseynov said.

IRFS calls on the Council of Europe and the OSCE, as well as the member states of these organisations, to strongly reject the call by Ilham Aliyev for snap presidential elections and

Instead call on his regime to respect the human rights of all of its citizens, and to return to democratic constitutional order.

IRFS calls on the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights and the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe to conduct a joint assessment of the unjustified decision of the President of Azerbaijan. IRFS further calls on the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe to hold urgent consultations and develop a package of recommendations to the government of Azerbaijan to conduct presidential elections in accordance with the standards of the Council of Europe, which Azerbaijan has undertaken to observe as a member of the organisation since 2001.

IRFS also calls on OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, Italian Foreign Minister Angelino Alfano to urgently convene a meeting of the OSCE Permanent Council and hold political consultations on unsubstantiated extraordinary presidential elections in Azerbaijan, and to assess - on behalf of the OSCE Council of Ministers - the extent to which the decision of President Ilham Aliyev corresponds to OSCE values that are clearly and unambiguously prescribed in the Helsinki Final Act and the Paris Charter for a New Europe.

IRFS further calls upon the members of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly to hold an extraordinary hearing on Azerbaijan at the upcoming session on 22-23 February in Vienna and adopt a resolution condemning Ilham Aliyev"s decision as a violation of the fundamental principles of human rights and democracy.

IRFS also calls on the Committee on Political Affairs, the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights and the Monitoring Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to urgently prepare an assessment report on the unwarranted snap presidential elections of Azerbaijan and other relevant reports on how these plans of the Azerbaijani authorities go against the country"s obligations to the Council of Europe regarding respect for human rights and standards of democracy.

IRFS calls on the European Union to completely reconsider its relations with the Azerbaijani authorities and suspend all negotiations as part of the preparation of the Strategic Partnership Treaty until the Azerbaijani authorities demonstrate will for genuine democratic reforms that are a priority within the framework of the Eastern Partnership program.

IRFS further calls upon the Azerbaijani civil society and political parties of Azerbaijan to challenge the presidential decree on holding early elections in the Constitutional Court of Azerbaijan.

IRFS urges the political leadership of Azerbaijan to conduct the presidential elections on 17 October 2018, as originally and repeatedly announced by the authorities themselves, and until that time to carry out necessary reform aimed at removing all restrictions on freedom of expression and freedom of association and assembly in the country. As the first and urgent steps to improve the pre-election atmosphere, IRFS calls on the authorities to release all political prisoners, including prisoners of conscience, among whom there are a number of journalists, bloggers, writers and poets, and to remove all legislative restrictions on the free functioning of civil society and political opposition
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 7, ARMENPRESS. The 80th anniversary of Zartonk daily was solemnly marked at Tekeyan Center on February 5 under the auspices of the Lebanese Ministry of Information. The representative of His Holiness Aram I Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia Smbat Spunjian, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Armenia to Lebanon Samvel Mkrtchyan, Director of ARMENPRESS news agency Aram Ananyan, readers of Zartonk.

In his speech called Zartonk in the pan-Armenian media landscape  thoughts over future media, Aram Ananyan praised the consistent work of Lebanese-Armenian Zartonk to withstand modern media challenges and referred to the cooperation of ARMENPRESS and Diaspora-based media. More than 5 decades ago, in 1967, when remote connection was established, ARMENPRESS started to provide native-language articles to the Diaspora news outlet. Zartonk was one of the first periodicals to which the Armenian telegraphic agency provided both local and international information on daily basis. I can say without exaggeration that the mentioned historical event gave new impetus to the journalists of Armenia and Diaspora, Aram Ananyan said.

Congratulating on the anniversary of the periodical, the Director of ARMENPRESS underlined that there is another jubilee year of key importance for Armenia  the 100th anniversaries of the first Republic of Armenia and the heroic battles of May. ARMENPRESS was also born in the first Republic of Armenia and will mark the 100th anniversary this December, he said, adding that this jubilee anniversary is a chance for adopting innovative approaches and entering a new phase for ARENPRESS as a state-run pan-Armenian media outlet.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 7, ARMENPRESS. President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan received on February 7 the delegation led by President of National Council of Swiss Confederation Dominique de Buman comprised of the Vice Presidents of the National Council and representatives of all the parliamentary factions.

As ARMENPRESS was informed from the press service of the Armenian Presidents Office, greeting the guests the President of the Republic noted that the visit of such a representational delegation from friendly Switzerland to Armenia once again shows the high level of political relations between the two countries and the mutual sympathy of the two peoples. President Sargsyan talked with satisfaction about the consistently developing inter-state relations and expressed confidence that the visit of the delegation with its saturated agenda will undoubtedly have a positive impact on the strengthening of Armenian-Swiss cooperation.

Serzh Sargsyan congratulated Dominique de Buman on the occasion of being elected President of the National Council of Switzerland at the end of last year and wished him productive work. The President thanked Dominique de Buman for his devotion and consistent works aimed at the strengthening of Armenian-Swiss relations. Emphasizing that Switzerland has always been a reliable partner for Armenia, President Sargsyan thanked friendly Switzerland for supporting and standing with the Armenian people during difficult periods for Armenia.

The President of Armenia and the President of the National Council of Switzerland highlighted the role of inter-parliamentary cooperation for the development of interstate relations. In this context Serzh Sargsyan assessed it symbolic that by an interesting coincidence that former heads of parliamentary friendship groups of Armenia and Switzerland now head the legislative bodies of Armenia and Switzerland, which doubles the obligation to deepen parliamentary relations between the two states.

The interlocutors assessed the International Organisation of la Francophonie, the Presidency of which has been taken over by Armenia, as another good platform for making Armenian-Swiss ties closer, and hoped that the Francophonie summit to be held in Yerevan in October will be held at a high level.

Serzh Sargsyan and Dominique de Buman highlighted the close cooperation between the parliaments of the two countries in international organizations. President Sargsyan particularly highlighted the visit of the parliamentary friendship group of Switzerland led by Dominique de Buman to Artsakh in 2012, noting that such visits allow to get acquainted with the situation on site and personally.

During the meeting President Serzh Sargsyan and Dominique de Buman exchanged ideas over Nagorno Karabakh conflict settlement process. The President of Armenia thanked the Swiss Confederation for its balanced position on the issue and the support to the OSCE Minsk Group Co-chairs, as well as its readiness and efforts aimed at contributing to the solution of the issue.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 7, ARMENPRESS. Sudden readiness checks were held in the Defense Army of Artsakh on February 6-7, which involved the administrations of the Defense Army, a number of military units, management and supply agencies under the leadership of the Defense Minister of the Artsakh Republic, Defense Army commander, Lieutenant-General Levon Mnatsakanyan. According to the program of military cooperation, action coordination and exchange of experience of the two Armenian states, the representatives of the command staff of Armed Forces of the Republic of Armenia headed by Colonel-General Movses Hakobyan tracked the military processes of paramount importance.

As ARMENPRESS was informed from the press service of the Defense Ministry of Artsakh, according to the sources, all the structures and subdivisions involved in the chekings were brought to the state of combat readiness of the "high" level, positioned in pre-calculated clusters in full readiness for combat actions, then, completed the orders of the command.

During the trainings according to the emerging combat situation requirements of nominal war, various subdivisions of the participating military units also performed separate combat tasks. The superior command reviewed the submitted reports, followed the requirements for the compliance of the processes, and also directed and made some corrections in the operations.

All commanders, divisions, military units and administrative bodies demonstrated a proper level of combat readiness. As a result the army improved the management system, the level of harmonization of all types of troops and military units, and the ability to get to combat readiness of a ''high'' degree.

The Defense Army with the subdivisions once again proved that they are able to rapidly respond to the existing and possible developments and make decisive combat resolutions.

During the summarizing of the results, the Artsakh Republic Defense Minister and Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Armenia highly appreciated the measures of combat readiness and stated that the Defense Army is capable of timely and adequate reaction to the developments in the operational tactical situation and thus effectively counteracting the enemy's possible actions.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 7, ARMENPRESS. Kurdish Mezopotamyaajansi.com news agency has referred to the last Armenian living in Syrias Afrin  Harut Gevorg.

ARMENPRESS reports Harut Gevorg, 61, is from a family that survived the Armenian Genocide.

In 1915 we were expelled here by Turkey. During the period of the genocide we went to Azaz, later to Aleppo and finally to Afrin. There were many Armenian families here, but now only I remain here. Some of those Armenians emigrated because of the war, but the majority was killed. Turkey, like during the genocide, kills women and children. Its already 100 years Turkey continues its attacks, Harut Gevorg told the agency.

The last Armenian in Afrin noted that Afrin was one of the few regions of Syria that had avoided war. He demanded Turkey to cease bloodshed.

Its enough. Do not shed blood, do not attack people. Afrin was the only place in Syria that witnessed no war. Why do you want to destroy this city that had become a shelter for people? We were expelled from our homes in Turkey and arrived here. Now they try to make us leave here. We demand those attacks and war to be ceased. Let everyone hears our voice, our call is addressed to all the people, Harut Gevorg concluded.

In January 2018, the Turkish military began an operation in the Kurdish-majority Afrin Canton and the Tel Rifaat Area of Shahba Canton in Northern Syria. Turkey code-named the operation as Operation Olive Branch. In the pretext of fighting terror, Turkey is actually targeting the Kurdish population.

According to UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 68 civilians, including 21 children, have died as a result of Turkey's actions in Afrin.
According to information published on July 24, 2021, the Oshkosh-Hanwha team has been selected as one of the five contenders for the Concept Design Phase of the US Army's Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle (OMFV) program tasked to replace the M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle.

Follow Army Recognition on Google News at this link



Hanwha defense with its Redback tracked IFV (Infantry Fighting Vehicle), is one of the competitors for the Australian Land 400 Phase 3 program. Australian Defence Forces plan to acquire 450 tracked IFV to replace the MM11AS4. (Picture source Australian defense force)

The OMFV second phase award was announced on July 23 by the US Army Contracting Command  Detroit Arsenal (ACC-DTA), paving the way for a 15-month-long program of work by selected contenders to make digital concept designs for the OMFV.

Oshkosh Defense and Hanwha Defense signed a teaming agreement in March to form a consortium and submitted a bid for the concept design phase of the OMFV program aimed at replacing some 3,500 M2 Bradley vehicles that have been service since 1981. The Oshkosh Defense consortium also includes Pratt Miller, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, QinetiQ Inc., and Plasan.

The OMFV program takes a five-phased approach to design, prototype, test and produce the vehicle with the aim of producing a transformational infantry fighting vehicle (IFV) that will dominate maneuver in multi-domain operations.

Following the second phase contracts, the selected consortiums are set to take part in another open competition in the second quarter of fiscal year 2022 for the next phases of detailed design and prototype, with a contract announcement for the winning bidder due in late 2027.

To gear up for upcoming contests, Hanwha Defense established an American corporation _ Hanwha Defense USA _ in May and is in the process of recruiting local engineers and experts on IFV capabilities.

"Hanwha Defense USA is honored to be supporting the Oshkosh Defense consortium in our selection for the OMFV Phase 2 contract. The partnership brings Hanwha's extensive, tracked combat vehicle experience, to both the Oshkosh consortium and the US Army," said John Kelly, head of Hanwha Defense USA. "In addition, Hanwha will create high value US design and manufacturing jobs in support of the OMFV contract."

The Oshkosh-Hanwha team is to offer an up-to-date OMFV design based on the chassis of the Redback IFV developed by Hanwha Defense. The Redback is one of two contenders for the LAND 400 Phase 3 project designed to introduce next-generation tracked armored IFVs for the Australian Army.

Three prototypes of the Redback are now undergoing tests and evaluations for the Commonwealth's Risk Mitigation Activity that will be concluded in October. One of the prototypes is scheduled to be shipped back home early next year to be trialed by the South Korean Army.

"It is with great pride that the Oshkosh-Hanwha team has been down-selected for the OMFV phase 2 contest, and we're fully committed to developing a next-generation infantry fighting vehicle for the US Army," said Son Jae-il, President & CEO of Hanwha Defense. "Hanwha Defense shares Oshkosh's demonstrated passion for quality and responsiveness to the customer, and I firmly believe our team will offer the best solution for the OMFV program based on our advanced technologies and know-how accrued through the development and production of military combat vehicles."

A defense business arm of Hanwha Group, Hanwha Defense is the leading wheeled and tracked combat vehicle and weapons systems developer in South Korea with a half century of accumulated experience, advanced capabilities and technology in multiple proven direct and indirect fire solutions.

Hanwha Defense has produced and delivered over 8,500 cutting-edge combat vehicles to South Korea and numerous countries, including Malaysia, Norway, Finland, Estonia, Poland, Turkey and India.
Jeffree Star is also a very unlikely car collector. His fleet already counts on more than a dozen vehicles, scattered between his mansion in Los Angeles and his ranch out in Wyoming, where hes now raising yak. If you want to know the kind of stuff a career in the beauty industry can buy, Star is perhaps the best example, second only to reality star turned makeup mogul Kylie Jenner.At the same time, Star is also an example of how far you can get in life by being your true self, never apologetic and never afraid. His car collection might not be to everyones taste but its illustrative of that: its a combination of some of the most outrageous (and eye-popping) shades of pinks and neon yellow and greens, crazy customizations, and eclectic taste. Supercar Blondie got to see part of it for herself, during a recent visit to Stars LA mansion Perhaps the most famous car in Stars fleet is the pink Cullinan that he himself calls the most custom Black Badge ever and, without the doubt, the pinkest vehicle Rolls-Royce ever created. Its pink inside and out, including the fuzzy floormats and the starry roof, and its such a pain to maintain that he has to ask guests to wear covers on their feet when theyre riding with him.Star loves his Rolls-Royces, that much you can tell from the start of the video. He was in a rollover crash earlier this year in another Cullinan , and he praised Rolls-Royce for building such an awesome car that saved his life . He has three at the mansion now, including the pink Cullinan. The other two are a yellow Dawn with matching 24-inch rims and factory lemon leather interior, and a Cullinan in chocolate bronze with an orange interior. Star says he also owns a 1965 Silver Cloud in baby ice pink, but its not there for him to show it off.At the opposite end of the garage is a stunning, still mostly original 1955 Ford Crown Victoria , one of 10 ever made with a glass roof. The paint, tropical rose with cream, is original, but the manual transmission is gone: Star says he doesnt know how to drive stick. Luckily, with his money, he doesnt have to.The other vehicles in the underground garage are his first-ever celebrity worthy car, a Lamborghini Huracan in pink (that came to replace his 91 Nissan Sentra), an Aston Martin Vantage wrapped in pink over the original lime interior (his least favorite car: no shade to Aston , he says), and a McLaren 750S that holds the title of being Californias first-ever pink license plate.Asked why not all of his cars have his logo in the headrests, like the McLaren and the Rolls-Royces, Star says he didnt want to overdo it, that he wanted to keep it classy. Star is the first to laugh at his joke.
Jennifer Lopez and her new (but old) beau Ben Affleck are currently sailing the Mediterranean, in Saint-Tropez, aka the summer playground of the very rich. To kick off the vacation, Jennifer shared photos of herself on board their chartered megayacht , the stunning Valerie. In case youre on the market for a new boat, this one sells for $130 million, not including maintenance and running costs.Though Valerie has never been offered for charter, it seems that being two of the biggest stars in showbiz helps with getting it. British tabloid The Daily Mail claims that this was Afflecks birthday present for Jennifer, and that he flew her in to the South of France on board a $72 million Bombardier Global 7500 plane, which he rented for some $200,000.Once they landed, they were whisked away in Mercedes-Benz vans, and boarded Valerie. Valerie is a 2011 Lurssen build, and it received an extensive refit in 2019. Listed with Dynamiq Brokerage , it was never offered for charter, but it is for sale by its original owner, Ukrainian billionaire Rinat Akhmetov.Valerie is an 85 meter (278-foot) megayacht with six decks (and an elevator connecting them), and accommodation for 17 guests across nine lavish cabins. It also has rooms for 27 crew, and an additional nursery for the guests children.With an exterior design by Espen ino and interiors by Reymond Langton, Valerie is the very definition of luxury, as the photos in the gallery show. Amenities include a private sundeck with pool, touch-and-go helipad, jacuzzi, well-appointed spa and a proper gym, gorgeous indoor and outdoor dining areas, and even a Schimmel Pegasus self-playing piano.Valerie is powered by twin MTU 16V 4000 engines, able to take it to a top speed of 17 knots. It has only been used privately since 2012, mostly in the Mediterranean. This is the first time since launch that it gets so much publicity, so yes, we may call this the power of Bennifer (2.0).
DOHC

After all, the SVT department (now Ford Performance) did create the cool Ford Mustang SVT Cobras, as well as the feisty Cobra R incarnations . Instead, the well-known Panther architecture models only got a performance swan song in the form of the lesser-known third-generation Mercury Marauder, a model equipped with the 302-horsepower 4.6-liter Modular V8 engine.But thats not nearly enough for virtual artist Abimelec Arellano (aka abimelecdesign on social media), who decided to continue his successful What-if series with a Cobra treatment bestowed upon the ubiquitous Ford Crown Victoria. And its not just any Mustang SVT Cobra transplant, as the pixel master didnt tangle with the low-end versions. Instead, his virtual case of performance has the CGI Crown Victoria Cobra R based on the ultra-rare (300 units) 2000 SVT Cobra R.As such, the modern design borrows some of the well-known Mustang traits, such as the crimson paint, front splitter, big bulge hood, side pipes, 17-inch wheels and a big wing out back. More importantly, this virtual Crown Vic also has an odd powertrain combination. Thats because inside the cockpit theres a stick shift. And the manual transmission is mated to the 385-horsepower5.4-liter V8 engine instead of a meager 2V 4.6-liter.Its a controversial build, as certain fans love the idea of having more 'big sedans with big motors' in their life (something thats clearly against the current), while others didnt get the SVT references at all. Instead, one even commented the Crown Vic reminds of the failed Queen Latifah and Jimmy Fallon Taxi movie... only in red.
Reported earlier this year, the problem has already been acknowledged by Google itself, with the Android Auto team working together with Samsung specifically on resolving it.Back in June, Google announced the South Koreans would include this highly anticipated fix in the July 2021 update for the Galaxy S21 series, but as it turns out, the phone maker needs a little bit more time to finally ship the update to everybody out there.In a post a few hours ago, a member of the Android Auto team reveals the Android Auto fix for Galaxy S21 users is now scheduled to land in September.Samsung has only released a security update in July which does not contain the fix for this issue. Samsung will roll out a fix for this issue starting September as part of Maintenance release (MR) and not in monthly security updates, the post reads Indeed, users who installed the July 2021 update released by Samsung for the Galaxy S21 didnt notice any reliability refinements for the Android Auto experience, and this post confirms no such improvements have been included in the first place.Theres not much you can do in the meantime if Android Auto crashes on your Samsung Galaxy S21. According to most users, the whole thing happens only when unlocking the phone, so in theory, one way to avoid the crash is to just keep the device locked during the whole time Android Auto is running.Theres no temporary workaround to restore Android Auto on the Galaxy S21 and the generic fixes, which include downgrading to an earlier version of the app, clearing the cache, or changing cables, dont seem to produce any improvements for users struggling with this glitch.
The models in this family were in production for 16 years, and certainly made their mark on riders, be it those who rode the V-Rods of the streets, or the ones taking the Destroyer to the strips. As soon as Harley stopped making them, custom shops took over, and began modifying V-Rods into special things.Europeans seem to have a soft spot for this particular family of bikes, with shops in Germany and Russia going to great lengths to come up with exciting projects.The bike youre looking at now is a 2014 V-Rod put together over in Russia by a relatively young shop called Box39. These guys specialize in making motorcycle wheels to the desire and specification of the clients, and in more than one occasion they tried their hand on the American muscle two-wheeler.Just like the Geo Black 300 Red Matt Rim put together by Germanys Bad Boy Customs, this one, called Giotto 8 on account it is part of a larger family of custom V-Rods, plays the black and red card too.Wearing a similar type of wire wheels weve seen before on the Giotto 6 , sized 21-inch front and 18-inch rear, the bike has been further customized with a plastic body kit than engulfs the front end all the way to the fuel tank, a two-color body paint, Beringer brakes, and an Akrapovic exhaust system as probably the sole performance-oriented modification made.We are not being told how much this V-Rod cost to put together.
And it seems that pixel masters are using each other as inspiration sources. After all, we just saw the Aston Martin V8 Vantage take an odd turn for virtual Formula Drift duties. But, at least, Arellano isnt just content with modifications that may or may not point towards the motorsport series outcome. Instead, he just decided to make purists cry, run away, and generally turn amuck with a set of renderings depicting a casual light-beige (to me its more like a shimmering pink hue ) and green DB5.The Aston Martin has remained true(ish) to its grand touring heritage but has also embarked on a virtual journey into the great... NASCAR. Yes, were not kidding. He apparently wanted to make it a NASCAR chassis V8 powered race car type thing, and so the Aston Martin DB5 relinquished some of its European roots in favor of a set of American-made enhancements. The most obvious would be the wide Goodyear Billboard tires, but original Corvette fans will surely notice the headlight mesh covers first.And thats not all, because the real bombshell is hidden under the hood. There, a proud flat-plane crank V8 engine shows its modern 5.2-liter Voodoo credentials. Yes, its the same mill used inside the 2015-2020 Ford Shelby Mustang GT350. So, with that in mind, did anyone also notice the DB5 has the fenders cut out to make way for the chunky tires?Well, at least the interior has a British Racing Green shade and plaid details here and there, while the rear vanity plate is a direct reference to James Bond. Probably as a consolation prize...
Schalkx calls it the Uitsloot or the Sloot Motor, with the word sloot meaning ditch in Dutch. Its the motorcycle that runs on swamp gas, meticulously harvested methane. The motorcycle has a converted Honda GX160 engine from a home generator, with the conversion done by Schalkx himself. On his website (hat tip to Interesting Engineering ), Schalkx explains that he drilled a hole into the airbox of the engine to feed the methane. The engine still starts with gas, but it then runs on methane, contained in a balloon encased in glass in the back.The harvesting part is the most time-consuming. According to the inventor, it takes eight full hours at the pond for a full tank of methane, and that is only good for some 20 km (12.5 miles) of riding around. To ensure he doesnt get stuck when he runs out, the motorcycle also has pedals, so he can pedal himself back for a refill.The harvesting process is done with help from an overturned container that floats on the water, gathering the naturally occurring methane. To speed up the process, Schalkx puts on his waders and does manual hoeing; the eight-hour refill time is accomplished with manual hoeing. Once the container is full, he brings it to shore, connects it to the container on the motorcycle and, with help from a manual bicycle pump, transfers the gas into the balloon.The process alone would be enough to deter less brave hearts, but Schalkx says his invention is both a critique of todays so-called sustainable vehicles and an example of what could be done with a bit more thought on the issue of sustainability. It is a quest to keep the combustion engine alive in a fossil free future, and a critique of todays EVs. Driving an electric car does not mean that you are exempt from the oil circuit on which our society runs, the inventor says. Throwing more money at a problem won't solve it, we are the problem and we have to change.Here is a video of the Uitsloot and the process it takes to fill it up for what Schalkx calls the best 20-km ride of your life.
Body of Texas firefighter is found in bathroom window in Cancun, Mexican authorities say
Brian Smith served four years in the U.S. Marine Corps, and retired as an assistant chief with the California Highway Patrol. He resides in Bakersfield. If you have a personal Cop Tale to share, please contact Smith at bmsmith778@gmail.com.
Robert Price is a journalist for KGET-TV. His column appears here on Sundays; the views expressed are his own. Reach him at robertprice@kget.com or via Twitter: @stubblebuzz.
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Drive-In Movies Back on Sat Nights at Oregon Coast's Lincoln City Cultural Center

Published 07/18/21 at 7:05 PM PDT

By Oregon Coast Beach Connection staff





(Lincoln City, Oregon)  An old friend of sorts has returned to the central Oregon coast. The Bijou Theater's Drive Summer Movie series is back in Lincoln City, happening again every Saturday at the Lincoln City Cultural Center (LCCC).

The feature skyrocketed last year after it was implemented, with all spots getting sold out rather quickly by late summer.

The drive-in was an offshoot of both the Bijou and the LCCC as they made serious efforts to maintain revenue by coming up with something creative during COVID's long shut down. Both facilities had been been promoting online shows, with the Bijou providing streaming movies to people at home while it was closed. This retro-themed, natural extension proved to be just the ticket, especially as the Oregon coast was flooded with visitors last summer, and seeing movies in your vehicle was the perfect way to remain safe from the pandemic.



Photo courtesy LCCC

With an FM transmitter for stereo sound and an enormous 22 x 12 foot silver screen, it's again going to be a pleasant couple of hours with an age-old favorite pastime, as well as favorite movies. And you're on the beach, to boot. The parking lot opens at 8 pm on Saturday evenings. They happen rain or shine.

Cost is $25 per car load. Shows start at dusk Saturday nights. For tickets visit CinemaLovers.com. Again this year: free large popcorn included with ticket purchase. Remember to pick it up at the Bijou prior to the movie.

The Oregon Coast Drive-In movie lineup:





7/31: E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982). The Steven Spielberg film launched the career of Drew Barrymore and also featured heavy-hitters such as Dee Wallace and Peter Coyote. Released by Universal Pictures, the film was a blockbuster and wound up the highest-grossing film of all time, until Jurassic Park took it out 11 years later.

Often dubbed E.T., it's the story of a cute little alien stranded on Earth who befriends the boy Elliot (Dylan Thomas). Elliott and his siblings help it return home while attempting to keep it hidden from their mother and the government.

The concept came from Spielberg's imaginary friend he created as a child after his parents had divorced, and then culled from the remnants of another movie that had stalled in production called Night Skies. According to Fandom, unlike most motion pictures, it was shot in roughly chronological order, to facilitate convincing emotional performances from the young cast.





8/7: Alien (1979). The groundbreaking sci-fi horror film was the first in a highly successful franchise that has lasted through this decade (although with mixed results). Alien was directed by Baker Baker and starred Tom Skerrit, Sigourney Weaver, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm and Yaphet Kotto. This nail-biter focuses on a highly aggressive extraterrestrial creature that gets aboard a cargo spacecraft, where it begins stalking and killing its crew. One tense moment after another leaves you jumping in your seat fairly often.

Originally, the story came from screenwriters Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett, with O'Bannon turning it into the screenplay. The movie was primarily filmed at Shepperton Studios near London, England. Ridley Scott is reportedly working on another film in the franchise at this moment.

8/14 Gremlins (1984). The wacky story of a man looking for a Christmas present for his son, snagging a mystical but adorable, fuzzy little creature called a mogwai in a Chinese junk shop. Problems arise  indeed explode  when the son gets the creature wet in spite of instructions otherwise. Gizmo is no longer cuddly and turns into a monster, spawning other similar critters that create havoc in the neighborhood. All of it over the holidays, no less.

The film also stars Corey Feldman.

8/21: Casablanca (1942). You can't get much more iconic than the Bogart / Bacall combo and this film that turned a song into a decades-long classic and the final kiss goodbye scene into a major staple in film literature. Countless films and TV scenes have referenced it, and almost 100 years later it's widely regarded as one of the best films of all time.

8/28 Bridesmaids (2011). The kooky American romantic comedy film was directed by Paul Feig, written by Annie Mumolo and Kristen Wiig, and produced by Judd Apatow, Barry Mendel, and Clayton Townsend.

Bridesmaids centers on the astoundingly talented Wiig (Annie in the film), who suffers a series of misfortunes after being asked to serve as maid of honor for her best friend, Lillian, played by Maya Rudolph. The all-star and glittering cast of fellow bridesmaids includes Rose Byrne, Melissa McCarthy, Ellie Kemper, and Wendi McLendon-Covey, alongside biggies such as Chris O'Dowd, Jon Hamm, and Jill Clayburgh (in her last film appearance).

It hit a nerve with the public and critics right off the bat, grossing $26 million in its opening weekend and eventually brought in $288 million worldwide. Bridesmaids remains an important point of discussion in the world of female-centric cinema.

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Massive Event for Seaside Prom Birthday on Aug. 7, 100 Years of Oregon Coast History

Published 07/15/21 at 5:55 PM PDT

By Oregon Coast Beach Connection staff

(Seaside, Oregon)  The big Seaside Prom celebration will happen after all on the north Oregon coast.

After wavering a bit and waiting on the latest in pandemic developments, Seaside officials have decided to go ahead with the Promenade 100-year anniversary celebration. The centennial parade and ceremony will happen on Saturday, August 7 to commemorate 100 years of the Seaside Promenade's existence. It was on that day in 1921 when hundreds of officials from around Oregon came to the burgeoning tourist mecca, joining then-Governor Olcott in Seaside to watch Martha Hagmeier,age 8, break a bottle of sea water on the concrete.

The Promenade Centennial Parade will begin at 10 a.m. near City Hall (989 Broadway), which was the historic location of Seaside's train station, and then proceed west down Broadway to the Turnaround. The Royal Rosarians, Portland's official ambassadors of goodwill, were present at the 1921 dedication and will return to Seaside to join the parade. Additionally, the group's prime minister will plant a rose at the corner of Broadway and Holladay in the city's Historic Gilbert District to commemorate the day's activities at 11:30 a.m.

Then at 1 p.m., visitors as well as its residents are formally invited to the Turnaround, where ceremonies will begin to look back on the history of this Oregon coast landmark. Past mayors as well as the current mayor will be speaking, along with community representatives and other officials. State Senator Betsy Johnson will give the keynote speech. A time capsule will be buried during the ceremony and another bottle of sea water will be broken to commemorate the milestone.



Above: before 1921, the Prom was a wooden structure

During all this, the public gathers on the beach in front of the Turnaround, which will server as a stage for the historic events. You are advised to bring beach chairs and blankets if you want to sit during the presentations.

As then-Mayor Hurd made clear in 1921, the Prom is not for Seaside alone but was quite literally built through local cooperation for the enjoyment of everyone, said Joshua Heineman, director of tourism marketing for the City of Seaside. Please join us as we celebrate the past and look forward to another hundred years of timeless memories being made on the playground that is the Seaside Prom.

Now affectionately known as the Prom, the 1.5-mile walkway has become an icon not just for the Oregon coast but for the whole of the Pacific Northwest, what Heineman called an Oregon nod to the great boardwalks and promenades of the world.

For deeper history see Seaside Promenade History: Beginnings of an Oregon Coast Icon, Part I

The Prom has been quietly whooping it up this year in other ways to celebrate its birthday, with the city providing a 32-page limited-edition Prom Centennial booklet that tells the landmark's story and provides some sweepstakes opportunities for visitors. It contains holographic stickers, a comprehensive history of the Prom, a look at activities and attractions, a walking tour of historic homes, and a seasonal passport program. Find more info at SeasideProm.com.

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For the first time in decades, the fundamental right to abortion is squarely being attacked in the Supreme Court. On Thursday, Mississippi filed a brief with the court directly asking it to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision establishing a right to abortion.

This hasnt happened since 1992, in the case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, when Pennsylvania asked the court to overturn Roe. Since then, as any observer knows, the court has heard many abortion cases, but none has featured the main brief asking the court to upend its precedent in this way. Supplemental briefs written by other groups have certainly made the request in those cases, but having the main party in the case ask the court to do so is different.

The case here is Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization. It involves a Mississippi law that bans abortion at 15 weeks of pregnancy. Until now in the case, lower federal courts, even the conservative ones that cover Mississippi, have struck the law down as unconstitutional. Theyve had no choice  the law clearly violates Supreme Court abortion precedent that requires states to allow abortion through viability, roughly 23 or 24 weeks of pregnancy. The Mississippi law, banning abortion roughly two months earlier, is flatly inconsistent with this precedent.

Which is why Mississippi, in filing its brief on July 22nd, really had no choice but to ask the court to overturn Roe. In its brief, the state called Roe v. Wade egregiously wrong. It wrote further: The Constitution does not protect a right to abortion. The Constitutions text says nothing about abortion. Nothing in the Constitutions structure implies a right to abortion or prohibits states from restricting it.

What makes this brief so significant is that the court rarely revisits precedent without explicitly being asked to do so by the parties in the case. Technically, the court could overturn old cases whenever it wants. Theres no rule stopping it from reconsidering what it has decided in the past just because the main parties in the case didnt ask it to do so. However, history shows that it doesnt like to do this without a direct request.

Mississippi made this request for two reasons. First, theres almost no way for it to win the case without attacking Roe and the cases that have flowed from it. A ban at 15 weeks is so inconsistent with the viability measure that Mississippi had no other choice.

Second, the court has changed. Just last summer, the court struck down a Louisiana law that made it harder for clinics to provide abortions. That decision was 5-4, with the chief justice joining the courts four liberals to declare the law unconstitutional. Since then, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has passed away and been replaced by Justice Amy Coney Barrett. That switch is monumental, giving the court six staunch conservatives and making it the most conservative group of justices in a century. Mississippi is banking on at least five of those conservatives agreeing with its position that Roe needs to go.

Of course, just because Mississippi has asked for Roe to be overturned doesnt mean it will be. The last remaining abortion clinic in Mississippi will file its response and fight this tooth and nail. But more important, enough justices may be hesitant to throw out the half-century-old precedent. In theory, the court sticks to precedent even when justices disagree with it, so some of the conservatives may feel the need to do so here as a way to preserve the institution of the court (even if they agree that Roe is a problem).

Also, the justices arent stupid. They know that roughly two-thirds of the country is opposed to overturning Roe. While the court certainly has the freedom to do unpopular things, theres a school of thought that it never wants to go against public opinion too much, especially on such a high-profile issue. Doing so would thrust the court into a political quagmire that it might want to avoid, especially since justices usually want to appear above politics. And, thinking even more partisan, overturning Roe might have extremely negative repercussions for Republicans at the ballot box in 2022 (and 2024), something the conservative justices arent supposed to think about, but may.

If the court doesnt heed Mississippis request to overturn Roe, it could still rule against the clinic and uphold the law. Doing so would be tricky because of how directly the law conflicts with past cases, but justices have threaded needles like this before. The conservatives on the court could whittle away at the right to abortion in this case while keeping Roe. Doing so would further cement the current reality on the ground that abortion is theoretically legal, but practically difficult to obtain, especially for those who are poor, rural, or people of color. In fact, many observers think this is the likely outcome here, as this route would give states more leeway on abortion without creating the political upheaval that overturning Roe would.

The case will be fully briefed by the fall, with oral argument soon after. We wont know the result probably until next summer, as the court usually saves its most controversial cases for the end of June. Until then, everyone will be watching this case closely, as the stakes just got much higher.

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NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP)  The bust of a Confederate general and early Ku Klux Klan leader that had been prominently displayed inside the Tennessee Capitol for decades  over objections from Black lawmakers and activists  was removed from its pedestal Friday.

The image of Nathan Bedford Forrest has sparked protests ever since its installation in 1978 as defenders sought to tout his legacy while critics objected to honoring a historical figure who supported the South's secession. Over the years, some suggested adding historical context next to the bust. Yet many others, including Republican Gov. Bill Lee, successfully argued for moving it to the Tennessee State Museum, just north of the Capitol.

Forrest was a Confederate cavalry general who amassed a fortune before the Civil War as a Memphis slave trader and plantation owner. Later, he was a leader of the Klan as it terrorized Black people, reversing Reconstruction efforts and restoring white power in the South.

He was in charge during the battle of Fort Pillow, where an estimated 300 African-American soldiers were massacred by Forrests men after surrendering. The massacre provoked outrage in the North and was one of the most bitterly disputed incidents in the Civil War.

The busts of Union Navy Adm. David Farragut and U.S. Navy Adm. Albert Gleaves also were moved to the museum on Friday, part of an agreement used to win over the votes needed on key panels that military leaders shouldnt be displayed in the Capitol.

Forrest died in 1887, but he's maintained a strong presence throughout Tennessee history. A state park and state holiday are named after him. There's a 25-foot statue of Forrest on a horse located along Interstate 65 shooting a gun.

Most recently, the bodies of Forrest and his wife were moved out of Memphis in June. Forrest, a former Memphis City Council member, had been moved and buried there in 1904 under his statue.

Yet the bust in the Capitol remained particularly painful for Tennessee's Black legislative caucus, many of whom had given emotional speeches on having to walk by a slave trader and Confederate general as they carried out their work each day.

From the Fort Pillow massacre to roving lynch mobs, from Jim Crow to the assassination of MLK, Jr., its time for us, as one people, to heal the wounds of the past," said Sen. Raumesh Akbari, a Black lawmaker from Memphis who chairs the Senates Democratic caucus.

Tennessees State Building Commission voted 5-2 to remove the busts on Thursday, the final hurdle in a months-long process that had been strongly opposed by legislative leaders.

The GOP-controlled General Assembly refused for years to advance legislation calling for the busts removal. In 2016, lawmakers amended state law to make it harder to remove statues or rename streets of controversial figures by requiring such amendments to receive a two-thirds majority vote from the Tennessee Historical Commission. The amendment came just a year after former Republican Gov. Bill Haslam threw his support behind the removal of the Forrest bust in 2015 after the slayings of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina. Haslam called for the removal again in 2017 after the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, but that year, the proposal was rejected by a state panel.

However, momentum shifted when Lee changed positions and called for moving the bust out of the Capitol in 2020 amid national outcry over the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minnesota. Floyds death sparked a new push to remove Confederate symbols, including the Forrest bust.

Lees position was markedly different than when he first came into elected office in 2018, arguing that the Ku Klux Klan is a part of our history that were not proud of in Tennessee, and we need to be reminded of that and make certain that we dont forget it. So I wouldnt advocate to remove the bust.

The Forrest bust will be ready to be viewed by the public at the state's history museum on Tuesday. It's unknown what details exactly will be posted about him.
JOHANNES EISELE, Contributor / AFP via Getty Images

A Lumberton man who was arrested following a high-speed chase that ended in a fatal crash is facing several charges, according to Jasper Countys inmate arrest report.

The Jasper County Sheriffs Office report states that Kade Davis, 23, has been arrested for the unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon, assault on family/household member with previous conviction, tamper/fabricate physical evidence with intent to impair, evading arrest detention, deadly conduction, possession of fewer than 2 ounces of marijuana, criminal trespass of a habitat/shelter/superfund/infrastructure, violation of bond/protective order and theft of property greater than $1,500 to less than $20,000.
Jennifer Cox-Horak remembers accompanying her father on trips to local nursing homes and while he delivered medicines to elderly people who didnt leave their homes.

He would cover the costs for those in desperate need of life-saving meds, she said.

The retired Orange pharmacist of more than 40 years Edward Eddie Simeon Cox, Jr., 79, died in Beaumont last month.

But his impact on the community lives on, as can be seen in the responses to his death. Cox-Horak said she made a post in a local Facebook group, hoping people would share their memories of her father. They did.

A former coworker of Coxs, Aeronita Smith, shared how he stood up to a racist customer for her.

One Sunday we (were) working, and this man came in and wanted to see the pharmacist, Smith commented. I was Black, so he had nothing to say to me. (Cox) came out to what the problem was and told the man to leave the pharmacy and take his prescription elsewhere because I was in charge of helping customers.

Another community member, Janet Seago Freeman, recalled her parents close friendship with Cox.

(Cox) and my parents would chat as he filled prescriptions, Freeman wrote. I continued to go there as an adult because of (Cox-Horaks) dad. He always kept me informed on my medicines.

Freeman said she even moved pharmacies when Cox did just to retain him as her pharmacist.

And those are just two of a number of commentors who shared stories of Cox working late and how he used to check up on customers after they went home. Carolyn Barfield said Cox would meet her at the pharmacy for after-hours prescriptions when her first child had a high fever.

His knowledge of medications and interactions helped me many times, Barfield wrote. Not sure if meds are needed in heaven, but if they are, he would be my choice to run the show.

Cox was born on April 10, 1942 in Oakdale, Louisiana to Edward S. Cox, Sr. and Anne Cox. Cox was familiar with Orange  his daughter Jennifer Cox-Horak said he spent summers there while he was in high school and college working with his uncle at his lumber company.

He married in 1969 and began his career as a pharmacist, first working at Kroger and later at Generic Pharmacy and others.

The care he displayed for those around him was clear at home, too.

Cox-Horak recalls a time when a neighbor was dying of cancer, and her father received a late-night call from the neighbors wife after the neighbors doctor authorized a pain prescription. Cox-Horak said her father filled the prescription and delivered it immediately.

He sat with her the remainder of the night as her husband passed, Cox-Horak said.

Outside of his pharmaceutical career, Cox-Horak said her father was an avid hunter and fisher.

He was a member of Ducks Unlimited with my uncle, she said. He fished the Sabine and surrounding areas his whole life. He deer hunted occasionally in West Texas.

Cox-Horak said her father also loved classical music and was a talented pianist who could play elaborate compositions from memory.

He was also a dog-lover and enjoyed being a father to Cox-Horak, Rebecca Cox and Ashley Rion and grandfather to his five grandchildren.

Cox often would take his daughters north of Orange to see blooming dogwood and redwood trees, Cox-Horak said.

She said her fathers lasting legacy will be his service to a community that supported him and he supported in return.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests memorial contributions be made in Coxs honor to the Humane Society of Southeast Texas, Be Intentional Nonprofit or All Paws Veterinarian Clinic.

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When police knocked on Michael Clark's door in Idaho Springs, Colo., in May, he emerged in his underwear, holding a swordlike weapon. Police ordered him to drop it, and the 75-year-old complied, placing it on a shelf several feet behind him.

"Get on the ground!" a female officer screamed, her weapon pointed at Clark.

"No," Clark said, trying to explain the dispute he was having with his neighbors.

Without warning, a male officer raised his Taser, pointed it at Clark's torso and fired. Clark fell backward into his apartment and went unconscious. The police then dragged Clark's body out of the apartment. As the two officers tried to handcuff the unresponsive Clark, the male officer placed his knee on Clark's neck.

Following the incident, Clark suffered a stroke and a burst appendix, the Associated Press reported. He was hospitalized for weeks after the incident, according to the Denver Post, and was later admitted to a nursing facility.

Sarah Schielke, Clark's lawyer, said in a Thursday statement that her client's health was "declining."

Clark has not been charged with a crime, according to the Denver Post. By contrast, the male officer, Nicholas Hanning, was charged earlier this month with assault in the third degree against an at-risk person. Hanning, a three-year veteran of the force, was fired on July 15. Idaho Springs Police Chief Nathan Buseck said Hanning's actions were "not reflective of the culture of our organization."

Body-camera footage of the May 30 incident was released on Thursday and distributed by Clark's lawyer. Schielke told The Washington Post that Clark plans to file a lawsuit "very soon."

"There is this toxic culture of never expecting to be held accountable in police forces," she told The Post. "What's happening is we're putting cameras on them, and they're not changing their behavior or attitude."

Hanning's lawyer did not respond to a request for comment late Thursday.

The incident is the latest flash point in how police use Tasers, particularly against the elderly. In March, police rushed a 67-year-old man to the hospital after using a Taser on him in Port Allen, La. The man was handcuffed at the time. In August 2018, police shocked an 87-year-old in Chatsworth, Ga., as the woman foraged for dandelions. And in October 2017, police in Kingstree, S.C., hit 86-year-old Albert Chatfield with a Taser, sending him to intensive care.

Clark's case also follows that of Karen Garner, a 73-year-old with dementia whom police in Loveland, Colo., tackled and arrested in June 2020 after she walked out of a Walmart without paying for items worth $13. Schielke is also representing Garner's family in a lawsuit.

The May 30 incident that ended in Clark getting Tasered began when his two next-door neighbors called 911 at about 10:40 p.m., according to the arrest warrant for Hanning, the police officer.

One of Clark's neighbors claimed that Clark banged on the wall and told her to be quiet. She said she was sleeping, so she knocked on Clark's door. She claimed the 75-year-old then punched her.

The body-camera footage released Thursday shows Hanning and his partner, Officer Ellie Summers, speaking with the neighbors. The woman, who had been drinking, according to her roommate, cried as she told the officers that Clark had punched her.

Hanning and Summers then knocked on Clark's door but did not identify themselves as police, according to the body-camera footage. Clark opened the door and asked: "What do you want?"

Hanning swore at Clark before moving into the apartment toward the man, telling him to put down the sword he was holding.

Clark walked to a shelf and placed it on top, then faced the police officers with his hands at his sides. Hanning ordered Clark to come out to the hall, while Summers ordered him to get on the ground.

Clark refused. "They hit that wall so hard, I thought they were going to come through the wall," Clark said, appearing to speak about his neighbors.

Within seconds, Hanning raised the Taser and fired it at Clark. He moaned and fell backward into his apartment, appearing to hit his head on a dining room chair. The officers rushed into the apartment, and when Hanning grabbed Clark's arm and pulled his body up, the man's head bumped into a bookshelf.

Hanning then dragged Clark out of the apartment by his feet, and the two officers handcuffed him.

Clark eventually regained consciousness and again tried to tell the officers his side of the story. He appeared confused about why he was Tasered and handcuffed.

After paramedics arrived several minutes later, Clark asked Hanning: "What did I do?"

"You punched that girl," Hanning told him. "You punched that girl and then answered the door with a fricking machete, man."

"No, that is absolutely false," Clark said. "I didn't come after nobody. I was just in bed."
Kim Brent / The Enterprise

Gov. Greg Abbott surprised exactly no one with his announcement this week that he would not be re-imposing a statewide mask mandate. In Republican Party politics these days  especially for incumbents like Abbott who face even more extreme opposition in GOP primaries  face masks arent lifesaving adaptations to a deadly pandemic. They are outrageous violations of your personal freedom and a sign that government power must be scaled back. If they dont draw the line here, some apparently believe, the next thing you know some bureaucrat might be trying to tell you how fast to drive in a school zone.

A message like that may appeal to the half of adult Texans who have not been vaccinated yet against Covid 19 and have no plans to do so. Again, its a freedom thing. But as politically popular it might be in some places, it ignores an inconvenient truth:
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A crowd gathers outside City Hall in Pittsfield. Participants in this years Citizens Academy will get a crash course in the role of the city clerk, community development office, building inspectors, and Department of Public Services and Utilities as part of their 10 weeks learning about municipal government.
Investigations editor

Larry Parnass joined The Eagle in 2016 from the Daily Hampshire Gazette, where he was editor in chief. His freelance work has appeared in the Washington Post, Boston Globe, Hartford Courant, CommonWealth Magazine and with the Reuters news service.
Kanye West is associated with Chicago, and for good reason, considering its where he grew up and launched his music career. The rapper, superproducer and fashion designer was actually born in Atlanta, though and its where he held his Donda Listening Event on Thursday night (July 22) in preparation for the release of the highly-anticipated album.

According to TMZ, Ye is also receiving an honor from the city. On the same day as his listening event, the City of Atlanta presented West with a plaque backstage at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, and officially proclaimed July 22 Kanye West Day.

Additionally, Kevin James, president of ATLs own Morris Brown College, presented Kanye with a token of appreciation, honoring his late-mom, Donda West, who taught at the school for nearly two decades and was chair of the English Department. She passed away on November 10, 2007.

RELATED: Kanye West Electrifies ATL Attendees With The Reveal Of Donda Featuring Jay-Z Verse

Named Dr. Donda West Meritorious Service to Morris Brown College, the award honors the scholar who started her career at the school, the only HBCU in Georgia founded by Black people.

TMZ reports that Kanyes family, including Kim Kardashian, their children and Khloe Kardashian, were next to the rapper when he received the awards. They also note that he was very emotional about the occasion.
Written by Joshua Eferighe

Kanye Wests 10th studio album, Donda, made its debut after a week of hype that was capped off with a global live listening event hosted on Apple Music on Thursday (July 22). The much-anticipated compilation, however, is still not available (as of July 24) even though it was scheduled to drop the day after the listening event. Nonetheless, fans now know that a myriad of talent of the highest order, from Lil Baby and Lil Durk to Jay-Z have contributed to the project which has a production value one would only expect from a 22-time Grammy winner. If you paid any attention to rumors leading up to the release, there were speculations on whether Donda would echo the religious sentiments of Jesus Is King, which had no swearing and stipulations that collaborators abstain from premarital sex. The truth is that no two Kanye albums sound the same. But whats abundantly clear after catching the stream is that his venture into spiritual music is not a shtick. Kanye as a Christian artist is here to stay. One of the elements that separates the father of four from other artists is his ability to continually reinvent himself, forever pushing the boundaries of what and how he creates. That has not changed. What has changed is his recommitment to Christ. And even if you dont believe the 44-year-old by what youve seen, its crystal clear in what you hear. One deep dive into the trajectory of his discography and youll see that his entire career was leading up to a moment like this. RELATED: Kanye West Donates Tickets To Donda Listening Party For HBCU Students

Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Universal Music Group















Older Kanye fans who havent abandoned him could very well be annoyed with his Jesus rhetoric. And on the flipside, the new fans who only know him as this Christian/secular hybrid are happy nonetheless. From the sounds of Donda, he may have found a happy medium between the two. Whether this ends up being a phase he grows tired of, a calculated move for another presidential run in 2024 or a way to add to his Grammy room (you know he probably has one), it's registering authentically in the studio and hes still making the best music of his life. God has always been in Kanyes music. The bigger difference is that now God is also now in Kanyes life.
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Christopher Steele, the ex-MI6 spy, is involved in the parent organisation called Independent SAGE  a collective that regularly criticizes the UK government for not introducing tougher measures to achieve Zero Covid.

On July 17, The Daily Telegraph brought to public attention that Independent SAGE, the highly controversial scientist collective advocating for excessively harsh coronavirus restrictions, was the creation of The Citizens, a shadowy campaign organization led by Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr.

In response, Cadwalladr took to Twitter to rubbish the scoop, noting that the connection between the two groups had been acknowledged on Independent SAGEs website for 17 months  which is true, although the scientist collective seems very much keen to downplay it, merely referring to The Citizens as a small support team helping with public events and media activities.

Congratulations to @Telegraph for revealing information that has been on @IndependentSAGE website since day 17 months ago. Give yourself a Pulitzer pic.twitter.com/G8fQMwKnnx  Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) July 17, 2021

This is totally at odds with Cadwalladrs recently updated Twitter biography, which designates her as cofounder of The Citizens, the parent of Independent SAGE, and The Citizens own Twitter account, which characterizes itself as the founder and producer of Independent SAGE.

The reasons for this chasmic discrepancy arent certain, although the most glaring oddity at the heart of The Citizens  unacknowledged by The Telegraph, and never before reported upon by the mainstream media  is undoubtedly that former MI6 spy Christopher Steele, author of the utterly discredited Trump-Russia dossier, is seemingly involved in the endeavor in some way.

In a statement, Firstlight Group, which provides media relations support and consultancy to Independent Sage, contended that The Citizens drew on a wide and diverse collection of unpaid advisors before it launched, of which Steele was just one.

He has never played any active or other role in the organisation or Independent SAGE, the PR firm added, although in a followup email Firstlight said Steele was part of a a network of pro-bono advisors we can call upon as needed, suggesting he could be drafted in to support The Citizens, and by extension Independent SAGE, at any time in the future. Requests for clarity on what precisely he did for The Citizens pre-launch were simply ignored.

Whats nonetheless clear is that Cadwalladr has long-been a fervent advocate of Steele, and frequently ended up in extremely close quarters with the purportedly former spook, as several photos of the pair together, and screengrabs of Zoom conversations with one another, surely attest.
Questioning the FBI's role in 1/6 was maligned by corporate media as deranged. But only ignorance about the FBI or a desire to deceive could produce such a reaction.

NBC's Today Show, Oct. 9. 2020

The narrative that domestic anti-government extremism is the greatest threat to U.S. national security  the official position of the U.S. security state and the Biden administration  received its most potent boost in October 2020, less than one month before the 2020 presidential election. That was when the F.B.I. and Michigan state officials announced the arrest of thirteen people on terrorism, conspiracy and weapons charges, with six of them accused of participating in a plot to kidnap Michigans Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who had been a particular target of criticism from President Trump for her advocacy for harsh COVID lockdown measures.

The headlines that followed were dramatic and fear-inducing: F.B.I. Says Michigan Anti-Government Group Plotted to Kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, announced The New York Times. That same night, ABC News began its broadcast this way: "Tonight, we take you into a hidden world, a place authorities say gave birth to a violent domestic terror plot in Michigan  foiled by the FBI.

Democrats and liberal journalists instantly seized on this storyline to spin a pre-election theme that was as extreme as it was predictable. Gov. Whitmer herself blamed Trump, claiming that the plotters heard the presidents words not as a rebuke but as a rallying cry  as a call to action. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) claimed that the president is a deranged lunatic and hes inspired white supremacists to violence, the latest of which was a plot to kidnap Gov. Whitmer, adding: these groups have attempted to KILL many of us in recent years. They are following Trumps lead. Voxs paid television-watcher and video-manipulator, Aaron Rupar, drew this inference: Trump hasn't commended the FBI for breaking up Whitmer kidnapping/murder plot because as always he doesn't want to denounce his base. Michael Moore called for Trump's arrest for having incited the kidnapping plot against Gov. Whitmer. One viral tweet from a popular Democratic Party activist similarly declared: Trump should be arrested for this plot to kidnap Governor Whitmer. Theres no doubt he inspired this terrorism.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo instantly declared it to be a terrorist attack on America: We must condemn and call out the cowardly plot against Governor Whitmer for what it is: Domestic terrorism. MSNBC's social media star Kyle Griffin cast it as a coup attempt: The FBI thwarted what they described as a plot to violently overthrow the government and kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. CNN's Jim Sciutto pronounced it deeply alarming.

A lengthy CNN article  dressed up as an investigative expose that was little more than stenography of FBI messaging disseminated from behind a shield of anonymity  purported in the headline to take the reader Inside the plot to kidnap Gov. Whitmer. It claimed that it all began when angry discussions about COVID restrictions spiraled into a terrorism plot, officials say, with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer the target of a kidnapping scheme. CNN heralded the FBI's use of informants and agents to break up the plot but depicted them as nothing more than passive bystanders reporting what the domestic terrorists were plotting:

The Watchmen had been flagged to the FBI in March, and one of its members was now an informant. That informant, others on the inside, as well as undercover operatives and recordings, allowed the bureau to monitor what was happening from then on.

The article never once hinted at let alone described the highly active role of these informants and agents themselves in encouraging and designing the plot. Instead, it depicted these anti-government activists as leading one another  on their own  to commit what CNN called treason in a quaint town. The more honest headline for this CNN article would have been: Inside the FBI's tale of the plot to kidnap Gov. Whitmer. But since CNN never questions the FBI  they employ their top agents and operatives once they leave the bureau in order to disseminate their propaganda  this is what the country got from The Most Trusted Name in News:

Gov. Whitmer herself attempted to prolong the news cycle as much as possible, all but declaring herself off-limits from criticism by equating any critiques of her governance with incitement to terrorism. Appearing on Meet the Press two Sundays after the plot was revealed, Whitmer said it was incredibly disturbing that the president of the United States10 days after a plot to kidnap, put me on trial, and execute me, 10 days after that was uncoveredthe president is at it again, and inspiring, and incentivizing, and inciting this kind of domestic terrorism.

On October 22  just two weeks before Election Day  MSNBC's Rachel Maddow hosted Whitmer and told the Michigan Governor that the evidence was clear that Trump had been "turning on a faucet of violent threats against her. Whitmer agreed that Trump was to blame for the kidnapping plot by having repeatedly attacked her in his rallies:

Joe Biden also made repeated use of this storyline. Appearing at a campaign rally in Michigan on October 16, the Democratic candidate blasted Trump for the crime of continuing to criticize Whitmer even after she was the target of a terror plot. He explicitly blamed Trump for having incited it: When the president tweeted 'Liberate Michigan, Liberate Michigan,' that's the call that was heard. That was the dog whistle." And he accused Trump of purposely stoking a wave of the worst kind of terrorism on U.S. soil: it's the sort of behavior you might expect from ISIS, he said of the accused.

Yet from the start, there were ample and potent reasons to distrust the FBI's version of events. To begin with, FBI press releases are typically filled with lies, yet media outlets  due to some combination of excessive gullibility, an inability to learn lessons, or a desire to be deceived  continue to treat them as Gospel. For another, the majority of "terror plots the FBI claimed to detect and break up during the first War on Terror were, in fact, plots manufactured, funded and driven by the FBI itself.

Indeed, the FBI has previously acknowledged that its own powers and budget depend on keeping Americans in fear of such attacks. Former FBI Assistant Director Thomas Fuentes, in a documentary called The Newberg Sting about a 2009 FBI arrest of four men on terrorism charges, uttered this extremely candid admission:

If youre submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency, for an intelligence agency, youre not going to submit the proposal that We won the war on terror and everythings great, cuz the first thing thats gonna happen is your budgets gonna be cut in half. You know, its my opposite of Jesse Jacksons Keep Hope Aliveits Keep Fear Alive. Keep it alive.

In the Whitmer kidnapping case, the FBI's own affidavit in support of the charges acknowledged the involvement in the plot of both informants and undercover FBI agents over several months.
Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

Since the US began pulling troops out of Afghanistan at the beginning of May, the Taliban has been making significant gains against the US-backed government. In an interview that aired Friday, CIA Director William Burns said he believes the Taliban is in the best military position theyve been in since the war started in 2001.

"The Taliban are making significant military advances; theyre probably in the strongest military position that theyve been in since 2001," Burns told NPR.

William Burns, Director of the CIA, via Reuters

Demonstrating the Talibans success on the battlefield, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said Wednesday that the group currently controls 200 of the 419 district centers in Afghanistan. Last month, he said the Taliban only controlled 81 district centers.

Burns assured that the US would continue supporting the Afghan military after the withdrawal and said the CIA would still be involved in the country. "So the US government, as the president has made clear  and CIA will play a part in this  will continue to be strongly supportive of the Afghan government in every way that we can. And for CIA, we will be sharply focused beyond the withdrawal of the US military and continuing terrorism challenges," he said.

Both the CIA and the Pentagon had been hoping to establish new bases in neighboring countries, such as Pakistan. But none of Afghanistans neighbors wanted to host US forces, and the military has to settle for launching airstrikes from the Gulf region.

For the CIA, its presence in Afghanistan will be more covert than the military. The US plans to leave about 600 troops in the country split between its embassy in Kabul and the international airport, also located in the Afghan capital. The US embassy is a sprawling 36-acre facility that can host thousands of people, with plenty of room for CIA operatives. Burns insisted that the CIA will "still be able to do a lot" in Afghanistan after August 31st, the date President Biden said the withdrawal would be completed by.

CIA activities in Afghanistan include backing paramilitary groups. It was recently revealed by the Intercept that the CIA backed death squads in Afghanistan that slaughtered dozens of civilians, including children, between 2018 and 2019. Burns spoke fondly of CIA operations in the country. "People should be proud of the role that CIA has played" in Afghanistan, he said.
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TORONTO - International travellers arriving at Canada's largest airport may now be funnelled into different customs lines based on their vaccination status.

Doses of the Moderna vaccine are seen at a COVID-19 vaccine centre in Toronto on July 23, 2021. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young

TORONTO - International travellers arriving at Canada's largest airport may now be funnelled into different customs lines based on their vaccination status.

Toronto's Pearson International Airport said Saturday it may be splitting passengers coming from the U.S. or other international destinations into vaccinated and partially or non-vaccinated queues.

"This is a measure to help streamline the border clearance process as there are different entry requirements for vaccinated and non/partially vaccinated travellers, which have been broadly communicated by the Government of Canada," said Beverly MacDonald, a spokeswoman for the Greater Toronto Airports Authority.

People wearing protective equipment at Pearson International Airport during the COVID-19 pandemic in Toronto on Monday, December 14, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette

The Vancouver International Airport has instituted a similar policy.

Fully vaccinated Canadian citizens and permanent residents are now able to skip a 14-day quarantine.

As of Aug. 9, fully vaccinated U.S. citizens and permanent residents will be allowed into Canada, followed by the rest of the world on Sept 7.

Ontario reported 170 new cases of COVID-19 on Saturday and three more deaths.

In Toronto, there were 44 new cases, with another 26 in Peel Region, 17 in Hamilton, 15 in the Region of Waterloo and 13 in Grey Bruce.

The numbers were based on 19,131 tests.

There were 132 patients in intensive care with critical COVID-related illness and 86 on ventilators.

More than 124,000 doses of vaccines were administered in the previous day, for a total of more than 18.8 million.

Of the 170 new cases, 122 of them are in people under age 40, while just one of the new cases is in someone 80 or older.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 24, 2021.
MONTREAL - A man was arrested for possible drunk driving after his vehicle crashed into a store in Montreal.

The Montreal Police logo is seen on a police car in Montreal on July 8, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson

MONTREAL - A man was arrested for possible drunk driving after his vehicle crashed into a store in Montreal.

An emergency call was placed at about 2:30 a.m., indicating that a pickup truck smashed into a business front door in the Riviere-des-Prairies area of Montreal.

Montreal police arrived at the scene and found the 33-year-old man without any visible injuries.

Montreal police spokeswoman Caroline Chevrefils says the man appeared to be intoxicated and was transported to a detention centre for a breathalyzer test.

Chevrefils says that the store damages were mostly found inside, without specifying the name of the business.

The investigation is ongoing and charges are yet to be laid.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published on July 24, 2021.
ABBOTSFORD, B.C. - British Columbia's public safety minister heaped praise on 100 firefighters from Mexico who arrived in the province Saturday to work "shoulder to shoulder" with local crews battling hundreds of wildfires.

A pyrocumulus cloud, also known as a fire cloud, forms in the sky as the Tremont Creek wildfire burns on the mountains above Ashcroft, B.C., on Friday, July 16, 2021. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

ABBOTSFORD, B.C. - British Columbia's public safety minister heaped praise on 100 firefighters from Mexico who arrived in the province Saturday to work "shoulder to shoulder" with local crews battling hundreds of wildfires.

Mike Farnworth personally welcomed the firefighters when their plane arrived in Abbotsford, telling reporters that he "cannot thank these men and women enough for answering our call for support."

"The crews here from Mexico are top-rate, incredibly skilled at the job they're going to do and we are so very, very pleased," Farnworth said, noting the firefighters will be in B.C. for 30 days.

"We cannot thank the Mexican government enough for assisting us."

Farnworth said the firefighters would immediately undergo rapid COVID-19 testing, and then meet with B.C. wildfire officials before being sent to work.

The BC Wildfire Service said there were 258 wildfires burning in the province on Saturday, which is down from 275 fires reported in its last update Friday, and down from about 300 earlier in the week.

But Farnwoth warned the province continues to see "difficult fire behaviour and conditions throughout the central and southern Interior," and that "challenging weather is forecast for the foreseeable future."

There are nearly 60 evacuation orders in place in B.C., affecting nearly 5,000 properties. There are 3,320 firefighters and other personnel working to fight the blazes, including 94 from out of province.

There was some relief Saturday for a few neighbourhoods that were under an evacuation order by the Village of Lytton. A wildfire destroyed most of the community earlier this month, but the evacuation order for the neighbourhoods has been downgraded to an evacuation alert.

Further south, the Regional District of Okanagan-Similkameen said the Osoyoos Indian Band also rescinded an evacuation order for a handful of properties that had been threatened by the Nk'Mip Creek wildfire. But later in the day, the Regional District of Kootenay Boundary issued an evacuation order for an additional 126 properties threatened by the same blaze.

While some fires are being put out, fire information officer Forrest Tower said that doesn't necessarily mean residents can return home.

"Even though you may be looking at satellite imagery and not seeing any hot spots, there is still a lot of activity going on in that area, and once the wildfire has been moved from that area, it still isn't safe," Tower said.

He said crews are working with heavy machinery and ensuring roadways are safe to travel, so evacuation orders must still be followed.

A Canadian Armed Forces contingent is also in the north Okanagan before being deployed to various fires, and Farnworth said more military help will arrive in the coming week.

"We will see the other side of this fire season, but we need to continue to work together to take care and to stay safe," Farnworth said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 24, 2021.
Its been a crazy last week or two for Manitobas Progressive Conservative government. After all, its not every day that a minister resigns, gets appointed to a prestigious position without prior knowledge, and then refuses that appointment. If that was all that happened, it would be enough. It wasnt.

Its been a crazy last week or two for Manitobas Progressive Conservative government. After all, its not every day that a minister resigns, gets appointed to a prestigious position without prior knowledge, and then refuses that appointment. If that was all that happened, it would be enough. It wasnt.

Until a few short days ago, Eileen Clarke was Manitobas Minister of Indigenous and Northern Affairs. A former mayor of Gladstone and MLA since 2016, Clarke has a reputation of being thoughtful, smart and strong. Clarke is no obsequious sycophant. As Premier Pallister noted in a tweet, he has known Clarke for decades and spoke highly of her in her departure.

Agassiz Progressive Conservative MLA Eileen Clarke, then Indigenous and Northern Relations minister, is seen with Sayisi Dene First Nation Chief Tony Powderhorn and Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs Grand Chief Arlen Dumas a few years ago. (File)

The imbroglio began after protesters tore down statues of Queens Elizabeth and Victoria at the Manitoba Legislature. This occurred during a protest on Canada Day. Im not a fan of tearing down statues, but we should look at history and learn from it.

Pallisters response took things to another level. Said he: "The people who came here to this country before it was a country, and since, didnt come here to destroy anything. They came here to build."

He may believe this to be true, but it is not unlike making intemperate comments about other important social issues such as same-sex marriage or race. This is a time in which we need more sensitivity, not less.

Clarke resigned two days later. She stated that Pallisters comments played a part in her decision, but she was extremely prudent in her decision to avoid indelicate comments about Pallisters specific comments.

Pallisters entire speech is available online. The line quoted above is a small part of a much longer commentary. Much of what he said was perfectly appropriate to our time. However, the need for sensitivity, listening and to understand others lived experiences, well, that is what we need at this juncture.

Pallister has rarely been a perfect voice for sensitivity.

The firestorm got worse as Pallister appointed Selkirk MLA Dr. Alan Lagimodiere as Clarkes replacement. In his first press conference, when confronted by NDP leader Wab Kinew, he echoed Pallisters most tone-deaf comments. It wasnt a good day for Tories.

Note that Lagimodiere, who is Metis, is a highly respected veterinarian who also possesses an MBA and a bachelor of science degree in agriculture. He just wasnt ready for his first moment in the spotlight.

The polls and media are saying it was a good day for Kinew.

Both Blaine Pedersen and Clarke resigned from cabinet. These were two substantial losses and must be considered significant blows to Pallisters inner circle.

All of this feels faintly like the 2014 departure of five key ministers in Greg Selingers NDP government. That departure harkened the end of the NDP reign of power here in Manitoba, or perhaps simply foretold it. It could be argued that the five ministers anticipated the electoral challenges that Selingers unpopularity would bring and wished to head it off at the pass.

Is a similar event happening to Pallister? Its hard to say, although the loss of both Clarke and Pedersen, albeit for different reasons, cannot be encouraging for Tories. Pallister is among the least popular premiers in Canada.

Perhaps Clarke is the canary in the coal mine.

Maybe we are reading too much into her departure. After all, we are all exhausted from the endless COVID lockdowns, press conferences, and negativity. Perhaps we are simply tired of Pallisters leadership. Who knows? Its been a tough year for everyone.

That being said, in no way is the departure of Eileen Clarke a good thing for this Tory government.
BAGHDAD (AP)  Iraqs prime minister says his country no longer requires American combat troops to fight the Islamic State group, but a formal time frame for their redeployment will depend on the outcome of talks with U.S. officials this week.

Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi sits during an interview with The Associated Press in Baghdad, Iraq, Friday, July 23, 2021. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)

BAGHDAD (AP)  Iraqs prime minister says his country no longer requires American combat troops to fight the Islamic State group, but a formal time frame for their redeployment will depend on the outcome of talks with U.S. officials this week.

Mustafa al-Kadhimi said Iraq will still ask for U.S. training and military intelligence gathering. His comments came in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press ahead of a planned trip to Washington, where he's slated to meet with President Joe Biden on Monday for a fourth round of strategic talks.

There is no need for any foreign combat forces on Iraqi soil, said al-Kadhimi, falling short of announcing a deadline for a U.S. troop departure. Iraqs security forces and army are capable of defending the country without U.S.-led coalition troops, he said.

But al-Kadhimi said any withdrawal schedule would be based on the needs of Iraqi forces, who have shown themselves capable in the last year of conducting independent anti-IS missions.

The war against IS and the readiness of our forces requires a special timetable, and this depends on the negotiations that we will conduct in Washington, he said.

The U.S. and Iraq agreed in April that the U.S. transition to a train-and-advise mission meant the U.S. combat role would end but they didn't settle on a timetable for completing that transition. In Mondays meeting at the White House, the two leaders are expected to specify a timeline, possibly by the end of this year.

The U.S. troop presence has stood at about 2,500 since late last year when former President Donald Trump ordered a reduction from 3,000.

The U.S. mission of training and advising Iraqi forces has its most recent origins in former President Barack Obamas decision in 2014 to send troops back to Iraq. The move was made in response to the Islamic State group's takeover of large portions of western and northern Iraq and a collapse of Iraqi security forces that appeared to threaten Baghdad. Obama had fully withdrawn U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011, eight years after the U.S. invasion.

What we want from the U.S. presence in Iraq is to support our forces in training and developing their efficiency and capabilities, and in security cooperation, al-Kadhimi said.

Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi poses in his office during an interview with The Associated Press in Baghdad, Iraq, Friday, July 23, 2021. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)

The Washington trip comes as the premiers administration has faced one setback after another, seriously undermining public confidence. Ongoing missile attacks by militia groups have underscored the limits of the state to prevent them and a series of devastating hospital fires amid soaring coronavirus cases have left dozens dead.

Meanwhile, early federal elections, in line with a promise al-Kadhimi made when he assumed office, are less than three months away.

Chief on the agenda in Washington, however, is the future of American-led coalition forces in Iraq.

Iraq declared victory over IS in late 2017 after a ruinous and bloody war. The continued presence of American troops has become a polarizing issue among Iraqs political class since the U.S.-directed drone strike that killed powerful Iranian general Qassim Soleimani and Iraqi militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis on Iraqi soil last year.

To quell the threat of widespread instability following the targeted killings, the U.S. and Iraq have held at least three rounds of strategic talks centering on Iraqs military needs in the ongoing fight against IS and to formalize a timeline for withdrawal.

Four years since their territorial defeat, IS militants are still able to launch attacks in the capital and roam the countrys rugged northern region. Last week, a suicide bomber killed 30 people in a busy Baghdad marketplace. That attack was later claimed by IS.

Al-Kadhimi has faced significant pressure from mainly Shiite political parties to announce a timeline for a U.S. troop withdrawal. Ongoing rocket and, more recently, drone attacks targeting the American military presence have also heaped pressure on the government. They are widely believed to be perpetrated by Iran-aligned Iraqi militia groups.

An announcement that combat troops will withdraw might serve to placate Shiite parties but will have little impact on the ground: The coalitions combat mission ended effectively in November when the Pentagon reduced U.S. troops in the country to 2,500, according to Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein. Shiite parties have said they do not object to trainers or advisors who may remain as part of the coalition.

U.S. and coalition officials have maintained that U.S. troops are no longer accompanying Iraqi forces on ground missions and that coalition assistance is limited to intelligence gathering and surveillance and the deployment of advanced military technologies. Iraqi military officials have stressed they still need this support going forward.

Iraq has a set of American weapons that need maintenance and training. We will ask the American side to continue to support our forces and develop our capabilities, al-Kadhimi said.

Al-Kadhimi assumed power as a consensus candidate following months of political jockeying between rival parliamentary blocs. The blocs were firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadrs coalition on one side and paramilitary commander and former minister Hadi al-Ameris Fatah group on the other.

The stakes were high: Al-Kadhimi's predecessor had resigned facing pressure from historic mass anti-government protests. At least 600 people were killed as Iraqi forces used live ammunition and tear gas to disperse crowds.

Al-Kadhimi presented himself as a champion of protester demands and set a lofty agenda: He promised to hold early elections, now scheduled for Oct. 10, and to bring to account the killers of activists, including whoever killed prominent commentator Hisham al-Hashimi outside his home last summer.

The arrest of an Interior Ministry employee in the shooting death of al-Hashimi fell short, many said, because it did not reveal which group ordered the killing.

Critics say al-Kadhimi has not gone far enough. This is partly because the very conditions that facilitated his rise to the premiership have also served as his chief limitation in parliament.

Political opposition watered down ambitious economic reforms that targeted Iraqs bloated public sector when the country faced a disastrous financial crisis after falling oil prices. Without a party backing him in parliament, and with rival parties vying to control ministries and other state institutions, al-Kadhimis government has appeared weak.

Repeated standoffs with Iran-backed militia groups following the arrests of militiamen suspected of launching attacks against the U.S. Embassy and U.S. troops have further tarnished the governments credibility.

Activists whose cries for elections once resonated in the squares of the capital now say they will boycott the October polls, distrustful that the political establishment could ever produce free and fair elections.

A U.N. monitoring mission has been established in hopes of boosting voter turnout. But protesters have taken to the streets recently and expressed outrage over the rise in killings of prominent activists and journalists. Even al-Kadhimi conceded certain forces were actively seeking to undermine the polls.

We are in a sensitive situation. We need to calm the political situation until we reach the elections," he said.

Al-Kadhimi has managed to prove his mettle in one arena: That of regional mediator. Iraqs friendly relations with Saudi Arabia and Iran have brought both regional foes to the negotiation table for at least two rounds of talks in Baghdad.

Iraq has succeeded in gaining the trust of these countries, and accordingly, it is working toward the stability of the region.

Associated Press writer Robert Burns in Washington contributed reporting.
Leckies Super Bowl problems, as told by former Seven boss Tim Worner We went to the Super Bowl as guests of Disney. We all went on a bus and David wanted to sit where the chaperones were supposed to sit right up the front. He rang me as I was right down the back of the bus to tell me everyone on the bus was a d---head except the driver. The rugby is boring, as told by Sevens top lawyer Bruce McWilliam The rugby union came in with CEO Gary Flowers and some internal people from IMG early in the morning to meet David. Gary said to David: And how can the rugby help you David? David said: Could you take your sport to another network? Its boring and it doesnt rate.

Loading What he really thinks, as told by Worner and McWilliam David saw the (Australian) US consul general at LOrangerie restaurant in LA. David said loudly to him right in front of Kirk Douglas and the whole family including Renee Zellweger: You were a f--ing terrible premier. Leckies editing advice, as told by former News Limited boss John Hartigan I will miss the editing advice he used to give me, particularly in one case when he was arguing the lack of news merit related to him being pulled over for a DUI on his way to work. I also wont miss his advice on farming skills - this from the very bloke that admitted to be that he couldnt even close the front gate.

"Ive got five minutes," as told by James Warburton Loading There was very large client of Seven who had been having problems with their products and were copping negative coverage in the media and from our programme Today Tonight. The client with bravado and confidence kept telling us that they demanded a meeting with the CEO, David, to let him know that this was not acceptable and that there millions of dollars were at risk. The call was set, the client had spent hours developing their script and were ready to roll. David came on the phone and said: 'Hi Leckie here. I know you are going to yell at me. I have five minutes so I will be quick. If you keep your business here with us I cant promise you anything other than balanced and fair reporting, in fact I reckon I can help you do better PR than whoever is helping you now - theyre hopeless. If you take your business away from Seven I will tell my team to take the gloves off and we will smash you. Anyway Ive got to go, let James know which way you want to go. Nice to meet you goodbye'. I can confirm as exasperated as the client was they kept their business with Seven. An elevator stop, as told by former Seven news director Peter Meakin

Perhaps Leckie learnt from the best. "On one occasion, Leckie spent an hour with his old friend and former colleague Peter Meakin being berated by Kerry Packer. After it was over, Packer went to get the lift and when it opened it was full. He held the door, looked at the staff, and said: 'You people be kind to this man [David]. Hes had a bad day.'" A Christmas cockatoo, as told by former Seven Melbourne chief Lewis Martin [Former Prime owner] Paul Ramsay invited some of us at Seven for Christmas Eve dinner held in his apartment above the Shangri-La. The Ramsay choir was performing and there was a huge cockatoo in a cage. David was swearing at the top of his voice. The cockatoo loved it and started mimicking David: It shrieked f off f off every time the choir tried to sing. A taste of Argentina goes overboard, as told by Bruce McWilliam Seven and Prime hired the Silver Whisper - a luxury ocean cruiser as there was no accommodation. It was moored in Piraeus Harbour.

David and Paul Ramsay were having a lovely bottle of wine on the stern of the boat. Paul had just bought a TV network in Argentina which was a disaster. The network lost the soccer rights. Paul sold it for a huge loss. Paul asked: What wine is that David? Argentinian, he said. Paul picked up the bottle and flung it overboard, sending the security people below crazy as they were monitoring for terrorist activities. A frogman came storming into the boat holding the bottle. David will punch him, as told by Skye Leckie and Bruce McWilliam I remember when David was in the induced coma. One of Davids brothers was holding his hand and rubbing his arm tenderly. The Leckie brothers never showed emotion. Skye said: Geez if David wakes up, hell punch him.
Nevertheless, the opposition is the latest in a series of obstacles Netflix has faced since it attempted to get the program to air.

Opposition to trademark applications is not unusual. And even if Netflix was not successful with its application it would not threaten it ability to air the series, only its ability to sell branded merchandise.

Nearly five months after Netflix requested use of the words Byron Baes for entertainment services, Teena Zerefos Waldron, the owner of childrens store Bondi Beach Baby, has filed an application opposing the trademark. The reason for the opposition to the trademark is unclear, but Ms Waldron does sell Bae Bibs for babies.

Announced in April, Byron Baes is the first locally-commissioned reality series for Netflix in Australia and will be about the lives of social media influencers that live in Byron Bay and the surrounding towns. It will run over eight episodes and is produced by Eureka Productions.

The commission was supposed to signal the US$228.5 billion ($US310.5 billion) services intent to invest in Australian content. But the plans were almost immediately rejected by locals. Bryon Bay retailers such as Arnhem Clothing, Spell and Zulu and Zephyr, and cafes and restaurants such as The Roadhouse, Bayleaf Cafe and The Byron Bay General Store were among the businesses that rejected filming on their premises in an attempt to block or stall production.

Concerns have been raised on a number of grounds including that the production has not followed best practice guidelines by failing to consult with traditional owners (Netflix says that Screen Australia protocols dictate this is necessary only when Indigenous people, practices or sacred sites might be filmed); that the show would present an unrealistic picture of a community struggling with a number of serious social issues; and that the attention generated by a program made for Netflixs 200 million subscribers worldwide would add immeasurably to the pressures on the towns already stretched infrastructure and fragile environment.

The corporation representing Byron Bays traditional owners then rejected an offer of a donation from Netflix in June. The opposition campaign now has a website with functionality for people to email the producers and Netflixs global head of TV.

Despite the efforts by the locals, Netflix has since started production. It is expected to air next year.
Investors are betting on hefty dividend hikes from mining giants and likely share buybacks at the upcoming round of earnings results, despite COVID-19 lockdowns in Sydney and Melbourne threatening to derail the economic recovery.

Profit season unofficially kicks off in Australia this week with half-year results from diversified resources behemoth Rio Tinto and investors say a key theme will be bumper dividends from miners that have benefited from surging iron ore prices.

Mining sector profits are expected to underpin hefty dividends and potential share buybacks. Credit:Ian Waldie

Banks, another key sector in the ASX 200, also have billions in excess capital that investors expect will ultimately be handed back to shareholders via share buybacks or special dividends.

The expectation of capital returns comes despite boards facing an uncertain economic outlook due to the worsening COVID-19 crisis in NSW, which threatens to derail the national economic recovery.
Australias greenhouse gas emissions extended their declines into the first three months of 2021, driven lower by a roaring renewable energy sector that set fresh records during this past windy weekend.

According to independent consultants Ndevr, modelling shows national emissions totalled 119.77 million tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent (MT CO2-e) in the March quarter. That was 2.9 million tonnes lower than the previous three months, and 7.5 million tonnes  or almost 6 per cent  down from a year earlier.

Blowing up a storm: record levels of wind energy generation this week in Australia. The rise of renewables is delivering the bulk of emissions reductions in Australia. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer

The figures, which precede official numbers due by August 31, show renewable sources of electricity such as wind, solar and hydro exceeded 30 per cent of the National Electricity Market (NEM) in the March quarter.

The increase alone shaved off 1.4 MT CO-e from the nations emissions tally, with the total now below 40 MT CO-e, or about a third of the total.
The Andrews government will tighten border controls as the state prepares to exit its fifth lockdown while keeping strict public health rules in place.

With Victorians in NSW to be locked out for weeks, the public health team is focused on ensuring the thousands of workers who cross the border each day pose minimal risk of spawning another COVID-19 outbreak and further lockdowns.

A Victoria Police checkpoint at Chiltern on the Hume Highway earlier this month. Credit:Jason Robins

Other restrictions are expected to return to settings in force when Victoria emerged from its fourth lockdown in June, when schools reopened, home visits were still banned, hospitality businesses were limited to 100 patrons, masks were required inside and outdoors, and a 25-kilometre travel limit applied.

A government source, speaking anonymously to detail the plans, said the government would tighten the rules around border crossing for permitted workers and establish additional testing requirements in coming days. Its all about protecting [against] further incursions, the source said.

The governments senior ministers were meeting late on Monday to finalise rules for the expected easing of restrictions on Tuesday at 11.59pm. Any unexpected cases that were not in isolation for their infectious period could thwart the easing, which was already delayed by a week.

Read the full story here
Senior NSW government ministers are pushing for a rapid return of major construction on infrastructure projects after the snap decision to close the industry was made without consultation.

NSW Planning Minister Rob Stokes and Infrastructure Minister Andrew Constance said the construction sector must swing back as hard and fast as possible from the two-week ban, which is damaging the states economy.

NSW Transport Minister Andrew Constance and Planning Minister Rob Stokes are pushing for a hard, fast return to construction. Credit:Peter Braig

Neither Mr Stokes nor Mr Constance was consulted about the closure of the states $600 billion construction industry before the decision was made by NSWs crisis cabinet.

The call was also made without consulting Property and Housing Minister Melinda Pavey and Better Regulation Minister Kevin Anderson, who also have oversight of construction in NSW.
Reza was our only son. He was an ethical and good person who cared about his family deeply. After their sons death, Mr Beratis parents suffered psychiatric injury and mental harm, and they had previously relied on income he provided, according to documents filed in the Supreme Court of Victoria on Friday. Men gather in front of a large photo of killed asylum seeker Reza Berati during the memorial service, held at the Al-Mahdi mosque in the Nabard neighbourhood in South East Tehran, Iran. Credit:Kate Geraghty The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald revealed last year that G4S and the Australian government were facing a barrage of new legal claims brought by former guards suffering post-traumatic stress disorder. Maurice Blackburn, lawyers for Mr Beratis parents, believe this is the first time civil proceedings have been brought in Australia by the family of someone who died in offshore detention. A 2014 report by the former secretary of the Attorney-Generals Department, Robert Cornwall, found the government failed to protect Mr Berati and other asylum seekers from harm, saying the riot was eminently foreseeable and could have been prevented if detainees had been on a clear pathway for assessing their claims. It also concluded Mr Berati was attacked by a number of people.

The report found that G4S Australia had noted in daily reports that as tensions on the island mounted, some detainees had fashioned weapons. Loading Mr Beratis parents claim the Commonwealth is responsible for the wrongful death of their son because it knew, or ought to have known, there was a high likelihood of tensions rising and violent protests occurring among detainees on Manus Island. This was because, court documents allege, authorities failed to give detainees a timeline for processing their refugee status claims, many detainees did not have access to legal personnel or immigration staff, and the infrastructure at Manus Island  built to house 500 people  was inadequate to accommodate the increased number of detainees after the facilitys population had swelled to 1340 by February 2014. The court documents say that in the moments before his death, Mr Berati was attempting to return to his bedroom.

Reza Berati was followed by a PNG national who worked at the centre with the Salvation Army who hit Reza Berati with a long stick. Reza Berati fell down and more than 10 men, including PNG locals, PNG centre staff and expatriate centre staff kicked him in his head, the documents allege. After the riots, then-immigration minister Scott Morrison blamed the asylum seekers for the violent protests. Two injured asylum seekers leave Manus Island following riots at the detention centre. Credit:Nick Moir There would have been no incident that night had there been no protests, I think thats clear to say, Mr Morrison said. But the protests in no way could ever justify what happened to Mr Berati or the other serious violent acts perpetrated on that night. Under no circumstances, in my view, could that ever justify what happened. G4S and the Commonwealth Department of Home Affairs declined to comment.

Former detainee Behrouz Boochani told The Age and the Herald Mr Berati was a peaceful person and his killing had been hard for his family because they remained unsure of what happened and who was involved. Loading For years and years they have been waiting to get justice but nothing has happened, he said. Mr Boochani said many people still have questions about Mr Beratis death, and the lawsuit might play a role in answering those questions. We have been outside of the law. It has not treated us in the same way they treat people in Australia. Paradoxically, we have been a victim of the law and we have also been outside of it, he said.

Human rights lawyer George Newhouse said the government was responsible for Mr Beratis death because they put him in harms way and failed to protect him. The family of Reza Berati deserve closure, they deserve to know the truth that is being withheld from us and they deserve to have those responsible for Rezas death held accountable, he said. This case is the thin edge of the wedge. The Australian government has knowingly destroyed the minds and lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of men, women and children in immigration detention and I expect many more cases to flow through our system as a result. Mr Newhouse said the government had accepted that former guards could make claims for their injuries offshore but tried to maintain the fantasy that detainees it put in harms way didnt have the same rights.

A police report from March 26, 2014  about six weeks after the riots  said a major obstacle to the investigation was G4S and its employees refusal to co-operate with the PNG police investigators. The Manus Island Regional Processing Centre was opened in October 2001. The last of its former detainees were moved to Port Moresby in November 2019 and the governments contractors were advised to end their services that November 30. Women surround a framed photo of asylum seeker Reza Berati, during the memorial service held at the Al-Mahdi mosque in the Nabard neighbourhood in South East Tehran, Iran. 27th Feburary, 2014. Photo: Kate Geraghty Credit:Kate Geraghty Human Rights Law Centre legal director Keren Adams said Mr Beratis murder had been a symbol of both the brutality and legal impunity of the offshore detention system. His parents have been left ignored and unheard, traumatised by their sons murder. These proceedings cant bring back their son, but they can ensure that those ultimately responsible for his death are finally forced to account for their actions, she said.
Instead, he is part of the de-extinction club: a growing group of scientists working to harness genetic engineering and cloning to reach into the past  and resurrect extinct animals. Top of the list are the thylacine and the woolly mammoth. Archer and others say the unnatural pace of climate change and habitat destruction mean bringing back key species may now be the only way to stop ecosystems from collapsing. Harvard Universitys renowned geneticist George Church, himself working to return the mammoth to the Arctic tundra, says reviving some species could even help combat the effects of global warming. But others, such as Ritchie, warn that it might put the wild in jeopardy all over again, or pull vital focus from the urgent work underway to save those species we do have left.

Paleontologist Michael Archer is also haunted by the story. But he has a plan to make sure Benjamin is not the last thylacine. Archer isnt one of Australias infamous Tasmanian Tiger hunters, the ones who trek into the bush convinced they may yet find a survivor of the extinct species. Though he has diligently DNA-tested suspected thylacine excrement sent in by such spotters, Archer says sightings always turn out to be fascinating bullshit.

Benjamins story now haunts ecologist Euan Ritchie as he maps accelerating extinction rates around the world. What a perfect metaphor, he says. Benjamin died of neglect and then we threw him out. These species took millions of years to evolve and now theyre disappearing by the thousands because we dont care enough. Its like going into a museum and lighting all of its precious paintings on fire.

He died three years later, locked out of his backroom shelter one freezing night, just weeks after his species was at last granted protected status in Tasmania following decades of hunting. Eventually, the world came to realise that Benjamin really was the last of Australias great striped marsupial. But, when he died, they saw only an animal too damaged to be preserved in a museum. His body was tossed in a dumpster.

In grainy black-and-white footage, Benjamin paces his enclosure, yawning and baring his jaws. He lies down, he sniffs the concrete. At one point (off-screen) he even gives the cameraman a cheeky bite on the bum.

He died of the cold. His name was Benjamin, the thylacine, Ben, the last Tasmanian Tiger  only we didnt know that when he was captured and put in a zoo in 1933.

Of course, unlike Noah, you will need more than two of a species to bring it back. If de-extinction is to mean more than a few curiosities in a lab or a zoo, scientists recommend a gene pool of at least 50 to 1000 animals to start. And you need to make sure that both the species and the wild youre sending them back into can cope with their return. And thats even before we get to the technology itself.

For some scientists, being smart means conserving sperm, egg and tissue samples from endangered species in cryogenically frozen arks, the same way conservationists might keep breeding pairs in captive populations, in case they can one day be returned to the wild. For Archer and others, being smart means using technology not just to slow down extinction but to reverse it.

Archer argues that conventional conservation efforts arent cutting the mustard and the time has come for extraordinary intervention - an ark of sorts. Normally, nature fills the vacancies from a big extinction event like this. But were not leaving any room for that this time. So were really in uncharted territory. And we have to be smart.

Theres a story humans tell of saving animals in an ark  two of each kind to survive a great catastrophe. Today, the great catastrophe is here, at least for wildlife. Humans are burning through the planets resources with an unprecedented appetite, changing the climate, concreting over the wild. Archer says extinction rates are as high as they were during the Cretaceous period, when 75 per cent of species including the dinosaurs were wiped from the map. In half a century, the World Wildlife Fund calculates, we have lost more than half of the planets biodiversity. Weve now entered the planets sixth mass extinction event, Ritchie says. And, ultimately, humans need these ecosystems to survive, too. Theyre our life support system.

So how does de-extinction work? Would a woolly mammoth cooked up in a lab be a real mammoth or just a funny-looking elephant? How do we choose which species get a second chance? And is there any dino DNA left to get us to Jurassic Park ?

Scientists are even learning how to wind back the clock on a living animals family tree, searching for dormant genes switched off over their evolution, such as a tail or bigger teeth, to help revive extinct ancestors, gene by gene. Thats how the paleontologist who inspired Michael Crichtons Jurassic Park in the first place, Jack Horner, is hoping to build a dinosaur from its decidedly less scaly descendant: the chicken. Birds are the dinosaurs that escaped extinction, after all.

Since the development of better gene-editing tools such as CRISPR (which borrows the precision of ancient bacteria immune systems to find and edit specific genes), Archer says museum collections, too, have become the flavour of the month. Suddenly everyone wants to go in and sample shrivelled toes [for] the DNA.

Its not quite enough to thaw a frozen mammoth from a block of ice. Scientists need either tissue to clone an animal or enough of its DNA, its genetic blueprint, to engineer it. In Jurassic Park , that source code came from a preserved mosquito with a belly full of dinosaur blood. In real life, that wouldnt actually be enough DNA to rebuild a dinosaur (the little molecule is hardy enough to survive at crime scenes but, after about 1.5 million years, its too decayed to read anymore). Still, carcasses of mammoths and Neanderthals preserved in the icy permafrost at the top of the world, some of them a million years old , have yielded enough of their genetic code for scientists such as Church to rebuild, and edit. Even the mysterious virus behind the deadly Spanish flu of 1918 was recreated in a lab from the frozen lungs of one of its victims, unearthed from an icy grave in Alaska.

More than 20 years after Dolly the sheep became the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, the technique is yet to be perfected, but Archer says its not quite the horror show people imagine. While the sci-fi nightmare of cloned humans never materialised, livestock can be cloned to preserve breeding lines, and celebrities and millionaires fork out upwards of $40,000 to clone beloved pets.

These animals, if they ever come blinking and growling to life in the lab, will be hybrids of the past and the present. But there is a way to bring back an 100 per cent extinct animal, Archer says, and thats cloning.

Church himself has viable DNA of his mammoth but will still need to pair it with the genome of its closest living relative, the Asian elephant, to try to bring it back (he sometimes calls the project the mammophant). Likewise, Ben Novak at the genetic rescue and de-extinction group Revive & Restore has big plans to re-engineer and breed an extinct line of North American bird known as the passenger pigeon using existing flocks (hes even done some experiments on birds at the CSIROs secure lab in Melbourne). And Archer plans to turn to the Tasmanian devil as a template to recreate the Tasmanian tiger, after the thylacines genome was at last sequenced from DNA found in teeth specimens at the Australian Museum.

Horner himself says hed be looking to turn on only a few lost traits in his dino-chicken (the claws, teeth, arms, scales and the tail to keep the fourth-graders happy). Already, a beak has become a snout in chicken embryos. The tail has proven the most difficult but in recent months weve made headway understanding how [it] evolved from dinosaur to bird. Even so, Horners chickenosaurus wouldnt really be an extinct animal. Itd be a new kind of dinosaur-like bird, he says.

Genes even older than [those of] the dinosaurs can be brought back, too, Church says. But its limited. Its hard to reconstruct a [species] entire genome that way. Its not like you have a 3D printer where you say, Print out this organism because the rules are way more powerful than that. Theyre more mysterious. And the question is always, why do it?

Archer hopes there will be a happier ending for the gastric-brooding frog, an extinct Australian species hes been working to clone since a colleague discovered some intact tissue cells miraculously still tucked away at the back of an old university freezer. This frog first caught the eye of medical researchers for its bizarre ability to turn its stomach into a womb and vomit up its babies. Nothing else in nature can do that, Archer says. But before it could be studied, in the mid-1980s, it vanished. Then in 2013, Archers team had a breakthrough. The extinct frogs DNA began to replicate when it was implanted in donor frog eggs. Under the microscope, the team watched the embryos start to develop with growing excitement.

The experiment was never tried again because by then the Spanish government had released goats into the mountains to replace the ibex, and so the team despaired they were too late. The ibex had lost its habitat. It had effectively gone extinct twice.

To clone, you take the egg of a suitably similar host animal, say, a domestic goat, and suck out the DNA-packed nucleus within, replacing it with that of the animal in line for resurrection, in this case, Celia the ibex. Then you hit it with a Frankstein-esque jolt of electricity to fuse the egg and nucleus, and you implant that new egg in a surrogate mother (another goat). If all goes to plan, the DNA will tell the egg to grow an ibex instead. In this case, a baby ibex did arrive but she lived for just 10 minutes, born with a fatal lung defect scientists say can be typical of the species, clone or not.

Of course, to clone an animal, the cell you are using must still be intact  alive, in a sense. That makes cloning an extinct species almost impossible. But it has happened. In 2003, scientists in Spain cloned an extinct mountain goat known as the Pyrenean ibex from the frozen tissue of the last of its species, Celia.

Some conservationists are also turning to the technique to stop inbreeding in dwindling wildlife populations. In late 2020, Novak teamed up with the US Fish and Wildlife Service to clone a critically endangered black-footed ferret from the frozen cells of a ferret who died in 1988. The clone, named Elizabeth Ann, is now a healthy six-month-old who is fond of tearing apart paper bags, barking at anyone who invades her personal space, and has three times more genetic variation in her little body than any other [blackfooted] ferret on the planet, Novak says.

But suddenly it just stopped, Archer says. The team believes the problem lies not with the DNA, but with their technique for cloning amphibians. We hit the same wall when we tried a living frogs DNA. We just need to get one [species] back, one of these [de-extinction] projects over the line, and people will see were not making monsters.

A woolly mammoth. Could its DNA be mixed with that of an Asian elephant to create a mammophant? Credit:Getty Images

What does bringing back a mammoth have to do with climate change?

OK, so Jurassic Park probably wont happen but what about a Pleistocene Park for the king of that Ice Age, the woolly mammoth? These towering herbivores were hunted to extinction by early humans some 10,000 years ago, the very last of them surviving on Arctic islands until 4000 years ago. But the mammoth is still the closest genetic relative to the now endangered Asian elephant. Even closer than the African elephant, Church says.

He believes resurrecting the mammoths ancient genes could stop the Asian elephant from following it into extinction. Splicing in traits that helped the mammoth thrive in the Arctic could open up crucial new habitat, as land-clearing and poaching closer to the equator increasingly whittle down their numbers. Endangered species are already relocated, with varying success, by conservationists, and their genes managed via breeding programs to protect diversity.

Church estimates that editing in about 40 to 100 mammoth genes, chiefly around cold resistance, will be enough to allow Asian elephants to thrive up north. Separate projects have edited about that number in pigs, for different traits, and Church says they are now breeding whole generations of healthy, engineered animals.

In the case of his mammophant, the team would grow the animal in an artificial womb to avoid any risk to the endangered elephant they would otherwise have to use as a surrogate. That means theres an extra hurdle to scale  growing a mammal artificially, all the way from fertilisation to birth, hasnt been done before. Church expects to crack the problem in about five years, in mice first, which have a faster gestation period than elephants (20 days versus 22 months). Then itll probably take another five to adapt it to larger animals and then we can see how it scales up for the mammoth.

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If it works, he already has a place to put the herd. Since the 90s, a group of Russian scientists has been transforming a huge swathe of land in Siberia back to the grasslands that mammoths and other large animals once roamed. It really is called Pleistocene Park and, with the mammoths help, some think it could actually slow climate change. Grasslands can absorb more carbon than forests, and mammoths rip down trees and create this tundra as they go. But, more importantly, their heavy feet also trample snow cover, stopping it from acting as insulation and so allowing the permafrost to be chilled by the icy Arctic winds. In theory, Church says this should help slow its thaw, which eventually threatens to release more carbon and methane than the atmosphere holds today.

But Ritchie questions why you would bring back a mammoth, a creature of the Ice Age, to a rapidly warming world? Youre not going to have herds of thousands of mammoths in time to have a real impact on the permafrost, given how fast its melting now with climate change, he says. Youll just end up with an elephant that cant handle the heat, and probably, a freak show. We have to think very carefully about how the world is going to be when we consider what to bring back.

Benjamin, the last thylacine, at Hobart Zoo in 1933. Credit:David Fleay Trustees

What happens when we put an extinct animal back in the wild?

Theres not much point resurrecting a species if it will face the same threat of extinction soon after, like the Pyrenean ibex muscled out of its mountains. And de-extinction proponents stress that animals should fill an empty ecological niche too. When wolves were hunted out of Yellowstone National Park in the United States, elk numbers exploded. With no predator to keep them in check, they tore up the grasses and rivers. Suddenly, the beavers had vanished too. And when they brought the wolves back, 70 years later, the ecosystem was restored, Church says.

Of course, for this more classical rewilding to work with a resurrected animal, it needs to act the way its ancestor did. But not everything is encoded in genes. How will an engineered mammophant, for example, learn to migrate across the Arctic tundra as mammoths once did if theres no parent to show it the way? And what if cutting and pasting together species genomes, in this case of elephant and mammoth or thylacine and Tasmanian devil, interferes with other natural instincts?

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These are problems Archer ponders a lot. You could even have two sets of instructions [in the DNA] that are contradictory, he says. But dont forget that the mammoth is a kind of specialised elephant, so most of the genome is already the same. Tasmanian devils, too, are close enough to thylacines, even though theyre smaller. For his part, he believes well have 99 per cent original behaviours in resurrected species. Most behaviour really is gene-deep in animals, he says, even the strange case of the gastric-brooding frog swallowing its fertilised eggs. No frog teaches another frog to do anything, theyre on their own from the moment theyre a tadpole.

In the case of a resurrected thylacine, there wont be much to compare it to. There are few records of how the marsupial lived, so some ecologists warn not enough is known to bring it back safely. Archer is quick to point out that the thylacine vanished from Tasmania only 90 years ago, and from the mainland at the same time as the devil (which is itself being considered for reintroduction over the Bass Strait) some 3200 years ago. We know what its going to do. Its going to become the king of beasts [in Australia] again.

Ben Novak with Martha, the last passenger pigeon, preserved with another of her species. Her death in 1914 galvanised Americas conservation movement. Credit:Revive&Restore

But consider the case of the passenger pigeon Novak hopes to bring back to North America. One hundred and fifty years ago, they were the most abundant bird on the planet. And, though they numbered as many as six billion, Novak says there were only three or four flocks flying the world at any one time. When they moved from forest to forest, they came in like a hurricane or a forest fire, breaking branches, destroying canopies and forcing those woods into regeneration cycles.

No other birds do this, Novak says. They were ecosystem engineers. Some of the restoration we thought fire did to the landscape weve now shown the birds did. Novak argues the forest needs them back. He and his team have sequenced the pigeons genome and compared it to its closest living relative, the bandtailed pigeon. Of the 25-million-odd genes where they differed, Novak has identified about 30 that could be particularly significant in making a pigeon behave like a passenger pigeon, such as disease resistance and, potentially, extra-social behaviour.

So heres his plan: Novak imagines a carefully controlled release, first on a netted reserve with nesting baskets packed into dense trees, encouraging the birds to breed in colonies and, to fool them into thinking they are already part of a much bigger flock, with speakers blasting pigeon calls and coos. If the birds gang up as planned, they would be fitted with GPS trackers and set free, by the thousand or so.

With enough funding, which Novak ballparks at about $US25 million, he thinks he could create a live passenger pigeon in the lab within seven years using CRISPR. Parallel work focused on breeding shows it would only take a few more years to build up a healthy sustainable population of 10,000 birds or so. That wont be enough to make a dent in forests the way the sky-darkening flocks of the last century did. Still, Novak says, its a start.

But does that mean that monster pigeon swarms will start descending on cities like New York? Historically, Novak says, the birds stayed clear of urban centres as there was not enough food. The bigger their flocks get, the more they will stay remote, near tree cover. And, if things do get out of hand, he says we already know what to do: it was just a few decades of hunting that wiped out those billions of birds in the first place.

Strange insects wreak havoc after they emerge from an unearthed mammoth carcass in the TV sci-fi thriller Fortitude. Credit:Fair Use

What if we crash the ecosystems were trying to save?

But suppose passenger pigeon flocks really are too much for American forests already scarred by record wildfires. Or that bizarre little frog becomes the next cane toad. Some have even wondered whether ancient viruses, entangled in the DNA of long-dead species, could be reawakened (cue the buzzing mammoth carcass in the TV sci-fi thriller Fortitude).

Archer, who himself was the first ecologist to sound the alarm on the danger of cane toads in Australia, says the fossil record can offer important clues as to how an ecosystem will fare with a reintroduced species. When he ventured into the Tasmanian bush with one of the last people to see thylacines in the wild, he found their habitat was broadly unchanged since the 1930s. Peter Ward, in his 90s on the hike, had trapped and hunted the tigers as a boy with his father and brother, back when there was a bounty on the marsupials head (due to now-debunked fears that thylacines were eating livestock). At the end of the track, Wards family hut was still there, just as hed left it, tins of food still on the shelf. Tears came into his eyes, Archer says. He even remembered what they sounded like. He said theyd make this yip yip yip sound as they circled the hut at night. The forest hasnt moved on.

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Novak says ecosystems are not a house of cards. When they have the right pillars  our keystone species like predators and pollinators and herds  then theyre more like a tower that an earthquake wobbles, but it doesnt collapse.

Besides, Church adds, the larger the animal, the easier a reintroduction is to reverse. Just as feral goats were removed from the Galapagos Islands, rounding up wayward mammoths wouldnt be impossible.

But while thylacines could help with Australias feral cat problem, as dingoes do on the mainland, Archer says its not quite a wolves-in-Yellowstone situation. Theyre not going to be chasing the big animals. In Tasmania, where there are no dingoes, thylacines would be competing for smaller prey with the Tasmanian devil. On the mainland, it might put pressure on the quoll too. These are both endangered species themselves, and so the thylacines impact would have to be closely monitored, Archer says, released as a trial in fenced areas first.

But 99 per cent of the time, with some careful planning, what happens is what you intend. This is the part of conservation we already know how to do well.

Indeed, for all the focus on worst-case scenarios, Novak says he could only find one instance of a conservation reintroduction backfiring, after analysing more than a century of US rewildings: when moving some endangered water birds into a wetland in 1988 caused others in the area to die off.

In America, regulators have now green-lit the worlds first release of a de-extinct species: a chestnut tree. Once the most abundant on the continent, the towering tree has been genetically engineered to survive the imported fungus that wiped it out eight decades ago. Some Native American tribes have even agreed to replant it on native land. Regulating the chestnuts return was no easy task and Novak hopes it will now be a guiding light for future de-extinctions, though he admits mammoths and pigeons are a whole different ball game to trees.

People just fell in love with Elizabeth Ann, Novak says of the cloned blackfooted ferret, pictured here as a baby.

But, just as gene-editing can bring back life, it can also end it. Gene drives hold awesome power to accelerate evolution and take out feral populations by spreading edits that disadvantage or kill a pest species quickly. Scientists have even proposed such an approach to tackle the mouse plague gripping Australias east. Novak says gene drives must be used carefully, but sometimes the risk of doing nothing, whether thats gene drives or de-extinction ... is actually a lot worse.

Will de-extinction help conservation? Or are we playing God?

For scientists eyeing de-extinction projects, there are a lot of vacancies out in the wild in need of filling. Novak says the technologies being developed will benefit existing endangered species too as their gene pools narrow, from the black-footed ferret to the northern white rhino, pictured below. The passenger pigeons and the mammoths, theyre our moon shots, he says. This is never going to replace traditional conservation.

But others worry that critical funding will be taken away from on-the-ground recovery efforts and shunted into pie-in-the-sky de-extinction projects. Australia has some of the worlds highest extinction rates but spends a tenth of what the US does on conservation efforts. De-extinction, if proven to work, will still carry a higher price tag than traditional conservation. At this late hour, Ritchie says, funnelling more funding into proven methods is a safer bet.

There are only two northern white rhinos left - and theyre both female. Credit:Getty Images

Novak understands the concern but says funding for de-extinction projects so far generally comes from sources not already investing in conservation, such as big tech. Weve tried hard [at Revive & Restore] to get money from new places like biotech companies, even Facebook. Since the not-for-profit was founded by conservationist Stewart Brand in 2012, Novak says about 90 per cent of the funding its raised has been spent on genetic rescue, such as their work with ferrets, not de-extinction. With the birth of Elizabeth Ann, he says those projects are advancing enough that they might begin to compete with traditional conservation. But in conservation, we always fight for funding to re-introduce this species or that one. Its always triage.

Archer, who says money for his own frog project comes primarily from people interested in the technology rather than the frog, stresses that forcing a choice between de-extinction and conservation will crush innovation. In Australia, where life has evolved over the past 50 million years cut off from the other continents, he says the case for de-extinction is especially strong. We have this added responsibility because our animals just dont exist anywhere else. Were a whole distinct branch of the global genome.

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Ritchie recalls the story of an Australian naturalist who took a taxidermied northern quoll into parts of the Northern Territory where it had vanished. A local Aboriginal woman just held it, crying, when she saw it again. It was one of her totemic species, and that pain, that loss, was still so strong.

Archer and Church say de-extinction could help end the doom and gloom of conservation, turning it around from an unwinnable war into something that could capture the publics attention (and perhaps real funding). But will the path there be littered with ghastly mistakes, animals trapped in awful lives because of editing blunders?

Genetic powers the most awesome force the world has ever seen but you wield it like a kid whos found his dads gun, Jeff Goldblums character Dr Ian Malcolm warns in Jurassic Park.

How can we stand in the light of discovery and not act? counters the parks creator John Hammond, played by Richard Attenborough.

Like Benjamin the thylacine, many of the species we have lost in the past century or two also died of the cold  of our indifference, our cruelty, our thoughtlessness. But does that mean we have a moral obligation to bring them back, as Brand says, to a world that misses them?

Also in this sci-fi explainer series ...
When the Prahran markets traders were informed last Wednesday night that a COVID-19-positive customer had visited the market and it would have to shut for cleaning, millions of dollars of fresh food was put in peril.

The exposure meant the stalls had to close for up to 10 days. But instead of simply throwing it out, traders have donated thousands of kilograms of produce to good causes.

One seafood trader donated 400 kilograms of premium fish because he wanted to do some good in a hard time.

Paul Hamilton, Michelle Sam, Hendrik Roessmann, Anita Seferian and Thomas Bullough pitch in while most of Q Le Bakers staff are isolating. Credit:Luis Enrique Ascui

FareShare Victoria kitchen manager Crickette DerJeu said the fish  including toothfish, blue cod, King George whiting and blue fin tuna  would be made into more than 3000 free meals for the disadvantaged.
Victorians are poised to be released from the states strict lockdown at 11.59pm on Tuesday, but tight public health restrictions will remain in place until the states Delta outbreak is fully extinguished.

Castigating selfish anti-lockdown protesters who roamed the city at the weekend, Premier Daniel Andrews said on Sunday the state was on track to drop stay-at-home orders because all of Sundays 11 cases were isolated for their infectious period  the first time this metric has been achieved during the current outbreak.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews at Sundays press conference. Credit:Chris Hopkins

Its my hope that were able to ease some of the restrictions that were living under, Mr Andrews said. Things are strong, things are solid. But things can come from nowhere in those next couple of days.

However, he said the situation in NSW remained so bad that Victorians stuck there would be blocked from returning home for longer than the initially forecast two weeks.
The Darya Krishna is expected to arrive at Gage Roads, out f Fremantle, on Monday. Credit:Jack Ronalds / Marine Traffic

The vessel is due to drop anchor in Gage Roads tomorrow, with the plan to dock in Fremantle Harbor in the coming days. It departed Singapore last Sunday and is now making its way towards the WA coast after leaving virus-stricken Indonesia.

Its the fourth ship out of Indonesia in recent weeks with positive cases on board, according to WA Premier Mark McGowan.

Four crew members out of the 20 onboard the Darya Krishna are reported as having COVID-like symptoms, one of whom is very unwell.

A Chinese bulk carrier ship headed for a West Australian port is suspected of having crew members with COVID-19 onboard.

Mr McGowan said WA Health authorities were monitoring the ship and they would have a teleconference call with crew members today to assess the situation as there were no testing capabilities onboard.

He said while the state government didnt want ships coming to WA with infected crew members, it was a federal decision to let ships anchor.

Of course our preference with these sorts of things is that the ship leaves as soon as possible to reduce the risk and set the right example because we dont want ships coming with infected crew members, he said.

This is the fourth ship out of Indonesia recent weeks with positive cases onboard, we think are positive cases, its obviously a growing problem. Thats why I raised it at national cabinet, thats why I wrote to the Prime Minister, doing all we can to try and deal with this difficult situation.

Ultimately the decision of whether Darya Krishna continued sailing or docked in WA was a federal one, Mr McGowan said.
An architect of the federal governments foreign veto laws has criticised the way they were ultimately applied to universities, saying the reluctance to identify China and other countries as targets of the laws had made them unnecessarily complex and burdensome.

The legislation, passed in December, gives the Foreign Affairs Minister the power to cancel agreements that states, territories, councils and universities enter into with overseas governments if they contradict Australias national interest.

University of NSW deputy vice-chancellor of planning George Williams said universities had struggled to comply with the governments new foreign veto scheme because of the country-agnostic approach in the legislation. Credit:Ryan Stuart

Former prime ministerial legal adviser Daniel Ward, who played a central role in drafting the Foreign Relations Act, said universities had wasted resources trying to comply because the government had adopted a misguided country-agnostic approach in the legislation.

Country agnosticism requires universities to jump through compliance hoops in a way that would be unnecessary if the laws simply applied to a list of countries designated by the Australian government, Mr Ward said.
State lockdowns to stop the spread of coronavirus will leave workers hundreds of dollars out of pocket even after government payments, with those in Sydneys south-west and retail staff across Melbourne among the worst affected.

Analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics labour force data by The Sydney Morning Herald/The Age shows some of the most locked-down areas in Sydney are home to a high concentration of workers in the retail and construction sectors, both of which are financially exposed to new restrictions aimed at stopping the spread of coronavirus.

The closure of construction sites and retail outlets will hit one in four workers in south-west Sydney. Credit:Janie Barrett

At the same time, modelling undertaken by the Parliamentary Library for the Greens shows part-time casual staff in Sydney and Melbourne working in retail, hospitality and beauty will be materially worse off when replacing their usual pay with state and federal government support.

The closure of construction sites and retail outlets will hit one in four workers in south-west Sydney, where more than 47,000 people work in these two industries, the ABS data shows. Another 10,000 work in accommodation and food services. One in 10 employees in this area, or about 20,400, works in the critical health care and social assistance sector.
3one4 Capital -- an early stage firm that primarily invests in -- expects to fully tie up commitments for its latest fund of over USD 100 million corpus during the current quarter.

Anurag Ramdasan, Principal - Investments at 3one4 Capital said that there has been "overwhelming interest" from global institutions into investing in India as the pandemic underscored the true potential of and digital firms.

Technology-backed startups offered a "phenomenal alternate" for customers amid complete lockdown last year, he noted.

Ramdasan said the latest fund has evoked a strong response and 3one4 Capital expects it to be fully subscribed "very soon".

3one4 Capital's new fund had seen more demand than anticipated and is now very close to clinching over USD 100 million commitment from investors.

The fund, like the past ones, would continue with the strategy of making 8-12 investments annually, he told PTI.

Elaborating on the latest fund, Ramdasan said that the 'first close' was in September 2020, when the initial commitment for the fund came in.

"Typically, if you raising USD 100 million you will split it across one, two or three closes. In the first tranche, you close the initial corpus which varies from fund to fund, but anywhere from 20 up to 50 per cent of the corpus, and then in the subsequent closes you clear the entire amount," he explained.

The interest this time has come from Indian family offices, domestic institutions, as well as large MNCs.

"We are almost there, more or less fully done," he said adding 3one4 Capital hopes to close the fund with corpus of over USD 100 million in July-September quarter.

Previously, the contributors to the funds were predominantly family offices, but now large institutions are also jumping in, he observed.

"Whether it is startups or venture funds, there has been overwhelming interest from global institutions into investing in India. That remains the same for VC fund, especially for funds like us. As our earlier funds have performed fairly well, investors from across sectors are looking at us," he said.

Digital are operating in "very interesting times", and the same is true for venture funds investing into digital Pandemic has spurred the digital adoption and, in turn, increased investor appetite for start ups, he noted.

Disbursals from the new fund have begun and over 10 investments have been made so far. 3one4 Capital has three funds in the seed stage, one in early seed stage and one 3one4 Capital opportunities fund, across which it manages a little under a quarter billion dollars.

3one4 Capital has over 50 companies in its portfolio, and its notable investments include Licious, Bank Open, DarwinBox, Betterplace, Koo, Dozee, Breathe Well Being among others. The latest fund is focused on ticket size of up to USD 2 or 3 million, and primarily into startups.

"With this fund what we get is the ability to write larger investment cheques, and that is what we will be going after. We will be investing more into companies in early stage," Ramdasan said.

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Businesses are finding it hard to manage reporting on climate risks and need to take urgent steps to meet the expectations of regulators as well as investors, according to a report.

Leading consultancy EY's report covered over 1,100 organisations across 42 countries, including India, and focussed on efforts made by them to publish their climate-related risks and opportunities based on the recommendations set by the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD).

The TCFD was established to improve and increase reporting of climate-related financial information. The scores of are based on the number of recommended disclosures that they make (coverage) and the extent or detail of each disclosure (quality).

The EY Global Climate Risk Disclosure Barometer 2021 also showed that coverage and quality of climate-related disclosures remain below global averages in India.

As per the report, only half of examined worldwide make all recommended disclosures and therefore have full coverage, and on an average, the coverage was 70 per cent.

" based in India presented 28 per cent on quality disclosure and 49 per cent coverage. Only 3 per cent of global companies reviewed meet the highest levels of quality and the average quality score is 42 per cent," EY said in a release on Sunday.

Among others, the number of Indian companies responding to disclosure platforms such as carbon disclosure project is on the rise. In the coming year, greater TCFD reporting is expected, driven by pressure from financiers, investors and customers, it added.

In November last year, 24 Indian companies signed a pledge to work with the government toward achieving the 2015 United Nations Paris Climate Change Conference (Paris Agreement) goals.

"Businesses around the world are struggling to manage the reporting of climate risks and should consider taking urgent action in order to meet the requirements and expectations of regulators and investors," it noted.

Chaitanya Kalia, Partner and National Leader, Climate Change and Sustainability Services (CCaSS) at EY India, said the pandemic has spurred the importance of climate change and the gravity of climate crisis which go beyond an organisation's own footprint, requiring more complex data management, analysis and forecasting.

Indian organisations are making progress on climate risk disclosures, and Sebi's business responsibility and sustainability reporting norms designed to be mandatory from FY23 onwards will further help investors identify firms' business sustainability risks, Kalia added.

Globally, the report said that only 41 per cent of the organisations reviewed have disclosed that they have conducted crucial scenario analysis, which is also a TCFD recommendation, to examine the likely scale and timings of particular risks and prepare for the worst-case outcomes.

Further, just 15 per cent of the businesses feature climate change in their financial statements, suggesting that they lack robust data or that they have not yet worked through the likely impact on the bottom, the report added.

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Realty firm Salarpuria Sattva's co-promoted Simpliwork Offices plans to raise USD 50-60 million as equity to expand business in India and enter into overseas markets, like Singapore, as it sees the demand for managed flexible office space rising amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Salarpuria Sattva, one of the leading real estate firms in the country with large presence in office market, has 50 per cent stake in Bengaluru-based Simpliwork Offices.

Kunal Walia, the founder and CEO of Simpliwork, holds the remaining stake.

In an interview with PTI, Walia said the company achieved a robust growth during the 2020-21 fiscal year in terms of revenue and also area expansion despite the pandemic.

"We were about 1.2 million sq ft in March 2020. We have added close to about 2 million sq ft in the last year alone," he said.

Founded in 2018, Simpliwork's current operational portfolio is 2.8 million sq ft across Bengaluru, Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Pune and Hyderabad. It is also entering Chennai market.

Walia highlighted that several major projects were delivered in the midst of the pandemic last year, such as India's largest flexible workspace (more than 5 lakh sq ft) in Hyderabad and the second largest flexible workspace (over 4 lakh sq ft) in the NCR region, among others.

"Our turnover for FY 2019-20 was around Rs 65-75 crore. From Rs 70 crore, we have reached about Rs 350 crore, making it a 5x growth," he told PTI.

On geographical expansion, Walia said the company will look at Tier-2 cities with captive demand and is seriously considering Kochi, along with Jaipur and Ahmedabad.

"However, we will venture into these cities only if we see a demand. If not, our focus will be on the top 6 cities, where 80-85 per cent of the office demand is in India," he said.

Asked about plans for fund-raising, Walia said: "We are definitely looking at fundraising but probably towards the end of this year. The market needs to stabilise first and demand needs to pick up as well."



Simpliwork is looking to expand internationally as it does not want to be restricted to India alone.

"If similar demands exist in international markets like Singapore, Hong-Kong, Dubai, would like to use the fund raise to venture into these markets. Some M&A and consolidation will definitely happen there. The international outreach would be the primary reason to explore fund raising," he said.

Simpliwork plans to enter Singapore market early 2022, but it depends on the pandemic and its ramifications, including travel restrictions etc.

"If travel is completely shut down, then our plans may get delayed," Walia said.

When asked about the size of fund raising, he said, "We are aiming for a USD 50-60 million fundraise, that can capitalise us comfortably for the next 3-4 years."



The company plans to raise this fund in pure equity form.

"We are already profitable, so it is not like we will raise funding and become unprofitable. The idea is to have risk capital to explore new ideas," he said.

Simpliwork intends to partner with larger developers to grow portfolio under management contract model.

"If so, upfront capital is then required to hire people, for stock on-ground, technology, and so on," he added.

The company has never raised equity funds from outside. Its current debt is around Rs 200 crore.

On area expansion, Walia said the company is conservatively aiming to increase its footprint to 4.5 million sq ft by March 2022.

"There is a demand in the market with inquiries coming in for 500-1000 seats. Unlike a typical coworking set up, we don't cater to a 50 sq ft density as most large organisations prefer about 80-120 sq ft density. Hence, a 500-seater becomes a 50,000-65,000 sq ft setup. And these are our main clients," he said.

Walia said the company has been witnessing an increased interest for the management contract business from large developers.

"We are talking to some very large organisations with multiple city portfolios, who want us to manage 1,00,0001,50,000 sq ft within each of their portfolio buildings.

"We expect that business to add a million sq ft this year, where the builder will do the CapEx, and rely on our expertise to manage the facility a model similar to hotel management contract," he said.

Another 7-8 lakh sq ft will be under traditional leasing, where the capex, leasing activity and management of the facility will be done by the company.

Walia pointed out that office rentals have fallen by 10-12 per cent for new leases.

Asked about footfalls in offices, he said: "Prior to the second wave, we had about 40-50 per cent employees in the office but post the second wave, it is about 8-9 per cent at the moment."



However, Walia said the company's office space is fully leased and occupied by large enterprises.

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The government is yet to settle queries regarding alleged irregularities to the tune of Rs 2,15,286 crore highlighted by the in various departments over a span of 25 years since 1994, according to the latest report of the public auditor tabled in the state assembly.

In its report on social, economic (non-PSUs) and general sectors for the financial year that ended on March 31, 2019, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) said that the alleged irregularities were pointed out in 2,734 inspection reports (IRs) issued between 1994-95 and 2018-19 covering 55 departments of the state government.

"We report that on IRs issued up to December 2018, 39,479 paragraphs pertaining to 6,385 IRs were outstanding for settlement at the end of June 2019," said the report, which was tabled during the ongoing Budget Session of the assembly.

These IRs are related to various departments like Public Health Engineering, PWD, Water Resource, Irrigation and Inland Water Transport, and other civil departments, it said.

"Of these, 1,208 IRs containing 5,262 paragraphs had not been replied to/settled for more than 10 years. Even initial replies, which were required to be received from the heads of offices within four weeks from the date of issue, were not received from 55 departments in respect of 2,734 IRs containing 20,575 paragraphs issued between 1994-95 and 2018-19.

"As a result, serious irregularities commented upon through 39,591 paragraphs involving Rs 2,15,285.77 crore, had not been addressed as of June 2019," the said.

Giving a break-up of the figure, the auditor said that alleged irregularities of Rs 24,240.61 crore were related to non-observance of rules in respect of custody and handling of cash, maintenance of cash book and muster roll.

Pending utilisation certificate and audited accounts of grant-in-aids resulted in possible irregularities of Rs 9,381.61 crore, while the delay in recovery of receipts, advances and other charges added up to alleged irregularities of Rs 8,821.35 crore.

The said that the actual payees' receipts wanting was estimated at Rs 7,309.12 crore, non-receipt of securities from persons holding cash and stores stood at Rs 1,056.29 crore, and non-recovery of overpayments were found to be at Rs 673.62 crore.

Not maintaining stores properly cost the exchequer Rs 602.28 crore, while Rs 155.54 crore alleged irregularities have been attributed to the want of sanction to write-off loans and losses, it said.

The CAG has further put Rs 1,63,045.36 crore of alleged irregularities under the head "others".

"Non-receipt of replies to the IRs in respect of the 55 departments were indicative of the failure on the part of the heads of departments (directors/executive engineers) to initiate action with regard to defects, omissions and irregularities pointed out by audit," the report stated.

The commissioners and secretaries, who are superiors to directors and executive engineers concerned, were informed of the status of these IRs through half-yearly reports, but they too "failed to ensure prompt and timely action" by the officers of the respective departments, it said.

"The above-mentioned facts also indicate inaction against the defaulting officers thereby facilitating continuation of serious financial irregularities and potential loss to the government though these were pointed out in the audit," the CAG said.

The report noted that the government had constituted one Audit Objection Committee (AOC) in May 2018 to discuss the outstanding audit objections up to 2017-18. It has so far discussed 1,102 IRs and 5,512 paragraphs, of which only 91 IRs and 981 paragraphs have been settled.

The CAG recommended that the state government reviews the matter and ensure an effective system for action against defaulting officials who fail to reply to the IRs; recover losses, outstanding advances and overpayments, and revamp the entire mechanism for prompt and timely responses to audit observations.

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The Disaster Management Authority (DDMA) has allowed Metro and to operate at 100 per cent capacity from July 26 (Monday), officials said.

Till now, operations were allowed with 50 per cent capacity in view of the Covid pandemic. However, with the fall in the number of cases, the restrictions have been eased.

Officials said on Saturday that even as Metro has been allowed to run at 100 per cent capacity, no standing passenger will be allowed.

Besides, it has also been decided to open cinemas, theatres and multiplexes in the capital with 50 per cent capacity.

Also, instead of 20, 100 people will be able to attend the funeral. Similarly, 100 people will be able to attend the wedding ceremonies instead of 50.

Permission was also given to open spas in Delhi but some rules have been fixed. Now, only those employees will be able to work in the spas who have received both doses of the Covid-19 vaccine.

Also, people who would visit the spa would be given a form through which information regarding their infection and history of Covid (if any) would be collected.

The Delhi government, however, has not yet considered opening schools and colleges.

--IANS

msk/pgh

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The death toll in flood-ravaged shot up from 112 to 149 on Sunday while another 64 are still missing, the State Disaster Management Authority said.

In what is billed as the biggest flood rescue operations in the state in decades, over 2.29 lakh people have been evacuated to safer areas after their homes were submerged in flood waters, in some places up to 20 feet high.

As many as 50 people were injured and are undergoing treatment at various hospitals in Raigad, Ratnagiri, Sindhudurg, Sangli, Satara, and Kolhapur.

With rains taking a respite on Sunday, the flood-ravaged districts presented a grim scenario with scores of people grappling to rebuild their lives.

Continuing his tour of the ravaged areas in coastal Konkan for the second day, Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray visited badly-affected towns like Chiplun and Khed in Ratnagiri.

Union MSME Minister Narayan Rane, accompanied by Bharatiya Janata Party's Leaders of Opposition Devendra Fadnavis (Assembly) and Pravin Darekar (Council) also toured some of the regions like Taliye village in Raigad and Chiplun in Ratnagiri.

He assured to submit his tour report to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and said both the Centre and state government will unitedly work to rehabilitate the flood-victims.

Later, he launched a scathing attack on the Maha Vikas Aghadi government, accusing it for various lapses and delays by the administration in rushing help to the affected populace.

According to the SDMA, the towns of Chiplun and Khed in Ratnagiri district were completely inundated and cut off as the bridge on River Vashishti was washed away on Friday.

As unprecedented rains jacked up the water levels to more than 15-20 feet, thousands of people, stranded on rooftops or upper floors of their houses, were seen screaming for help.

Teams of the Indian Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, NDRF, and SDRF are still deployed in various areas, rescuing people, and providing food or medicine and other aid materials to the victims, said the SDMA.

People in several towns and villages voiced their rage at the administration for not rushing them food, water, clothes, medicines, cleaning materials and other items of daily use to help them re-start their lives from scratch.

When Thackeray, ministers and officials went to the affected, they were virtually mobbed by desperate people demanding help, recounted tragic tales of how they survived only in the clothes they wore and had lost absolutely everything in the flood fury.

Over a dozen hillslides and landslips have been reported in different districts which buried scores and many more reported missing, while scores of roads in the regions are still closed for vehicular movement.

The state government has sanctioned Rs 2 crore each for Raigad and Ratnagiri for relief operations and Rs 50 lakh for the other affected regions where water levels have started receding and cleaning operations have been taken up.

"The flood relief columns in coordination with the civil administration today evacuated stranded locals from the flood affected areas of Kolhapur and Sangli district. Visuals of evacuation in Sangli district," tweets PRO Defence Pune



(Video source: PRO Defence Pune) pic.twitter.com/KFtDHkm2Ih  ANI (@ANI) July 25, 2021

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Nearly 40,000 fresh cases reported

India reported 39,742 fresh infections on Sunday, taking the cumulative caseload to 31.3 million, according to central health ministry data. The country saw 535 more deaths due to the pandemic, taking the death toll to 420,551. The active caseload is at 408,212, while the total recoveries have surged to 30.5 million. As many as 433 million vaccine shots have been administered since the nationwide inoculation programme kicked off on January 16. Of these, 5.1. million were given on Saturday. Read more

https://www.mohfw.gov.in/

Do not let daily count go above 50,000: Covid group to govt

The empowered group of officers, tasked with formulating the nations Covid emergency strategy, has said that all steps should be taken to ensure that the daily count of fresh cases doesnt cross 50,000, a report in The Indian Express said. The group asked the government to prepare itself for a level of 400,000-500,000 cases a day in the next surge. This is significant as this guidance sets a new benchmark for the overall system to go on alert, the report said citing sources. Read more

Common Covid symptoms for people who are vaccinated

Research underway in the United Kingdom has published findings on the most recent Covid symptoms, Deutsche Welle reported. In the Zoe Covid Symptom Study, people infected with the virus reported their symptoms through an app. According to the findings, Covid symptoms have apparently changed. This could be due to the delta variant, which now accounts for 99% of most of the infections in the UK. The current ranking of Covid symptoms after two vaccinations is in this order: Headache, runny nose, sneezing, sore throat, and loss of sense of smell. Read more

'Troubling rise' in neurological cases among post-Covid patients: Hospital

Delhi's Moolchand Hospital said there has been a "troubling rise" rise in neurological issues, including brain haemorrhage, among people who have recovered from Covid, PTI reported. The hospital said in a statement that it has been recording "increasing cases of intracerebral (brain) haemorrhage, and 50 per cent of the neuroscience department is filled with such cases". A senior neurosurgeon at the hospital said "(a) majority of these cases are those who have had Covid-19 infection in the past, with a gap of two to three months". Read more

Older people have fewer antibodies against Covid: Study

New research has found that older people, including those vaccinated against Covid, appear to have fewer antibodies, thus making them potentially more susceptible to various variants, a report in the Hindustan Times said. The study found that the youngest group (all participants in their 20s) had a nearly seven-fold antibody response compared to that in the oldest group (participants between 70 and 82 years of age), prompting the team to conclude that "the younger a participant, the more robust the antibody response." The study was conducted by a team of researchers from the Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) in the US. Read more
Indonesia's Health Ministry said Sunday that COVID-19 cases in the country rose by 38,679 within the past 24 hours to 3,166,505 with the death toll adding by 1,266 to 83,279.

Another 37,640 recovered patients were discharged from hospitals, raising the total number of recoveries in the Southeast Asian country to 2,509,318, according to the ministry.

The virus has spread to all the country's 34 provinces and the more transmissible virus Delta variant has contributed to the surge in COVID-19 cases in some regions.

is accelerating its massive vaccination program while maintaining restrictions on public mobility in several regions amid the second wave of outbreak.

The government is considering relaxing the restrictions on Monday if cases decrease significantly.

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The in has set up a 40-member squad to protect minor girls from sex offenders and curb crimes against women, an official said on Sunday.

The 'Special 40', comprising women volunteers, will collect information for and also be deployed in festivals, fairs and other gatherings as a safety measure, he said.

"Young girls are targets of drug addicts and other criminals, especially in the slums. We want to protect minor girls and women with the help of this squad. It has women volunteers in the 20-50 age group. In additional to physical training, they are being taught legal provisions related to crimes against women," Additional superintendent of (ASP) Prashant Choubey told PTI on Sunday.

The squad, which has been given a special attire and walkie-talkie sets, will teach girls about 'bad touch, good touch" in slums and ways to prevent sexual assault, he said.

Incidents of minor girls fleeing their homes and falling prey to anti-social elements have come to light recently, and this squad, if need be, will provide counseling to prevent such cases, the Additional SP said.

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Indian Army on Sunday informed that it has established a Central War Room for coordination between the three services for ongoing relief operations in

"#OperationVarsha21--A Central War Room has been established at Department of Military Affairs for close coordination between the three Services for ongoing #FloodRelief operations in #Maharashtra," Additional Directorate General of Public Information (ADGPI), Indian Army tweeted.

The three Services have joined hands with the civil administration as well as the State Disaster Management Authorities in relief and rescue operations in flood-affected areas of Maharashtra, Karnataka and Goa.

Working in close coordination with the administrations of worst-hit Ratnagiri, Kolhapur and Sangli districts of Maharashtra, the Indian Army has deployed task forces, comprising infantry, engineers, communication, recovery and medical teams in the affected areas.

According to the official release by the Ministry of Defence, the teams conducted rescue and relief operations and saved precious lives in Chiplun, Shirol, Hatkangle, Palus, and Miraj areas.

Naval Seaking, Advanced Light Helicopters and Indian Air Force MI-17 helicopters conducted multiple sorties and rescued people marooned due to sudden and sharp rise in the water levels. They also conducted aerial surveys of the affected areas to enable senior officials to assess the situation and plan rescue and relief operations.

Around 400 personnel of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) were airlifted by Indian Air Force aircraft from Bhubaneshwar, Kolkata and Vadodara to Pune, Kolhapur and Ratnagiri in and Goa along with 40 tons of rescue equipment.

The teams of the three Services are working round the clock to rescue the locals affected by floods, besides providing them with food, water, medical. More rescue teams and aircraft are on standby for deployment.

Today, Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray visited flood-affected Chiplun where he met officials and local representatives to assess the extent of damage and ongoing relief operation.

Over the last few days, Maharashtra witnessed heavy rainfall following which landslides and floods occurred in several parts of the State.

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About 112 people have lost their lives in rain-related incidents, 99 still missing in Maharashtra till Saturday night, said the Relief and Rehabilitation Department.

As per the state government's data, about 1 lakh 35 thousand people have been evacuated from the flood-affected areas.

"As per the data of July 24 at 9.30 pm, about 1 lakh 35 thousand people have been evacuated from the flood-affected areas. A total of 112 deaths have been reported and 3221 animals have died. A total of 53 people were injured and 99 are missing," said Relief and Rehabilitation Department.

Meanwhile, floodwater has entered the roads and fields, submerging many areas of the Sangli district in Maharashtra.

Locals of the area are keeping around the clock vigil and alerting the passersby of the rising water levels.

"Situation is not okay. Water is receding towards Samdoli now. Many cars are also stuck here," said Sumit, a local.

Another villager Pramod, who was among the locals keeping a watch to check the water level, said, "We are sitting here to ensure that floodwater doesn't enter Samdoli. If water goes beyond here, our daily route will be shut."

Meanwhile, people of nearby villages have temporarily sought rehabilitation at Samdoli village following floods in several areas of the Sangli district.

Sarpanch of Samdoli, Vaibhav informed, "About 60-70 people have been shifted here. Floods have ravaged their houses, we are arranging whatever possible from our end."

Earlier in the day, Disaster Response Force (NDRF) in a statement said an extensive search is on for missing persons in Maharashtra's Raigad, Ratnagiri and Satara districts.

NDRF said its 26 teams are engaged in relief and rescue operations in Mumbai, Thane, Ratnagiri, Palghar, Raigad, Sahara, Sangli, Sindhudurg Nagar and Kolhapur in coordination with the state administration. Additional eight teams are being airlifted to Maharashtra-- four each from Kolkata and Vadodara.

Earlier, a landslide caused by in Raigad district in Maharashtra has led to the death of at least 36 persons.An NDRF team is undertaking the rescue efforts at the site of the incident and efforts are being made to airlift another team from Kurla. The team could not land on Friday due to bad weather conditions.

Meanwhile, NDRF is constantly tracking the India Meteorological Department's (IMD) weather forecast and Central Water Commission's report and taking actions accordingly, the statement said.

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The epic battles of Tololing, Tiger Hill and others were recalled and 559 lamps lit in a tribute to the martyrs at the Memorial in Drass area of Ladakh as events to mark the 22nd Kargil Vijay Diwas commenced on Sunday in the presence of top military officers, family members of the army personnel and others.

President Ram Nath Kovind is scheduled to visit Drass on Monday to pay homage at the Memorial, located on the foothills of theTololing.

A special meet recalling the many inspiring stories of Operation Vijay was organised by the Army at Lamochen near Drass early this morning which was attended by a number of military personnel including the gallantry award winners and families of heroes



An account of the battles on Tololing, Tiger Hill, Pt 4875 and other prominent features of the daring feat achieved by the valiant soldiers of the Indian Army were narrated with these very landmarks visible to the audience as they were taken down memory lane, PRO Defence Col Emron Musavi said.

At the Memorial, 559 lamps were lit, symbolic of the lives sacrificed for the nation, he said.

A fusion of military bands put up a display which was followed by a solemn 'Beating the Retreat' ceremony.

A memorial service was held where the attendees paid silent tribute to the fallen heroes with moist eyes.

Col Musavi said the last event of the day was 'A Twilight with Brave Hearts' with the soldiers at Polo Ground, Drass.

Later in the evening, a performance by the fusion band of Indian Army along with their lighted pipers was conducted, the PRO said.

He said the trailer of Captain Vikram Batra's biopic, 'Shershah' produced by Dharma Productions was also released and 'Maa Teri Kasam', a soulful and emotive song, conceptualised by Northern Command screened.

Batra sacrificed his life fighting Pakistani forces during the in 1999 at the age of 24 and was posthumously awarded the highest wartime gallantry award -- the Param Vir Chakra



Kargil war was declared over on July 26, 1999, after Indian soldiers pushed back Pakistani troops, a bulk of them drawn from the neighbouring country's Northern Light Infantry, from the captured peaks in Kargil.

The day is observed as 'Kargil Vijay Diwas' to commemorate India's victory.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his monthly 'Mann ki baat' radio address, mentioned Kargil Vijay Diwas and asked the people of the country to pay tributes to those who made the nation proud in 1999.

General Bipin Rawat, #CDS visited #Dras Sector along #LineofControl & reviewed the prevailing security situation & operational preparedness. #CDS also interacted with troops and complimented them for their high morale & exhorted them to remain resolute and steadfast.#IndianArmy pic.twitter.com/YxYPHKS8E5  ADG PI - INDIAN ARMY (@adgpi) July 25, 2021

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A total of 10,134 doses of were administered in on Sunday, taking the cumulative number to over 96 lakh, according to the Cowin portal.

The vaccines were administered at only one government centre and 76 private centres as the former remain closed on Sunday.

The city administered 69,893 doses on Saturday, 21,253 out of which were first doses while 48,640 were second doses.

The bulletin issued by the government on Sunday said the city had 70,900 doses of Covishield along with 2,16,140 Covaxin shots.

The government has said that only 20 per cent of Covaxin stocks can be used for the first dose, since its reserves are limited and its delivery cycles irregular. Also, on account of limited stocks of Covishield, the government has directed its stocks to be used only for the second dose till July 31 at all its centres.

The bulletin said that many in the 18-44 age group will be qualifying for the second dose in the coming weeks.

The city has administered over 96 lakh doses, including 23,84,076 second doses.

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A surge in Covid-19 cases following the emergence of the highly transmissible delta variant has sparked fresh health concerns and raised questions about the safety and pace of reopening, even in places where vaccination rates are high such as the U.K. Sam Fazeli, a Bloomberg Opinion contributor who covers the pharmaceutical industry for Bloomberg Intelligence, answers questions about the variant and its potential threat. The conversation has been edited and condensed.

The delta variant has caused an uptick in Covid cases, especially among the unvaccinated but also among those who have received their shots. Isnt it true, though, that vaccines offer good protection, even against this variant?

Well, its complicated by definitions. We know that vaccines were never 100% effective against an infection even before delta arrived. In the trials of Pfizer Inc.-BioNTech SE and Moderna Inc. vaccines, for example, we saw efficacy over 90%, meaning very few people tested positive for the virus. What was critical, though, was that vaccinated people in these trials were 100% protected against severe disease or hospitalization. The delta variant, as we will discuss below, has some characteristics that give it a better chance of causing an infection, which means it escapes the initial shield provided by antibodies. But vaccinated people are still at a far lower risk of developing severe disease, or if they do, their symptoms resolve more quickly. However, lets not be under any illusions  people will still die from Covid-19 even if they are vaccinated, but in far lower numbers than if they were not.



What makes delta such a threat? How does it work?

The delta variant has developed certain mutations that make it more pernicious than its relatives. It has become better at infecting cells, partly by virtue of being able to somewhat evade antibodies in either previously infected or vaccinated people. Once inside cells, it is better at replicating. Evidence for this is confirmed by much higher amount of virus (viral load) in the nasal swabs of people who are infected with delta compared with those seen in the first wave of the pandemic. That may come from a process called syncytium formation, in which infected cells fuse with normal neighbors. The process helps the virus hide from the immune system and replicate faster. The delta variant seems to make bigger clusters, which helps it create more potentially infectious copies. A higher viral load also means that an infected person may exhale more virus particles, giving it a better chance to find its next victim. All of this leads to a much higher fitness.

What are the risks of contracting a breakthrough infection?

Again, we need to be very careful here. Breakthrough infections are not at all surprising, given that we knew the vaccines were never 100% effective against an infection. And the variants are eroding their efficacy in this setting. The virus infects people through the lining of their respiratory tracts, otherwise known as the mucosal membranes. These areas may not have as many vaccine antibodies, which gives the virus a small foothold. But an infection alone may not be a reason for concern in vaccinated individuals.

How severe are the breakthrough cases were seeing? How concerning is it that even populations with high vaccination rates, such as Israel and the U.K., are seeing more of these?

Fortunately, we are not seeing breakthrough disease, i.e., the vaccines effectiveness against severe disease and hospitalization is still very high regardless of the individual variant. And remember that if vaccinated people do get an infection, their immune system will respond and actually cause some of the symptoms that we are used to with other infections, such as headache, a stuffy nose, and muscle/joint ache. Obviously people are not the same  some will have a much stronger antibody response to a vaccine than others and their immune system response to an infection will also be different, meaning different cold/flu-like symptoms. And with time a decline in antibody levels in some people who started out with a weaker immune response could permit a mild infection.





ALSO READ: WHO, ECDC call for enhanced efforts to prevent Delta transmission

Are even mild breakthrough cases a concern?

There are several issues here. One is that if you get a mild infection, then you can pass that along to someone who is not protected, though studies show this transmission is lowered in vaccinated people. You also have a risk of driving a new mutation in the virus, which ultimately makes it even better at infecting vaccinated people. This is less likely, though, given that viral replication and duration of infection is reduced such that it may not have enough time to evolve new mutations. One important question is whether vaccinated people with mild infections have the same risk of long Covid. That is the one risk that I see in a world that accepts mild Covid infections as normal.

Is a persons risk of a breakthrough higher depending on which vaccine they received?

Much of the data we have on this front is from lab tests, which can only tell you so much. This data suggests that the mRNA vaccines are better than the so-called adenoviral vaccines such as Plcs and Johnson & Johnsons. Real-world data, in which matched groups of vaccinated and unvaccinated people are compared, so far seems to suggest that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has a higher effectiveness in preventing a mild infection by delta than the vaccine, based on research published in the U.K. The effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine appears lower in Israel, based on information from the Ministry of Health, but we need much more detail to be able to assess why there is a difference between the U.K. and Israel. I also think we will find that the J&J vaccine has a lower effectiveness against mild disease. But the same types of analyses suggest that they are similarly effective against severe disease and hospitalization.

What kind of precautions should a fully vaccinated person take, knowing the delta variant is a threat?

I will tell you what I do. I wear two masks when I go out into public areas like supermarkets and shopping malls where I don't know the vaccination status of people. If I am having friends around, I make sure I know who is vaccinated and who is not, and decide on that basis whether we go indoors or outdoors. I still don't eat indoors in restaurants, and I avoid bars and pubs. I did take a plane the other day, and wore two masks and avoided crowded spaces as much as possible.

Many elderly people were the first to get vaccinated in the U.S. Should we be worried about the vaccines protection waning, and does the presence of the delta variant pose higher risks for that population?

We know that the mRNA vaccines were equally effective against the previous versions of the virus, regardless of age. They also prevented serious disease to the same extent. What we don't know is how delta behaves in older people and how their immunity evolves over time. So we should exercise caution while we figure this out.

Is it time to start rolling out boosters against delta?

I think we need to be prepared to do so, yes, especially if we continue to run our lives based on mild infection rates. We should prepare for both delta and beta, the variant first discovered in South Africa. But I am not sure the virus has finished with its evolution. Do we need boosters right now? I don't think so. But should we have vaccines on order just in case? Yes, I think we should.

What about children?

Children younger than 12 are a tough issue. The perception is that they don't get bad disease, which is true to some degree. But some are susceptible to truly bad cases. In some instances, a problem referred to as multi-system inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C) can develop. The problem is that much of the data in terms of risk to children is based on a time when we had lockdowns and many people were educating their kids from home. Also, we didn't have delta. So we are at risk of a significant rise in cases when children return to school, often without masks, in September. And then we have the added problem of a resurgence in cases of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which was heavily suppressed during the past 12 to 18 months, driven by masking and lockdowns. RSV is normally the leading cause of acute respiratory hospitalizations in infants and young children, as well as the elderly. Most infants are born with protective antibodies passed on to them by their mother, but this wont be the case for recent newborns. So the risk is these children could catch both RSV and Covid-19 at the same time. We have no idea what this means in terms of health outcomes
When the Covid rollout started, the biggest material prize was an Instagramable sticker.



Now in Hong Kong, you could score a Tesla or even an apartment in the worlds most-expensive housing market. With gold bars, a diamond Rolex and a $100,000 shopping spree also up for grabs, Its vaccine lotteries are easily the flashiest. Yet its far from the only location rolling out eye-catching incentives to try and boost flagging rates.



Russias giving away snowmobiles. West Virginians can score lifetime hunting licences and custom rifles. In Alabama, those vaccinated got offered a chance to drive on a speedway track.

As the delta variant rips through the world, pleas for people to get vaccinated are becoming more forceful in countries fortunate enough to have abundant supplies. Governments and private businesses are trying a range of tactics, from ads featuring reassuring messages from trusted local figures  like doctors or hospital workers  to efforts in places like France to limiting access to public venues.





ALSO READ: 45.37 mn coronavirus vaccine doses provided to States, UTs so far

Giveaways are the less politically fraught option, though they have raised ethical questions. While policymakers dont expect such incentives to have much effect on the outright skeptical, the hope is they may give those who are procrastinating a push over the line.



But do they push up rates? Evidence is patchy. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence of initial surges. In Hong Kong, the number of residents fully vaccinated against Covid-19 has doubled in the last seven weeks to over 2 million people, coinciding with the rollout of a host of private sector incentives.



On the other hand, a study of Ohios vaccine lottery found no evidence it had increased vaccination take-up though it did suggest rates had slowed less in Ohio than in the US overall.
Chief Minister B S



Yediyurappa on Sunday said he will take an appropriate decision, once he receives directions from the BJP high command this evening, regarding his continuation in the post.

"By evening once it comes, you will also get to know about it, once it comes I will take an appropriate decision," Yediyurappa said in response to a question whether the directions from the party high command in Delhi were expected today.

To a question on pontiffs holding a mega conclave in Bengaluru Sunday, which is seen as expressing solidarity with him, he said, "there is no need for pontiffs to hold any meet, I have confidence in PM Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah and BJP President J P Nadda."



Questioned about a Dalit Chief Minister replacing him, Yediyurappa said, "I'm not the one to decide about it, it is for the high command to decide.

Let's first see what decision they will take today..."



Asked whether he was satisfied with his work for two years, he said, "if you are satisfied that's enough for me."



Indicating that Monday might be his last day in office, Yediyurappa had recently said that based on the instructions that the central leaders will give him on July 25, he will get on with "his work" from July 26.

His government will complete two years in office on July 26.

Meanwhile, scores of pontiffs are expected to participate in a "maga conclave" to be held here on Sunday, coinciding with the possible decision by the BJP central leadership on his exit.

Dingaleshwar Swamiji of Balehosur mutt, who had held a press meet here on July 23 to inform about the conclave with other Swamijis, had refused to connect the event directly with the possible leadership change, but it is being widely seen as an attempt to muster support to Yediyurappa and send out a message.

Yediyurappa is in flood and rain ravaged Belagavi district to review the relief and rescue operation there.

Noting that he will be visiting people affected by rains and floods, the Chief Minister said after visiting some affected villages and analysing the situation there, he will be heading back to Bengaluru.

"By the god's grace, rains have receded both yesterday and today and if the situation continues in the same way for the next couple of days, I'm confident that things will come under control," he said, adding that rains receding in Maharashtra is a good sign.

(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.)
Describing the draft e-commerce rules as a perfect set of guidelines for conducting structured and transparent e-commerce business in India, the Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) has said that the rules if implemented would end the crony capitalism that allegedly exists in the current e-commerce scenario in the country.

The traders' body has also suggested to come up with a monitoring mechanism to ensure compliance of these regulations by the online majors. In a letter to the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, it has also suggested the penal actions should be taken in case the rules are violated.

Secretary General Praveen Khandelwal said that the foreign funded e-tailers and some of the prominent industry chambers are giving lame arguments to oppose draft rules.

He noted that it is a "sinister trap" of vested interests of companies duly supported by industry chambers to dislodge the draft rules. However, more than eight crore small businesses of the country are committed to oppose any wrong narrative if anyone tries to build around the draft rules, Khandelwal said.

He added that inclusive growth of e-commerce business in India largely depends on four core fundamentals -- transparent operations of e-commerce platforms, easy accessibility and adequate grievance redressal by e-commerce entities, non-discriminatory access of marketplace platforms to all stakeholders of the value-chain, avoidance of conflict of interest between marketplace platforms, sellers and various service providers on the platform.

The organisation further said that any marketplace having an equity or economic interest in any entity should not be allowed to sell goods on the said marketplace and it should be treated as "affiliated entity".

In its submission, the argued that mandatory registration of e-commerce entities conducting business through any e-mode should lay the substantial foundation of a well-defined eco-system and the extent of e-commerce landscape can easily be gauged with the registration process and shall protect consumers from rogue or fraudulent e-commerce companies.

Transparency should be the hallmark of any business activity and every e-commerce marketplace must therefore act in a transparent manner with respect to all stakeholders, namely - the customer, sellers, logistics partners and payment gateways, it said.

Therefore, all sorts of agreement between the platform and sellers registered on the said platform should be disclosed in a transparent manner disclosing all information about the sellers and products to the consumer at the pre-purchase stage, according to the traders' body.

Further, the search algorithm used by the e-commerce marketplace must be transparently disclosed and displayed to the users so that they can make informed choices.

Among other suggestions, has said that it must be ensured that consumers can reach out to senior grievance redressal officers of the marketplace entities to resolve their concerns and therefore the provision of appointment of Grievance Officer, Nodal Officer nd Compliance Officer is laudable.

--IANS

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(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 has recommended extending the tenure of three managing directors and chief executive officers (MDs and CEOs) and 11 executive directors (EDs) of public sector banks, for up to two years or until the age of retirement, whichever is earlier, as it looks to ensure stability and continuity at state-owned lenders amid the pandemic.

The Department of Financial Services (DFS), according to people in the know, has written to the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) suggesting the move, before the Board Bureau (BBB) identifies new candidates for the role of bank chiefs.

The letter, written earlier this month, recommended a tenure extension for S S Mallikarjuna Rao, MD and CEO of Punjab National Bank, until January 31, 2022, when he is due for superannuation. Raos term as MD and CEO is set to end on September 18 this year.

Similarly, the DFS has suggested giving a two-year extension to Atul Kumar Goel, MD and CEO of His term is ending on November 1. A S Rajeev, MD and CEO of Bank of Maharashtra, also has been recommended for an extension of two years beyond December 1.

Moreover, EDs have been recommended for an extension for up to two years or the age of 60, whichever is earlier. Shanti Lal Jain and Ajay K Khurana, both Bank of Baroda EDs, have been recommended for a two-year extension. A Manimekhalai (Canara Bank) and P R Rajagopal (Bank of India) have also been named for another two-year term as EDs.

Sanjay Kumar and Vijay Dube (Punjab National Bank), Gopal Singh Gusain and Manas Ranjan Biswal (Union Bank of India), Vikramaditya Singh Khichi (Bank of Baroda), Shenoy Vishwanath Vittal (Indian Bank), and Alok Srivastava (Central Bank of India) have been recommended for an extension until their age of superannuation.

In its letter to the DoPT, the DFS has noted that the proposal has been approved by the minister", the sources said.

The proposal to the DoPT was sent after consulting the Board Bureau and the final call on the matter would be taken by the Appointments Committee of Cabinet (ACC), they said.

The move comes amid the governments efforts to bring senior executives from the private sector for top posts in public sector In a public notice on June 16, the BBB had invited "applications from qualified candidates for the post of managing director& chief executive officer (MD& CEO) of (PNB) on a full-time basis".

The criteria were that the applicant should be in the age group of 45-57 years, and from mainstream banking; he/she should have spent at least one year at the board level. The compensation offered was in line with the MD and CEO of a large public sector bank.

With the DFS proposal to extend the tenure -- which is likely to be accepted by the DoPT -- the private sector participation in government banks may have to wait for a while.
On Monday, when Secretary of State will be on his way to India, his deputy, Wendy Sherman, will be in representing the interests of the US and its allies during talks with Beijing's top diplomats delivering a tough US message that it will act to defend its interests, according to senior administration officials.

"The deputy secretary is going to represent the US interests and values and those of our allies and partners. We're going to do it honestly and directly," a senior official said on Saturday.

"We're redefining this relationship... not going to be afraid to take steps when we see that our interests have to be defended," the official asserted.

Senior US officials briefed reporters ahead of Sherman's scheduled meetings with Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng and Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Tianjin on Monday during a trip to Asia that has taken her to Japan, South Korea and Mongolia.

Blinken, who will be on his way to India on Monday, is scheduled to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi and External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Wednesday when is expected to figure in their talks.

But before the US-India meetings, China's President Xi Jin Ping moved the border row between and India up a notch by going to an area in China close to the border with India.

And sending a message directed at India, China's news agency Xinhua quoted him as saying in Lhasa, "China will strengthen infrastructure construction along the border, and encourages people of various minorities to set their roots at the border, to defend the territory and build the homeland."

The meetings in Tianjin comes amid rising tensions between China and US over a wide range of issues, most recently over cybercrimes and the clampdown on democracy in Hong Kong.

A senior official said, "I anticipate very clearly that she (Sherman) will be not only representing the United States, but she will be standing up and advocating her positions that are shared around the world."

The official said that while Sherman was in Japan -- where she met Defence Minister Nobuo Kishi and Vice Foreign Minister Mori Takeo -- and in South Korea, she underscored Washington's "commitment to standing shoulder to shoulder with our allies and partners to address pressing global challenges, advance a free and open Indo-Pacific, and uphold and strengthen the rules-based order."

After Sherman's visit to Japan, Blinken spoke to Foreign Minister Motegi Toshimitsu on Thursday and "emphasised the importance of the US-Japan Alliance to peace, security, and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region and around the world," State Department Spokesperson Ned Price said.

The senior officials, who spoke on condition of not being named, outlined a strategy of building a front of allies and like-minded countries to effectively face up to China.

"A lot of our effort is really aimed at shaping the environment around China, on building resilience among allies and partners to Beijing's coercive and... and actions that are at odds with our collective interests and values and ensuring, as we said, that we can present an affirmative vision," the officials said.

"We know we're stronger when we work with our allies. We know this makes us more effective when dealing with Beijing," the official said, while taking care to add, "We aren't seeking an anti-China coalition in our work with allies and partners, but rather trying to work together in a multilateral fashion to uphold the rules-based order," the official said.

European countries have joined the US in imposing sanctions on the Chinese over the treatment of Uighars in Xinjiang province and joined the US along with other allies and the NATO last week to call out China on hacking.

The officials said that the united response to China has shown effects.

"These multilateral actions have really gotten Beijing's attention, and. in some cases, I think has actually caused Beijing in many ways to take steps that actually are potentially counter to its own interests," an official said.

The confrontations set off rounds of retaliatory sanctions, although the all the sides have been careful to avoid the upper echelons of government or act broadly against the countries given their mutual economic dependence.

After the US imposed sanctions on seven Chinese officials over Hong Kong, China farcically retaliated against Wilbur Ross, who was former President Trump's Commerce Secretary -- and already under Democratic Party attacks over census-related matters -- and five others, carefully avoiding any Biden officials.

The interlocking of economies that globalisation has brought limits the actions either side can take while many international issues and crises require cooperation.

Sherman is "going to underscore that we do not want that stiff and sustained competition to veer into conflict. This is why the US wants to ensure that there are guard rails and parameters in place to responsibly manage the relationship," an official said.

"There are important global challenges where the US and China both have an interest and where we think it's important to exchange views and explore potential areas for cooperation. So we anticipate that this will also be a focus of these meetings," the official said.

"Sherman is going to make clear while we welcome stiff and sustained competition with the PRC (Peoples Republic of China), everyone needs to play by the same rules and on the level -- on a level playing field," the official added.

Sherman's visit is the first high-level meeting between US and Chinese officials after Blinken and Yang Jiechi, the Chinese Communist Party's head of foreign affairs, met in March in Alaska.

That meeting deteriorated into an angry showdown before the media with both sides trading accusations and proclaiming defiance.

Biden has yet to meet China's President Xi Jinping although he has held a summit with Russia's President Vladimir Putin.

Democrats had made Russia out to be the biggest threat to the US because of their perception that Moscow had helped Trump with the 2016 election, but once in office reality set in for Biden who has continued Trump's confrontation with Beijing and even turned up its level.

(Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in and followed @arulouis)

--IANS

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(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.)
China's market regulator has ordered Holdings Ltd. and its affiliated to relinquish exclusive rights to labels, in what appears to be yet another case of a clampdown on the multinational technology conglomerate.

China's State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) in a statement on Saturday said, "To restore market competition, and its affiliated must end their exclusive copyrights within 30 days and stop charging high prepayment and other copyright fees."

should not demand superior treatment compared to competitors from copyright owners without justified reasons, the SAMR added. The company was also fined about USD 77,340, the SAMR statement read.

China's market regulator started a probe into Tencent in January this year after receiving market reports about the firm's acquisition of Corporation (CMC) in July 2016, Xinhua news agency reported.

The market regulator said that this is the first ruling took necessary measures under antitrust law. Those penalizing measures will help reshape the competition and lower the barrier for market entry, it said.

Meanwhile, experts believe that this development is another example of Beijing's crackdown on influential IT giants. Earlier this April, the Chinese government imposed a huge fine on Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group. Later in July, the regulator had announced probe into US-listed tech firms.

Claiming a crackdown on anti-competitive practices among Chinese internet giants, Beijing has ramped up a broader effort to clean up the operations of the country's fast-growing and freewheeling tech sector.

Chinese regulators have been calling out tech for alleged offences, including inconsistent pricing, user privacy concerns and difficult working conditions, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported.

Beijing has been infamous for using antimonopoly rules to curb the market influence of foreign firms. Tech companies have responded with pledges to be good corporate citizens.

(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.)
Some 160,000 people, including far-right activists and members of France's yellow vest movement, protested Saturday across the country against a bill requiring everyone to have a special virus pass to enter restaurants and mandating COVID-19 vaccinations for all health care workers.

Similar protests were held in neighbouring Italy.

Police fired water cannons and tear gas on rowdy protesters in Paris, although most gatherings were orderly.

Legislators in France's Senate were debating the virus bill Saturday after the lower house of parliament approved it on Friday, as virus infections are spiking and hospitalizations are rising. The French government wants to speed up vaccinations to protect vulnerable people and hospitals, and avoid any new lockdown.

Most French adults are fully vaccinated and multiple polls indicate a majority of French people support the new measures. But not everyone.

Protesters chanting Liberty! Liberty! gathered at Bastille plaza and marched through eastern Paris in one of several demonstrations Saturday around Thousands also joined a gathering across the Seine River from the Eiffel Tower organised by a former top official in Marine Le Pen's anti-immigration party.

While most protesters were calm, tensions erupted on the margins of the Bastille march. Riot police sprayed tear gas on marchers after someone threw a chair at an officer. Other projectiles were also thrown. Later some protesters moved to the Arc de Triomphe and police used water cannon to disperse them.

Marchers included far-right politicians and activists as well as angry at President Emmanuel Macron. They were upset over a French health pass that is now required to enter museums, movie theaters and tourist sites. The bill under debate would expand the pass requirement to all restaurants and bars in and some other venues.

To get the pass, people need to be fully vaccinated, have a recent negative test or have proof they recently recovered from the virus.

French lawmakers are divided over how far to go in imposing health passes or mandatory vaccinations but infections are rising quickly. More than 111,000 people with the virus have died in France, and the country is now seeing about 20,000 new infections a day, up from just a few thousand a day in early July.

More than 2 billion people worldwide have been vaccinated and information about COVID-19 vaccines is now widely available, but many protesters said they felt they were being rushed into something they're not ready to do.

Cline Augen, a secretary at a doctor's office, is prepared to lose her job under the new measure because she doesn't want to get vaccinated.

Ayoub Bouglia, an engineer, said, We need to wait a little bit before the French people can decide ... I think a part of is always going to be unwilling and that blackmail and threats won't work.

In Italy, thousands of protesters gathered in Rome, Milan, Verona and other cities Saturday, protesting the government's decision to require a Green Pass to access indoor dining, local fairs, stadiums, cinemas and other gathering places.

In the northern city of Verona, several thousand people marched down the main shopping street, chanting No Green Pass! and Freedom! They included families with young children, medical doctors who said they are risking their jobs not to get vaccinated and people who likened the Green Pass decision to decisions by fascist dictatorships.

The demonstrations proceeded peacefully and dissipated into summer evening crowds.

Despite the vocal opposition, Italy's new requirement, effective Aug. 3, has led to a boom in vaccine appointments in Italy, where so far nearly half of the eligible population is fully vaccinated.

(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.)
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador waves as he addresses supporters after polls closed in the presidential election, in Mexico City. Photo: Reuters

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador called for "a new coexistence" of all the countries of the Americas after stating that the model imposed more than two centuries ago "is exhausted; it has no future".

The Mexican President on Saturday proposed that Latin American states do "something similar to the European Union, but attached to our history, our reality and our identities", reports Xinhua news agency.

Lopez Obrador made his comments on the 238th anniversary of the birth of Simon Bolivar at Chapultepec Castle in City, during the 21st Foreign Ministers meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC).

Lopez Obrador highlighted Cuba's forbearance in the face of the US' blockade imposed more than 60 years ago.

"The people of Cuba deserve the prize of dignity," he said.

In his speech, he called for the Organization of American States to become a truly autonomous body, "not a lackey of anyone but a mediator at the request and acceptance of the parties to conflicts in matters of human rights and democracy".

Marcelo Ebrard, the Foreign Minister of Mexico, which holds the presidency of CELAC this year, thanked the representatives of the organisation's 33 member countries for attending the event in which challenges facing the region as well as those faced by each individual nation are addressed.

--IANS

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The serving Nevada's second largest metro area faces a shortage of that could force the cancellation of cargo and passenger fights, potentially restricting the flow of tourists and essential goods into the northern part of the state.

Nevada's political leaders issued a statement late Saturday pledging to minimise disruption at the Reno-Tahoe and ensure the aerial fight against Western wildfires isn't hampered. Besides serving Reno, a popular gambling destination, the is the nearest passenger terminal to Lake Tahoe.

To be clear, further failure to secure adequate fuel supplies is unacceptable, wrote Gov. Steve Sisolak, Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen, and US Rep. Mark Amodei.

Airport officials across the US West have voiced concerns about shortages and their effect on what is shaping up to be a very busy wildfire season.

demand declined sharply and supply chains atrophied during the coronavirus pandemic, according to aviation supply companies, jet fuel transport companies and They have yet to bounce back in the West even as the economy picks up and people flock to airports for long-delayed trips.

Stacey Sunday, a spokeswoman for the Reno-Tahoe Airport Authority, said the Reno airport's shortage is caused by a confluence of factors, including a scarcity of tanker truck drivers and high demand from passenger airlines and firefighting aircraft. The airport's longest runway is also under construction, limiting how much extra fuel airlines can load onto inbound flights because heavier loads require longer stopping distances.

"There's just nobody available to drive the trucks of fuel in here," Sunday said.

It's hard to predict how long the shortage will last, Sunday said. There have not been major impacts so far, but problems could arise in the coming days, she said.

Passengers were advised to check with their airline for any delays.

The governor and federal lawmakers said in their statement that they learned of the potential fuel shortage earlier this week.

We are currently speaking to all responsible parties to understand how this situation occurred and prevent future shortages, but our immediate focus is on ensuring resources to combat Western wildfires are not impacted and that there is as little disruption as possible for Nevadans and visitors who depend on reliable air service," they 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 friction between and the United Arab Emirates that had held oil markets hostage finally ended last week, with an announcement that the Emirati quota from which production cuts are calculated will be increased.

Thus ends the latest drama within the ranks of OPEC+, but the curtain did not fall before giving us a preview of how that consortium is likely to ultimately unravel. The trigger wont be the historical and political tension between the two Gulf powers, but their opposing views of the coming global shift away from fossil fuels and the way in which they can best protect their interests during the energy transition.

The Saudi- spat is part of a longstanding pattern of disagreements. Although the two countries are aligned in many ways, the relationship has been peppered with friction from the outset. Territorial disputes marred the early years of Emirati independence after 1971, and a treaty allegedly resolving the issues remained contentious for decades.

In the mid-2000s, thwarted efforts of the to build a causeway from its territory to Qatar. Even more acrimonious was Emirati action in 2009 to scupper the Saudi project of a pan-Gulf currency, after the lost the battle to host the monetary agency in its country.

More recently, the Saudis and Emiratis parted ways on the conflict in Yemen and, last month, the UAE was hit hard by a Saudi tariff on goods produced by foreign workers in neighboring countries.

But ultimately, it is not the uncomfortable geopolitical relationship that will cause the two countries to part, but diverging perceptions of the energy transition.

The UAE has a clear strategy: It seeks to attract investment and become a global leader in renewable energy and the petrochemical industry. The country has already diversified its economy; only roughly a third of government revenues comes from oil and gas in the UAE, whereas hydrocarbon revenues represent at least two-thirds of government revenue in the other Gulf Cooperation Council nations. Moreover, the UAE has become an important destination for foreign investment related to





ALSO READ: OPEC+ agrees to boost oil output after Saudi Arabia, UAE end standoff

In oil and gas, the UAE is focused on increasing its production capacity and securing markets in emerging economies  the only places where demand for oil will continue to grow in the years ahead. It is making good progress toward its goal of being capable of producing 5 million barrels of oil a day by 2030, up from 3.5 million in 2018. The purpose of this large production increase, at a time when the global transition away from fossil fuels is gaining momentum, is twofold.

First, in the short and medium term, the UAE wants to be in a position to capitalize on and monetize its oil resources as much as possible over the course of the transition. Second, in the longer term, the country seeks to ensure that it is one of the few oil producers the world still relies on, even when most of the worlds energy needs are met by other energy sources.

Even the ambitious Net Zero strategy of the Energy Agency has the world consuming nearly 25 millions of barrels a day in 2050. This number is down starkly from the approximately 90 million barrels a day the world used in 2020, but it still outstrips what the UAE hopes to produce in 2030 by a factor of five.

Riyadh has, somewhat more slowly, come to embrace a similar approach. Where the two differ most is over the timeline. As can be seen from the recent back-and-forth over production quotas, the UAE is better positioned to handle an early transition. What the recent squabble showed was not only the tension between the two capitals, but also the reality that the UAE would rather risk the breakdown of the OPEC+ arrangement than be tied to a quota that did not reflect its increased production capacity.

Clearly, the UAE feels ready to compete for market share at lower oil prices if need be, rather than restrain production to prop up prices. The revised production quota for the UAE shifted the Emirati calculation in favor of continuing to adhere to the OPEC+ strategy  for the time being.

Saudi Arabia, in contrast, is eager to keep the OPEC+ agreement alive. Before it can weather a battle for market share at rock-bottom prices, it needs more time to diversify its and attract more foreign investment into other sectors before it would be comfortable in moving away from OPECs current role in managing the markets. We are still going to be the last man standing, and every molecule of hydrocarbon will come out, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, the Saudi energy minister, told Bloomberg News this week.

The current robust growth in oil demand  from a global emerging from Covid-19  is delaying the day when the UAE will decide that the longtime strategy to constrain production and prop up prices is outdated. When the time comes, the UAE will move smartly to maximize production and focus on market share at the expense of profit. Moving in that direction now would seem unwise; that would precipitate others jumping ship from the OPEC+ approach and, with well over 5 million of barrels of spare production in the system, the price would rapidly move to the doldrums.

But the day OPEC+ fractures will come, although a spike in oil prices is likely to come before it does. Either spurred on by Iran entering the market more quickly than most predict, or by signs that demand growth is dramatically slowing or stopping, one or more producers will determine that its interests are best served by capturing the biggest piece possible of a shrinking market. The events of the past weeks suggest that the UAE  not Russia, which has little excess production capacity right now anyway  is a good candidate to lead the exit.

Regardless of which country precipitates the end of the current OPEC+ arrangement, the likely collapse in oil prices will frustrate efforts to move away from oil as the energy source becomes more, not less, affordable.
Foreign portfolio investors (FPIs) offloaded to the tune of over Rs 5,689 crore in July so far as they continued to adopt a cautious stance in view of various domestic and global factors.

During July 1-23, took out Rs 5,689.23 crore from equities, as per depositories data.

During this period, they invested Rs 3,190.76 crore in the debt segment.

So, net withdrawal during the period under review stood at Rs 2,498.47 crore.

Rising valuations, surge in oil prices and firmness in US dollar would have made foreign investors wary of the near-term risks, which would have prompted them to stay on the sidelines, Himanshu Srivastava, associate director - manager research, Morningstar India, said.

Harsh Jain, co-founder and COO at Groww, said that in addition, with Sensex and Nifty hovering around the all-time high mark, foreign investors are being cautious in investing money.

V K Vijayakumar, chief investment strategist at Geojit Financial Services, said, "They have been continuous sellers in the cash market for the last six trading days."

With respect to other emerging markets, Arun Agarwal, deputy vice president, fundamental research at Kotak Securities, said that all key emerging and Asian have seen FPI outflows this month to date except Indonesia.

"FPI flows to India is expected to remain vulnerable to monetary policy and rising crude oil prices. Additionally, investors should note that the wide valuation gap between large-caps and small and midcaps has been filled," said Shrikant Chouhan, executive vice president, equity technical research at Kotak Securities.

Srivastava added that India remains an attractive investment destination from the long-term perspective. As the macro environment improves and domestic economy starts treading on the recovery path, FPI flows can be expected to rebound
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West Bengal BJP president Dilip Ghosh on Sunday claimed Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, having "misused" central resources, now wants to meet Prime Minister "to beg for funds with folded hands".

His remark, however, drew flak of the ruling party, which said that Ghosh should be having a "better understanding of the federal system", under which a head of the state can always meet the PM.

Ghosh, while talking to reporters, also alleged that TMC members have siphoned off money from state coffers and left it near-empty.

"She has misused the funds that were allocated by the Centre and now she wants to meet the PM to ask for more with folded hands as the state has gone virtually bankrupt," the senior BJP leader said when asked about Banerjee's slated visit to the national capital.

West Bengal is facing a financial crisis due to large-scale corruption on the part of the government, Ghosh maintained.

Given the financial situation in the state, and the rising factionalism within the TMC camp, Didi has realised that she won't be able to run the state well ahead of 2024 Lok Sabha polls, he added.

Expressing shock over the state BJP president's assertions, TMC state spokesperson Kunal Ghosh said he is known for such ignorant comments.

"Does he understand about the federal set up where the head of a state can always meet the PM? Dilipda should check facts... Bengal has mopped up more revenue under the TMC rule than in the past, he noted.

Echoing him, state minister and TMC MLA Chandrima Bhattacharya sought to know if the CM has whispered into the ears of the BJP leader the purpose of her visit.

Banerjee had told reporters on Friday that the prime minister has granted her time for a meeting during her scheduled Delhi visit in the last week of July, but did not specify the date.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A "very low" stock of Covaxin and a meagre supply of the vaccines are going to badly affect the ongoing inoculation process in West Bengal, a senior health department official said on Saturday.

The state was supposed to get 75 lakh of vaccine doses this month and received 54 lakh till Friday, he said.

"The Covaxin stock in our state is very low. We have only one lakh and some small quantity in the hands of the districts. We were supposed to receive two tranches of a total of 2.55 lakh Covaxin which were not delivered as per schedule," the official said.

Till Saturday, West Bengal has received a total of 2.36 crore vaccine doses from the central government and procured at least 17.74 lakh doses, he said.

The state has vaccinated over 2.75 crore people so far and out of them, 81.9 lakh got the second dose, he said.

According to the official, the state has currently the infrastructure to administer more than 1.5 crore doses per month.

"The only constraint is getting an adequate quantity of vaccine on time," he said.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has urged the central government to allot at least three crore vaccine doses to the state.

Meanwhile, on Saturday, the Covid-19 toll in West Bengal rose to 18,604 with eight more deaths while the tally went up by another 730 new cases to reach 15,22,833, the health department said in a bulletin.

In the last 24 hours, 920 recoveries were registered in the state, which improved the discharge rate to 98.03 per cent.

Till Saturday, 14,92,878 people have recovered from the disease and the state currently has 11,891 active cases.

In the last 24 hours, 52,188 samples have been tested for Covid-19 taking the total number of such clinical examinations to 1,54,28,549, the bulletin 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.)
Here you'll find our latest collection of Caledonian-Record reports on the coronavirus outbreak and local response, from the beginning of April. Our January, February and March stories are here: https://www.caledonianrecord.com/news/local/our-coronavirus-coverage/collection_5885178c-692e-11e
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David Hughes, a former Cherokee County Department of Social Services supervisor, was indicted and booked in May 2020 on multiple charges. Photo courtesy of Cherokee County
Photo: The Canadian Press Firefighters from Mexico walk across the tarmac after arriving on a charter flight in Abbotsford, B.C, on Saturday, July 24, 2021.

VANCOUVER - The BC Wildfire Service says there are 257 wildfires currently burning in the province.

That's one fewer than Saturday's update, but down from about 300 earlier in the week.

There are now 58 evacuation orders in place, affecting about 4,400 properties.

Another nearly 17,500 properties are on evacuation alert, meaning residents have been told to be ready to leave on short notice.

One hundred firefighters from Mexico arrived Saturday to help fight the blazes, and British Columbia's public safety minister thanked them for their support.

Despite the drop in the number of active wildfires, Mike Farnworth says there is challenging weather in the forecast for the foreseeable future.
At the recent Hamilton County Commission meeting on Wednesday, July 21, much heated discussion centered around infrastructure needs of the county, specifically the condition of the roads. Most of the discussion centered around state roads in high traffic locations.

Tim Boyd, who always does his research, summarized the problem best when he said, "The builders and developers are not responsible for the condition of the roads, the government is responsible for the condition of the roads." This statement could not be more true.

We are very fortunate to have unprecedented job growth in Hamilton County. It stands to reason that people follow job growth. If the opposite were true, we would have a decline in population. As a consequence of positive growth, our infrastructure demands in high traffic areas are struggling to keep up with demands as our population rapidly expands.

As demands are placed on our infrastructure, specifically our roads, combined with rising fuel prices, transportation costs are at an all time high. Major employers in Hamilton County such as McKee, Volkswagen, Amazon all know that transportation costs are a major component to the cost of their product and ability to compete in a global market. I believe Greg Vital is the logical choice, combined with his positive relationship with the East Tennessee delegation, to approach and lobby the Republican majority in the State House to make the necessary changes needed to solve the Hamilton County transportation issues in high traffic areas.

As a job creator, and business owner Greg is all too familiar with controlling costs by investing in our future. I know Greg Vital as a successful business man, a negotiator, and a lifelong resident of Hamilton County. Greg loves Hamilton County and his community and will fight tirelessly to represent the people in District 29 State House.

I hope you will join me in voting for Greg Vital in the primary election on Tuesday and more importantly in the Sept. 14 general election.

Dean Moorhouse
Barefoot Contessa star Ina Garten loves letting fans in on her cooking secrets  including how (and with what) she stocks her kitchen. At times, fans have been truly surprised by whats in Gartens kitchen  including when everyone freaked out over the ramen noodles in her pantry. But it turns out she keeps another interesting item in the kitchen, and she even collects them everywhere she goes.

Barefoot Contessa star Ina Garten | Nathan Congleton/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank

Every once in a while, Ina Garten takes fans behind the scenes of her food empire. In the past, shes walked fans through the barn where she films her show (and where her home office is), as well as her real-life kitchen and pantry. Fans always love what they see.

When Garten took fans to her pantry during the pandemic, some noticed that she kept a surprising ingredient on her shelf: Packaged ramen noodles. Garten revealed that shed been working on a ramen chicken noodle soup recipe. Some of Gartens other pantry staples included Planters nuts and Smuckers jelly. And when it comes to cookware, Garten prefers the brand Le Creuset. Plus, she keeps certain items on her counter at all times, including lemon and garlic. This way, theyre always on hand when she wants to use them to jazz up a recipe.

RELATED:Barefoot Contessa: Ina Garten Once Revealed That Marrying Jeffrey Is What Started Her Love of Cooking

Ina Garten collects white cake stands

Gartens pantry staples didnt come as a surprise. In fact, keeping items such as garlic and lemons out and on hand isnt a bad way to cook; no wonder her dishes always have all the right flavors. And while Garten loves Le Creuset cookware, theres another kitchen item that she once revealed she simply cannot get enough of: White cake stands.

Its a bit of a strange obsession, but the cake stands have become somewhat of a collectors item for Garten through the years. Garten once revealed to Oprah Daily that she buys one almost every time she sees one.

I absolutely adore white cake stands, Garten said. Every time I see one, Im like, I have to have that. Garten said she purchases several cake stands whenever she visits Belgium, specifically. Theres a couple antique stores I always stop at  which means I end up buying six cake stands here and three more there. But we use them all!

Ina Garten also uses a spatula shes had for more than 50 years

If the cake stands came as a surprise, this might as well: Ina Gartens most trusted spatula happens to be more than 50 years old. Garten told Oprah Daily that, while she has plenty of kitchen tools, the oldest one is her favorite.

I have just what I need, and I take very good care of it, Garten said of her kitchen tools. In fact, my favorite spatula is one I received as a wedding gift, which means  and Im embarrassed to admit this  its 52 years old. Garten also added that shes tried to search for more updated versions of the same spatula but hasnt had any luck.
In 2019, Addison Rae went from an unknown teenager with a passion for dancing to one of the worlds most popular social media stars. Now, shes not just famous for her oft-ridiculed dance moves but her media appearances around the world.

Addison Rae | Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images

As such, when Netflix needed someone to star in its modern, gender-flipped telling of the classic teen comedy Shes All That, they called on Rae for the lead role in a remake of a movie that holds sentimental value, too.

Hes All That flips the script

According to Movie Babble, Shes All That was a 1999 comedy featuring Freddie Prinze Jr. as a popular high school jock and Rachel Leigh Cook as an ugly duckling who, with some help from Prinze, becomes one of the most beautiful girls at the school.

Its an oft-maligned trope in which the stunning Leigh Cook did little more than put on glasses and regular clothes to play ugly.

Not the first or last to use that trope, Shes All That follows a Hollywood tradition of films where perceived ugly ducklings need the popular people to show their inner beauty. Despite additional themes about how beauty is only skin-deep, the film was a massive hit for teens in 1999.

Now, Netflix hopes to recreate that magic through 2021 sentiments. Now, Rae will be tasked with making actor Tanner Buchanan beautiful for prom. With Leigh Cook returning in a new role, fans are divided on what they feel For Rae. However, its not about impressing anyone but her biggest fan and supporter.

Making mama proud

Shes All That may have come out before Rae was born, but it doesnt mean she hasnt seen it. According to her, the original is one of her favorite movies. My mom used to love the movie, so Id definitely seen it more than once when I auditioned, she told Sirius XM in an interview.

According to Rae, it wasnt hard to get the inspiration once the cameras rolled. She played off of Buchanan and took notes from Leigh Cook while preparing for the role. Now, she can see how it all plays out when the film is released on Netflix in August. Not likely to be a critical smash, Rae can count on the woman who first showed her the movie to be its biggest fan.

Rae is not an actor, and the extent of her career is not yet known. If this turns into something bigger, she can look back at those times that mom popped her favorite movie in and showed her young daughter the story that shes now retelling for a new young audience.

Who is Addison Rae?

Addison Rae did not have any major following when she started posting TikTok videos in 2019. Fresh out of high school, she started dancing for fun. With every video, however, Raes following grew a little bigger. Before long, brands flocked to a new brand of teen sensation to shill their products and represent them at events worldwide.

Rae was attending Louisiana State University at the time with her sights on a career in broadcast journalism. However, after crossing over the million-follower threshold, she quickly realized that she didnt need schooling to make it into the spotlight.

I remember thats when it changed for me, Rae told Business Insider in 2019. I knew I wanted to take it more seriously and expand it to other platforms. I uploaded a video to YouTube and got really active on Instagram. Before long, Rae was a member of the Hype House, a group of influencers, attached at the hip, who gang together to make content for all ages. Now, she has over a million followers.

No longer just a dancer and occasional comedian, Rae sings, acts, promotes, and even goes back to her broadcast roots from time to time. However, with her acting debut on the verge of release, shes just happy to make her mom happy.

RELATED: Addison Rae Faces Backlash After Talking to Donald Trump at a UFC Fight
As Lucifer prepares to release Lucifans from waiting game purgatory with season 6, the time is right for another round of fan theories. From Dan to Michael to Deckerstar, viewers have ideas about where things are headed for some of their favorite characters. But Tom Ellis has peoples wheels turning thanks to a recent social media post. Could he be holding the key to a major plot point for season 6 of the show? Some fans think so.

Lucifer Season 5 Episode 11 with Lauren German and Tom Ellis | John P. Fleenor/Netflix

Tom Ellis Lucifer post features a famous car

Those who keep up with Tom Ellis on Instagram noticed an interesting tease on one of the stars latest posts. And no, it has nothing to do with his physique. Rather, theres a photo that features Ellis  dressed as Lucifer  leaning on a DeLorean.

That car has become synonymous with Back to the Future, the classic blockbuster movie about time travel. Though theres no clock tower lurking in the background or a flux capacitor, theres a newspaper at dapper Lucifers feet. Ellis simple caption, Good times are coming, holds no clues, but his hashtags do. He mentions teaser, season 6, and behind the scenes. And eagle-eyed fans peeped a cool detail in the photo.

Lucifans spot a time travel nod to Chloe Deckers mom

Chloes mom showed up in season 5 and went on a date with God, but she didnt spend that much time reminiscing about the glory days of her career. However, Lucifer fans know that Penelope Decker was once an 80s sci-fi screen queen, and Ellis post is a reminder.

On the marquee behind him is the title of one of Penelopes movies, Althea: Queen of the Quarks. Fans recall the film being namedropped in the show as one of her acting credits, and it has many wondering if Lucifer is going to travel back to the 80s. John Decker was still alive when Penelope worked on the film, and Chloe has memories of that time too.

Back in December, Lucifer fans in Italy discovered a similar photo that had older, non-DeLorean cars driving past the theater. A video shows a close-up for the faux films poster with Penelope in her full purple alien costume.

The whole scenario has some viewers believing that Lucifer will jump around the timeline now that hes God. But does this have anything to do with Chloe? Or is he working on a case? A few Redditors wonder if Luci is cooking up a way to save Dan by traveling back in time. All signs point to time travel, however, and the theory is the DeLorean equates to a Marvel-like storyline.

Lucifer Season 6 arrives in September

Confirming this time travel theory wont take long, as Lucifer Season 6 drops on Sept. 10. Netflix and Lucifer cast and crew announced the news during Comic-Con @Home and on social media. Fans can look forward to 10 episodes with more Lucifer, Amenadiel, Maze, Chloe, Linda, Ella, and even Dan when the show returns. And Deckerstar is central to the plot.

let's be bad one last time #lucifer s6 arrives on @netflix september 10th pic.twitter.com/DgD0X0qrfR  Lucifer (@LuciferNetflix) July 25, 2021

While we dont expect to see Christopher Lloyds Doc or Michael J. Fox in the upcoming season, one never knows what tricks the devil has up his sleeve.

RELATED: Lucifer Season 5: Tom Ellis Says He and Dennis Haysbert Sobbed and Couldnt Get Through Their Lines in 1 Scene
Fans cant wait for Peaky Blinders Season 6, as theyve waited quite some time to see how the TV series of the Shelby family ends. So far, weve seen Cillian Murphy play Thomas Shelby, the leader of Shelby Company Limited in Birmingham, London, between the first and second World War. And he sought out help from his Aunt Polly Gray, played by Helen McCrory. Now, fans have theories regarding what will happen to McCrorys character in season 6  and they mostly center around Polly leaving the country.

[Spoiler alert: Spoilers ahead for the end of Peaky Blinders Season 5.]

Is Helen McCrory in Peaky Blinders Season 6? She died in April 2021

Helen McCrory during a Q&A at the premiere of Peaky Blinders | Anthony Harvey/Getty Images

Its unclear if McCrorys Aunt Polly Gray will make an appearance in Peaky Blinders Season 6 due to the actors death in April 2021. At age 52, McCrory died of cancer.



Im heartbroken to announce that after a heroic battle with cancer, the beautiful and mighty woman that is Helen McCrory has died peacefully at home, surrounded by a wave of loss from friends and family, her husband, Damian Lewis, announced on April 16, 2021. She died as she lived. Fearlessly. God, we love her and know how lucky we are to have had her in our lives. She blazed so brightly. Go now, Little One, into the air, and thank you.

Murphy also commented on the talented McCrory and working by her side for several years. Any material, any scene  she made it special, Murphy told The Guardian, according to Decider. She could do power and vulnerability, one after the other. She was just so cool and fun, and had such compassion for everyone she met. I was kind of in awe about how she lived her life  the way she balanced her work and her family so beautifully.

Fans have theories about what will happen to Aunt Polly

Forever part of the Peaky Blinders family.



Anthony Byrne pic.twitter.com/93SeaS2JhP  Peaky Blinders (@ThePeakyBlinder) April 19, 2021

So, what will come of McCrorys stellar character, Aunt Polly Gray, in Peaky Blinders Season 6? Those whove followed Aunt Pollys character arc know she assists Tommy in the family business. But she frequently felt conflicted by her own allegiance to her son, Michael Gray, who appeared to want to overtake the Shelby family business with his new wife, Gina Gray.

So, what will happen to Aunt Polly Gray in season 6 if McCrory was able to film her scenes? Reddit fans have a few guesses. Many think shell leave England in favor of Australia.

She left the company and the country, a fan guessed. Cut off everyone, even Michael, with the exception of Ada. Ada wont disclose where Polly is to anyone by her request.

The only logical solution I can think of is sending her character to Australia, another fan added. Shes wanted to get away from the Peaky life for a while, and now that Michael is too far gone, shes got no reason to stay.

She is already out of the story, yet another fan noted. She handed in her Letter of Resignation, like, three days after Tommy denied Michael the crown (guaranteeing a war between them). She couldnt take sides and knew she would get killed by whichever one she chose to abandon. So, she left Birmingham for parts unknown.

Others think the show creators didnt have to adjust Aunt Pollys storyline at all, as they likely knew about the cancer diagnosis prior to filming. I believe her condition was known about so there is a chance that they completed her scenes as a matter of priority, another fan commented.

Is Peaky Blinders Season 6 being filmed?

Its a wrap! Huge thanks to the cast and crew of #PeakyBlinders season 6. Youve given this one everything. And it's going to be epic



@RobertViglasky pic.twitter.com/9QGfWcd2uJ  Peaky Blinders (@ThePeakyBlinder) May 28, 2021

So, is Peaky Blinders Season 6 currently going through the filming process? According to the official Twitter page for the show, production wrapped. Now, post-production will allow the creators to give fans the final product they crave.

Its a wrap! a tweet from May 28, 2021, reads. Huge thanks to the cast and crew of #PeakyBlinders Season 6. Youve given this one everything. And its going to be epic.

Were not sure when the new season will air, but its certainly the last. Were hoping to see season 6 on Netflix by early 2022.

Check out Showbiz Cheat Sheet on Facebook!

RELATED: Peaky Blinders Season 6: Director Said Fans Will Certainly Find Out Who Betrayed Thomas Shelby
Craig Conover from Southern Charm spoke to Naomie Olindo after her breakup with Metul Shah, sharing that their connection never fizzled. He said it was the first time he had spoken to Olindo in the past three years. Adding that she was his first love and he will always care about her. We know each other better than anyone, he said. Olindo recently returned to Charleston, South Carolina after briefly moving to New York with Shah. The couple broke up after three years of dating. So, could Olindo and Conover be reuniting as a couple? Conover says he will always care about her, but they arent getting back together.

Southern Charms Craig Conover and Naomie Olindo will always have a connection

So when all of that went down, obviously she was a big part of my life, Conover said on his Pillows and Beer podcast, which he hosts with Austen Kroll. Adding he and Olindo recently connected. We talked on the phone once. One time. Because its been three years, four years. And at the end of the day, I feel like in my life, with my exs I feel like I can pick up the phone with them and nothing ever happened. But a lot happened.

Southern Charms Craig Conover, Naomie Olindo at a party |Brianna Stello/Bravo/NBCU Photo Bank

Kroll pointed out that Conover and Olindo didnt have an explosive, damaging breakup. But thats when Conover said. We never ended it, he laughed. No one actually did. We just one day never talked again. But also guys, dont freak out. Im not saying there is a future. No. But Ive been able to since the Bahamas to speak objectively about this.

The former Southern Charm couple had an amicable end

Conover said no one did anything bad in the relationship when he dated Olindo. Or unforgivable, he continued. So, theres nothing juicy. But weve talked. Kroll said the fact Conover and Olindo talked is juicy, adding he and Conover hadnt even talked. Kroll and Conover kicked off their podcast sharing that theyve been in a fight, which is why the latest episode was delayed.

RELATED: Southern Charm: Cameran Eubanks Reveals if She Thinks Shep Rose Will Leave the Show, Plus Why She Walked Away (Exclusive)

Conover laughed that he had to dish to Olindo about his fight with Kroll. I have not spoken to her, Kroll said although he wanted to reach out. But it makes me happy you have. Kroll guessed Conover and Kroll chatted for at least 45 minutes.

Craig Conover said he and Naomie Olindo are not getting back together

Conover emphasized that he and Olindo are just friends. It was very being friends, he said. And in a time where you get in these places in life where Im not saying she didnt have anyone else to talk to. But we just talked. And we used to be closer than anyone else. Its not romantic. Its not like were back together. Austin asked if weve talked, weve talked.

RELATED: Southern Charm: Its No April Fools Joke  Craig Conover Will Launch a Sewing Down South Store in Charleston (Exclusive)

But no, it was a nice conversation, he continued. Shes doing fine and the funny part is [Conovers manager] Jerry [Casselano] came in my house and was like, Do we need to talk about this? Is this gonna be a thing? I was like no, nothing changes in my life. He said even his books ghostwriter wondered if he needed to add something more after Conover spoke to Olindo. But Conover said maybe the ghostwriter should reach out to Olindo.
After two seasons of HBOs Succession, viewers moved on to another comedy satire series  The White Lotus. Although the shows seem different, numerous similarities brought fans to The White Lotus while they await the return of Succession Season 3. After streaming the new limited HBO series, the dark humor hooked viewers. Most of all, fans want to know who dies in The White Lotus?

The White Lotus cast members (L-R) Molly Shannon, Sydney Sweeney, Murray Bartlett and Chief Content Officer Casey Bloys | FilmMagic for HBO

Is Succession similar to The White Lotus on HBO?

The White Lotus episodes follow several groups of wealthy people, whereas Succession closely follows one billionaire family. The new HBO limited series portrays a week-long vacation at an extravagant resort in Hawaii over six episodes. Succession follows the life of the Roy family, primarily set in New York City. However, as fans of the series know, the billionaires often travel to luxurious locations such as a castle in England. Money is no object in either HBO series.

However, The White Lotus shows extremely wealthy people intertwined with the staff at the resort instead of only in the background on Succession. Spa director, Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), finds herself wrapped up in one guests life oddly and quickly  Tanya McQuoids (Jennifer Coolidge). Plus, newlyweds Shane Patton (Jake Lacy) and Rachel (Alexandra Daddario) dont have the picture-perfect honeymoon. Shane doesnt understand why his new bride might want to continue her career although she married into money.

RELATED: Mare of Easttown Fans Moved on to The White Lotus  Is It a Similar Murder Mystery Miniseries?

The underlying theme of wealth and class is prevalent throughout both HBO shows. Plus, someone heads home in a box during a flashback in the opening scene of the new limited series. Who dies in The White Lotus? After the first episode, fans arent sure whether the death was an accident or a murder. However, it does remind viewers of how Logan Roy (Brian Cox) swept Kendalls (Jeremy Strong) car accident under the rug with his money and power in the Succession Season 1 finale.

The White Lotus director compared the series to HBOs Succession

Filmmaker Mike White is no stranger to HBO. He was the co-creator, executive producer, writer, director, and one of the actors on the HBO series Enlightened. Although White had a bad taste in his mouth after the executives canceled his former show after two seasons, he tried again with The White Lotus. In an interview with Carrie Batton at The New Yorker, the director opened up about the similarities and differences between HBOs Succession and White Lotus.

I think of that show, Succession, White told the outlet. Its a great show, but its very kings court. You can kind of otherize them. Theyre billionaires. With White Lotus, I wanted it to be more like  this is your next-door-neighbor rich person who is part of the system.

Whites HBO series, Enlightened, also strived to tackle wealth inequality and struggles. However, Whites hope with White Lotus was to make the characters more relatable. He added that he didnt intend for viewers to look at the characters in White Lotus as bad guys. Instead, the filmmaker wanted fans to see themselves.

I wanted them to see the rich people in the show and think, Thats meI am that person. Ive said those things. Ive been defensive in that way.

Both HBO shows have an air of mystery about whats going to happen next

Like Succession, there is a mystery buried within the satirical comedy series The White Lotus. Who dies in The White Lotus? White explained to the New Yorker that he began the series with a dead body to create that ominous dark feeling  this sense of dread. Succession began with the Roy family patriarch almost dying.

RELATED: The White Lotus: Who Dies During the Vacation? Every Theory so Far

As Succession Season 2 continues, viewers watched Logan become even more vengeful and dark. Who becomes his predecessor? Both shows head down a dangerous path as viewers hypothesize over how the series answers their main question. At the same time, issues of wealth, power, and class arise. The White Lotus pulled fans who love Succession into its grips with only the first episode. The White Lotus airs Sundays at 9 p.m. EST on HBO and HBO Max.
The Pioneer Woman star Ree Drummond does more than just cook. The celebrity chef might be best known for her time slot on Food Network, but shes built so much more for herself through the years.

In 2016, Drummond expanded into downtown Pawhuska, Oklahoma, (where she lives) and opened The Mercantile  known as The Merc for short. The Merc encompasses a restaurant, bakery, and home goods store. And while there is so much to love about the space, Drummond once revealed one of her favorite things about owning such a shop.

The Pioneer Woman star Ree Drummond in 2019 | Tyler Essary/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank

The Pioneer Woman star Ree Drummond opened The Mercantile in a historic building

Drummonds ranch is in Pawhuska, Oklahoma; her Food Network intro once referred to it as the middle of nowhere. But since her rise to fame, which only sped up in 2011 when The Pioneer Woman premiered on TV, Drummond had envisioned building up her hometown. And in 2016, she brought that vision to life.

Drummond and her husband opened up The Mercantile, a complex that houses her home goods store as well as two eateries, back in 2016. Though The Merc itself is new, the building dates back 100 years. It once housed what was known as the Osage Mercantile, and Drummond brought the building back to life.

The Pioneer Woman star Ree Drummond in 2017 | Monica Schipper/Getty Images for The Pioneer Woman Magazine

RELATED: The Pioneer Woman: Ree Drummond Once Said She Credits Ladd for All My Good Ideas

Ree Drummond once revealed what she loves so much about owning The Mercantile

Drummond loves spending time at The Merc. Still, she knew it wouldnt be an easy process to get it going. In an interview with Design & Living Magazine, Drummond gave some insight into how difficult it was to bring the vision to life.

It was blood, sweat, tears, blood, sweat, tears, blood, sweat tears, over and over, but its been so rewarding, Drummond said. Things I didnt think Id be as interested in, Im really interested in  I thought I would be totally invested in the food, which I am, but my attention always seems to be on the products, so its a lot of fun.

But Drummond revealed something else to love about owning a space that so many people want to visit: The tourists themselves.

What I love about it is that it doesnt require me to travel, Drummond said. I meet so many people from different places without leaving my hometown. She also added that her father-in-law loves visiting the store and chatting with people. He finds out where everybodys from.

The Pioneer Woman star Ree Drummond | Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Hearst

Food Network star Ree Drummond has taken on other business ventures as well

The Mercantile isnt Drummonds only business endeavor outside of the show; she wears many hats. Since starting her blog back in 2006, Drummonds brand has only continued to grow. She also boasts both cookware and clothing lines, which sell at Walmart.

In addition to that, Drummond launched The Pioneer Woman Magazine back in 2017, and her blog, ThePioneerWoman.com, is still in full swing. Plus, Drummond has written plenty of cookbooks, as well as childrens books. And beyond that, she married into one of the largest cattle ranching families in the country.
Vanderpump Rules star Scheana Shay has confirmed that shes engaged to her boyfriend of two years, Brock Davies. Two months after welcoming their daughter  Summer Moon Honey Davies  Davies proposed to Shay with a massive engagement ring.

But it wasnt a diamond. Instead, it was a 12.74-carat rectangular cushion-cut pink morganite ring. Now fans are asking  what is morganite?

Vanderpump Rules star Scheana Shay | Charles Sykes/Bravo/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

The Vanderpump Rules star says she is the happiest girl in the world

Shay and Davies started dating in late 2019, and they welcomed their daughter in April 2021. On the morning of July 23, Shay took to Instagram to share her engagement news with her 1.3 million followers. She posted a pic of her and Davies sharing a kiss after he proposed.

In the caption, the Vanderpump Rules star wrote, I SAID YES!!!!!  We are engaged!!! Thank you to @brock__davies for making me the happiest girl in the world and to @kylechandesign for making me the most gorgeous ring ever!!

Davies also shared the news by posting another proposal pic and writing in the caption, I need you

Scheana Shay knew the proposal was coming

After sharing her engagement news, Shay told People magazine that she knew the proposal was coming. But, she didnt know where or when. The Vanderpump Rules star admits she was so surprised when Davies gave her a love letter and then got down on one knee.

We sit down at my kitchen island, and he gives me this beautifully printed, typed-out letter, Shay recalled. Im not even three words in and Im bawling. It was like our whole love story And then all of a sudden like a f-cking wizard magician, he bends down and pulls out this huge bouquet of flowers.

The Vanderpump Rules star has a morganite engagement ring

Shay says that Davies took her out to their balcony and proposed underneath a balloon arch that read Marry Me. Then, he gave her a 12.74-carat rectangular cushion-cut pink morganite ring with 12 diamonds set on a 14-karat white gold band.

Jeweler Kyle Chan  whos designed rings for Shays VPR co-stars Brittany Cartwright and Katie Maloney  was the mastermind behind Shays morganite sparkler. According to Vox, morganite is a light pink stone thats a variety of beryl, a clear mineral that forms in hexagonal crystals.

Vanderpump Rules star Scheana Shay is engaged  get a look at her rock! (via @toofab)https://t.co/kIkwkORaDM  TMZ (@TMZ) July 23, 2021

Morganite ranges in color from pale pink to coral. Its other varieties include emerald (green beryl) and aquamarine (light blue beryl).

Morganite was discovered in the early 20th century

In 1910, a man named George F. Kunz discovered morganite in Madagascar. At the time, he was the chief gemologist for Tiffany & Co. and the personal gemologist of banker J.P. Morgan. Because Morgan was such an avid gem collector, Kunz named the new pink stone in his honor.

How does morganite compare to diamonds? On a dollar-per-carat basis, they are much more affordable. A single carat of morganite costs about $300, while a diamond carat can cost $2,000 or more.

For example, when Ben Affleck proposed to Jennifer Lopez in 2002, he did it with a 6.1-carat pink diamond ring that cost about $2.5 million. That same size ring in morganite will set you back about $1,800.

The Vanderpump Rules star is planning a destination wedding

As for Shays upcoming nuptials, she says that they havent set a date yet. However, she is hoping that they will be able to have a destination wedding in Bali.

Thats where we first said I love you. Its a special place for us both! she explained.

Shay also confirmed that she is protecting her finances and signing a prenup before she marries Davies. As fans know, this is Shays second marriage. She split from Mike Shay in late 2016 after three years of marriage.

Vanderpump Rules season 9 premieres this fall on Bravo.

RELATED: Vanderpump Rules: Scheana Shay Reveals Her Biggest Regret From the Last 10 Years on the Show
The final, but uncertified, vote was 638-594 in favor of Joshua Sam.
Mixville Park pavilion is going to get a facelift after the Town Council voted to accept funds from the John G. Martin Foundation. The funds will be used to reconfigure the main pavilion so it can be serve as an outdoor multi-use center for those using the recreation area.

The Council accepted $150,000 for the renovation at its July 13 meeting.

The pavilion over at Mixville has been in disarray for a while now, and its fantastic that we can finally give it the attention that it needs, said Councilor Don Walsh.

Frank Loehmann, who serves on the Foundations Board of Directors, was credited by the Council as being instrumental in securing this funding for the park, and members made sure to thank him for his efforts.

We really want to highlight what an incredible man Frank is, began Council Chairman Rob Oris. From being responsible for the new building signs around town and now helping with this, Frank is really someone this town cannot take for granted.

Loehmann, who currently serves on the Towns Public Safety Commission, thank the Council for its recognition and went on to explain his love for Cheshire.

I wanted to make sure that when people come into our town they are greeted with the best and most beautiful signs, he said. I have a lot of love for this town and consistently want to help it get better. We did the signs, we also helped out the Dog Park when they needed help with their fencing, and now we want to help Mixville. I already have my sights on the next project, too.

Loehmann also highlighted his relationship with Parks and Recreation Director John Gawlak as one of the driving forces in the Town securing this grant.

The pavilion will now be called the John G. Martin Outdoor Center, with an aim to help serve the towns youth by providing a space for education on the natural world.

The Foundation, created in honor of the former president of Heublein, Inc. who died in 1986, honors Martins legacy by contributing to the education of Connecticuts youth by financially supporting a variety of initiatives.

The new outdoor center will allow for enhanced summer camp activities as well as an area of refuge, according to the grant proposal. The new center will also serve as equipment storage and could shoulder seasonal outdoor education programs as the Park and Recreation Department sees fit.
3 places to go before summer ends

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It is hard to believe but summer is rapidly drawing to a close.

Now is the time to get out and go somewhere.

You might, however, be surprised by the crowds. Thats because pent-up demand and effective vaccines have fully recovered domestic travel to pre-pandemic levels.

For those wanting to ease their way back to normalcy, the following three destinations are slightly off the beaten path. Each can also be reached by car, which is important since airport rental cars are few and far between.

Lunenburg

With Canada reopening its border to vaccinated Americans in early August, the Nova Scotia town of Lunenburg is a great destination for a late summer trip.

Lunenberg, located along Nova Scotias scenic South Shore, features a postcard-perfect, UNESCO-listed historic old town.

Think colorful wooden houses and maritime warehouses. Many of the houses, which once belonged to fishermen or merchant mariners, feature a local adaption of bay windows called the Lunenburg Bump.

One of the big landmarks is St. Johns Anglican Church on Cumberland Street. The church, the second-oldest Protestant church in Canada, was built in the 1750s using wood salvaged from a Boston church only to be heavily restored following a fire in 2001. Originally designed in the New England meeting house style, it took on an ornamented carpenter Gothic appearance in the mid-19th century.

Cincinnati

This Ohio city punches well above its weight with several excellent museums.

Cincinnatis eponymous museum, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and the smaller Taft Museum of Art are joined by three other niche museums.

Across the Ohio River in neighboring Kentucky is the Creation Museum, which tells the story of biblical creation. Even an agnostic will admit the exhibits are done well. In fact, the museum makes it clear that Christianity and science arent mutually exclusive of each other. About 40 minutes away is Ark Encounter, a full-size replica of Noahs Ark.

Back downtown at Union Terminal is the Nancy and David Wolf Holocaust & Humanity Center, which tells the story of the Holocaust. This is partly done through the latest technology  allowing visitors to see the faces and hear the voices of survivors who settled in the Cincinnati area.

Fort de Chartres

The partially reconstructed fort, near Prairie du Rocher in southwestern Illinois, sits along the Mississippi River.

It was first built in the 1750s by the French when this swath of the Mississippi River Valley was called the Illinois Country. At the time, Fort de Chartreswas the frontier of the frontier.

Several hundred miles to the east the French and British, along with their respective Indian allies, were fighting for control of the continent in the North American theater of the Seven Years War  a war started by George Washington in present-day Pennsylvania.

The 51st annual Fort de Chartres Rendezvous, featuring authentically dressed reenactors, takes place Sept. 11-12 on the grounds of the Fort de Chartres State Historic Site.

Nearby is the all-but-vanished Kaskaskia, the first capital of Illinois under the American flag.

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Chinese authorities raid Zoom church service, order pastor to stop preaching

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Police officers and Chinese Communist Party officials raided a church in Guangdong Province, which advocates for justice in China, while its pastor and elder were leading an online worship service on Zoom, forcing the two to stop preaching.

Security agents, police officers and other officials surrounded the Shenzhen Trinity Gospel Harvest Church in Shenzhen city and forced Pastor Mao Zhibin and Elder Chu Yanqing to stop preaching, the U.S.-based group China Aid reported.

The incident took place earlier on July 11, about three months after a church member, Shi Minglei, also known as Hope, fled to the United States. Hope was also attending the online service that was raided.

Pastor Mao and elder Shen Ling also recently signed A Joint Statement by Pastors: A Declaration for the Sake of the Christian Faith, led by Pastor Wang Yi of the heavily persecuted Early Rain Covenant Church.

In April, several members of Early Rain Covenant Church were arrested for participating in an Easter worship service on Zoom and ordered to cease all religious activity.

Persecution watchdog group International Christian Concern reported at the time that the Christians were participating in a Zoom worship service from their homes on Easter Sunday when six leaders were arrested and detained by the Public Security Bureau.

The 5,000-member Sichuan house church has not been able to gather in person since the communist regime shut down the church in 2018 and arrested their pastor and other leaders. Since then, it has opted to gather online.

At that time I was also in the Zoom call, but there was a long period of time where I did not hear a thing, a member of ERCC was quoted as saying. I thought its the network connection issue at first, but I soon heard a quarrel erupt. Our co-worker Wang Jun was questioning some people, [saying], Who are you to do this [to us]?

Open Doors USA, which monitors persecution in over 60 countries, estimates that there are about 97 million Christians in China, a large percentage of whom worship in what China considers to be illegal and unregistered underground house churches.

Authorities in China are also continuing their crackdown on Christianity by removing Bible Apps and Christian WeChat public accounts as new highly restrictive administrative measures on religious staff went into effect this year.

China is ranked on Open Doors USAs World Watch List as one of the worst countries in the world when it comes to the persecution of Christians.

The country has also been labeled by the U.S. State Department as a country of particular concern for continuing to engage in particularly severe violations of religious freedom.

Authorities in China are also continuing their crackdown on Christianity by removing Bible apps and Christian WeChat public accounts as new highly restrictive administrative measures on religious staff went into effect this year.
CofE vicar faces firing for hugging parishioner at funeral, going maskless to sing last verse of hymn

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A diocese of the Church of England is investigating a vicar and has threatened him with disciplinary action, including firing, for singing the final verse of the Easter hymn Thine be the Glory without wearing a mask and thereby breaking the denominations COVID-19 guidelines.

The fact that someone would report me to the (church) authorities over this is quite upsetting, the Rev. Charlie Boyle, the vicar of All Saints Church in Poole, Dorset, says in a statement released by the Christian Legal Centre, which is supporting Boyle.

The Diocese of Salisbury received a complaint against the 52-year-old vicar after he sang the hymn during an Easter Sunday service without wearing a mask, although he is exempt from wearing a mask as he is asthmatic.

The Archdeacon of Dorset launched the investigation after Boyle refused to resign quietly, Spiked noted in an op-ed, adding that the government guidance on places of worship at the time stated that those who are leading services or events in a place of worship were exempt from wearing a face covering.

The Archdeacon visited Boyle and told him that he should leave his post and the vicarage by the end of July.

The allegations against the vicar include singing Thine Be The Glory while walking down the church aisle, hugging someone at a funeral, placing Bibles on pews (which had been in storage for a year) and failing to take overall responsibility for COVID risk assessments of the church, according to Premier Christian News, which also noted that Boyle is evangelical and he brought in more modern music and structures to grow the church.

The way that Ive been treated personally by the diocese of Salisbury has been very heavy-handed  when really, what we could had was just a conversation over the phone, Boyle was quoted as saying.

There was hardly anyone in the church anyway, the CofE minister was quoted as saying, concerning the allegation that he sang a portion of the hymn without wearing a mask. I feel shocked and saddened that they could be so petty.

Referring to the accusation that he hugged a parishioner during a funeral, Boyle said, Do you know what? Id do it again. Its an involuntary reaction of comfort. I feel sad that the whole world has got to this stage where people will complain behind your back about giving a hug to somebody. The motivation to hug someone is out of kindness and love.

A spokesman for the diocese was quoted as saying: The Diocese cannot comment on individual cases. High standards of integrity and service are expected from our clergy. Occasionally clergy fall short of what is expected and complaints are brought against them. These matters need to be dealt with in a formal and confidential way. The Clergy Disciplinary Measure can be used by anyone who has a formal complaint. Such complaints need to be thoroughly investigated with pastoral support always being offered at the same time.
Republicans unveil legislation to block federal funding of colleges that offer abortions

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Pro-life groups are celebrating congressional Republicans' introduction of legislation that would block federal funding for colleges and universities that provide abortions or abortion pills to students.

At a press conference Wednesday morning, Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, and Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., unveiled the Protecting Life on College Campus Act of 2021. At the event, hosted by the pro-life group Students for Life of America, the lead sponsors of the legislation illustrated the need to protect college students and preborn children with this important landmark pro-life legislation.

This legislation is the next logical step in our quest to protect life, Roy said. He lamented the rapid rise in the share of chemical abortions (abortion pills) as the percentage of all abortions conducted in the United States, which has increased from 6% of all abortions in 2001 to around 40% 20 years later.

Roy indicated that a California law provided the impetus to introduce the legislation. Starting in 2023, every public university in California will be required to provide chemical abortion pills to their students, he explained. According to Roy, This legislation aims to stop that from expanding and indeed hopefully, we can  impress upon the people of California to turn back on this foolish path that theyre taking.

He described the situation in California as a preview of what is to come if good people do nothing, warning that similar legislation to the California law has been proposed in other states. The introduction of the Protecting Life on College Campus Act of 2021 comes as pro-abortion activists have worked to loosen the requirements for distributing the abortion pill so that women could obtain the abortion pill by mail without having to see a doctor in person first.

Earlier this year, abortion advocates succeeded in getting the Biden administrations Food and Drug Administration to lift the ban on obtaining the abortion pill by mail during the coronavirus pandemic. A judge had previously struck down the ban last year, but the Trump administration succeeded in getting the U.S. Supreme Court to order its reinstatement. At the press conference, Roy slammed the push for women to perform do-it-yourself abortions.

We shouldnt be a country where we take women at their most vulnerable time, when theyre young, theyve gone off to college  and essentially allow for there to be chemically induced abortions for a do-it-yourself abortion and what that does to the psychology of the young woman and what that does for obviously the life of the unborn, he declared.

While much of the press conference focused on the dangers of abortion pills, the legislation would cut off federal funds from all colleges that provide the option for their students to obtain any type of abortion on campus, chemical or surgical.

During his remarks, Daines asserted that chemical abortions are dangerous and they target very vulnerable young women.

We cant let our campus clinics become abortion clinics. The craziness in California, and theyve gone crazy out there in California, that can become the mainstream in America, he continued. It is time for Congress to pass this life-saving bill.

As Rep. Mary Miller, R-Ill., another member of Congress working to pass the bill, explained, After the initial abortion pill kills the baby in the womb, the mother takes a second pill that forces her to pass the dead child while all alone.

Miller slammed the abortion industry for telling girls that once they take  this pill, they are no longer pregnant. She characterized that claim as false, noting that the abortion pill causes you to go into labor and you will give birth to a dead baby by yourself, alone, without medical attention.

In addition to elected officials, activists from pro-life groups also spoke at the press conference. Students for Life of America President Kristan Hawkins asserted that schools should not be in the business of ending the lives of future students.

Former Republican Congresswoman Marilyn Musgrave, who now serves as vice president of government affairs at Susan B. Anthony List, elaborated on the side effects of abortion pills: Potential complications include severe bleeding, intense pain, infection caused by incomplete abortions, physical and emotional trauma and even death in some instances.

Musgrave also noted that six states have passed chemical abortion safeguards into law. The Family Research Council identified those states as Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Montana, Ohio and Oklahoma.

Toni McFadden, Students for Lifes minority outreach and healthy relationships director, testified about her own experience with a chemical abortion. She recalled how two months after taking the abortion pills, she started severely hemorrhaging with blood clots the size of my fists leaving my body.

I went home, sat on the toilet for hours, waiting to flush my dead baby down the toilet, she added. I could have been one of 24 women that we know of who have died taking these very same pills.

According to the text of the legislation, the Protecting Life on College Campus Act of 2021 would prohibit the award of Federal funds to an institution of higher education that hosts or is affiliated with a student-based service site that provides abortion drugs or abortions to students of the institution or to employees of the institution or site.

The bill would also require colleges and universities with one or more school-based service sites to submit an annual report to the Secretary of Education and the Secretary of Health and Human Services certifying that no such site provides abortion drugs or abortions to students of the institution or to employees of the institution or site.

Even before the introduction of the Protecting Life on College Campus Act of 2021, pro-life groups have put together in-depth studies highlighting the dangers of abortion pills.

Students for Life of America recently collaborated with Charlotte Pence Bond, the daughter of former Vice President Mike Pence, to create a docuseries titled This is Chemical Abortion featuring five short videos on the topic. Last year, Live Action put together an investigative report on the dangers of the abortion pill as part of its campaign called Abortion Pill Kills.

In addition to Roy, Daines and Miller, the Protecting Life on College Campus Act of 2021 has been cosponsored by more than 50 House Republicans. The bill faces an uphill path to passage in Congress as Democrats, who support expanded access to abortion, control the House, the Senate and the White House.
Removing parents incentive to work undermines intent of child tax credit, policy expert warns

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The Internal Revenue Service distributed the first payments for the newly expanded Child Tax Credit last week, which Democrats praised and Republicans derided as an anti-work welfare check that is not pro-family and disincentivizes work.

A component of President Joe Bidens American Rescue Plan signed in March, the first enhanced Child Tax Credit was worth roughly $15 billion and reached 35 million families on July 15, with an average payment of $423.

Families should receive $3,000 for every child from age 6 to 17 years old, and $3,600 annually for every child younger than age 6 under the expanded child tax credit. This is an increase from $2,000 per child in 2020.

The income-based payments begin to phase out for individuals earning more than $75,000 and married couples earning more than $150,000, Fox Business reported.

Families whose earnings are too high to qualify for the payments can still receive the $2,000 tax credit for their child if their income level is below $200,000 for individuals and $400,000 for married couples.

For the first time in our nations history, American working families are receiving monthly tax relief payments to help pay for essentials like doctors visits, school supplies, and groceries," Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a statement. "This major middle-class tax relief and step in reducing child poverty is a remarkable economic victory for America  and also a moral one."

The IRS sent out the first of six monthly payments last Thursday. The monthly payment is up to $300 for each child younger than age 6 and up to $250 per month for each child ages 6 through 17, according to the IRS.

There is no limit to the number of children per family who can receive the credit.

The Treasury Department claims that the American Rescue Plan will lift over 5 million children out of poverty this year and cuts child poverty in half.

"We did what we promised," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said of the child tax credit on Tuesday. "Help is on the way. Help is here. Money in the pocket. Children going back to school, people going back to work. Money in the pockets of the American people, vaccines in their arms."

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said "no greater thing" has helped American families more than the expanded child tax credit.

Republican leaders are not opposed to a child tax credit, but criticize the enhanced tax credit, which they believe "replaces work with welfare checks."

Connor Semelsberger, director of Federal Affairs, Life and Human Dignity for the Family Research Council, told The Christian Post in an emailed statement that though a Child Tax Credit is pro-family, removing the incentive to work undermines its intent.

The Child Tax Credit is an important pro-family policy that recognizes even hardworking parents need economic support to care for and grow their families, Semelsberger told CP. However, what has always been established from the inception of the policy is that it is a benefit for taxpaying families. Whether that is a family with one or both parents working, the goal of the policy is to provide families who pay taxes with further financial flexibility to meet their childrens material, educational and spiritual needs.

Semelsberger said the economy instead needs policies to help families rediscover the value of work over welfare checks.

The goal of increasing the amount of the Child Tax Credit to adequately respond to the economic needs of families is laudable, he continued. However, the removal of the requirement to work completely undermines the original intent of the Child Tax Credit. In an economy with more job openings than willing workers, we need policies that help families rediscover the dignity that comes with working to provide for your family and country, not one that replaces work with welfare checks.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said the child tax credit disincentivizes marriage and working families, saying it is anti-work, and it certainly isnt pro-family.

Over the next six months, some American households with no working adults will receive over $6,000 in cash payments from the federal government, Rubio said in a statement.

In the past few months, Rubio said Americans have seen the destructive consequences of when the government pays people not to work.

Rubio is not unsupportive of a child tax credit and has worked in the past to help expand the credit for families.

The way President Biden tells it, the handout is part of his administrations pro-family plan. In reality, he has transformed the pro-worker, pro-family Child Tax Credit into an anti-work welfare check, Rubio added.
Trump appointee upholds Indiana University's COVID-19 vaccine mandate

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Indiana Universitys COVID-19 vaccination mandate was recently upheld when a federal judge sided with the university over eight students who claimed the requirement is "unconstitutional."

In a Sunday ruling, Judge Damon Leichty of the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of Indiana rejected the students' motion for a preliminary injunction allowing the state's flagship university to uphold its vaccine requirement while the lawsuit is adjudicated.

"Even assuming in certain respects irreparable harm and an inadequate remedy at

law, the students here havent established a likelihood of success on the merits of their

Fourteenth Amendment due process claim, or that the balance of harms or the publics

interest favors the extraordinary remedy of a preliminary injunction, before a trial on the

merits," the judge wrote.

Indiana University, a public research institution based in Bloomington, Ind., announced the vaccine mandate in May, requiring all students, faculty and staff to be fully vaccinated or have an approved exemption by Aug. 15 or upon returning to campus.

If a student is granted an extremely limited religious or medical exemption, they will be subject to additional requirements for not receiving the vaccine. These include testing twice a week, a mandatory quarantine if exposed to someone who tests positive, mandatory face masks in public spaces and mandatory return to their home address if the campus has a virus outbreak.

If unvaccinated students with an exemption fail to comply with these requirements, the plaintiffs claim they face disciplinary action up to and including dismissal or termination from the university.

Students who do not meet exemption requirements and refuse to receive the vaccine will have their class registration canceled, card access and access to IU systems terminated and can not participate in any on-campus activities.

The lawsuit alleged the universitys mandate violates the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which includes rights of personal autonomy, bodily integrity and the right to reject medical treatment.

Plaintiffs also claim the mandate is a violation of Indianas vaccine passport law that prohibits state and local entities from requiring vaccine passports or immunization status. The law also specifies there should be no negative consequence for not producing an immunization record.

The Trump-appointed judge ruled it is in the legitimate interest of public health to uphold the universitys vaccine mandate.

The legal team for the eight graduate and undergraduate students filing the lawsuit, Americas Frontline Doctors and the Bopp Law Firm, appealed the judges decision on Tuesday.

Continuing our fight against this unconstitutional mandate is necessary to guarantee that IU students receive the fair due process theyre owed by a public university, James Bopp, Jr., director of litigation for Americas Frontline Doctors and lead counsel in the lawsuit, said in a statement.

The appeal asked the district court to prevent IU from upholding the vaccination requirement while the appeal is pending.

An admitted IU students right to attend IU cannot be conditioned on the student waiving their rights to bodily integrity, bodily autonomy, and consent to medical treatment like IU has done here, Bopp continued.

IUs Mandate did not properly balance the risks (both known and unknown) of the COVID vaccine to college-age students against the risks of COVID itself to that population and that college-aged students have a very low risk of adverse effects from a COVID infection."

Dr. Simone Gold, the founder of Americas Frontline Doctors, reiterated that the organization will continue to pursue equal justice for all students and all people according to the rule of law.

We are troubled to see the Court show any hesitation in their resolve to recognize and protect each persons sovereignty over their own body, Gold said in a statement. "Voluntary consent to receiving medications is black letter law since World War II.

Gold said it is unreasonable and unethical to mandate or coerce students to take a new vaccine lacking long-term safety data.

In a time when information is spread faster and farther than any previous point in history, it is critical that those in positions of authority are thorough and factual in their consideration of the data relevant to the policies they seek to implement, Gold continued. No fact could be more relevant to the issue of student vaccine mandates than the statistically near zero risk to the students themselves.

The Christian Post reached out to IU for comment but did not receive a response by press time.

More public and private universities across the country have imposed COVID-19 vaccine requirements on their students for the fall even though COVID-19 vaccines have only received emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration. The vaccines have not yet received full approval. Parents and students are speaking out in opposition to these vaccine mandates.

Olivia Sandor, a rising college freshman who planned to attend Brigham Young University-Hawaii, was recently denied a medical exemption for the vaccine despite having a rare and life-threatening condition. She can no longer attend her dream university because of the school's vaccine mandate and the denied medical exemption.

Dr. Robert Malone, an mRNA vaccine technology pioneer, has warned that reports have linked the vaccine to heart inflammation and other health problems.

Malone appeared on Fox News last month to discuss his concerns about the vaccine for those who are not at as high of a risk for COVID-19, like children and young adults.

"[O]ne of my concerns are that the government is not being transparent with us about what those risks are," Malone said. "And so, I am of the opinion that people have the right to decide whether to accept vaccines or not, especially since these are experimental vaccines."

The CDC released an update last week which lists anaphylaxis, thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, myocarditis and pericarditis and even death as adverse but extremely rare side effects of COVID-19 vaccines.

The CDC is also tracking cases of heart inflammation associated with the mRNA coronavirus vaccine.
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Gods kingdom, you may have heard, is an upside-down one. Its the place where the first are last and the beggars sit at the head of the table. Its the place where we love our enemies and where no one is left behind. Our mission in the pursuit of this kingdom is likewise to understand the paradox of faith. Why, for instance, would someone care about another person half a world away whom they have never met? Why would a family open their doors to a stranger who, by this worlds standards, has nothing to offer?

And yet this is what is happening every year as orphaned and forgotten children are placed in families. Although its numbers have decreased in recent years due to government regulations, and an increase in adoptions within countries, every year thousands of families welcome children into their homes whose countries are not their own.

For the past year this movement of Gods upside-down kingdom has, on the surface, slowedhalted at timesas families and children have waited to be brought together for the first time. For months, COVID-19 shut down international adoptions completely. As most countries have begun to open their borders again, more than 400 families across the United States are still waiting to be united with their adopted children in Chinathe only country still not open to international adoptions.

Here at Lifeline, we have always seen an ebb and flow of countries temporarily closing their borders because of various reasons. But we have never seen it happen all at once.

In the blink of an eye, it seems, adopted children were unable to find their way to their forever homes. Stop and think about the physical and emotional toll this takes on both parties. The process of international adoption was halted. Families waited. Children waited. Care workers waited.

And yet this is where Gods kingdom might appear to not make sense. Because waiting for God means something entirely different than what it may mean for so many of us. It is not remaining inactive or in a state of repose, as until something expected happens, as the dictionary would have us believe. Waiting, in Gods upside-down kingdom, is not idle; instead, it is this: but they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint (Isaiah 40:31).

Waiting = forward movement. For the families seeking to adopt, waiting has meant a renewal of a commitment, an active seeking to work together in creative ways even as they have waited upon the Lord to move mountains (i.e., open borders). Since we began doing international adoptions in 1999, we have never seen the orphanages, group homes, and foster homes that we work with care for the kids so well. We have never seen the waiting families support the children so well, jumping in to help the caregivers financially, sending care packages, writing letters of support, and of course, praying. Waiting in this new world looks like going above and beyond for the sake of the children.

Families who adopt internationally, in fact, are heroes, and heroes that, as the church, we have the opportunity to support. They model the upside-down world of Jesus in how they love the forgotten and wait expectantly. And yet how often do we forget that we have this opportunity to care well for our adopting families? Thirty percent of our churches in this country have orphan care ministries, but all of us are called to support the families who feel called to adopt.

But how do we do this well? How do we set our hearts on the path to this type of compassionate care? Let me offer three ideas.

First, consider your own adoption journey.

The process of international adoption directly reflects our own adoption story. These families open up their homes to a child who, from a worldly perspective, has nothing to offerno wealth, no notoriety. But these families are compelled by something larger than what they can see. So too we were adopted into Gods family when we had nothing to offer. Romans 5:8 reminds us that God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. The first step in caring for families seeking to adopt is to recognize we have much to learn from them as it relates to Gods adopting us. The model Gods heart for the world.

Second, be about the churchs mission.

Scripture is clear that we are here to seek and save the lost, not to defend ourselves and reject the other. Our churches exist to glorify God, and the only way we can do that well is to care for those in our midst and to love those not yet under our care. Families who adopt remind us of our core missiondiscipleship and evangelism, personal care and committed outreach. Too often, we believe that we define our own mission. However, when we realize that as the church we are to reflect the bigger mission of God, we begin to see things we could not see. In the case of families seeking to adopt, this means we allow ourselves to enter their world. We must walk alongside them in good times, and in bad.

Third, love in tangible ways.

Words are powerful, but words are never enough. As we support families seeking to adopt, we speak words of hope and connection to them. But once we (1) consider our own adoption journey and (2) seek to be about Gods mission, we will want to go above and beyond simple verbal platitudes. Our churches can be places where we tangibly step into partnership with these families. We pray with them, spend time with them, hear their stories, offer financial support, and assist with immigration processes and administrative needs. We provide support groups and allow space for them to share their stories. In short, we seek every way possible to walk alongside them.

As the world opens up again and international adoption allows waiting families and children to finally come together, lets not miss the upside-down work God is doing in our day. God is asking His church in every part of the world to look beyond what we can see and imagine a world where no children are without a forever home. That kind of dream begins with you and me caring well for those who have already begun to make that dream a reality.
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Conversations matter. Weve seen that more than ever recently amidst reports of growing polarization as people become more and more immersed in social media echo chambers, such as this news story from NBC. Its become so rampant, in fact, that Duke University has established an entire research lab devoted to the study of polarization as a result of social media usage.

The Internet was supposed to change the world for the better. Here was a tool to open up a world of new possibilities and global harmony as it enabled the free flow of ideas on the information superhighway. But the main gateways of todays Internet, such as Facebook, Google and YouTube, have worked out that they achieve their best results (i.e. advertising revenue) by feeding people what they want to hear and watch in their news feeds. Rigged algorithms perpetuate a feedback loop  the right-winger only hears from those with the same views as himself; the radical feminist exists in an online world largely sympathetic to her own perspective. The same goes for the average religious or anti-religious web user. It allows people to live in an echo chamber where they can be protected from people who disagree with them.

The increasingly partisan nature of the online world tends to escalate the problem of having good conversations. Visit any Facebook group dedicated to discussing religion and youll find things can get vitriolic very quickly. Many conversations descend into the equivalent of verbal hand grenades being lobbed over the barricades of our carefully erected worldviews.

Atheists attack faith-heads while believers respond in kind by demonizing their opponents. Its not helped by the fact that online interactions are devoid of the tone, emotion and body language from which we take so many clues in our face-to-face conversations. A smiley emoticon isnt quite the same as actually giving someone a genuine smile.

In my past 15 years hosting the Unbelievable? radio show and podcast, Ive tried to reboot the concept of good conversations, and the effect its had on me and those who listen in. In the process, Ive aimed to put the God discussion back into the public sphere and get so-called opponents listening to each other again. There have even been some minds changed along the way, including mine.

I also seek to widen the conversation. What if we tried talking to people outside our own bubble? What can we learn from inviting people outside the Christian faith into our big conversations?

Bubbles are made for popping, and in our Internet age, both believers and non-Christians are only a Google search away from radical skepticism about Christianity. If Christians want to reach out and share their faith, they need to be prepared for the arguments they will encounter.

But modern apologetics has an image problem, often being viewed as the sole province of academics and intellectuals. Philosophical arguments for God and historical pieces of evidence for Christianity can be seen by the average Christian as an abstract exercise, far removed from the real-life world.

Because of the apologetics circles, I tend to move in, I know of many people for whom the rational case for Christianity was a significant part of their journey towards faith. But for most Christians who embraced faith at an earlier stage in their lives, apologetics is often something discovered after conversion.

I didnt become a believer on the basis of a well-thought-out argument for faith. Rather, I had an experience that convinced me of the truth of Christianity. However, once that conviction had taken root, I was regularly challenged with reasons to doubt that experience and abandon my beliefs. This is when apologetics came into its own, providing objective evidence that confirmed the subjective experience of my encounter with God.

In the present climate of argumentative and antagonistic debates (especially online), the sane, measured and usually friendly discussions I host between intelligent people have struck a chord with audiences.

Debates are somewhat pointless if they merely reinforce each sides views. But good conversations have a habit of getting beyond the rhetoric and point-scoring of a debate, and instead, open up a space for genuine learning. At their best, such discussions cause people to rethink their views and make room for new ways of understanding.

In an age of fake news, fake tans and even fake spirituality, people are looking for authentic conversations on faith, to help them make up their own minds. We are rarely granted absolute proof of anything in life. Rather than seeing doubt as the enemy of faith, Ive come to see it as an inevitable part of the process of making sense of our beliefs. And if we arent talking to one another anymore, it means we stand little chance of understanding others.

Iron sharpens iron is a proverb often used by believers to describe the way they can benefit from mutual spiritual encouragement. But I have found the same applies when believers and non-believers dialogue. Ones worldview may take a few knocks in the process but, if the conversation is entered into in the right frame of mind, a brittle faith can be tempered into an altogether tougher, sharper one in the end.
At least 3,400 Nigerian Christians killed, 3,000 abducted so far in 2021, NGO estimates

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A Nigerian civil society organization estimates that over 3,400 Christians have been killed by extremists since January, a number that nearly surpasses the number of Christian deaths Open Doors USA estimated in Nigeria for all of 2020.

The Anambra-based International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (Intersociety) released a report this week estimating that at least 3,462 Christians have been killed by extremists in just 200 days, while at least 3,000 Christians have been abducted. The report also estimates that no fewer than 300 Churches and 10 priests have been attacked.

The report comes as global human rights activists continue to raise the alarm about the troubling trend of deadly attacks carried out on communities in the farming-rich Middle Belt of Nigeria by radicalized Fulani herders and the country's northeast by Islamic extremists.

Intersociety, an organization headed by Christian criminologist Emeka Umeagbalasi, relies on what it deems to be credible local and foreign media reports, government accounts, reports from international rights groups and eyewitness accounts to compile statistical data.

Due to the lack of adequate government record keeping, death tolls reported by media outlets or government are estimates and often are skewed.

The number of Christians killed so far in 2021 is just 68 deaths less than the total deaths of Nigerian Christians for all of last year, which Christian persecution watchdog organization Open Doors reported as 3,530.

Intersociety estimates that Benue state has the highest number of recorded Christian deaths this year, with 450 recorded deaths. Kaduna state was second with 410 Christian deaths, the group noted.

Many have accused the Nigerian government of inadequately responding to protect its citizens.

The Nigerian Government has continued to face sharp criticisms and strong accusations of culpability and complicity in the killings and supervision of same, the Intersociety report reads.

The countrys security forces have so fumbled and compromised that they hardly intervene when the vulnerable Christians are in danger of threats or attacks, but only emerge after such attacks to arrest and frame up the same population threatened or attacked."

Advocates warn that insurgent groups often experience no accountability for their actions or receive ransoms for kidnappings, though the government denies paying ransom to terrorists.

Nigeria, Africas most populous country, is No. 9 on Open Doors 2021 World Watch List for Christian persecution worldwide due to an extreme level of Islamic oppression.

It is deeply saddening that till date those responsible for the anti Christian butcheries in the country have continued to evade justice and remained unchecked, untracked, uninvestigated and untried; leading to impunity and repeat-atrocities, Intersociety said in the report.

The surviving victims and families of the dead victims are also totally abandoned by the Government of Nigeria.

Jihadi attacks in West Africa have been on the rise since the beginning of 2021, and Nigeria is targeted more than any country in the region, the United States-based Chrisitan persecution watchdog group International Christian Concern reports.

Islamic terrorist groups have killed thousands in the region in recent years as they seek to impose a caliphate and Islamic Sharia law.

Christians have been specifically targeted and disproportionately been affected by this violence.  The responses by the government are clearly not enough, since perpetrators of such violence are able to continue attacking Christians, and other Nigerians, with impunity, Illia Djadi, Open Doors senior analyst on freedom of religion and belief in sub-Saharan Africa, said, according to ICC.

The Global Terrorism Index ranks Nigeria as the third country most affected by terrorism in the world. It reports that from 2001 to 2019, over 22,000 were killed by acts of terror.

In December, Nigeria became the first democratic nation to be added to the U.S. State Department's list of "countries of particular concern" under the International Religious Freedom Act.

Human rights activists have warned that the violence in Nigeria is reaching the standard for genocide.

A commissioner from the U.S. Commission on International and Religious Freedom warned in its 2021 annual report that Nigeria will move relentlessly toward a Christian genocide if action is not taken quickly.

When the world and the U.S. ignored  [the] genocide in Rwanda, hundreds of thousands of people died, former Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., said in a panel discussion on Nigeria earlier this month hosted by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

History is repeating itself," he added.

Last year, the Nigerian presidency released a statement stating that groups who claim that a religious genocide is occurring in Nigeria are receiving funding from separatists groups, a claim some activist groups have refuted.
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP)  A popular strip club that once beckoned customers off a busy highway leading into Anchorage is now a church offering salvation  instead of temptation  thanks to a daughter of a former exotic dancer.

Linda Dunegan believes divine intervention played a hand in transforming the building that housed Fantasies on 5th into the start-up Open Door Baptist Church, turning the show floor into a sanctuary and trading the dancers pole with a pulpit.

"This church came about because I prayed for five years, said Dunegan, who tried to buy the building before but walked away  for good, she thought  when she and the owner couldnt come to terms. Then the owner gave a real estate agent a week to sell it and suggested the agent call Dunegan. This time, the deal went through.

God has been very good to me," Dunegan said, to give me a family, a wonderful husband, food on the table, a place to live.

The journey to savvy real estate investor with 19 properties in three states seems implausible for a girl barely surviving on a daily bowl of rice in her native Vietnam.

Dunegan grew up in a small village near the Cambodian border, where most homes were on stilts and the surrounding water was everyones fishing grounds  and toilets.

Her mother and father had an arranged marriage that Dunegan said failed when her mother didn't produce a male heir and was sent back to her village with her two daughters. With no other skills, her mother took a job as a waitress in a bar, where she met an American who would become her husband and help the family flee the war-ravaged country in April 1975 on a military transport when Dunegan was 8.

The family struggled financially and moved around a lot, flitting from Los Angeles to Hawaii, Florida, Arizona and all over the East Coast.

In the early 1980s, her mother and stepfather divorced. Friends encouraged her mother to move to Anchorage, where they said there was good money to be made working as a waitress in the bars filled with oil industry workers.

Once in Alaskas largest city, her mother quickly found out that there was better money to be made dancing at different bars, though Dunegan wasn't sure if Fantasies on 5th was one of them. She and her mother had a falling out recently, and attempts by The Associated Press to contact her for comment were unsuccessful.

As a child, Dunegan said she escaped into literature, reading a book a day. She studied hard, made the National Honor Society and went to college, eventually earning a doctorate. She also had a nearly three decade military career with service in the Air Force and Navy reserves and the Alaska Air National Guard.

Along the way, she married Gerry Dunegan, a longshoreman, and together they built their real estate holdings.

Dunegan's path to devout Christian took root when she was a child in America and a woman at one of the churches they attended ostensibly for the free food decided to take her under her wing.

I was dirty, unsightly, and she took me to Sears. She bought me three dresses, Dunegan said.

I work to pay that back today, she said of the gesture that meant the world to her.

Pastor Kenny Menendez said God called him to start a new church in Anchorage; he just didnt know he and others would have to excavate through the detritus of a strip club to find it.

The electricity was off on his first visit, but cellphone flashlights exposed black and red carpeting, booth seating, private showrooms, poles, a catwalk, a stage, huge bar tables and chairs among the Halloween decorations still displayed after the club abruptly closed a few years ago.

I looked at it as, Yeah, it could be a church, said Menendez, who gave up a career in purchasing at an aerospace industry manufacturing plant in his native Oregon for his first ministry. It just needed a facelift, which included turning a private lap dance room into the youth ministry.

Seventy-six people showed up for the grand opening, some to see what a church inside a former strip club looks like. Now they average about 45 people every Sunday, a decent crowd given its competing with about three dozen or so other Baptist churches in Anchorage.

He also believes the Almighty approves of the work they are doing.

I would say God is pleased to have a change, a transformation in the building, a place that really ultimately points more people towards him instead of away, he said.

He has hopes that the church  which is situated between a marijuana retail store, a sex shop and downtrodden motels  will help improve the neighborhood.

One would hope that, yes, this is the beginning of just putting some light right here, he said.

The church, which will have its first anniversary in October, isnt the only benefactor of the three-story building. Dunegan intends to use the second floor for fundraisers and as a reception rental location, and the third floor as a base for her Childrens Benefit Foundation.

Here, she plans to bridge the gap for Anchorage youth, setting up cultural exchanges for them to visit Vietnam. She also intends to raise funds to help provide medical professionals in Vietnam with needed supplies, with a dream of possibly someday opening a hospital there.

She said in an Air National Guard magazine article that it was her mother who planted that seed in her over two decades ago.

Were starting out small," Dunegan said, "but our heart is big.

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Associated Press researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report.
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Florida doctors and Democratic lawmakers are calling out Republican Governor Ron DeSantis for his anti-scientific approach to Covid-19. DeSantis has been an opponent of measures designed to curb the viruss spreadsuch as mask mandatesdespite the rising number of cases in his state.

The consequence of his leadership has been a steep rise in Covid-19 cases and increased numbers of Floridians dying, Dr. Frederick Southwick, a University of Florida physician and member of the Committee to Protect Health Care, told WPBF News in Palm Beach.

As a physician and a Floridian, I am frankly angry and ashamed, said cardiologist Dr. Bernard Ashby, who leads the committees Florida chapter, according to WLRN.

Floridas Democratic congressional lawmakers are also concerned, writing in a letter to DeSantis this week about their grave and urgent concern over the worsening COVID-19 surge in Florida.

Since the start of the pandemic, Florida has remained a national focal point due to your administrations lax, delayed, and incomplete responses to this serious threat, the lawmakers wrote. Your administrations reluctance to use all the science- and evidence-based tools available to defeat the virus has created unwarranted roadblocks at the local level.

For the last two weeks, one out of every five new cases of Covid-19 is in Florida, according to the White House. And hospitalization rates have skyrocketed by 95 percent over last month. Despite that news, DeSantis has staunchly refused to implement mask requirementseven in public schools, where children under 12 are not yet old enough to be vaccinated against the virusand continues to use his gubernatorial powers to undermine local Covid mandates. Just last month, DeSantis issued a blanket pardon for any person or business that non-violently refuses to comply with local Covid-19 measures in the state. DeSantis has also sued the Biden administration and CDC to re-open the cruise industry.

Meanwhile, vaccination rates in the states rural areas remain low, despite DeSantiss recent promotion of the vaccine. Although across the state 60 percent of residents above the age of 12 are vaccinated, counties in northern parts of the state are around 30 percent vaccinated. And vaccination rates have decreased by 80 percent since April. Yet DeSantiss administration has acted as if the pandemic is over, discontinuing daily reporting of Covid-19 cases and banning businesses from requiring proof of vaccination.

At the same time as DeSantis says the vaccines are effectivewhich they arehes also banning businesses from requiring proof of vaccination, Dr. Mona Mangat, an immunologist who is also a member of the physicians committee, told WLRN. He has taken away private companies ability to protect their employees and customers by requiring the safe and readily available vaccine.

Instead, DeSantis is trolling the administration and selling merchandise mocking Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nations leading infectious disease expert and chief medical advisor to the White House. His campaign store is selling t-shirts that say Dont Fauci my Florida and a koozie with a DeSantis quote: How the hell am I going to be able to drink a beer with a mask on?

But Ashby is not impressed. If DeSantis were as concerned about stopping Covid-19 spread as he was about coming up with these clever jabs at Dr. Fauci we might not be in this position, Dr. Ashby said.

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A Twitter bio for a Texas-focused bot says not to take the account seriously, but that proves hard to do given the hot takes that it spews out on the daily.

More for you Lifestyle The funniest face masks on the Internet

Twitter account @texastakesbot is exactly that  a bot that shares hot takes that only Texans will have a certain feeling about. Most of the tweets seem to mix and match statements on a list of topics, ranging from politics and Texas cities to food and Buc-ees (the signature beaver icon is the accounts avi on the platform, after all).
Photo courtesy of GHBA

HomeAids annual Project Playhouse fundraiser announced that Project Playhouse Union Station, engineered and built by Legend Homes, has moved full-steam-ahead with its final stop at Minute Maid Park during the Houston Astros home games through Aug. 20 in Section 152, on the Concourse Level. Legend Homes Union Station is being represented by signage and also showcased in a video clip on the Astros jumbotron. Fans can also take photos there.

The Union Station playhouse features several first-class amenities, such as air conditioning, a television, a window seat, toy storage, a play table, a rock-climbing wall and slide, and a rooftop deck with a telescope.
BROOKLYN PARK, Md. (AP)  A man suspected of driving under the influence crashed into a Maryland home early Saturday morning, killing a 68-year-old, police said.

The collision happened around 3 a.m. Saturday in Brooklyn Park when the driver failed to stop at a stop sign, jumped a curb and crashed into a home occupied by Gerald Patrick Keogh Jr., news outlets reported.

Keogh became trapped between the car and damaged interior walls until emergency crews arrived and extricated him, Anne Arundel County police said. He was taken to a Baltimore hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

The driver, 49-year-old Christopher Davis of Baltimore, fled the scene but was apprehended, according to police.

Police said he showed signs of impairment and toxicology results are pending.

Davis was facing charges of manslaughter by vehicle, homicide by vehicle while impaired by drugs, driving while impaired, failure to remain at the scene and other charges.

Court records that don't list an attorney who could comment Davis' behalf showed he has a bond review scheduled for Monday.
SHREVEPORT, La. (AP)  A former tax preparer from north Louisiana has been sentenced to more than two years in prison for defrauding the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. Attorneys Office in Shreveport said Friday.

Angelena Adams, 52, of the Princeton community in Bossier Parish was ordered to serve 27 months in prison and pay restitution of more than $188,000.
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP)  A group of South Carolina senators will travel around the state this week holding public hearings on how to draw new districts for South Carolina House and Senate seats as well as the U.S. House.

The Senate subcommittee handling redistricting is holding the first of 10 hearings over the next three weeks before lawmakers use the 2020 U.S. Census data to draw new maps.
CONCORD, N.H. (AP)  New Hampshire residents cant be required to be vaccinated against COVID-19 in order to access public facilities, benefits or services under a bill signed into law by Gov. Chris Sununu.

Supporters say the bill signed this week establishes medical freedom by specifying that all residents have the natural, essential and inherent right to bodily integrity, free from any threat or compulsion by government to accept an immunization.
BANGKOK, Thailand (AP)  As Thailands medical system struggles beneath a surge of coronavirus cases, ordinary people are helping to plug the gaps, risking their own health to bring care and supplies to often terrified, exhausted patients whove fallen through the cracks.

In the Samai area of Bangkok, Ekapob Laungpraserts team heads out for another weekend on the front lines of a crisis.

His volunteer group, Samai Will Survive, has been working around the clock, responding to about a hundred SOS calls daily from desperate COVID-19 patients unable to get the help they need.

We realize how hard working and how tired doctors and nurses are, says the 38-year-old businessman. What we are trying to do today is to help relieve some of the burden. Before, all cases must go to the hospital, so today there are no hospital beds. So we volunteer to help out.

Its not long before they're in action: Malee, a COVID-19 positive woman whose breathing has suddenly worsened. The group, wearing personal protective equipment, delivers oxygen and much-needed reassurance to Malee and her husband, an army officer who also has the virus.

I lost hope even with the army. I called doctors at field hospitals. All they told me to do was to send information, just send information, Worawit Srisang said. I got the same answers everywhere. At least these guys visit us in person. What the patient needs is a chance to see a doctor, not just send information.

Thailands predicament is stark. Around 15,000 new cases are confirmed each day and still more people are getting infected. In Bangkok alone, 20,000 people are waiting for a hospital bed.

So homespun heroes like Ekapob and his group  buying equipment and supplies with public donations  are an essential safety net, gaining crucial time for both patients and a health care system under severe strain.

Theres another call: an elderly woman with COVID-19 symptoms. But shes not fit to wait in line for hours at an overwhelmed test center, so for the moment shes stuck where she is.

Grandma cant get tested, so she lies sick in bed. If we want to send her to the hospital, they will ask for her test result. So we are back in a circle, because we would ask them to do the test, Ekapob says, looking in through the window.

Its very likely she has COVID-19. All her family members have already tested positive.

After a check, his team members decide shes not in imminent danger. They hook her up with oxygen, then its back into the night and on to the next case.

Theres a raging debate in Thailand now over the national vaccination roll-out. Many Thais are angry over the slow pace and a perceived lack of accountability for the fact that only around 5% of the population currently is fully protected.

The volunteers see the consequences almost every night.

They're called to 52-year old Nittaya Kongnuch, who like so many is struggling to breathe normally.

As they try to make her more comfortable, her sister tells an increasingly familiar story. Their mother died last week from the virus, as their urgent calls for help to brimming hospitals went unheeded.

My mother showed bad symptoms from the beginning. I called and called to tell them my mom couldnt handle this anymore, but nobody came. The nurses kept saying there were no beds, said Piyawan Kodduang, fighting back tears.

Most fatalities occur in private. But not all. Last week, a body lay for hours in a Bangkok street, incurring the wrath of an embarrassed prime minister.

On Saturday night, Ekapob and his team see exactly how that can happen, as they're called to a homeless woman whos showing signs of infection.

As wary residents watch from a distance, the team moves in to carry out a rapid test.

Within a few minutes they have the result: positive.

After making some phone calls, Ekapob finds her a place in a facility where she can be observed while awaiting a bed in a field hospital.

At least she has a fighting chance. Without the volunteers, its likely she wouldn't have any.

Thailand has had 497,302 cases of COVID-19 and 4,059 deaths since the pandemic began.
TUNIS, Tunisia (AP)  Tunisias president fired the country's prime minister Sunday and froze parliaments activities after violent demonstrations over the countrys pandemic and economic situation.

Protesters erupted with celebration in the streets of Tunis after the late-night announcement.

President Kais Saied also lifted the immunity of all parliament members and said he would name a new prime minister in the coming hours to bring calm to the country. He used a special constitutional measure allowing him to assume executive power and freeze parliament for an unspecified period of time until normal institutional workings can be restored.

We have taken these decisions ... until social peace returns to Tunisia and until we save the state, he said in a televised address after an emergency security meeting following nationwide protests.

Thousands of people defied virus restrictions and scorching heat to demonstrate Sunday in the capital of Tunis and other cities. The largely young crowds shouted Get out! and slogans calling for the dissolution of parliament and early elections.

The protests were called on the 64th anniversary of Tunisia's independence by a new group called the July 25 Movement.

Security forces deployed in force, especially in Tunis where police blockades blocked all streets leading to the main artery of the capital, Avenue Bourguiba. The avenue was a key site for the Tunisian revolution a decade ago that brought down a dictatorial regime and unleashed the Arab Spring uprisings.

Police also deployed around the parliament, preventing demonstrators from accessing it.

Police used tear gas to disperse some demonstrators throwing projectiles at officers and made several arrests. Clashes also took place in several other towns, notably in Nabeul, Sousse, Kairouan, Sfax and Tozeur.

Protesters also stormed the offices of the Islamist movement Ennahdha, the dominant force in parliament. Videos circulating online showed smoke pouring out of the Ennahdha building. The attackers damaged computers and other equipment inside and threw documents onto the streets.

The party denounced the attack, saying that criminal gangs from inside and outside Tunisia are trying to seed chaos and destruction in the service of an agenda aimed at harming the Tunisian democratic process.

On the coronavirus front, Tunisia has reimposed lockdowns and other virus restrictions because its facing one of Africas worst virus outbreaks.

___

Associated Press journalist Mehdi El Arem in Tunis contributed to this report.

___

Follow all AP stories on the coronavirus pandemic at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic.
GODDARD, Kan. (AP)  A splash park where several people became ill with bacterial infections has been allowed to reopen after it made necessary changes and passed inspection, Sedgwick County officials said.

The splash park at Tanganyika Wildlife Park in Goddard, which has been closed since June 18, reopened this weekend, The Wichita Eagle reported.
In January, when Ed Condon and JD Flynn broke off from their jobs at a long-standing Catholic news agency, they promised readers of their new newsletter that they would deliver reporting without an agenda, or a foregone conclusion. "We aim to do serious, responsible, sober journalism about the Church, from the Church and for the Church. . . . We want The Pillar to be a different kind of journalism."

Six months later the Pillar broke the kind of story mainstream news organizations would be unlikely to touch: They said they had obtained commercially available data that included location history from the hookup app Grindr, and used it to track a high-ranking priest from his offices and family lake house to gay nightclubs.

MORE NEWS: Columnist explains why Californians should leave Texas

Now Condon and Flynn, two 38-year-old canon lawyers-turned-muckrakers, are at the center of both a global surveillance-ethics story as well as a mud fight among their fellow Catholics over whether last week they served or disgraced the church. One Catholic writer described it as "a witch hunt aimed at gay Catholic priests."

In some ways the Pillar story and reaction to it feels almost like a throwback: Conservative Catholics who point to the 1960s and liberalizing sexual mores for society's troubles and focus on gay priests. But in 2021 the availability of personal digital data and the use of smartphones for surveillance are far bigger fears for the vast majority of Americans than is news about a member of the clergy possibly using a hookup app.

Flynn and Condon's story also punctuates how America's religious and journalistic landscapes have changed. Institutions and hierarchies now have to contend with scrappy startups taking matters into their own hands.

And in the growing conservative Catholic media scene, their newsletter and its takedown of Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill represents a new power and boldness of those demanding their church be purged of leaders who they see as too permissiveon issues like abortion,gender norms and sex outside of heterosexual marriage.

On Friday, the pair answered the question of whether there would be more sex-data stories following the Tuesday announcement of Burrill's resignation as chief administrator of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The Pillar reported it had brought some of its findings from the data to the Archdiocese of Newark to say there were "patterns of location-based hookup apps" at various clerical residences there. In a statement to The Post, the archdiocese said the Pillar provided no actual data or evidence of misconduct and that the matter is being reviewed.

Flynn and Condon initially said they were not interested in participating in an interview for this article, then agreed to consider questions by email, and later said they didn't have sufficient time and declined. But in comments they've tweeted since Tuesday and a podcast they posted Friday, they explained a bit of their thinking.

"There's nothing to recommend the indiscriminate naming and shaming of people for moral failures just because you can. That is unethical. And that is not something I believe we've done,"Condon said on the podcast.

"People are entitled to moral failures and repentance and reconciliation and to a legitimate good reputation. There's a difference between that and serial and consistent, immoral behavior on the part of a public figure charged with addressing public morality, isn't there?" Flynn said.

They also compared their Burrill piece to one done by the New York Times' Opinion section, which explored the dangers of leaked smartphone data and used such data to identify a person who was near the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. The New York Times piece quoted one man who was interviewed and agreed to his name being used.

One of the writers of the Times' piece Friday said the whole point of the reporting was to expose the vulnerability of such data, and that they didn't name anyone without consent.

"This was the nightmare scenario that we were talking about to some degree. . . . To see it happen is just confirmation of just how dangerous this type of information is," said Charlie Warzel, who has since left the Times and now is also publishing on Substack, the same online newsletter platform the Pillar uses. "Despite the fact that I don't think there are any ethical similarities with what we did and this, it obviously makes me feel terrible that our work was used as a justification in this."

Condon and Flynn were willing to go where Catholic media in the past apparently have not.

Specifically, in 2018, when an anonymous tipster offered an explosive scoop to Alejandro Bermudez, executive editor of the Catholic News Agency, the Colorado-based outlet owned by EWTN, a multimillion dollar nonprofit Catholic media company.

The data hawker, who, Bermudez said, agreed to meet at a Denver coffee shop, claimed to have a trove of information showing priests using dating apps. The person came from a technology background but was interested in "reforming" the church and wanted the material that allegedly could expose priests' double lives to be in Catholic hands, he told The Post.

Bermudez said he doesn't recall the tipster's name but that he was dubious about the data's credibility and its news value, and he passed for those reasons.

Flynn and Condon were at CNA when Bermudez got that tip, but neither knew about it, Bermudez said. He also doesn't know whether the data in the Pillar story is the same information once presented to him but said there are parallels.

Bermudez said CNA gets a few pitches each year from people who allege they can reveal priests' indiscretions. But he said he would not have published the story about Burrill and was concerned about the other ways similar data could be weaponized within the church.

RELATED: Dating app honeytraps another Capitol Riot suspect from Texas

"Once this cat is out of the bag, what is the limit?" Bermudez said. "If we say, 'Listen, that was completely legitimate, that was completely moral,' then any kind of tracking by any authority in the Catholic Church is fair game."

Now it appears similar information did end up in Catholic hands - just not those of a legacy Catholic media organization, instead in those of two men running an upstart newsletter who say their journalism is in the service of Jesus Christ. Some Catholics agree; others, even fellow conservative Catholic journalists, worry the pair also see themselves as a kind of prophet, judge, jury and executioner.

Flynn grew up in a Protestant family in New Jersey and converted to Catholicism. He worked for the Archdiocese of Denver from 2007 to 2013 under leading conservative Archbishop Charles Chaput. Flynn was chancellor there for the last two of those years. He was also spokesman for the diocese of Lincoln, Neb., the lone holdout in the American Catholic Church where girls may not be altar servers. He is a canon lawyer, an expert on church laws, such as those guiding Catholic annulments or disputes.

Condon, nephew of Catholic University President John Garvey, grew up in New Jersey and England, and worked in British politics for years before serving as a canon lawyer in U.S. dioceses.

At the Catholic News Agency, the pair quickly stood out for being the rare right-leaning Catholic journalists aimed squarely at the hierarchy and holding it accountable. Both regularly sprinkle their tweets with references to church law and confidently - some say cockily - tout their own interpretations as the most pure and accurate.

They also draw readers with their personal tweets, more casual than Vatican-stuffy, with Flynn as the wholesome dad of three sharing photos of his family and preaching about traditional values, while Condon plays the cynical grump who pines for the old days when men wore suits and elegant watches.

Flynn was interviewed for a 2018 master's project at the University of Missouri about ethics in Catholic journalism.

In that paper, he said he thought all journalists are the same in that they all have a "guiding set of assumptions. . . . The concept of objective journalism is a myth."

However, the paper described Flynn as saying that Catholic journalism has a different set of ends in mind than simply to inform and educate. The difference, he argued, is that "the Catholic perception of the common good is, ultimately, the salvation of souls, and more generally the Church's ideas, developed over the centuries, about what constitutes human flourishing."

Flynn and Condon resigned from CNA late last year to launch the Pillar, mirroring a broader media narrative in which journalists have left established media companies to strike out on their own. The publishing platform allows them editorial freedom, but not always a guaranteed paycheck: Writers can collect subscription money from newsletters, with Substack taking a 10 percent cut. Some writers get an advance.

As of last week, the Pillar ranked as the third-highest-grossing Substack in the "faith" category, and it has thousands of subscribers.

"The trends in Catholic media are not that different from secular media," said the Rev. Matt Malone, editor in chief of America, a Jesuit magazine. Some writers are going independent with Substacks while legacy outlets, he said, are trying to "amass this sizable digital audience and to navigate editorially in a polarized world."

But while competition among secular media for eyeballs and clicks is about financial survival, for Catholic media, there's another underlying struggle: for the right to say who is on the side of God and the true church.

There are left-leaning sites that focus on social justice aspects of church teachings such as the rights and needs of the poor and immigrants, while others focus heavily on teachings around abortion and sexual orientation.

Kathryn Jean Lopez, a Catholic writer who works for the conservative National Review, said last week she was torn about the ethics of the Pillar's methods. However, she said she understood the men's motivation.

Lopez said the Pillar is a product of "this frustration that men aren't living the lives they stepped up to live" - namely priests who violate their promises to be chaste, and concerns that teachings about things like contraception and homosexuality are being ignored.

"They're concerned about the rot in the church. There's clearly been a nodding and winking and looking away. The church is not immune from the fallout of the sexual revolution - that's gotten as extreme as putting children on puberty blockers," she said. "Someone has to clean up the church for the sake of the world. . . . I think this is why the Pillar exists."

Condon and Flynn were vague about why they left CNA.

In their podcast episode Friday, they said a source approached them a few months ago with a broad data set that supposedly let them link dating-app use to priests' phones. The data did not contain names and phone numbers but did have the phones' unique identifying numbers and information about their locations. Using additional information, like the priest's known locations and travel, it was possible to identify who some of the data belonged to, the writers said.

Flynn and Condon said they verified the data's legitimacy but did not say how or with whom. They said the data had been bought legally but didn't say whether they paid for it.

They argued that Burrill was a legitimate target because he was a CEO-like figure at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which develops policies such as those protecting children from sexual abuse. Getting pushback for linking being gay and child abuse, the men said they were calling out Grindr itself as dangerous for children, not gay people. In its original story on Burrill, the Pillar wrote, "There is no evidence to suggest that Burrill was in contact with minors through his use of Grindr."

Michael Brendan Dougherty, a senior writer at the National Review, said he has been impressed by the outlet's reporting on Vatican finances.

"(The church) doesn't need more volunteer interpreters of the Pope's 'true intentions' or whatever it is other outlets speculate about. It needs journalism about corruption, management and policy. That's what the Pillar does," Dougherty said.

But media ethics watchers were unnerved by their tactics, even if the data was legally obtained.

"I worry very much about creating - through some of these precedents - a permissibility of journalists to basically publish whatever they can get their hands on," said Edward Wasserman, media ethics professor and dean emeritus of University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.

Many other prominent Catholics were similarly disturbed by the Pillar's methods.

Michael O'Loughlin, a national correspondent for America Magazine, called it "a witch hunt aimed at gay Catholic priests" on Twitter.

GOOD OMENS: Combat veteran surprised with new truck before Astros game

Monsignor Richard Antall, a pastor in Cleveland and author, wrote in a Catholic digital magazine focused on the LA area that the Pillar's story took an "inquisitorial approach." David Scott, the spokesman for the USCCB President Archbishop Jose Gomez, shared Antall's essay in a tweet:

"Serious ethical questions about this 'investigation.' Must reading," Scott tweeted.

Toward the end of Friday's podcast, Flynn and Condon bemoaned the public debate about their recent work.

"I hate being the center of attention like this," Flynn said.
COVID-19 has become a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Why is Ontario Premier Doug Ford ruling out mandatory vaccine certificates to accommodate this tiny minority that is imposing burdens on the rest of us?
A. The once-a-week designation was only supposed to be temporary. It's ok to return to twice-a-week.

B. Watering allowances should be more fluid and seasonal depending on rain amounts and droughts.

C. Only those going over their watering limits should have to water less.

D. Florida has a major overconsumption problem, and people need to get used to watering less. Once-a-week needs to stay put.

E. Whatever is done, all citizens need to have equal rules.

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Nothing beats the heat like a little learning and a whole lot of fun. St. Jude School students learned this while taking part in a variety of summer camps in the first half of the summer at the school in Mountain Top. From Survivor of the Funnest to science camps to learning about Latin cultures, students participated in various activities to keep the learning going all summer long.

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By virtue of its wayward subsidiary, Unilevera massive international conglomeraterisks potentially crushing financial consequences in terms of its ability to receive investments from, or do business with, the majority of U.S. states, said Brooke Goldstein, executive director of the Lawfare Project and co-founder of the End Jew Hatred movement.

The post Will US anti-BDS laws cause a financial meltdown for Ben & Jerrys and Unilever? appeared first on JNS.org.
Our little village is known for its neighborliness and community spirit. For over 180 years, residents have found Gates Mills to be a unique blend of Western Reserve architecture, civic engagement and convenient location. Nestled along the Chagrin River, it is minutes from office, retail, me
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 25) - The San Roque Cathedral in Caloocan was placed under temporary lockdown starting Sunday after a guest priest died of a heart attack and was eventually tested positive of COVID-19, said Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines president and Caloocan Bishop Pablo Virgillo David on late Saturday.

In a Facebook post, David said that Fr. Manuel Jadraque, Jr. of the Mission Society of the Philippines took a tricycle from Monumento to the church on Saturday morning. However, upon arrival, Jadraque was found unresponsive and very pale inside the tricycle.

The priest was declared dead on arrival at the Caloocan City Medical Center.

David said that he insisted to have a post-mortem swab test on Jadraque due to instances of COVID-19-related heart attacks.

Sadly, the test result came out this evening and he was found to be positive of SARS-Cov-2. We have no way of finding out if the heart attack had been triggered by COVID despite the fact that he had been fully vaccinated already, said David.

David noted that that the 58-year-old priest was already fully vaccinated with COVID-19 Sinovac vaccine.

We also do not know which strain of COVID it was. We therefore asked the city government to have the lab specimen submitted for genome sequencing to find out which variant had infected Fr. Manuel, the bishop added.

The Department of Health earlier explained that getting vaccinated does not mean full protection from COVID-19, but it prevents one person from getting severe forms of infection.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 25)  Money will not be an issue next year as the government has already earmarked 45 billion to finance additional COVID-19 vaccine purchases, Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III said.

During a briefing with President Rodrigo Duterte late Saturday, Dominguez assured the Philippine government has enough budget to cover fresh vaccines for 2022.

Vaccine booster shots are also on the table, he added.

"For next year we have in the budget P45 billion for additional vaccinations. To assure you and the health community, we do have money for that," he said.

"Question is how do we use that? Booster shots? Another set of vaccinations? We need to know so we can allocate," Dominguez said.

The coronavirus shots secured for 2021totaling 171 million dosesare "more than enough" to protect the entire adult population, the Finance chief said.

"I dont think that we are good only after six months, I think we are good beyond 2022," he told Duterte.

In a statement on Saturday, National Task Force against COVID 19 Chief Implementer and vaccine czar Secretary Carlito G. Galvez Jr. said the government expects to receive six million doses more of COVID-19 vaccines next week.

READ: 5.5M Filipinos now fully vaccinated against COVID-19

As of Friday, the country has 30.98 million doses of COVID vaccines.

Galvez said the government continues its discussion with pharmaceutical firms for an additional 26 million doses.

The pandemic task force is eyeing to administer at least 500,000 doses per day between July and August, and boost the figure to 750,000 doses in the last quarter of 2021.

Over 5.5 million Filipinos are now fully vaccinated against the virus, Galvez said, still far from the 70-million target by the end of the year.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 25)  President Rodrigo Duterte lauded the public for abiding by rules amid concerns about the government's vaccination program.

President Duterte made the comment in his address on Saturday night where he talked about the government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Mabuti ito we are better off because our citizens are really law-abiding citizens, and you can tell by the respond of the people. We have yet to see a ruckus there somewhere regarding the vaccination process. Wala tayong mga ano 'yun nagri-riot 'yung iba eh. Dito wala, naghihintay," he said.

[Translation: We are better off because our citizens are really law-abiding citizens, and you can tell by the respond of the people. We have yet to see a ruckus there somewhere regarding the vaccination process. We don't have riots. Here there is nothing, people wait.]

The President said riots were happening in other countries because of vaccines.

"Well, you know, one thing going in our favor is really in other countries, they are having riots about the bakuna [vaccine]. In Indonesia, in some parts of iyong sa France," he said.

READ: Indonesia is now the epicenter of Asia's COVID-19 crisis. Here's what you need to know

READ: OCTA worries about PH ability to battle Delta variant

In the same address, Duterte said there must be a better system to make sure people are safe when lining up to get their vaccines amid rainy weather.

"The LGUs should immediately look for a place which is dry, and which can house so many, dividing them into groups. It's a question of common sense," Duterte said in a national address aired late Saturday night.

Duterte said crowding was the problem, and that local officials should anticipate the needs of the people in their area who want to get vaccinated.

Last night, vaccine czar Secretary Carlito G. Galvez Jr. said 5.5 million Filipinos are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, adding around 16.4 million shots have already been administered since the rollout of the vaccination program last March.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 25)  A day before his last State of the Nation Address, President Rodrigo Duterte was given another "failing mark," this time by healthcare workers whose calls for fair compensation and release of unpaid pandemic-related benefits persist.

Some medical workers from both private and public hospitals on Sunday said they have hardly felt the billions of pesos allocated for frontliners under the Bayanihan 1 and 2. For one, despite the significant budget, they said they have yet to receive their special risk allowance, or SRA.

"Pinapaikot-ikot lang kami," said Jao Clumia, president of the St. Luke's Medical Center Employees Association - Quezon City. "'Yung benepisyo umano ng mga health workers ay naipamigay na nila. Hindi po 'yun totoo."

[Translation: We are being given the run-around. They said the benefits of health workers have already been given to us. That's not true.]

Last month, the Department of Budget and Management said the payment of the SRA should be released not later than June 30, the same day the Bayanihan 2 expired.

"Nakakapanghinanakit lang, kasi ginawa ng mga health workers ang kanilang gampanin pero sa kakarampot na benepisyo ay hindi maibigay," said Jesus Obien, who heads the Chinese General Hospital and Medical Center Employees Association.

[Translation: It's disheartening because health workers have done their jobs, but even the measly benefits weren't even accorded to us.]

Aside from the low pay and overdue incentives, Alliance of Health Workers (AHW) National President Robert Mendoza said frontliners have long been overworked. While the Department of Health's standard ratio is one nurse for every 12 patients, Mendoza said the reality is that a single nurse would have to tend to around 35  sometimes even up to 100  patients at a time.

The pandemic, he said, further highlighted government neglect, driving them to occupational burnout.

"Binigyan natin ng grado ang Pangulong Duterte sa pagsupo dito sa COVID-19," he added. "Bagsak po siya sa amin sa Alliance of Health Workers, at 'di kami matatakot maningil bukas para sa kanyang kapabayaan sa mamamayan at mga manggagawang pangkalusugan."

[Translation: We already graded President Duterte on his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. It's a failing mark from us in the Alliance of Health Workers, and we won't be afraid to hold him into account tomorrow for his neglect of the public and healthcare workers.]

According to the DOH, over 21,000 medical workers have been infected with COVID-19 as of July 23.

As the budget hearings also near, the AHW called on the government to allot at least 10% of the country's gross domestic product for COVID-19 response and public health services. It also renewed calls for the abolition of the state-run PhilHealth, which has been embroiled in massive corruption allegations, and instead realign the agency's budget to public hospitals nationwide.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 25) -- Militant groups will be keeping their protest brief on the day of President Rodrigo Dutertes final State of the Nation Address due to the threat of the highly contagious Delta variant of COVID-19.

Bagong Alyansang Makabayan Secretary General Renato Reyes, Jr. said militant groups will converge at 9 a.m. on Monday along the University Avenue of the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City.

A unity march with various groups will follow along Commonwealth Avenue by 11 a.m.

Were expecting by lunch time tapos na tayo, Reyes told CNN Philippines Sunday.

[Translation: We are expecting to be finished by lunch time.]

The militant leader said protesters agreed in a dialogue with the police and the local government of Quezon City to limit the rally participants to those who have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Seniors and minors are prohibited from joining the gathering.

Unlike in rallies held before the pandemic, there will also be no burning of protest materials, including effigies of Duterte.

We will not burn anything kasi ano yan, its a problem sa controlling the movement of the crowd, Reyes said.

[Translation: We will not burn anything because it will be a problem in controlling the movement of the crowd.]

The Philippine National Police will deploy around 15,000 policemen in Metro Manila for the SONA, with the majority stationed along Commonwealth Avenue going to Batasang Pambansa.

National Capital Region Police Office chief Brigadier General Vicente Danao said the police will remain alert while exercising maximum tolerance on protesters.

We cannot be complacent on our deployment. Because the threat naman, kahit sabihin nating how big or small, is always there naman, although wala tayong nare-receive na ganoon kaseryoso, he said.

[Translation: We cannot be complacent on our deployment. Because the threat, no matter how big or small it is, it will always be there, although we have not yet received any serious threats so far.]
Congratulations, belcorp.biz got a very good Social Media Impact Score! Show it by adding this HTML code on your site:

Belcorp.biz scored 64 Social Media Impact. Social Media Impact score is a measure of how much a site is popular on social networks. 3/5.0 Stars by Social Team

This CoolSocial report was updated on 23 Oct 2014, you can refresh this analysis whenever you want.

belcorp.biz is very popular in Facebook and Google Plus. It is liked by 256 people on Facebook and it has 8 google+ shares.

The total number of people who shared the belcorp homepage on StumbleUpon. The total number of people who shared the belcorp homepage on Delicious. This is the sum of two values: the total number of people who shared, liked or recommended the belcorp homepage on Facebook + the total number of page likes (if belcorp has a Facebook fan page). This is the sum of two values: the total number of people who shared the belcorp homepage on Twitter + the total number of belcorp followers (if belcorp has a Twitter account). The total number of people who shared the belcorp homepage on Google Plus by a google +1 button.

Basic Information

PAGE TITLE Belcorp DESCRIPTION KEYWORDS OTHER KEYWORDS belcorp, nuestra, capevedi, cluster,



The title found in the head section of the homepage. The description meta-tag found in the head section of the homepage. The URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is the address of the site. The keywords meta-tag found in the head section of the homepage. CoolSocial advanced keyword analysis tool is able to detect and analyze every keyword on each page of a site.

Domain and Server

DOCTYPE XHTML 1.0 Transitional CHARSET AND LANGUAGE UTF-8 DETECTED LANGUAGE Spanish Spanish SERVER Microsoft-IIS/6.0 (ASP.NET) OPERATIVE SYSTEM Windows Server 2003 Windows Server 2003

Character set and language of the site. Type of server and offered services. Represents HTML declared type (e.g.: XHTML 1.1, HTML 4.0, the new HTML 5.0) Operative System running on the server. The language of belcorp.biz as detected by CoolSocial algorithms.

Site Traffic trend during the last year. Only available for sites ranked <= 100000 in the world.

Referring domains for belcorp.biz by MajesticSeo. High values are a sign of site importance over the web and on web engines.

Facebook link

FACEBOOK PAGE LINK NOT FOUND

The URL of the found Facebook page. The description of the Facebook page describes website and its services to the social media users. A Facebook page link can be found in the homepage or in the robots.txt file. The total number of people who tagged or talked about website Facebook page in the last 7-10 days. The total number of people who like website Facebook page. Facebook Timeline is the new layout of Facebook pages. The type of Facebook page.

Twitter account link

TWITTER PAGE LINK NOT FOUND
Bossgfx.com scored 58 Social Media Impact. Social Media Impact score is a measure of how much a site is popular on social networks. 3/5.0 Stars by Social Team

This CoolSocial report was updated on 28 Dec 2012, you can refresh this analysis whenever you want.

This is the sum of two values: the total number of people who shared the bossgfx homepage on Twitter + the total number of bossgfx followers (if bossgfx has a Twitter account). The total number of people who shared the bossgfx homepage on Google Plus by a google +1 button. The total number of people who shared the bossgfx homepage on Delicious. The total number of people who shared the bossgfx homepage on StumbleUpon. This is the sum of two values: the total number of people who shared, liked or recommended the bossgfx homepage on Facebook + the total number of page likes (if bossgfx has a Facebook fan page).

Basic Information

PAGE TITLE Boss Graphics DESCRIPTION KEYWORDS OTHER KEYWORDS



The keywords meta-tag found in the head section of the homepage. CoolSocial advanced keyword analysis tool is able to detect and analyze every keyword on each page of a site. The description meta-tag found in the head section of the homepage. The title found in the head section of the homepage. The URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is the address of the site.

Domain and Server

DOCTYPE HTML 5.0 CHARSET AND LANGUAGE English (United States) UTF-8English (United States) DETECTED LANGUAGE English English SERVER Apache OPERATIVE SYSTEM Linux Linux

Operative System running on the server. The language of bossgfx.com as detected by CoolSocial algorithms. Type of server and offered services. Character set and language of the site. Represents HTML declared type (e.g.: XHTML 1.1, HTML 4.0, the new HTML 5.0)

Site Traffic trend during the last year. Only available for sites ranked <= 100000 in the world.

Referring domains for bossgfx.com by MajesticSeo. High values are a sign of site importance over the web and on web engines.

Facebook link

FACEBOOK PAGE LINK FOUND FACEBOOK PAGE www.facebook.com/bossgraphics DESCRIPTION We are Boss Graphics LIKES 3 PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT 0 PAGE TYPE Computers/technology TIMELINE PAGE TIMELINE

The type of Facebook page. Facebook Timeline is the new layout of Facebook pages. The total number of people who tagged or talked about website Facebook page in the last 7-10 days. The description of the Facebook page describes website and its services to the social media users. The total number of people who like website Facebook page. The URL of the found Facebook page. A Facebook page link can be found in the homepage or in the robots.txt file.

Twitter account link

TWITTER PAGE LINK FOUND TWITTER PAGE twitter.com/#!/BossGraphic DESCRIPTION We are bossgfx and we will create unique graphic designing for you.'} ACCOUNT CREATED ON 04 Aug 2012 LOCATION null TWEETS 0 FOLLOWERS 1 LISTED 0
Iejgxcs.yxhbgc.com scored 40 Social Media Impact. Social Media Impact score is a measure of how much a site is popular on social networks. 2/5.0 Stars by Social Team

This CoolSocial report was updated on 17 Jan 2013, you can refresh this analysis whenever you want.

The total number of people who shared the iejgxcs.yxhbgc homepage on Google Plus by a google +1 button. This is the sum of two values: the total number of people who shared the iejgxcs.yxhbgc homepage on Twitter + the total number of iejgxcs.yxhbgc followers (if iejgxcs.yxhbgc has a Twitter account). The total number of people who shared the iejgxcs.yxhbgc homepage on Delicious. This is the sum of two values: the total number of people who shared, liked or recommended the iejgxcs.yxhbgc homepage on Facebook + the total number of page likes (if iejgxcs.yxhbgc has a Facebook fan page). The total number of people who shared the iejgxcs.yxhbgc homepage on StumbleUpon.

Basic Information

PAGE TITLE -9- DESCRIPTION KEYWORDS OTHER KEYWORDS ol, www, ol, 6ctr s6, online, 6ctr,



CoolSocial advanced keyword analysis tool is able to detect and analyze every keyword on each page of a site. The keywords meta-tag found in the head section of the homepage. The description meta-tag found in the head section of the homepage. The URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is the address of the site. The title found in the head section of the homepage.

Domain and Server

DOCTYPE CHARSET AND LANGUAGE GBK DETECTED LANGUAGE SERVER Microsoft-IIS/6.0 (PHP/5.2.17) OPERATIVE SYSTEM Windows Server 2003 Windows Server 2003

The language of iejgxcs.yxhbgc.com as detected by CoolSocial algorithms. Operative System running on the server. Type of server and offered services. Represents HTML declared type (e.g.: XHTML 1.1, HTML 4.0, the new HTML 5.0) Character set and language of the site.

Site Traffic trend during the last year. Only available for sites ranked <= 100000 in the world.

Referring domains for iejgxcs.yxhbgc.com by MajesticSeo. High values are a sign of site importance over the web and on web engines.

Facebook link

FACEBOOK PAGE LINK NOT FOUND

Facebook Timeline is the new layout of Facebook pages. The total number of people who tagged or talked about website Facebook page in the last 7-10 days. The total number of people who like website Facebook page. The URL of the found Facebook page. The type of Facebook page. The description of the Facebook page describes website and its services to the social media users. A Facebook page link can be found in the homepage or in the robots.txt file.

Twitter account link

TWITTER PAGE LINK NOT FOUND
100%

Website sahelabi.com uses latest and advanced technologies. It is very popular on the web, it's within the 1 million most visited websites of the world at position 85885 by Alexa. It supports HTTPS. The main html page has a size of 82760 bytes (80.82 kb uncompressed).

This CoolSocial report was updated on 2021-07-25, you can refresh this analysis whenever you want.
Doris Nell Gipson Lucky, 86, who passed away Tuesday, July 27, 2021 in Houston. Viewing will be held on Friday, July 30, 2021 at Emanuel Funeral Home of Palestine from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Funeral will be held on Saturday, July 31, 2021 at Mt. Pilgrim Baptist Church in Oakwood at 11 a.m. with a
On the 10th of November, 1955, Captain Gerald Douglas of the merchant ship Tuvalu was en route from Suva (the capital of Fiji) to Funafuti (the capital of Tuvalu) in the South Pacific when he spotted something odd. He saw a ship drifting out in the sea, tipped so heavily to one side that the port-side deck rails were dipping in and out of the water.

via Wiki Commons The MV Joyita as it was found listing and empty. The guys on the side look very relaxed, though.

A recovery party was soon dispatched, and the ship was determined to be the MV Joyita, a cargo and fishing charter vessel that regularly made rounds around Samoa. It had left from Apia in Samoa on October 3rd and was expected to arrive in Tokelau, an island territory of New Zealand, about 48 hours later, but never arrived. A search and rescue team was out for six days, between the 6th and 12th, and although they searched some 100,000 square miles of Pacific, they could find nothing. And now here it was, 600 miles off course -- and completely empty. What remained is a maritime mystery that has puzzled people for decades, inspired a book that offers a theoretical solution, and has been called the Mary Celeste of the South Pacific.

The MV Joyita started out life in 1931 as a pleasure yacht, built in Los Angeles for film director Roland West and named for his wife, actress Jewel Carmen  its name meaning little jewel in Spanish. In 1936, it was bought by Milton E. Beacon and made numerous trips to Mexico and up to the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939 and 1940. The ship was 69 feet long (yes, we know) and weighed 47 tons. In 1941, it was purchased by the US Navy and became Yard Patrol boat YP-108, patrolling the waters around Hawaiis Big Island.

via Wiki Commons It protected Hawaii from 100% of that year's surprise SEA attacks.

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In 1943, it ran aground and sustained serious damage, but as the Navy was desperate for boats in the middle of WWII, it was repaired and returned to service. By the wars end, it was in surplus, so the Navy equipment was removed and the Joyita was once again sold to a private owner. In 1948, it got two new engines, and the hull was outfitted with a cork lining for extra buoyancy. In 1952, the ship passed to its final owner, Captain Thomas Henry Dusty Miller, born in England and living in Samoa.

Captain Miller used the boat for chartered trade, shipping, and fishing expeditions, making money off carrying people and goods around the islands. When the Joyita left from Apia, Samoa, on October 3, 1955, it was carrying four tons of cargo, including timber, medical supplies, food, and 80 empty oil drums. There were also 16 crewmen and nine passengers. Among the passengers were a doctor named Alfred Denis Andy Parsons, a government official, a copra buyer, and a couple with two children, ages 11 and 3. There was no sign of any of them on or around the ship, and the search and rescue team hadnt seen any trace of them either.

RicHard-59/Wiki Commons Nine passengers set sail that day for a three-day tour. A three-day tour.

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As the recovery team boarded the boat, things only got more sinister. The radio was tuned to 2182 kilohertz, the international marine distress channel, indicating that they had required help. The port engine clutch and the auxiliary pump were both disassembled and unconnected, meaning the ship had only been running on one engine. The clocks were stopped at 10:25 pm, and the lights were on. The logbook, sextant, and other navigational equipment were gone, along with all three lifeboats. Finally, there were some eerie signs of possible violence. The ships bridge had been smashed by something and covered with a canvas awning, moreover, the deckhouses windows were broken. On deck, a doctors bag was found open containing a scalpel, stethoscope, and lengths of bloody bandages.

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When the Joyita was towed back to Suva, the maritime inquiry found that there was a clogged drain in the bilges, meaning that they and the lower decks were flooded. There was still fuel in the tanks, and a rough estimate supposed it had completed about 243 miles of its journey and was only about 50 miles from Tokelau when whatever happened happened. It was also found that although the radio was working, there was an unseen break in the cables, which would have limited the radios range to only about two miles.
Star Wars would not exist without Japanese cinema. Starting with the original trilogy, which took more than a few cues from The Hidden Fortress and Throne of Blood, you then have J.J. Abrams openly admitting he took inspiration from Kurosawas High and Low when making The Force Awakens. The Mandalorian got in on it, too, basically being Lone Wolf and Cub in Space. And while not directly related, even the prequel trilogy can trace its roots to Japan, being the spiritual equivalent of one of those Japanese pornos where a live squid ends up inside someones anus.

So with Disney commissioning a bunch of Star Wars anime, the circle is now complete.

Coming to Disney+ in September, Star Wars: Visions will be an anthology of nine shorts set in the SW universe and directed by seven different Japanese studios putting their own spin on a franchise that has been ripping off their culture for nearly 50 years now. Its a little like someone stealing your stuff and then commissioning you to paint a portrait of it. But, hey, despite The Rise of Skywalkers best efforts, Star Wars is still relevant and mega-popular, so this will be a chance for Japanese artists to create something that literally gets to the very soul of the franchise.

Each of the Visions stories will be different in terms of both tone and style. Some will have a more retro feel like T0-B1, which will apparently be inspired by the classic manga Astro Boy. Then you have the Tatooine Rhapsody short, which has been described as a rock opera despite the fact that the last time someone tried to make a space opera inspired by Star Wars, we got Flash Gordon.

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Other stories will include classic jidaigeki-style samurai dramas, only with lightsabers instead of katanas. It even looks like one of the shorts will feature a Black character, bumping the total number in all of Star Wars by like 10%. Of course, if you dont want to wait until September to see a Black sci-fi samurai fighting robots, you can check out the awesome anime Yasuke.

Follow Cezary on Twitter.

Top Image: Lucasfilm
Photo by Getty Westend61 / Photo by Getty Westend61

HARTFORD  A teenager who was wounded by gunshot is in critical condition Sunday, according to city police.

Police went to Hartford Hospital Sunday around 4:19 p.m. for a report of a gunshot victim arriving for treatment by private vehicle, a release from Lt. Aaron Boisvert read.
Robert Parris Moses, a civil rights activist who was shot at and endured beatings and jail while leading Black voter registration drives in the American South during the 1960s and later helped improve minority education in math, has died. He was 86.

Moses, who was widely referred to as Bob, worked to dismantle segregation as the Mississippi field director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the civil rights movement and was central to the 1964 Freedom Summer in which hundreds of students went to the South to register voters.

Moses started his second chapter in civil rights work by founding in 1982 the Algebra Project thanks to a MacArthur Fellowship. The project included a curriculum Moses developed to help struggling students succeed in math.

Ben Moynihan, the director of operations for the Algebra Project, said Moses wife, Dr. Janet Moses, told him her husband passed away Sunday morning in Hollywood, Florida. Information was not given as to the cause of death.

"Bob Moses was a hero of mine. His quiet confidence helped shape the civil rights movement, and he inspired generations of young people looking to make a difference," said former President Barack Obama on Twitter.

Moses was born in Harlem, New York, on January 23, 1935, two months after a race riot left three dead and injured 60 in the neighborhood. His grandfather, William Henry Moses, has been a prominent Southern Baptist preacher and a supporter of Marcus Garvey, a Black nationalist leader at the turn of the century.

Like many Black families, the Moses family moved north from the South during the Great Migration. Once in Harlem, his family sold milk from a Black-owned cooperative to help supplement the household income, according to Robert Parris Moses: A Life in Civil Rights and Leadership at the Grassroots, by Laura Visser-Maessen.

Moses didnt spend much time in the Deep South until he went on a recruiting trip in 1960 to see the movement for myself. He sought out the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.s Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta but found little activity in the office and soon turned his attention to SNCC.

I was taught about the denial of the right to vote behind the Iron Curtain in Europe, Moses later said. I never knew that there was (the) denial of the right to vote behind a Cotton Curtain here in the United States.

The young civil rights advocate tried to register Black people to vote in Mississippis rural Amite County where he was beaten and arrested. When he tried to file charges against a white assailant, an all-white jury acquitted the man and a judge provided protection to Moses to the county line so he could leave.

In 1963, he and two other activists  James Travis and Randolph Blackwell  were driving in Greenwood, Mississippi, when someone opened fire on them and the 20-year-old Travis was hit. In a press release from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Moses described how bullets whizzed around them and how Moses took the wheel when Travis was struck and stopped the car.

We all were within inches of being killed," Moses said in the 1963 press release.

A reoccurring theme in Moses' life and work was the need to listen and work with the local populations where activists were trying to effect change, whether that was registering Black voters in some of the most staunchly anti-integration parts of Mississippi or years later working with students and teachers to come up with ways to improve math knowledge.

In an interview with the National Visionary Leadership Project, he talked about the need for civil rights workers to earn the trust of the local population in Mississippi.

You had to earn the right for the Black population in Mississippi to decide that they were going to work with you because why should they risk everything to work with you if you were somebody or a collection of people who were just not serious?" he said.

He later helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which sought to challenge the all-white Democratic delegation from Mississippi in 1964. But President Lyndon Johnson prevented the group of rebel Democrats from voting in the convention and instead let Jim Crow southerners remain, drawing national attention.

Disillusioned with white liberal reaction to the civil rights movement, Moses soon began taking part in demonstrations against the Vietnam War then cut off all relationships with whites, even former SNCC members.

Moses worked as a teacher in Tanzania, Africa, returned to Harvard to earn a doctorate in philosophy and taught high school math in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He later taught math in Jackson, Mississippi, while commuting back and forth to Massachusetts on the weekends.

The press-shy Moses started his second chapter in civil rights work by founding in 1982 the Algebra Project using money he received through the MacArthur Foundation Fellows program  often referred to as genius grants  to improve math literacy among underserved populations. Ben Moynihan from the Algebra Project said Moses saw the work of improving mathematics literacy as an extension of the civil rights work he had started in the 1960s.

Bob really saw the issue of giving hope to young people through access to mathematics literacy.... as a citizenship issue, as critical as the right to vote has been," Moynihan said.

Ernesto Cortes Jr., director emeritus and senior advisor to the Industrial Areas Foundation which helps develop community organizers, worked with Moses over four decades during which Moses would come to seminars and trainings. Cortes said Moses did not talk fast and was very attentive and deliberate. One of the key lessons Moses imparted was his steadfastness  sticking to a goal despite being repeatedly knocked down  and his generosity.

Bob always looked to develop other people, and give them recognition and give them their due, Cortes said.

___

Former AP reporter Russell Contreras was primary contributor to this report.
INDIAN FALLS, Calif. (AP)  California's largest wildfire merged with a smaller blaze and destroyed homes in remote areas with limited access for firefighters, as numerous other fires gained strength and threatened property across the U.S. West.

The massive Dixie Fire, which started July 14, had already leveled over a dozen houses and other structures when it combined with the Fly Fire and tore through the tiny Northern California community of Indian Falls after dark Saturday.

An updated damage estimate was not available Sunday, though fire officials said the blaze had charred nearly 298 square miles acres (772 square kilometers) of timber and brush in Plumas and Butte counties. It was 21% contained.

Firefighters carrying hand tools were forced to hike through rugged terrain where engines can't go, said Rick Carhart, spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

It has been burning in extremely steep canyons, some places where it is almost impossible for human beings to set foot on the ground to get in there, he said. "Its going to be a long haul.

Still, crews made progress Saturday by proactively setting fires to rob the main blaze of fuels, Carhart said.

The fire prompted evacuation orders in several small mountain communities and along the west shore of Lake Almanor, a popular resort area. About 10,000 homes remained under threat, officials said.

Firefighters also reported progress against the nations largest wildfire, the Bootleg Fire in southern Oregon, containing 46% of the blaze that had consumed nearly 640 square miles (1,657 square kilometers).

More than 2,200 firefighters battled the blaze, focusing Sunday on constructing containment lines at the north and eastern edges in dense timber. Crews could get a break from rain and higher humidity predicted for this week, said Marcus Kauffman, spokesman for the Oregon Department of Forestry.

The lightning-caused fire has burned 67 homes, mainly cabins, and at least 2,000 houses were under evacuation orders.

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown told CNNs State of the Union that its imperative federal and state authorities invest in mitigation such as tree thinning and preventive burns to limit the number of similar massive blazes. But she conceded that the harsh reality is that were going to see more of these wildfires.

Theyre hotter, theyre more fierce, and obviously much more challenging to tackle. And they are a sign of the changing climate impacts, Brown said Sunday.

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency for four northern counties because of wildfires that he said were causing conditions of extreme peril to the safety of persons and property. The proclamation opened the way for more state support.

Such conditions are often from a combination of unusual random, short-term and natural weather patterns heightened by long-term, human-caused climate change. Global warming has made the West much warmer and drier in the past 30 years.

In southwest Montana, officials were focusing on structure protection for three fires amid weather forecasts of rising temperatures, low humidity and westerly winds this week, factors that could produce explosive growth.

Crews were trying to protect about 200 homes and cabins and prevent the 44-square-mile (144-square-kilometer) Trail Creek blaze from reaching the Big Hole National Battlefield in Beaverhead County, fire spokesman Jason Nedlo said. The battlefield site, operated by the National Park Service, has been closed because of the fire threat.

Five federal firefighters were in stable condition Sunday after being burned when swirling winds blew a lightning-caused wildfire back on them in eastern Montana on Thursday. The five were building a defensive line at the Devils Creek Fire in Garfield County when the weather shifted suddenly.

Elsewhere in California, the 104-square-mile (269-square-kilometer) Tamarack fire south of Lake Tahoe continued to burn through timber and chaparral and threatened communities on both sides of the California-Nevada state line. The fire, sparked by lightning July 4 in Alpine County, California has destroyed at least 23 buildings, including more than a dozen in Nevada. It was 27% contained Sunday, and officials were able to lift evacuation orders.

Heavy smoke from that blaze and the Dixie Fire lowered visibility and may at times ground aircraft providing support for fire crews. The air quality south of Lake Tahoe and across the state line into Nevada deteriorated to very unhealthy levels.

In north-central Washington, firefighters battled two blazes in Okanogan County that threatened hundreds of homes and again caused hazardous air quality conditions Saturday. And in northern Idaho, east of Spokane, Washington, a small fire near the Silverwood Theme Park prompted evacuations Friday evening at the park and in the surrounding area. The theme park was back open Saturday with the fire half contained.

Although hot weather with afternoon winds posed a continued threat of spreading blazes, weekend forecasts also called for a chance of scattered thunderstorms in California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and other states. However, forecasters said some could be dry thunderstorms that produce little rain but a lot of lightning, which can spark new blazes.

More than 85 large wildfires were burning around the country, most of them in Western states. They had burned over 1.4 million acres (2,135 square miles, or more than 553,000 hectares).
MILFORD  Traci Webers journey to becoming the author of a book on yoga started as a text message from one of her students.

The student had recently started a publishing company called [f]empowerment press and asked if Weber was interested in writing a book based on her yoga class.

She asked if I wanted to do the 30-day challenge that I had offered to my students into a book, said Weber. I texted her back and said, Yes, lets do this.

Weber, a Milford resident, just released her first book titled Reclaim Your Wild.

I never in my wildest dreams thought that I would write a book. Im still feeling that impostor syndrome, said Weber. Im humbled and in awe that this is here. Im very proud of it and also a little surprised that I accomplished this.

Weber said the book contains a yoga pose for each day, instructions on how to do the pose and a picture of her performing the pose. It also lets the reader know what chakras (body energy center) the post aligns with and gives readers a daily task. She said the yoga poses are accessible to all levels of practitioner, and there are ways to modify the poses.

I think now, after COVID, this book is kind of essential to people for many reasons, and one of those reasons is to get people outside, said Weber. There are tasks in here like go on a hike where youve never been, take a moon bath, go to a drumming circle, do an outdoor foot ritual soak.

The book is a 30-day journey to help women get back to their true wild nature, said Weber.

Women have been put into societal boxes, she said. This is sort of a guide map to help women get back to who they truly are.

The book took more than a year to produce, but Weber said she has been working on the project for much longer than that. She said she has actually been working on it since she was 12, although she herself didnt know it at the time.

When I was 12, I found a book by Richard Hittleman, and it literally saved my life, said Weber. I had a difficult childhood, and his book gave me the tools to navigate my childhood.

Years later, in 2014, Weber said she decided to start training to become a yoga teacher and to learn more about its philosophy.

I didnt think I was going to be a teacher, and I had no idea what I was going to do, she said.

After she graduated, Weber decided to start her own yoga business called WalkAboutYoga. Then COVID-19 hit and everything shut down, she said.

I took a camping trip to Virginia by myself and riding around on my bicycle asking the universe how can I do the things that I love, she said. How can I help women? How can I practice yoga? How can I be in nature and do all of these things and make a living?

When she got back to her tent, Weber said she saw that she had received the fateful text message inviting her to write a book based on the 30-day challenge that she had issued her students three years before.

As Weber was writing the book to help others, she said it also helped her.

What this book has taught me is that if someone like me can have a dream come true, anybody can, she said. This book also helped me remember some things about my past that I didnt recall. Some of them were really awesome powerful things like teachers I remembered, and other things were kind of hurtful and traumatic. But all of those things helped me create this book. So Im grateful for it.

Weber said the book, like yoga, can be a daily practice for people to start.

You may at the end of this book go, yea Im feeling a little bit better, but maybe Im going to do this a couple more times and continue my growth, she said. You can take the challenges as much as you like.

Realistically, Weber said, people wont finish reading the book and find that they have been transformed into their wild, primal selves.

Its a continual thing because society is going to come back and say Nope, 9-to-5, punch that clock. Or society is going to come back in and say You cant wear your hair like that or You cant dress like that. So this is a guidebook for life, in a way.

Ultimately, Weber said she hoped her book would give to other women what Hittlemans book gave to her.

His book really helped a 12-year-old girl get through a lot of stuff, and thats what I want to be to people, she said. I just really want to share the gifts of yoga with people to help them better their lives, to better understand themselves, and be more comfortable with themselves. My goal is to really just have yoga help other women like it has helped me.
BARCELONA, Spain (AP)  Like many of Spains 20-somethings, Sergio Rosado has seen the new, more contagious coronavirus strain strike those too eager to cut loose when authorities rolled back health restrictions with vaccinations picking up pace.

But the 22-year-old student shares the country's widespread public trust in the vaccines, and Rosado plans to get his shots as soon as his turn comes.

I have friends that have caught COVID-19 at big parties. Lots of people I know have caught it, Rosado said. I did go out too, but to places without many people and in controlled spaces, and with face masks.

Spain, like its fellow European Union members, got off to a slow start in administering shots compared to Britain and the United States after regulators approved the first vaccines. But once deliveries by drugmakers started flowing to meet demand, the country quickly made up ground.

After only fully vaccinating 10% of its adults from January until the end of April, now nearly 54% of its adults, around 25 million people, have received two vaccine jabs, making Spain one of the inoculation leaders in the 27-nation European Union.

The program is built on Spains efficient public health care system, a well-ordered vaccination plan that stuck strictly to age groups, and a populace confident in the safety of childhood immunizations and therefore largely resistant to skepticism about COVID-19 jabs.

Vaccination forms part of our genome, Amos Garcia, president of the Spanish Association of Vaccinology, told The Associated Press. Our professionals have always believed strongly in the benefits of vaccines. We have always strongly encouraged children from a very young age to get their vaccines.

He said general vaccination rates for children in Spain were over 95%.

Spains public health care system, which has suffered budget cuts in the past decade, buckled last year under the first wave of the virus, which has claimed at least 81,000 lives in the country.

But fears that the health system wouldnt be up to the job of managing a massive vaccine rollout proved unfounded. Eligibility information was widely disseminated, and people didn't hesitate to sign up when it was their age groups turn. Vaccination lines generally moved swiftly, and unlike France, there was no paperwork to get in the way when people went to their local clinics or mass vaccination points.

It also helped that no politician, not even on the fringes of the right or left, sowed doubts about the vaccines. The only political issue regarding the vaccines was when they weren't arriving fast enough, and regional health authorities in charge of administering them demanded more quicker.

This is not a question of progressives or of conservatives. It is a public health question, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez told MSNBC while on a visit last week to the United States.

Unlike Germany or France, Spain doesn't have a big anti-vaccine movement. More than 90% of Spains public health workers have been vaccinated, compared with 42% of public health workers in France.

So while France and Greece have had to pressure skeptics and procrastinators into getting their shots by making vaccines mandatory for people working certain jobs, such as paramedics and nursing home workers, Spaniards have so far needed very little prodding.

In methodically working its way from the most elderly downward, Spain achieved its first goal: stopping the most vulnerable from dying. But the emphasis on vaccines as the salvation could also have contributed to Spains young letting down their guards as curfews and face mask requirements were lifted, just as the delta variant arrived.

The result is that, despite its smooth vaccine rollout, Spain is currently one of Europes hot spots for new infections. Spain is reporting more than 25,000 new cases a day now compared with 3,400 a day a month ago, according to Our World in Data.

A month ago, when we let go of the most of the restrictions, we didnt call it Freedom Day like England, but basically it was a fairly big move toward more freedom," Rafael Bengoa, former Director for Health Systems at WHO and one of Spains leading public health experts, told the AP.

That is one of the reasons that we have the present epidemiological situation."

If you want to control the pandemic in this situation, you have to be doing both the traditional public health restrictions plus the vaccinations, Bengoa explained.

In response, some regions have put new restrictions back into place, such as a nightly curfew in the region that includes Barcelona.

Spain is counting on its vaccine program to make quick inroads with people under age 40 and it seems that the desire to get vaccinated hasn't fallen victim to a generation gap. Spains government polling bureau said last week that nearly 90% of respondents under 35 said they wanted to get vaccinated.

Still, Bengoa thinks virus restrictions will remain in place for a while.

We have to explain to the population that this is here to stay, he said. We will control it. But ... youre going to have to live with a virus that is more dangerous than the flu.

___

Hernan Munoz in Barcelona, Aritz Parra in Madrid, and Angela Charlton in Paris contributed to this report.

___

Follow all AP stories on the coronavirus pandemic at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic.
Herford, NC (27944)

Today

Partly cloudy this evening, then becoming cloudy after midnight. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 68F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Partly cloudy this evening, then becoming cloudy after midnight. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 68F. Winds light and variable.
Julia Melnick, 65, of Flatwoods, Kentucky passed away Tuesday, July 27, 2021 at Kings Daughters Medical Center, Ashland Kentucky. Julia was born November 4, 1955, a daughter to the late Nolan K. and Molly (Spillman) Adams. In addition to her parents, she was preceded in death by two spouses:
Illinois residents James Brandt, left, and wife, Sally, second from left, met Linda and Tom Paul, right, only recently. James Brandt traced his family lineage to the Valley and found he and Paul, his cousin, descended from a 19th century Leck Kill farmer.
TikTok users have been sent into a frenzy by a woman with an uncanny resemblance to Hollywood A-lister Amanda Seyfried.

The Tunisian-born social media star Rou, who is in her 20s, boasts 118.6K followers and 3.8M likes on the platform after sharing her incredible likeness to the American actress.

Her most watched video, which has gathered over two million views, sees the double reply to a comment likening her to the actress by sharing comparison photos of the two of them.

Some users were adamant that they had stumbled across the real Amanda while they were scrolling through the app, with comments insisting Rou 'must be related' to the actress and calling the pair 'twins'.

Tunisian-born social media star Rou who is in her 20s, boasts 118.6K followers and 3.8M likes on TikTok after sharing her incredible likeness to American actress Amanda Seyfried

The Mean Girls star and Hollywood A-lister is pictured during the 76th Venice Film Festival in Italy in August 2019

The video was in reply to a comment that read: 'OMG Amanda Seyfried? You look just like her wow' and saw her mimicking facial expressions of the star in famous films such as Mean Girls and Dear John, as well as red carpet photographs.

The clip quickly went viral on the app, racking up 392.1K views and 3143 comments, with users saying the resemblance is insane and saying that the Hollywood A-lister is literally your twin.

'She is Amanda Seyfried and you cannot fool us', wrote one astonished user.

'Omg you are blessed, I think shes the most beautiful woman', commented a second user.

Some users were adamant that they had stumbled across the real Amanda while they were scrolling through the app and were baffled to discover it was Rou (left). Right, Seyfried as Sophie in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again

The clip likening the pair clip quickly went viral on the app, racking up 392.1K views and 3143 comments. Left, Rou in one of her TikTok videos. Right, Seyfried posing for a Lancome campaign in 2019

Another baffled fan said: 'No because you are her omg, yall are literally twins.'

'THIS IS WHO I WAS THINKING OF when I saw you omg the resemblance!' said another user.

Several users also took the opportunity to spam the account with their favourite lines from Seyfried's classic comedy Mean Girls, in which she plays Karen Smith.

'So you agree, you think you're really pretty?', teased one user.

The user first gained attention online posting beauty videos which have racked up over 130K views and 7,000 likes and has now gained an extensive following doing various TikTok trends.

Users also compared Rou to Australian actress Phoebe Tonkin, Norwegian model Kristine Frosted and Perth-born model and actress Gemma Ward.
A young woman who had grey hair by the time she turned 25 has shared why she's chosen to embrace her silver strands and ditch the dye for good.

Sophie McGrath, 27, told Daily Mail Australia she found her first grey hair at only 13 years of age in 2007, but wasn't concerned and simply pulled out the strand with tweezers.

The ceramicist from Wellington, New Zealand originally had gorgeous dark brown hair, which is still somewhat present along her hairline today.

'I continued to pull the greys out as more appeared over the next couple of years, until I started dying my hair around 15,' Sophie said.

To this day Sophie is unsure why the greys came through at such a young age, but says it hasn't weakened her self-confidence.

Sophie McGrath, 27, (pictured) told Daily Mail Australia she found her first grey hair at only 13 years of age in 2007, but wasn't concerned and simply pulled out the strand with tweezers

'Both my parents had a significant amount of grey by their early forties, but no one else had nearly as much grey early on as I do,' she said

'Both my parents had a significant amount of grey by their early forties, but no one else had nearly as much grey early on as I do,' she said.

'Perhaps that combination of genes meant that I was destined to go grey so young! My mum also ditched the dye in her mid-forties so I did see her embrace her silvers relatively early on.'

While turning grey might sound daunting and stressful to some, Sophie still wasn't worried and simply continued dying her hair to cover it up.

Sophie started dying her hair almost every month for ten years before deciding to fully embrace her natural grey hair at 25.

Throughout the decade of dying her hair, she enjoyed experimenting with different colours but eventually deemed it to be time consuming, expensive and something she 'needed' to do.

'It never occurred to me that I could leave my natural colour, but that may have been because I was so young and had been dying it for so long,' she said.

'If anything, my confidence was lower while I was dying my hair because I felt like I had to hide something so natural about myself.'

Sophie started dying her hair almost every month for ten years before deciding to fully embrace her natural grey hair at 25

In recent years Sophie has completely ditched the dye, as she found herself feeling tired of the monthly beauty maintenance.

'Dying my hair turned into something I constantly thought about; I realised that feeling like I had to cover my silvers was causing me more stress than the grey hair itself!' she said.

'I have never felt more confident about how I look than I do now with my grey hair proudly showing.'

Now that her hair is 100 per cent natural, the strands are healthier, softer and shinier than ever before.

In recent years Sophie has completely ditched the dye, as she found herself feeling tired of the monthly beauty maintenance. Now that her hair is 100 per cent natural, the strands are healthier, softer and shinier than ever before

Accepting her natural colour was a 'big decision' for herself and her partner as they were a year away from getting married.

'I won't pretend I wasn't concerned about how my hair would look in the photos, so I opted to have my dyed hair lightened to help with the grow-out,' she said.

Right before the wedding day in November 2019, Sophie used a dark grey tint on her dyed ends.

Prior to making her decision, Sophie was inspired after seeing a woman on Instagram in her thirties embracing her silver hair.

'It was like a lightbulb moment! I started following the 'embrace the grey' and 'silver sisters' hashtags on Instagram, which were filled with people of all ages embracing their natural silvers,' she said.

'I realised that just like other people embracing their grey hair, I wasn't ashamed of my silvers.'

Accepting her natural colour was a 'big decision' for herself and her partner as they were a year away from getting married

Right before the wedding day in November 2019, Sophie used a dark grey tint on her dyed ends

In a sense, Sophie's grey hair has given her more freedom and confidence than she has ever experienced before and is something she 'never imagined would have such as positive impact on her life'.

'Stepping outside of the mould in that way has given me the confidence to do the same in other areas of my life, and I'm so happy that I took that first step,' she said.

'I've had so many conversations with people in their twenties who also have grey hairs but feel as though they have to cover them up in order to not be seen as 'old' or letting themselves go.

'Turning grey early is far more common than most people realise, and would become apparent if more people ditched the dye.'
The couple behind an incredible church conversion that has withstood the devastating bushfires of 2019 and 2020, floods and the global coronavirus pandemic have revealed how they brought their dream project to life, despite the odds.

Simon and Marie Partridge, from Cronulla, had been keen to buy and renovate an 'interesting church' for years before they stumbled across The Church at Tantawangalo in December 2017.

The church is situated around 40 minutes inland from Merimbula on the New South Wales south coast, and it looked to be the perfect project to renovate and turn into a guesthouse.

The couple behind an incredible church conversion that has withstood the devastating bushfires of 2019 and 2020, floods and the global coronavirus pandemic have revealed how they brought their dream project to life (The Church at Tantawangalo pictured)

Simon and Marie Partridge, from Cronulla (pictured with their daughter), had been keen to buy and renovate an 'interesting church' for years before they stumbled across The Church at Tantawangalo in December 2017

The church is situated around 40 minutes inland from Merimbula on the NSW south coast, and it looked to be the perfect project to renovate and turn into a guesthouse (pictured now)

'The Gothic revival building was still functioning as an Anglican church when it came up on the market, and it was in very good condition when we looked at it in early 2018,' Marie told FEMAIL.

'It still had its original stained glass windows, pointed-arch doors and stunning eight-metre herringbone ceilings.'

What it didn't have, however, was running water, power points, heating or a toilet.

We had to basically bush camp and put tents up in the church while we re-did it, using a pan toilet out the back

The couple beat out 120 other people at an incredibly popular auction to secure the unique property, and they set to work in transforming it into a guest home like no other.

'I'm qualified as an interior designer and Simon has experience with landscaping and carpentry, but the church still required quite a lot of work to get it functioning with water and power,' Marie said.

'We had to basically bush camp and put tents up in the church while we re-did it, using a pan toilet out the back.

'We thought we had mice for a while during the renovation, but later realised they were bats.'

The couple have kept many of the original features of the church (pictured now), including the stained glass windows, pointed-arch doors and stunning eight-metre herringbone ceiling

The couple beat out 120 other people at an incredibly popular auction to secure the unique property, and they set to work in transforming it into a guest home like no other (the church pictured)

The couple spent the next 18 months and close to double the amount of money they anticipated they would spend renovating the church.

'We probably could have done it faster, but we wanted to take our time with it and mainly did the work during the school holidays,' Marie said.

'It took staying at the church for a bit to realise that the sun was on the front steps in the morning, and that we would need to knock down a centre wall and install a giant bi-fold door to let more light in.'

The biggest costs were knocking down the wall and installing the floor-to-ceiling door, as well as putting in an underground water tank, the stunning front door and a statement bath tub.

'We really wanted to keep it so that the church was the thing that had the "wow factor", rather than some flashy kitchen with a giant island which wouldn't be in keeping with the church's character,' Marie said.

'We decided to give the church a bit of a modern interior feeling with brush brass in the lighting and tapware, but I think the church building still speaks for itself.'

The couple spent the next 18 months and double the amount they anticipated they would spend renovating the church (pictured ahead of removing the wall to put in steel bi-fold door)

'It took staying at the church for a bit to realise that the sun was on the front steps in the morning, and that we would need to knock down a centre wall and install a giant bi-fold door to let more light in,' Marie said (pictured during the renovation)

The couple and their daughter would bush camp and put up tents in the church during the school holidays while they did the work (pictured)

While there were a lot of foreseen issues along the way, what the couple could never have planned for was the nearby threats from multiple bushfires and floods throughout 2019 and 2020, as well as the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

At one stage during their renovation, bushfires ripped through the nearby town of Tathra, where they destroyed 60 or more homes.

'The fires came to within 10 kilometres of us, and I remember us being up there just watching and hoping,' Marie said.

'The neighbouring community were so kind, and really helped out lending us water when we had none.

'Fortunately, the wind changed and we were so lucky to be unaffected by fire.'

Today, the church features a dramatic entrance hall with original timber double door and an expansive open-plan kitchen, dining and living room (living area pictured)

Guests can enjoy a wood-burning fire, a luxurious bathroom in the original vestry with a free-standing bath and a queen size bed with handmade merino wool blankets (interior pictured)

While the church was mercifully unaffected by the bushfires, it wasn't long before Tantawangalo was hit by the floods in 2020.

'The worst went to about three metres above the levels of the river,' Marie said.

'We're lucky, because we're situated quite high up on the hill, but it was another time which proved to be quite scary.'

The Church opened to the public on 1 March 2020 on Airbnb and Riparide, before Simon and Marie were promptly forced to close on account of the pandemic.

It later re-opened in June 2020, and has been almost fully-booked ever since.

'It has been one thing after another, but thankfully we haven't been as badly affected as some,' Marie said.

'Perhaps a silver lining of COVID is that the church has been almost solidly-booked since restrictions have eased, as I think people are looking at different places they can travel to in Australia, now that we can't go overseas.'

It still boasts the eight-metre wooden ceilings, original stained glass windows, and a floor-to-ceiling steel bifold door - which lets the light flood in when it's sunny (pictured from above)

The church (pictured from the outside) has a dramatic entrance hall with original timber double door and an expansive open-plan living area

'Perhaps a silver lining of COVID is that the church has been almost solidly-booked since restrictions have eased, as I think people are looking at different places they can travel to in Australia, now that we can't go overseas,' Marie (pictured with her family) said

Today, the church features a dramatic entrance hall with original timber double door and an expansive open-plan kitchen, dining and living room.

It still boasts the eight-metre wooden ceilings, original stained glass windows, and a floor-to-ceiling steel bifold door - which lets the light flood in when it's sunny.

Guests can also enjoy a large wood-burning fire, a luxurious bathroom in the original vestry with a free-standing bath and a queen size bed with handmade merino wool blankets.

'I'm a big believer with interior design that you don't have to spend thousands always to get something looking great,' Marie said.

'While there are several quite expensive pieces, there is also plenty of Freedom, Kmart and Bunnings dotted around the house.

'It's all about blending the high and the low to give it a seamless finish.'

To find out more about The Church at Tantawangalo or to book it, you can visit Airbnb or Riparide here. You can also follow the church on Instagram here.
Prince Harry harbours a 'Prince Andrew complex' and fears he has a 'limited shelf-life' before the public become 'more interested in Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis', a friend of the royal has claimed.

The Duke of Sussex, 36, who is currently living in his $14 million mansion in Santa Barbara, has given a series of explosive interviews since he stepped back from royal duty last year.

A friend has said he 'always been in such a rush to make an impact' before he begins to slip down the pecking order in the royal family.

Speaking to The Sunday Times, the companion said: 'Harry has always been in such a rush to make an "impact", because he thinks he has a limited shelf-life before the public want to hear more from George and his siblings and he worries that after that, hell turn into his uncle.'

Prince Harry's friend has claimed the royal was fearful of 'becoming irrelevant' when he was working as a senior member of the Royal Family

The insider also stated that Harry feared falling down the Royal Family pecking order and 'turning into his uncle', Prince Andrew (pictured after Prince Philip's death in April)

The claims come after Harry announced he is working on his memoir at the age of 36.

It was revealed on Saturday that he has clinched a lucrative four-book deal  with the second due out only after the Queen has died.

Harrys lawyers have said the claim that he is waiting for his grandmother to pass away before releasing one of the books is false and defamatory.

In news sure to alarm Buckingham Palace, industry insiders said the 'tell-all' tome unveiled by Harry earlier this week is only the 'tip of the iceberg'.

It has been claimed that Harry was concerned interest in him would begin to wane as Prince William's children, Prince George, eight, Princess Charlotte, six, and Prince Louis, three, got older. Pictured: The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and their three children

Sources said the Duke of Sussex oversaw the bidding and told publishing houses to begin at 18million, with the final figure possibly reaching 29million.

The Royal Family has been left deeply concerned by Harry's decision to secretly collaborate with Pulitzer-winning ghostwriter JR Moehringer. The two men have been working on the book for up to a year.

Publishers have described it as 'the definitive account of the experiences, adventures, losses, and life lessons that have helped shape him'.

It is described by Harry as a 'wholly truthful first-hand account' of his life. But royal aides are worried that it will prove to be a highly one-sided account of the prince's experiences and reignite tensions with his estranged family.

The Queen and senior royals are still dealing with the fallout from his slew of interviews, most notably with US chat show host Oprah Winfrey.

The prince has made a string of highly damaging allegations about his closest relatives, including claims of institutional racism.

After the interview, Prince William was forced to speak publicly about the claims that someone in the Royal Family made racist comments to the couple.

As a result of the Oprah interview in March, Prince William was forced to speak publicly about the claims that someone in the Royal Family made racist comments to the couple. Pictured: Prince William and Prince Harry attend the unveiling of Princess Diana's statue at Kensington Palace

Speaking in March, he said: 'We are very much not a racist family.'

Prince Charles is reported to have taken the incident hard too, with one source stating: 'He has genuinely been so upset by it all. He just doesnt recognise any of the examples or narrative.'

Others are reportedly fearful that Prince Harry's recollection of events may not fall in line with that of the Royal family.

One royal aide is claimed to have said: 'I fear they may sail into the sunset now, convinced they did the right thing by speaking "their truth". Now I hope everyone shuts the f*** up.

The latest comments come after Prince Harry's old Eton and Army friends reportedly warned him not to reveal their secrets in his tell-all memoir.

Many of his older friends are worried his book could cause them huge embarrassment and some have warned they are ready to dish the Royal dirt if his book exposes them.

Harry and his wife Meghan agreed a lucrative four-book deal, including the Prince's memoir, for a figure possibly close to 29million.

Prince Harry's old Eton and Army friends have warned him not to reveal their secrets in his tell-all memoir due to be published next year and warned they may be ready to dish the royal dirt if his book exposes them

Harry's book deal deal has rattled some of his chums who fear unwanted revelations could be the final insult after years of them refusing to gossip about him (pictured serving with the army in Helmand province, Afghanistan, in January 2008)

The deal has rattled some of Harry's chums who fear unwanted revelations could be the final insult after years of them refusing to gossip about him.

A friend said: 'It feels very hypocritical given Harry chucked people out of his friendship group for talking to the press.

'There is a fear that he's going to reveal details of his hedonistic youth which some worry will play havoc with their careers and personal lives.'

Another pal said ominously: 'Harry's mates have remained loyal to him so far.'

Lawyers acting for Meghan and Harry yesterday said reports of a four-book deal with one to be released after the death of the Queen were false and defamatory. Penguin Random House, the publishing house that has agreed a deal reportedly worth at least 18 million, declined to comment.

Harry's wife Meghan is to pen a 'wellness' guide as part of the contract with Penguin Random House. The subject and author of the fourth title is unknown.

Harry's wife Meghan is to pen a 'wellness' guide as part of the contract with Penguin Random Hous

The Queen and senior royals are still dealing with the fallout from his slew of interviews, most notably with US chat show host Oprah Winfrey

Penguin Random House said that the 'proceeds' from the book would be donated to charity but has not detailed whether this would include both royalties and the advance.

A spokesman for the prince also insisted that he had informed his family  including the Queen  about plans for his book 'very recently'.

Yet the Mail understands his office made attempts to contact the royal household only hours before the story was broken by a US newspaper after learning it was about to become public.

Penguin Random House was contacted in detail about the story yesterday but said it would not be making any further comment 'over and above what is contained in the original press release'.

Buckingham Palace declined to comment last night on the revelations.
Former princess Tessy of Luxembourg has shared intimate snaps of her new blended family after she married hunky Swiss businessman Frank Floessel in a low-key ceremony in Zurich on Friday.

The beautiful bride, 35, wore a simple tiered midi wedding dress that featured a black ribbon under the bust, with the floaty material covering her blossoming baby bump.

The ex royal and mother-of-two is currently expecting a baby boy with her, now husband, Frank, which is due later this summer.

Taking to Instagram, she shared photographs of her two sons Prince Gabriel of Nassau, 14, and Prince Noah of Nassau, 12, whom she shares with ex-husband Prince Louis of Luxembourg, 34, who she divorced in 2019, alongside her new husband and stepdaughter Julia, writing simply: 'My Family.'

Former princess Tessy of Luxembourg, 35, has shared intimate snaps of her new blended family after she married hunky Swiss businessman Frank Floessel in a low-key ceremony in Zurich on Friday (pictured, Tessy with her two sons Prince Gabriel of Nassau, 14, and Prince Noah of Nassau, 12, whom she shares with ex-husband Prince Louis of Luxembourg, 34, who she divorced in 2019, alongside her new husband and stepdaughter Julia)

In another photograph, Tessy can be seen walking along a corridor holding hands with hew new stepdaughter Julia

In a gushing post shared yesterday, Tessy wrote 'we said yes' before commenting: 'Thank you all again for your hundreds of messages! So much kindness and love in each and every of your words!

'Such a spread of love and appreciation for our wedding day has enormously touched our hearts.'

She continued: 'Enjoy your weekend.

'Mama will take some time off now this weekend and soak in family love and snuggles on the sofa together. Sending you all a big hug!'

Other images show Tessy's children posing in their wedding attire whilst at the reception of her wedding

Tessy's new stepdaughter chats with her son Prince Noah in one of the new images shared of her big day on Friday

Meanwhile she also shared a series of images from the big day, including one as she walked down the corridor holding hands with her new stepdaughter Julia.

In another, Julia can be seen chatting to Prince Noah over dinner, while in a third, Frank beams as he poses for a selfie with his daughter.

Tessy's two sons Prince Gabriel and Prince Noah served as the best men while Julia, was a bridesmaid.

A video showed the bride arriving at the ceremony in a white Tesla with butterfly doors, and then stepping out of the car holding her bouquet of flowers as she blows a kiss to the guests.

Tessy looked stunning as she wore her blonde locks in a sophisticated up-do and enhanced her pretty features with a touch of make-up, wearing a blush and light pink lipstick.

She also shared snaps from her wedding preparations showing her arranging her bridal bouquet and flowers as well as her appointment with hairdresser in the morning.

The beautiful bride wore a simple tiered midi wedding dress that featured a black ribbon under the bust, with the floaty material covering her blossoming baby bump

A video shows the bride arriving at the ceremony, which was a small and intimate gathering of close family and friends due to current Covid restrictions, in a white Tesla with butterfly doors

She stepped out of the car holding her bouquet of flowers and looking radiant with her blonde locks in a sophisticated up-do as she blew a kiss to the guests

The simple ceremony was a different occasion than her first wedding to Prince Louis in 2006, which took place in a modest country church, six months after giving birth to their first child, Prince Gabriel.

As only a small number of people were allowed inside the venue, with guests gathered outside watching a livestream on their phones and showered the happy couple with confetti after the ceremony.

Later, the guests were treated to a sit-down meal with gorgeous views overlooking a lake and were given traditional wedding favours of sugared almonds to take home.

Last week, Tessy revealed that her nuptials were approaching in a post saying she felt like she was living in a 'romantic movie', writing: 'Lots of exciting memories happening at the moment.

'We are getting married next week and despite loads of last minute work and other arrangements, everyone is super looking forward for Mama and Papa to formalise this relationship before little bean arrives.

'Gabriel, Noah and Julia will be the best men and bride maid. It feels like I am in a beautiful and romantic movie indeed.'

Her two sons Prince Gabriel and Prince Noah whom she shares with ex-husband Prince Louis of Luxembourg, served as best men for the ceremony

With only a small number of people allowed inside the venue, guests gathered outside to watch a livestream on their phones and showered the happy couple with confetti after the ceremony

Later, the guests were treated to a sit-down meal with gorgeous views overlooking a lake and were given traditional wedding favours of sugared almonds to take home

She continued: 'It will be a very small and intimate gathering of close family and friends. We do know that many close friends from abroad, especially UK will be missed due to Corona regulations.

'However, do not worry, the big wedding ceremony will be held in a few months time after baby has arrived and i am sure by then that the corona regulations should be adjusted.

'Thank you all again for all your continues messages, letters, wishes and numerous gifts for little bean. We are showered with love.'

Tessy is believed to have known financier and CEO Frank Floessel, for several years, and announced her engagement to him on New Year's Eve and announced her pregnancy in February.

In May, she shared a sweet sonogram of her baby on Instagram, and revealed her adorable nickname for the baby is 'little bean', writing: '"Our life together has just begun. Youre part of me my little one".

The ex royal and mother-of-two in currently expecting a baby boy with her, now husband, Frank, which is due later this summer after announcing her pregnancy in February

Tessy is believed to have known financier and CEO Frank Floessel, for several years, and announced her engagement to him on New Year's Eve

Alongside the image of the sonogram, Tessy wrote: 'Meet little Bean. Your big brothers and sister are super excited to be meeting you in the summer for real in person and not just your strong karate kicks.'

She continued: 'Thank you all for your wishes, cards, letters, prayers, and numerous gifts already received for little bean.

'We are looking forward to be receiving more of them over the next weeks and months. We are planning on replying in July to all of them.'

She added: 'We feel very blessed and are humbled that you chose to share our joy with us in such a meaningful way. Such an act of compassion, kindness and love.'

Tessy announced her pregnancy several months ago by sharing a snap on Instagram cuddling up with Frank, while the businessman's hands gently rested on the mother-of-two's growing baby bump.

It comes after the couple announced their engagement to one another at the end of last year, with Tessy posting on Instagram : 'Yes to 2021 and many more years together.'

Frank also shared his own joy over the big news, telling RTL Today: 'After having mastered the extraordinary and difficult last year together, I took my chance to take the next step in our relationship and I am overjoyed that Tessy said yes.'

Entrepreneur Frank got his master's degree in ETH Zurich and Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is currently CEO and president of CBA Finance.

The former royal appears to have known Frank for several years, having written about his work on her blog in September 2018.

He has also acted as a trustee for the organisation Professors Without Borders, which Tessy co-founded in 2016.

In 2019, Tessy told Hello magazine that it 'took a long time' after her divorce, when she was stripped of her royal titles, explaining: 'After every relationship it takes a while to heal when the heart has been broken. It has been really, really wonderful for me to realise that I am able to trust and love again. It's nice to see that life goes on.'

Former princess Tessy announced she is expecting her first child with her hunky Swiss businessman boyfriend in February

Tessy went on to reveal how she is 'very happy' that her ex-husband Prince Louis maintains a close bond with their sons, despite the fact they can't see each other during quarantine.

She said her son's 'love and trust' with their father had 'become stronger' because of the separation during the pandemic.

Tessy has previously told how her family 'suffered greatly' when she became a princess in 2006 after marrying Prince Louis, whom she met in 2004.

Speaking on Sky News special report The Meghan Effect, Tessy explained: 'My little cousin needed to change schools twice. My twin brother was incredibly bullied at work  he still is today.

Tessy became a princess in 2006 when she married Prince Louis, six months after Tessy gave birth aged 19, to their first child

Frank was first pictured on a family hike with the proud mother and her two boys last year, with Tessy captioning the photos 'Family is all that matters' with two love heart emojis

'My sister, my parents suffered, my oldest brother doesn't talk to me anymore because of that, because it was too much for him to handle.

'That was when I married in, and when I got divorced, oh my gosh the same.'

Born a commoner, Tessy joined the Luxembourg Army in 2002 at the age of 18, rising to the rank of corporal. Two years later, when she was one of a handful of female UN peacekeepers in Kosovo, she met Prince Louis, who was visiting the army.

His family only became aware of their love affair when Tessy fell pregnant and gave birth aged 19, and unmarried, in September 2005, providing Grand Duke Henri with his first grandson.

It infuriated the royal family, and Prince Louis renounced any claim to the title of Grand Duke due to the constitutional crisis they had created by having a child out of wedlock.

When Tessy married Prince Louis in September 2006, six months after giving birth, in a modest country church wedding, the Grand Duke stripped her of any claim to his title.

The couple's fairytale marriage broke down in 2016, and they were granted a decree nisi in February 2017.

A judge ruled that Prince Louis should pay 4,000 for each child, per year, the equivalent of 75-a-week, after finding that Luxembourg's royal family could not be expected to cover the costs of the Prince's break-up.
The Queen's Sandringham estate is set to become the new home of endangered curlew birds in a bid to help conservation efforts.

Several eggs which have been laid by the birds at eight RAF bases and reared across the country will be released at the house in Norfolk this week.

At the ceremony, which will be attended by Prince Charles, 84 chicks will be released in the grounds and at Wild Ken Hill.

As reported in The Times, senior ornithologist Richard Saunders explained the birds often settle at airfields because they mimic their natural grassland habitats which have been lost in recent years.

The Queen's Sandringham estate is set to become the new home of endangered curlew birds in a bid to help conservation efforts. Pictured: The Queen at Royal Windsor Cup polo match earlier this month)

Several eggs which have been laid by the birds at eight RAF bases and reared across the country will be released at the house in Norfolk this week. Picture: Stock image of a curlew

The UK's breeding population represents more than 30 per cent of the west European population.

According to the Breeding Bird Survey, the breeding population of curlews declined in Scotland, England and Wales by 42 per cent between 1995 and 2008.

Richard explained: 'They try to defend their nest, and they even dive-bomb fighter planes.'

As a result, the eggs that are laid on airfields are often destroyed under licence by the RAF to avoid accidents.

At the ceremony, attended by Prince Charles, 84 chicks will be released in the grounds of Sandringham (pictured) and at Wild Ken Hill

According to RSPB, the reduction of their habit is likely to be the result of drainage of farmland and moorland, improvement of grasslands and predators.

Prince Charles is said to have a shown a keen interest in the conservation of the birds, which have been dubbed the 'pandas of UK conservation', in recent years.

He hosted a conservation event for the birds on Dartmoor in 2008 and another early last year, the Curlew Recovery Summit, at his residence Highgrove House, Gloucestershire.

Its aim was to help maintain respectable land management and discussed the control of the birds' predators.

The curlew is the largest European wading bird and is recognisable by its long legs and distinctive down curved bill. Picture: Stock image

The curlew is the largest European wading bird and is recognisable by its long legs and distinctive down curved bill.

They feed on worms, shellfish and shrimps which they pinch up using their tweezer-like bill.

The birds are most commonly seen at Morecambe Bay, the Solway Firth, the Wash, and the Dee, Severn, Humber and Thames estuaries.
The tics and verbal outbursts associated with Tourettes syndrome are often mocked. But the women living with it (many undiagnosed) are isolated and ashamed. Anna Moore talks to three sufferers who decided to embrace this debilitating condition

Tourettes syndrome is a neurological disorder that affects about one per cent of the population

Anitas tics began before she could speak  or before she knew she could speak. As a toddler, before she said mama or milk or any other conscious word, she said, repeatedly, at random times Michael Schumacher. I didnt watch much TV and had no interest in Formula One, so I dont know how I latched on to that name, but it lasted well into adulthood, she says.

As a young child, shed whistle, pop her lips and swear without knowing why. Her arm would shoot to the side with no warning. Shed pinch people  her mother, her friend, strangers on a bus. At the age of 12, her tics resulted in her being beaten unconscious by some older pupils  at that point, she left formal education for home schooling.

Multiple trips to the GP didnt help. Anitas doctor told her it was attention-seeking behaviour that shed probably grow out of. When I heard that, I was totally ashamed, says Anita, who is now 30. I barely went outside and lived in fear of people seeing me tic, of being judged. I didnt have siblings  it was just me and my mum  so I was very alone. She became agoraphobic and began to self-harm (her arms show the scars). Years passed and the tics continued. I couldnt see how it could be attention-seeking when it happened when I was on my own, says Anita.

Still, she did not recognise her tics as Tourettes syndrome. The neurological disorder affects about one per cent of the population  there are more people with Tourettes than there are with green eyes  yet it still remains largely hidden and misunderstood. (Research shows that it takes an average of five GP visits before a referral for specialist help.)

Like most people, I believed the stereotype that Tourettes was people shouting swear words, says Anita. I was having bodily movements and my verbal tics could be random including the words sheep and cats. The real problem is that Tourettes is believed to be a male condition. Its much harder to get a diagnosis if youre a woman.

Anita, whose verbal tics started as a toddler, was diagnosed in her 20s. She is now a popular YouTuber.

A recent surge of tics in teenage girls has thrown Tourettes syndrome into the spotlight. At the start of 2021, some specialist clinics were receiving three or four referrals of adolescent girls a week compared to the normal rate of four to six a year. There have been various theories to explain the rise  the stress caused by the pandemic and lockdown living, as well as possible contagion from social media platforms such as TikTok where people with Tourettes have gone viral with videos of their symptoms.

When I step out of the door I never know if I'm going to shout a slur or wink at someone

Suzanne Dobson, CEO of UK charity Tourettes Action, hopes the flurry of headlines will raise the profile of what to many is seen as a joke condition. If Im in a taxi and mention my job to the driver, theyll say, Is that the one where people shout and swear? she says. In fact, only ten per cent of people with Tourettes do that. Tourettes brings on a huge range of involuntary sounds  coughing, grunting, odd phrases, operatic noises  and a vast number of involuntary body movements that can involve any muscle in the body.

She continues: People know about the swearing but they dont see the pain it causes, the life it stops. I know people confined to wheelchairs because their legs give out from under them. Others have rubbed their eyeballs so hard  200 times a day  they are now blind. Nobody knows about the fear of leaving the house, catching a bus or going to the shops. No one talks about the research which shows that having Tourettes makes you four times more likely to die by suicide.

The causes of Tourettes are still unknown, although its believed to be a combination of genetics, an excess of dopamine and a sensitivity in the brain. Though tics typically start in early childhood and, for 70 per cent of cases, largely disappear by adulthood, stressful life events can also trigger them in those born with a predisposition. Dobson knows a woman whose tics began after she was raped, and a man whose tics were triggered when he found the body of a close friend who had killed himself.

Although Tourettes has until recently been diagnosed in four times more boys than girls, the ratio is changing, says psychiatrist Dr Uttom Chowdhury, co-author of Tic Disorders: A Guide for Parents and Professionals. As with autism, were realising that girls with Tourettes might be more likely to be undiagnosed. It could be that it is picked up more in boys because girls are masking, staying a bit quieter, more hidden, causing fewer problems in school.

This was true for Andrea Shine, now 30, whose Tourettes went undiagnosed until she was 28. I had tics as far back as I remember but they were thought to be bad habits, she says. As a child, I used to scrunch my nose and mouth, make a mouth-pop noise and a humming sound. My mum would get annoyed and tell me to stop, but it was just seen as an annoying habit.

It was only in her 20s, as a mother of three living in Norfolk, that her tics snowballed. Its like this build-up of energy that can only be relieved by a tic, she says. The first was a leg kick in the evening when I was tired. Then it progressed to my arms throwing themselves up, then a head jolt. Then there were more random noises including squeaks or grunts. It was extremely frightening, she continues. I was a seemingly healthy adult unable to control my own body. Tests and scans ruled out life-threatening degenerative diseases and instead the diagnosis was Tourettes syndrome. Now the tics are daily, sometimes constant. Her life has turned upside down.

Andrea Shine posts on Instagram about life as a mum with Tourette's

On a bad tic day, I suffer vertigo and sickness from head-shaking and jolts; I have drop tics where my legs give way and Ive fallen downstairs a few times, she says. I have difficulty washing up and will throw glasses and plates. Ive been banned from using knives and cooking with hot pans  Ive gone from being an independent woman to constantly needing help from my partner.

Being a mother with Tourettes  her children are three, eight and nine  is especially hard. Sometimes, I completely avoid the park playground as I dont want to curse or throw insults around, she says. Id love to speak to other parents, but I feel like they dont know how to approach the topic so they avoid me. I cant attend school assemblies or concerts in case I upset anyone. I would absolutely love to sit in silence and watch my childrens nativity play but that seems unlikely ever to happen.

So far, Andreas children have adapted well. The kids and I laugh about the silly things I say, she says. Tourettes is genetic so theres a chance one of them also has it. The older two fully understand  Ive shown them people on social media with tics, and my nine-year-old proudly explains what Tourettes is to his friends. When it comes to the youngest, its harder. He has started to repeat a few naughty tics he has heard me say  its very hard to explain to a toddler.

people know about the swearing, but they dont know about the pain it causes

Tourettes is very much seen as a male disorder, continues Andrea, who posts about her life on Instagram as @mummashine. Id love to have some mum friends who really understand what Im going through. I do think women have it harder.

Terrina Bibb, a 28-year-old artist from Redditch, Worcestershire, who also lives with Tourettes, agrees. You dont feel pretty, you dont feel feminine, she says.

Terrinas tics began when she was a final-year art student. My first recollection is clearing out a cupboard with my mum and having this sensation that I could only get rid of by throwing my head back. More tics followed. Soon Terrina had left her job as a waitress  swearing in front of a table of customers and throwing peas over another made the work impossible.

At first I was thinking, Am I faking it? Is it in my head? so when I was diagnosed with Tourettes, I was almost relieved, she says. But my life kind of got taken away. I know there are people out there with worse illnesses, life-threatening ones, but I rarely go out. When you leave the house, you dont know whats going to happen. I need a stick because of my leg tics and I might be walking along the street then say, Youre fat. If youre in an airport, you might shout about a bomb. Your brain works against you in almost every single way.

Terrina Bibb channels her tics into portraiture

Except one. When it comes to her art, Terrina has made it work for her instead. I do portraiture and thought Tourettes would take that away, too  but I just couldnt let it, she says. Instead, Ive had to let the tics get involved in my drawings. Using paint was impossible, so now Terrina holds pen to paper and has developed a scribble style for her drawings, which sell from 160 to 800, depending on what the client wants: I really concentrate in order to do the eyes, mouth and nose, then let the tics happen for the rest.

Having a passion can be key, says Dr Chowdhury. There is no cure. Theres medication which can dampen down Tourettes, but when you stop taking it, the tics can come back. Many people find the side effects, including drowsiness and nausea, impossible to live with long term. When I see children with tics, I look for a passion, Dr Chowdhury continues. If they play sports, or love drama, or music, or anything that they can focus on, theyll be OK. I try to normalise it for them  its a neurological quirk that shouldnt stop you doing what you want.

For Anita, finally obtaining a diagnosis in her 20s allowed her to embrace life. It gave me an explanation, she says. It meant that it wasnt my fault  I wasnt a troubled, violent person. It was incredibly freeing.

She volunteered for an animal rescue charity (both Anita and Andrea have found that being around animals calms their tics). She started her own business collecting sea glass from her local beach and selling it  then, as her confidence grew, she started posting funny, fascinating videos online that demystify the disorder. She is now a popular Twitch streamer and a YouTuber  under the moniker Sweet Anita  with 1.3 million subscribers.

Anita is beguilingly beautiful and remains seemingly composed in her clips, even mid-tic attack. I give people something that I dont think a dictionary definition or a Wikipedia page will ever do, she says. You can learn about our condition but you cant learn how to make friends with us, how to see past the tics, how to interact and be calm around someone who is different to you.

Anita is also planning to write a book and dabble in stand-up comedy. Her life is busy and full and, though currently single, she has no trouble finding dates. Ive had patient, loving partners who dont mind my condition whatsoever, she says. I used to have a dancing tic which I was really embarrassed by  but whenever I did it in public, my ex would just start dancing harder so that people would stop looking at me and pay more attention to him!

My tics cause problems every single day, she continues. When I step out of the door, I dont know if Im going to shout some kind of slur, or whistle and wink at someone who thinks Im propositioning them. Not every person you inadvertently proposition is going to be a safe person to turn down. I have been punched. But for Anita, nothing could be worse than staying shut in her house.

Living in fear of people, wasting my life, thinking Id never have any positive experiences at all was far more terrifying than any altercation, adds Anita. Being relaxed, leaning into who I am, shedding the shame was the best thing I could do. If I can open some doors and start some conversations so that down the line we wont waste a bunch of scientists and artists and brilliant people whod have been hidden away from the world, then Im happy  and I wouldnt change a thing.

For more information and advice on Tourettes, please visit Tourettes Action, tourettes-action.org.uk
As a mixed-race child adopted into a white family, Emma Johnson started to question her identity when she hit her teens. But would tracking down her birth parents mean betraying her devoted adoptive mother Jill Firth? As told to Eimear OHagan

Emma and Jill on Mother's Day this year

Emma's story

Emma Johnson, 43, is a baker and lives in Leeds with her son Jaydan, 18

When I was little, there was one particular bedtime story I never tired of hearing. It was the one about a room filled with cribs, each with a newborn baby inside, and out of all those babies my mum chose me. Id drift off to sleep smiling, feeling incredibly special.

I cant remember a time when I didnt know I was adopted. It wouldve been impossible to keep it secret; my skin colour in a white family is an obvious clue.

Mum never hid the truth from me. She framed my adoption at six weeks old so positively  something wonderful that had happened to her  rather than focusing on the sad flipside that another mother had given me away.

I knew from my adoption file, which Mum showed me from an early age, that my birth father was black and my birth mother white  just 17 when she had me in 1978.

For a long time, that information was enough. I was content with who I was and how I came to be Mums daughter.

I grew up in a rural village in West Yorkshire. People are often surprised when I tell them I rarely experienced racism as a child. Mostly, it was a very protective, loving bubble and although I knew I looked different, it didnt matter to me and it didnt matter at home where I always felt as much my parents child as my brother Matthew, now 46, and sister, Abigail, 40. We were loved and disciplined the same and attended a local private school together.

However, as I got older, I began searching for a link to where I came from. I would record videos of black people on TV and rewatch the clips, fascinated to see others who looked like me. Things like Mum being able to wash and brush Abis hair, while mine was relaxed by an Afro-Caribbean hairdresser, were subtle reminders there were other people more like me than my family.

The first time I really felt affected by racism was when I was 17 and, ironically, it was out of the mouths of black people. Id gone to college in Leeds and felt excited about being among black and mixed-race students for the first time. I wanted to fit in but they rejected me, calling me a coconut  black on the outside, white on the inside  and posh. I didnt speak their slang and compared to many of them Id had a privileged upbringing. It felt like they refused to accept me as one of them.

For the first time in my life I began to question my identity. I wasnt white like my family, nor was I black enough for the community I biologically belonged to. So who was I and where did I fit in?

I felt lost and although Mum was always there to listen, reminding me how loved I was, there was little she could do to assuage my confusion.

I made the decision to meet my birth parents. I wanted to better understand where I came from and what looks and traits Id inherited, in the hope of figuring out who I really was.

To prepare me, Mum wisely insisted I have specialist counselling beforehand. In 1996, I met my birth father first and then a few weeks later my birth mother. Theyd split up after I was born, both going on to have children with other partners, but had remained in contact.

I gave little thought to how meeting them would make Mum feel. I was 18 and focused on myself. Now I realise how incredible she was to be so supportive and encouraging. It cant have been easy to face the prospect of sharing her daughter with strangers.

My birth mother was emotional when we met. To her I was still the tiny baby shed given up  because of her age and the lack of acceptance of her mixed-race relationship.

Over time we forged a close relationship; I felt an instinctive connection with her I realised Id never had with Mum. It was hard to come to terms with. I felt as if I was betraying Mum whod loved me so beautifully and completely.

I felt lucky to have two mothers and loved them both, but I never wanted them to feel threatened by each others place in my heart. It was something I felt very conscious about, but that worry was never fuelled by Mum, who was only ever welcoming of my relationship with my birth mother.

Emma with parents Mike and Jill and siblings Matthew and Abigail, 1982

For more than two decades I stayed in touch with both my birth parents, getting to know half-siblings, grandparents, aunts and cousins, relishing developing a connection with the West Indian community my father was from. Its food, music, culture were all new to me and it was like discovering the missing piece in a puzzle.

Mum even hosted parties so my family  both adoptive and biological  could come together. Whatever emotions she felt, she hid them well, recognising this was my path to walk, unencumbered by her feelings or fears.

When my son Jaydan was born in 2002, it hit me so hard, the agony my birth mother must have felt when giving me up. I remember holding him and thinking Id die from heartbreak if someone had taken him away from me.

It was also the first time Id properly understood how amazing Mum was to have loved so deeply a baby that wasnt biologically hers. I adored Jaydan because he was mine, my flesh and blood, but shed managed to do that with a strangers baby.

Sadly, around 18 months ago my relationships with my birth parents broke down and were no longer in touch, but I have no regrets about getting to know them. Its been a journey of self-discovery and now I feel so much more at peace with who I am and my place in the world.

Mum has quietly walked alongside me on that journey  always supportive, a place of emotional security and love I could return to. Our bond is a unique, unshakeable one.

I feel grateful every day that I came to be her daughter.

Jills Story

Jill Firth, 77, lives near Ilkley, Yorkshire, with her husband Mike

Cradling Emma in my arms for the first time, her beautiful brown eyes gazing up at me, I felt overwhelmed with love and responsibility. She was my daughter, I was her mother  it made no difference I hadnt given birth to her.

In 1977, my second son Samuel passed away soon after birth. He had a severe genetic syndrome and because of that I was advised not to have any more children.

Im one of three and Mike is one of five, and neither of us wanted Matthew to be an only child. We applied to adopt and when asked would we consider a trans-racial adoption we said yes without hesitation. It really didnt matter to us what colour a childs skin was, we just wanted to be their parents.

In 1978 I received the wonderful news wed been matched with a mixed-race baby girl. After the heartbreak of losing Samuel, bringing Emma home from her foster family felt extra special.

Jill with Matthew, four, and Emma, one, 1979

I wrote to Emmas mother at the time, promising I would always love and care for her daughter. Of course, it was inescapably sad that in order for me to become Emmas mother, another woman had had to give her up, but I assured her Emma would always know where she came from.

When Emma was two, my youngest child Abigail was born, an unplanned but much-wanted baby, and our family was complete. Inevitably, people would do a double-take when I took them to the park or supermarket, wondering why I had two white children and one black child. I didnt care  they were just our children.

Today, alongside her job as a baker, Emma sits on adoption panels, using her experiences to match prospective adopters with children. Something shes very passionate about is advising on trans-racial adoption, and how parents can help a child remain connected to their racial heritage.

When we adopted Emma, there was no such support or guidance, we were just left to get on with things. Bar some family holidays to Barbados  because Mike and I felt it would be good for Emma to experience her birth fathers West Indian heritage  we had no idea how to help her feel connected to that part of her identity, or even how important that would turn out to be.

Watching her struggle in her late teens, I felt very redundant. For years Id been able to protect her from the harsh realities of the world, but now all I could do was love her and be there for her.

Had Emma asked to meet her birth parents at a younger age, Id have encouraged her to wait. But by 18 I felt she was ready and hoped it would deliver the sense of grounding she was searching for.

I was genuinely happy Emma developed relationships with her birth parents and never felt threatened as they became close. I always told her she could have all of us in her life  she didnt ever have to choose.

While Im sad for Emma that relations with her birth family ended, meeting them helped her embrace her mixed-race identity. She is a happier, more at ease version of herself  which is all I have ever wanted for her.

I have loved Emma since the moment she was placed in my arms; I always will.
Ive always liked Julianne Moore. I say that even though Ive never actually met her. But I have confidence that if our paths ever did cross, I would still feel the same.

Stylist: Holly Elgeti. Hair: Alex Szabo at Carol Hayes Management using T3. Make-up: Nicky Weir using Hourglass. Dress, Emilia Wickstead. Earrings, Alighieri. Ring, Emefa Cole. Bravo Media

The actress has always seemed to embody a dual strength and elegance. In an industry which is notoriously obsessed with superficiality, she has always striven for depth: choosing interesting roles, maintaining a politely guarded private life and refusing to have plastic surgery even though the pressure to stay stuck in the unwrinkled varnish of youth is especially intense in Hollywood.

Recently, the 60-year-old used an interview with As If magazine to dismantle the sexism inherent in the phrase ageing gracefully. She pointed out, rightly, that it is a phrase used only to describe women and never men. No one has ever said the 80-year-old Harrison Ford is ageing gracefully. In fact, hes just reprised his role as the action-hero lead Indiana Jones.

Even when he recently injured his shoulder on set, leading to the temporary halting of filming, no one rushed to comment that he was too old to have taken on the role.

Men are allowed to age powerfully. Women, on the other hand, are expected to be more demure. If they really must get older, the sexist reasoning goes, then surely they can at least do so subtly, without too much fuss and while preserving their femininity?

'Ageing gracefully' is only used to describe women

But being graceful is yet one more straitjacket into which we bind our women. When you are graceful, you are delicate, discreet, composed, tasteful and held at a slight remove. Being graceful doesnt allow much scope for messiness or contradictory feeling. Graceful behaviour does not mean doing your own stunts  climbing the worlds tallest building, holding ones breath underwater for around six minutes, and jumping 25,000 feet out of a plane as the 59-year-old Tom Cruise has done for the Mission: Impossible films. If Julianne Moore did the same she would be accused of being unseemly and a bit ridiculous.

Graceful sounds like a compliment but, in reality, is simply another way to make women feel less than. As Julianne pointed out during the course of the interview, ageing is not something anyone has control over, so the idea that one can seek to do it in a certain way is actively disempowering. It introduces an illusory metric that no one can ever live up to. And so we all fail.

There are two alternatives to ageing gracefully. One is to age disgracefully, but that also carries with it a certain weight to rebel against the inevitable march of time. We dont all have to dye our hair purple and get tattoos in our 70s to prove to the outside world that we still feel our wild teenage selves at heart (although if you want to, then thats wonderful).

Its admirable to refuse to be defined by ones age, but why should that be necessary? Why cant we be proud of our years and of our accumulated wisdom while also being grateful that we are alive? Because the second alternative to ageing is, of course, death, for which there is as yet no cure. And no one has ever been praised for dying gracefully.

My attitude to all this is perhaps best encompassed by another strong, powerful woman. The actress Eva Mendes gave an interview last year in which she suggested a different approach, inspired by the Spanish language. She said that instead of saying I am 46, I wish I could say, I have 46 years to me because in Spanish its very beautiful. Its like I dont feel 46 but I do feel like I have 46 years of experience to me. I just find that so empowering.

I agree. So, from this woman who has 42 years: dont bother about being graceful. Its far more attractive to be wise.

This week I'm ...
More than five months ago, in the wake of a harrowing article I had written about a young woman who was robbed of 100,000 in an online Bitcoin fraud, I made an impassioned plea to the Government: do more to ensure social media providers  the likes of Google and Facebook  'wash their platforms clean of fraudsters'.

At the time it appeared the Government was in listening mode with Prime Minister Boris Johnson acknowledging that online financial fraud was 'becoming an increasing concern of Government and I think of people across the country'. Think? Know, more like.

Yet, sadly, Johnson has since failed to act on these words, resulting in a locust-like plague of financial fraudsters currently hovering over the UK intent on emptying our bank accounts of our lifetime savings.

Solving the puzzle: A locust-like plague of financial fraudsters is currently hovering over the UK intent on emptying our bank accounts of our lifetime savings

As Rachel Rickard Straus's article highlights, these locusts are now out of control, causing untold misery to many of those who encounter them.

Back in February, I called for new proposed online harm laws to be extended to include financial fraudsters  an idea Johnson said at the time he would look at.

Given these laws were designed to force social media giants (under the threat of massive fines) to do more to clamp down on those who use their platforms to promote terrorism, cyberbully or commit hate crimes, it seemed logical for them to also embrace financial fraudsters.

After all, a majority of financial scams originate online which indicates powerful social media companies need to be encouraged (that is, threatened with big fines) to do more to eradicate them from their platforms.

But so far  despite protestations from City regulators, the police, MPs and consumer groups such as Which?  the Government has refused to play ball. As a result, it is now highly likely that the Online Safety Bill will proceed through Parliament without addressing one of the biggest crimes of the century: financial fraud. Scandalous.

Without Government intervention, it means that consumers will now have to rely on social media providers to clear their platforms of financial locusts.

Google is taking a step in the right direction by only accepting financial adverts from companies which are authorised by the City regulator. But it remains to be seen whether the move, effective from the end of next month, will be enforced.

Unlike most other crimes, financial fraud goes under the radar  primarily because there is no physical harm involved. Yet it doesn't mean the emotional pain and financial trauma it causes should be ignored. Or that perpetrators should get off scot-free.

It's why we have launched our Nail The Scammers campaign, with the aim of getting Government to take financial crime more seriously. We believe a new police unit should be formed, with the sole task of eradicating the financial locusts causing us so much devastation. We will not rest until the locusts are no more.

Compensation over women's pensions?

It now appears only a matter of time before the Government is forced to agree a compensation package for women born in the 1950s who were not given adequate warning of changes to their State pension age. An information void that resulted in millions of women not being told that they would have to wait up to six years longer than they thought before their State pension kicked in.

In some cases, this led to real financial hardship as women were not given sufficient time to plug the hole left in their household finances by the delay in their State pension.

A few days ago, the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman found the Department for Work and Pensions guilty of 'maladministration' for not writing to women promptly enough about the delay.

It now has to decide whether this led to an injustice that warrants financial compensation. If it recommends compensation, which seems likely, it will then be up to the Government to respond.
Tony Hetherington is Financial Mail on Sunday's ace investigator, fighting readers corners, revealing the truth that lies behind closed doors and winning victories for those who have been left out-of-pocket. Find out how to contact him below.

Dispute: The Chartwell Plaza development in Southend, Essex

Ms L.O. writes: I looked for properties online and found a flat in the Chartwell Plaza development in Southend. As I have a dog, I twice asked the agent if dogs were allowed. He told me that although dogs were not allowed in the main tower, they were allowed in part of the building called the 'annex' where I was buying a flat, so there was no problem.

I paid 22,000 as a deposit to Prosperity Wealth & Developments Limited. Now I have received a report on title which says that in fact no animals are allowed without prior consent which can be revoked at any time.

However, the company says if I do not go ahead with the purchase I will lose my 22,000 deposit.

Tony Hetherington replies: This really is a case of shifting the goalposts, big time. Even if you were given permission to bring your dog with you when you moved into the flat, the permission could be withdrawn later, leaving you with a choice of finding a new home at short notice or getting rid of your pet.

The good news though, is that the goalposts are pretty firmly rooted. A major factor in your decision to buy the flat was the assurance that your dog could live there too. You would not have signed the reservation form or parted with 22,000 if you had been given the real facts, and because of this, Prosperity Wealth & Developments cannot keep a penny of your 22,000.

So, this was an open and shut case. Almost. After I approached Birmingham-based Prosperity Wealth, it took just 24 hours for the company to tell me that it knew you wanted your dog to join you in your new home.

Staff explained: 'We sought permission from the freeholder and unfortunately, as we suspected, were told this was not approved.'

The sales agent disputes telling you that your dog would be allowed in the annex, but Prosperity Wealth appeared to accept that it is unlikely you would have bought a new home if part of the price was having to get rid of your dog. The company told me it had decided after all to give you a full refund of your 22,000.

You were pleased. I was pleased. And Prosperity Wealth had won itself a pat on the back on this page. But this is where the company bizarrely managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Without telling me, it refused to repay your deposit unless you first did your best to stop me reporting what had happened.

In a series of messages, Prosperity Wealth told you: 'We will need communication that the article will be cancelled.' You explained that this was outside your control, and you asked: 'Does the refund depend on the article not being published by Mr Hetherington?'

Prosperity Wealth told you: 'We need to see evidence that you have communicated with him and confirmed the case has been resolved, and you do not wish your statement to be published.

'Once we have seen this confirmation, we will be able to process the refund.'

So, you let me know what was going on, and I agreed you could send me the demands made by Prosperity Wealth, and let the company have a copy. A day later, the 22,000 landed back in your bank account. But what a stupid decision by the Birmingham business to turn what would have been a small report showing it had treated a customer fairly, into a bigger story of how it threatened to keep your cash unless you tried to censor The Mail on Sunday.

Virgin's delay on 402 cashback

L.F. writes: Virgin Holidays were offering cashback for bookings made via the Top Cashback website.

I booked for myself, my wife and two friends, and should have received 402 in cashback.

I paid the balance due and we took the holiday months ago, but Virgin has still failed to pay the cashback.

Waiting game: Virgin Holidays were offering cashback for bookings made via the Top Cashback website

Tony Hetherington replies: This is not a straightforward scheme. In fact, it has been confusing from the start. Top Cashback said it could not pay you because Virgin had not paid it. However, Virgin told me it was fully committed to honouring the deal, but added: 'We have only very recently received an invoice from Conversant.'

Neither you nor I had heard of Conversant, but Virgin described it as a 'supplier which works with Top Cashback'. So far, so good. But then Top Cashback told you it no longer works with Virgin Holidays, and suggested you should not contact Virgin as its staff might not understand how the scheme operates.

I found this easy to believe as I was getting confused myself, particularly when Top Cashback told me 'the network's tracking registered wrong'. What does this mean? Well, Top Cashback told me: 'Conversant owns CJ who are the affiliate network involved.' It is also 'the tracking platform'!

By then, many weeks had passed since Virgin told me it had paid the invoice. Finally, Top Cashback promised payment within five days, and at last the 402 arrived. You worked hard for months for this money, so you truly earned it.

Why did I receive a 6,000 cheque for PPI I never had?

D.M. writes: I received a letter saying I had been named as executor in the estate of someone bearing my surname. The letter asked that any cheques I received should be forwarded to the writer.

I knew that the deceased was not a relative of mine, so I returned the letter without noting the details. However, two weeks later a letter arrived from Black Horse Ltd, part of Lloyds Bank, with a cheque for 5,937.

This is supposedly the result of a PPI claim, yet I have never even had payment protection insurance.

Tony Hetherington replies: You tore the cheque into pieces which you sent to me with your letter. My first thought was that the cheque was fake, but might be accepted by your bank long enough for the 5,937 to appear in your account. Then you would receive an apologetic phone call, asking you to transfer the money elsewhere. And finally, when Lloyds bounced the cheque, your own bank would cancel the credit from your account, leaving you 5,937 out of pocket.

But I was wrong. The cheque you ripped up was genuine. Helpful staff at Lloyds went back through their records and found that a firm of solicitors had submitted a PPI claim on behalf of the estate of a deceased client. It was the solicitors who for unknown reasons named you as the executor.

Although it was not directly the bank's fault, Lloyds has sent you 100 by way of saying sorry for wasting your time.

If you believe you are the victim of financial wrongdoing, write to Tony Hetherington at Financial Mail, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TS or email tony.hetherington@mailonsunday.co.uk. Because of the high volume of enquiries, personal replies cannot be given. Please send only copies of original documents, which we regret cannot be returned.
Whether you're looking to get fit, learn a new language or drop a few pounds, hard work pays off. But, when it comes to looking after your financial health, doing less really can deliver more.

Taking a lazy approach to investing can leave you richer and happier. So says Rob Smith, head of behavioural finance at Barclays. 'The more you do to an investment portfolio, the more you can hurt investment performance,' he says.

'If you try to time the stock market to increase your returns, your emotions will often get the better of you and you'll end up making bad decisions. Being more hands-off, or even lazy, is definitely a good thing when it comes to investing.'

In the slow lane: Taking a lazy approach to investing can leave you richer and happier

As well as being hit with the costs associated with buying and selling investment funds or shares, human nature makes it difficult to ride out the bumps in the stock market if you're an active investor.

If share prices fall, it hurts, especially if you picked that investment yourself. Selling  turning a price drop into an actual loss  can feel like the only way to stop the pain.

Similarly, when an investment performs well, it's a great feeling. You got it right and it's the absolute darling of your portfolio, so how could you possibly sell it?

As it's impossible to know when the right time is, many investors hang on to these portfolio darlings until the price falls, taking their profit with it.

Even something as simple as living by the investment maxim of 'buy low, sell high' feels incredibly unnatural. Nobody wants to invest in a company that's out of favour and has a low share price to prove it. But it's some of these shunned companies that can turn around their fortunes and those of their brave investors.

Just how much these poor investment decisions can hurt performance can be seen in the stock market turmoil during the pandemic. When news broke that Covid-19 had reached mainland Europe last year, global equities went into freefall on February 20 with many investors cutting their losses and selling up.

These investors were probably feeling pleased with themselves a month later when world stock markets  as measured by the MSCI World Index  had fallen by more than a third. But their smugness was short-lived.

News of a $2.2trillion (1.6trillion) US stimulus package on March 23 caused markets to rebound and, although it took a full six months to get back to pre-pandemic levels, a significant part of that recovery happened between March 24 and 26.

Rick Eling is investment director of advice group Quilter Financial Planning. He says: 'If an investor had sold out when the market started to fall but missed those three days in March, they would have missed almost half of the total recovery. Someone who did nothing and left their investments untouched would have been much better off as a result.'

While there's plenty of evidence in favour of being a lazy investor, it is worth investing a little time and energy into getting the basics right when you start out. This may sound daunting, but James Norton, senior investment planner at asset manager Vanguard in the UK, says it doesn't require any special insight into investments or how the stock market works.

He says: 'Think about your goals. Are you saving for a mortgage deposit in five years, or putting money aside for your retirement in 40 years? Knowing when you need the money will help to determine how much investment risk you're comfortable taking.

'The longer you have to achieve your goal, the more risk you can afford to take.'

ASSESSING YOUR ATTITUDE TO INVESTMENT RISK

Your appetite for investment risk will determine the assets you might want to invest in. As a rule of thumb, shares are higher risk than bonds, so if you only have a short investment horizon, look for an investment fund that has a higher proportion of bonds as these will protect you from the short-term wobbles of the stock market.

Conversely, with more time on your side, you can afford to be more adventurous.

Investments in higher risk areas such as emerging markets and technology stocks have the potential to deliver peachy returns if you can afford to let them do their thing. But whether your goals mean you're comfortable with risk or you need to go for something a little more conservative, the key to picking the perfect investment is diversification.

Barclays' Rob Smith says: 'Nobody knows where the next big idea will come from so it makes sense to invest in as many different companies as possible  preferably via an investment fund or investment trust. This helps to manage risk as some shares will go up in value while others go down.'

He adds: 'On our investment platform, customers who invest in diversified investment funds outperform those who pick a handful of shares. It's extremely difficult to pick stock market winners.'

For the ultimate in diversification, you can't beat a global fund investing across a range of different markets (see below). But, if venturing into the unknown feels too nerve-racking, there's nothing wrong with a fund with a smaller reach  for instance, Europe or even the UK  provided there's plenty of variety in its portfolio.

ADOPTING A PASSIVE STANCE TO INVESTING

There's lots of choice when it comes to selecting a well-diversified fund that suits your needs. As well as actively managed funds  and multi-manager funds where you're invested across a variety of different funds selected by an overall manager  passive funds can provide a useful option for lazy investors.

These are run by computer programmes designed to track an index, so you don't need to worry about a manager picking a duff investment or having an off day.

The other benefit of passive funds is cost. Without a manager to pay, these can have annual charges of less than 0.1 per cent.

Norton says it's essential to check you're not paying more than you need when you pick a fund. He explains: 'There might not seem to be much between a fund charging 0.5 per cent a year and another charging 2 per cent, but over time this difference can significantly affect how much you accumulate.'

To illustrate this, he points to 10,000 invested over 50 years. If this achieved average annual investment growth of 7 per cent, it would be worth nearly 300,000.

But take off annual charges of 2 per cent and it would shrink to around 115,000. 'You can't control markets, but you can control investment costs,' Norton adds.

'Picking a fund with a low charge is a simple way for someone to make a significant difference to their investment returns.'

Plumping for one well-diversified fund rather than a hotchpotch of different investments has another benefit for lazy investors. Saddle yourself with a range of funds or shares and you'll need to master the art of rebalancing.

This wonderful piece of investment jargon basically means trimming back your star performers and stocking up on the laggards to get back to your original portfolio.

Experts recommend doing it every six to 12 months and, while it helps reduce risk, it takes time and all the buying and selling can add to costs. Hold one fund and you can forget about rebalancing altogether as the fund's manager will do it all for you.

Without a need to rebalance your investments, it's possible to sit back and leave your money to do its thing. Daniel Bland, head of sustainable investment management at EQ Investors, recommends this hands-off strategy.

He says: 'Check your investment regularly and you risk becoming obsessed. Its value will go up and down with every market movement making you feel increasingly uncomfortable.

'If someone's managing everything for you, only look once or twice a year to make sure it's doing what you expected. Relax and let your investments do all the hard work.'

A FINAL THOUGHT...

Setting up a direct debit to add to your investments every month can be a great strategy for lazy investors.

Most wealth platforms  run by the likes of AJ Bell, Hargreaves Lansdown and Interactive Investor  allow you to invest small monthly amounts.

EQ Investors' Bland is a fan of this approach  and even recommends it when you have a large lump sum to invest. 'Phase it in,' he says. 'It means you won't have to worry about whether you invested at the right time.'
Older investors are leading the way in influencing the companies they invest in, according to a new survey by Interactive Investor.

A third of investors aged over 65 are registered to vote at the annual meetings of the companies in which they hold shares, according to a survey of the wealth manager's customers.

However, only a quarter of its investors aged 55 to 64 are registered  and this number drops again to a fifth of those aged 45 to 54. Younger investors are least likely to vote. Just 5 per cent of 25 to 34-year-olds are registered to vote and only 2 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds.

Show of hands: Millions of ordinary investors have rights over the companies in which they hold shares

Millions of ordinary investors have rights over the companies in which they hold shares. They can vote on companies' environmental policies, for example, or even help rein in excessive pay by voting against remuneration proposals.

However, just a handful use the powers they have by voting or attending annual meetings.

This is because many don't know they have these powers or because the investment platforms through which they hold shares make it hard to wield them. Interactive Investor is encouraging customers to use their power as shareholders.

A majority of investment platforms do not widely advertise the fact that customers have the right to vote  and many make it a laborious process, which can easily put investors off.

Cliff Weight, director of investor campaign group ShareSoc, says most investment platforms do not encourage customers to vote because they don't think there is sufficient demand. But he adds: 'Until you provide a service, you don't know if people want it. It's like if something's not on the menu, you don't know if people will order it.'

Shareholder votes this year have embarrassed several large UK listed companies. BP's climate targets were put under the microscope by activist investors while AstraZeneca's boardroom pay came under fire, resulting in 40 per cent of shareholders voting against executive pay rise proposals.
Business leaders are today urging the Government to throw its weight behind vital Covid testing schemes that have helped firms such as John Lewis and Jaguar Land Rover to beat the 'pingdemic'.

Bosses say a major workplace Covid testing drive could play a critical role in keeping the economy firing after 600,000 people were forced into self-isolation after having been pinged by the Test and Trace app.

Some firms including John Lewis, Jaguar Land Rover and Heathrow Airport have been using a testing pilot scheme called 'daily contact testing' (DCT), which allows employees to keep going to work after being pinged or contacted by Test and Trace.

'Ping' sting: 600,000 employees have been forced into self-isolation after having been contacted by the Test and Trace app

Instead of isolating, staff without Covid symptoms take Government-provided rapid lateral flow tests when they arrive at work for seven consecutive days. If they test negative, they are allowed to enter the workplace.

Thousands of companies have also been given free lateral flow testing kits for routine use by the Government under a separate scheme called the workplace testing programme.

But in a major blow, both schemes are set to end on Saturday  two weeks before the double-jabbed no longer need to isolate  even though workplace testing has been extraordinarily successful at cutting Covid transmission and keeping workplaces open.

The Mail on Sunday can reveal that just 2 per cent of John Lewis employees have tested positive since January under the daily contact testing scheme.

That meant 98 in every 100 were able to carry on working without disruption, with no major outbreaks in John Lewis workplaces.

And earlier this year, our Tests at Work campaign successfully lobbied Ministers to hand out free testing kits to more companies, after we revealed a trial had saved thousands of sick days and avoided entire factory shutdowns at major employers including Dixons, Boohoo, EDF and Tata.

The soaring numbers of staff isolating after being 'pinged' by the NHS app has led to cancelled trains, empty supermarket shelves and postal delays over the past week.

In response, the Government has opened up the daily contact testing scheme to a selection of key workers in food, transport and other critical industries  meaning they can avoid isolation by getting tested each day at one of hundreds of dedicated sites across Britain.

But bosses say that still leaves great swathes of the working population at risk of being forced into isolation if they are contacted by Test and Trace, threatening Britain's economic recovery. This will be true even after the rules change for the double-jabbed on August 16, as many younger workers will not yet have received their second dose.

Business leaders now want Ministers to allow all companies to swab their own staff daily  using free testing kits provided by the Government  to avoid tens of thousands more going into isolation.

Andrew Murphy, executive director for operations at John Lewis Partnership, which also owns Waitrose, said: 'To lose this trial at the end of July is really distressing.'

CBI president Lord Bilimoria said: 'It's high time to fast forward the move to allow those double-jabbed to not self-isolate if not infectious.

'We also need a test and release scheme for those who have not been double-jabbed. If the [DCT scheme] works then it should expand to more firms than a mere handful, so it's good to see the food industry now involved.'

Staff isolating: Pimlico Plumbers' chief executive Scott Mullins

Businesses may be advised to collect kits from community testing hubs or to stump up for lateral flow tests themselves.

Lord Bilimoria added: 'Workplaces must have access to an effective, accessible and free testing regime. With free workplace testing due to end in a matter of days, firms need urgent clarity on how community testing will work in practice.'

Car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover said using DCT across its manufacturing plants 'has reduced the number of people we have self-isolating'.

Will Wilson, chief executive of transport specialist Siemens Mobility where more than 5 per cent of the workforce are isolating, said: 'Extending the successful workplace testing scheme can help us avoid unnecessary self-isolations and keep the transport network running.'

Pimlico Plumbers chief executive Scott Mullins said: 'It's time to move away from a system that sends hundreds of thousands of healthy people off work at any given time and switch to more vigorous testing instead.'

He said his firm has more staff off work now than at any time since the pandemic began.

Adrian Hallmark, chief executive of luxury carmaker Bentley, said: 'Testing has enabled us to keep our crew safe from Covid and keep going.

'Testing is absolutely essential in getting us through this part of the pandemic.'
Secretive Monaco tycoon John Jakes has received a 26million dividend despite suffering a hit to revenues and cutting jobs last year.

Acorn Mobility Services, which makes and installs the electronic chairs, posted a 4.4 per cent slump in revenues to 230.6million in the year to September 30, 2020.

As part of a cost-cutting drive, the company reduced employee numbers by 128 to 1,460.

Going up: Acorn Mobility Services makes and installs the electronic chairs

However, pre-tax profits rose 62 per cent to 44.9million and the firm paid a 26.6million dividend, up from 23.8million a year earlier.

Acorn furloughed 263 non-essential staff, although it would not say whether it applied for Government money to fund wages under the job retention scheme.

Yorkshireman Jakes, who lives in the tax haven of Monaco and chairs the company, is known for receiving bumper payouts and has landed dividends of nearly 150million since 2010. He owns 100 per cent of the firm.

The accounts show the company has no bank debt and increased margins from 68 per cent to 71 per cent. Profit growth was aided by cost cuts and a marketing push.

Acorn declined to comment on furlough or the dividend.

Group finance director Joanne Richardson said: 'With most of the world in lockdown, it was inevitable that we would install fewer stairlifts globally during the period covered by this report, but we recovered quickly. These are a positive set of results.'

Jakes set up Acorn in 1992 in Bradford, initially doing up used stairlifts before turning to manufacturing them two years later.

In 2001, Acorn bought Brooks Stairlifts, whose founder created the first British stairlift in the early 1970s for his wife.

Jakes has expanded Acorn into western Europe, the US and Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

Its stairlifts are manufactured in the UK at factories in Steeton and Shipley, West Yorkshire, and at Haddington, near Edinburgh. More than 70 per cent of its income comes from overseas markets.

The company, which employs TV doctor Hilary Jones as a medical adviser, has been forced to rework its operations during the pandemic to protect its customers  typically older people. Its employees adhere to strict social distancing and limit their time in customers' homes. It says stairlifts with digital faults can often be fixed remotely.

Jakes is also a 7.3 per cent shareholder in listed funerals operator Dignity. The stock has gained 34 per cent this year.
Lighting up: Philip Morris was known for its Marlboro Man adverts

The boss of tobacco giant Philip Morris International has mounted a staunch defence of its controversial deal to buy a British inhaler company  and pledged to stop selling cigarettes in the UK within the next ten years.

Jacek Olczak said his bid to take over Wiltshire-based Vectura is a crucial part of his plan to become a 'healthcare and wellness' company.

Philip Morris International struck the controversial 1billion deal earlier this month, trumping an offer from US private equity firm Carlyle.

But the deal for FTSE 250-listed Vectura, which provides inhaled medicines and asthma treatments, sparked a backlash from healthcare campaigners and politicians.

Critics allege that it is unethical for a company that sells cigarettes also to sell medical devices used by people suffering the consequences of smoking.

MPs have written to Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng and Health Secretary Sajid Javid calling on them to block the deal.

Speaking to The Mail on Sunday, Olczak responded: 'There are some critics saying, 'Why is Philip Morris going into pharmaceuticals?' I want to allow this company to leave smoking behind. If I don't do alternatives to smoking, what do you want me to do?

'There's a lot of emotions. However, if I bring some logic to this whole thing: what I'm actually doing is helping Philip Morris to get faster out of cigarettes. I think in the UK, ten years from now maximum, you can completely solve the problem of smoking.'

Asked if that meant Philip Morris would stop selling cigarettes in the UK within the next ten years, he replied: 'Absolutely.'

Olczak said the Marlboro brand was likely to disappear altogether from Britain, where it was established in the late 1800s, before being registered in New York in 1908.

The name was a nod to the then British company's Great Marlborough Street factory in Soho, Central London. The modern day Philip Morris International  now an American-headquartered multinational that sells tobacco products across the world  has invested vast sums in alternatives to smoking, including e-cigarettes, or 'vapes', and heat-not-burn devices.

Heating tobacco, as opposed to burning it, generates a nicotine-containing vapour without many of the chemicals usually associated with smoking. It is considered less harmful to the health than smoking traditional cigarettes. Olczak said of the Marlboro brand: 'It will disappear.

The first choice for consumers is they should quit smoking. But if they don't, the second best choice is let them switch to the better alternatives.

'If the cost is that Marlboro is going to disappear, I absolutely will not blink an eye. I can build another brand. It is worth doing this if we solve the problem of smoking.'

On the Vectura takeover itself, Olczak said the company, which has its headquarters in Chippenham, would be run at arm's length from Philip Morris International and would not be subsumed into the bigger tobacco business.

'We intend to operate Vectura as an autonomous business unit, because it has nothing to do with nicotine products,' he said.

'I'm actually building another part of Philip Morris. A company like Vectura is an important component of accelerating my path.'

Despite the political backlash, a source close to the Government said Ministers were 'unlikely' to intervene because there was no clear legal argument for blocking the deal. Vectura's investors are also expected to support the takeover.

Two of the firm's top 20 shareholders told The Mail on Sunday that they are backing the bid because their responsibility is to get the highest investment returns for their clients.

However, fund managers have been branded as hypocritical for banging the drum about ethical and socially responsible investing  while backing the sale of a health company to a tobacco giant.

Giving up: Jacek Olczak wants to get away from cigarettes and into 'wellness'

Vectura's shareholders include the world's largest asset manager BlackRock, and Legal & General, which manages 1.29trillion of its customers money globally.

Alan Miller, founder of wealth manager SCM Direct, said: 'The hypocrisy of BlackRock and Legal & General is breathtaking and the takeover of Vectura is just the latest example.

'Neither has objected to this takeover even though both their chief executives espouse the virtues of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing and green principles generally.' Legal & General has also linked bonuses for executives to ESG targets from 2021. Axa Investment Managers is another Vectura shareholder that has found the proposed takeover by Philip Morris at odds with its investment ethics.

Its parent company, the French insurance giant Axa, has a large healthcare business. Axa has signed the Tobacco-Free Finance pledge and claims on its website to be 'leading the fight against tobacco'.

A source close to Axa said it was 'stuck between a rock and a hard place' on the Vectura deal because accepting the Philip Morris bid would likely be the best outcome for shareholders.

One fund manager said that the cash bid meant he would not be left holding equity in a tobacco stock, although he admitted that his fund would be profiting from the sale to a tobacco company.

He pointed out that Philip Morris needs to make such deals if the company is to transition into a 'health and wellbeing' company, just as oil giants are attempting to shift away from fossil fuels.

Olczak said: 'It's like saying if I'm producing oil, I cannot go electric. Telling me the way I am solving the problem is creating the perception I'm hypocritical  would you not rather have a cigarette company that cares about solving the problem?'
Principled: Sir Mike Gooley also criticises holiday firms that held on to travellers' money after cancelled trips

This was the year Sir Mike Gooley was supposed to be winding down towards retirement.

But after five decades in charge of Trailfinders, the 84-year-old has been as busy as ever. Gooley's current daily routine starts at the ungodly hour of 4am, when he rises to plot the next step in securing the future of the travel business he founded in 1970.

Not only has the Covid pandemic left most holiday businesses fighting for survival, but the Government's incessant flip-flopping on international travel rules has added a thick layer of complexity to Gooley's already tremendous workload.

As if to underline the point as we talk at Trailfinders' headquarters in Kensington, West London, Gooley's wife pops in to lament the inordinate amount of time he spends working at their kitchen table each morning.

And in what has become his trademark style in 51 years of business, Gooley himself pulls no punches when asked whether Ministers could have spared him a few of those early starts.

'The Government's approach to travel doesn't seem logical and consistent,' he says.

'Travel seems to be getting on the wrong end of the decisions. It seems to have been unfairly penalised when airports and airlines have made significant efforts,' he adds, in their bid to make travel Covid-secure.

'When you go to a country which has no greater or a lower infection rate than the UK, like Malta, and have to go through all these quarantine and PCR tests and so on, what's the difference between getting on a train in Manchester and coming to London?

'We have become a risk-averse society. We're very docile. I think even if you went back 20 years people would have been up in arms, saying, 'Look, if I want to risk getting bloody Covid, I will'.'

Gooley accepts there's an argument that if you bring back a variant of Covid, you put other people at risk, but says of Government policy: 'At times, it doesn't make any sense.'

The newly ennobled octogenarian is a powerful voice in his industry. An ex-Army man, he founded the package trips firm as regular international travel started to become more accessible to middle-class families in the early 1970s. He has since grown the company into a nationwide high street brand, serving many millions of customers.

Lately, Gooley has been busily keeping a 'Covid obituary list' of travel firms that have bitten the dust. To prevent further casualties, he has three key demands for the Government as the travel industry looks to salvage foreign breaks this summer.

First, he wants the requirement for testing to be scrapped for the fully vaccinated when they return from a green list country (which currently includes the likes of Australia, Iceland and Gibraltar), saving time and money for travellers.

Second, he wants VAT on PCR tests to be ditched. He explains: 'This is a new source of income. We're not asking the Chancellor to give it up as it never existed before  and it's discouraging travel.'

Third, he believes that lengthy queues at immigration to the UK are putting passengers off travelling. Officials at English airports were last week told to stop checking Covid forms for arrivals from green or amber list countries, but Gooley argues more needs to be invested in extra Border Force agents to cut waiting times.

He says: 'For someone to stand for six hours trying to get refreshments or have a pee is not exactly good for your health, is it? I couldn't do it. I can't actually stand for more than five or ten minutes.'

Gooley's office sits in a sprawling collection of buildings dotted around Kensington High Street. Chief executive Toby Kelly, a 22- year company veteran, takes me on a tour through a labyrinth of largely empty desks, with many employees still working from home.

Despite the desolate scene, there's plenty of signs of the lifeblood of the company: huge landscapes from every continent dominate the walls. There's even a laundry room, a hangover from when Trailfinders was run by backpackers.

After leaving the Army, Gooley, inspired by his own globe-trotting exploits, set up shop catering for the scores of Australian backpackers in Earl's Court.

'It was eight weeks before we did our first booking. And she cancelled two days later,' he recalls.

A painting of him in a tilting Land Rover in Zaire  now the Democratic Republic of Congo  bogged down on a notorious section of road stands above the boardroom table, a fond memory from an epic roadtrip from London to Nairobi in the 1970s.

He proudly shows me a black and white shot of him as captain of the SAS rugby squad in the early 1960s. He admits he struggles to identify with some of his long-retired Army peers, with work still dominating his time. These days time away from the office is spent eating out or watching sport.

The past year has been tough, but Gooley describes Trailfinders' finances as 'bombproof'. The pandemic has cost the business at least 50million, but left a healthy 275million of cash on the books.

Recently filed accounts show that turnover crashed from 849million to 107million in the year to late February 2021, with a profit of 42million becoming a 44million loss. Nearly 20 per cent of his 1,000- strong workforce remain on furlough and more than 400,000 trips have had to be rescheduled. The company has refunded 246million to clients.

Gooley says he learnt to take a prudent approach to business from the experience of his mother, who ran a successful maternity home during the Second World War, only to lose her fortune following a stroke, and competition from the NHS. Gooley says: 'That made a huge impression on me, to keep reserves. And I've squirrelled away the whole time.'

His caution is writ large at Trailfinders, where there's no sign of gung-ho expansion. New additions to its 41 branches nationwide are made cautiously, and senior hires are from its own workforce only.

Bookings are at about 200 a day, down from 1,000 pre-Covid. Spain, Greece and countries on the green list are currently popular, with Canada the post-pandemic pick of the bunch. Customers now book further ahead, typically nine rather than six months before their trip.

Although Covid has devastated Trailfinders in the short-term, Gooley believes there may be a silver lining: customers struggling with the administrative headaches of rearranging plans with airlines, hotels and transport companies may now be more likely to seek the certainty of a travel agent.

Trailfinders, which trades solely through advisers in its stores and call centre, has had to fight the rise of holidaymakers opting for direct online booking over the past two decades.

Gooley says: 'The vast majority of our bookings are not straightforward, and some are very complex  five different airlines, seven destinations, for example.'

He says it 'hurts' to see rivals, such as Expedia, winning simpler business which takes less customer care. But he says organising complex trips provides a unique place in the market for Trailfinders.

Gooley says the pandemic has proven exactly why he has long campaigned for all travel companies to emulate Trailfinders by keeping customers' money in a separate account from the moment they book to the end of their trip.

He says of travel firms: 'For them to use your money for any other reason than to discharge what you thought you'd bought is embezzlement as far as I'm concerned.'

As customers have battled for refunds, Gooley has been demanding that Transport Secretary Grant Shapps step in.

The Civil Aviation Authority is consulting on reforms to the Air Travel Organiser's Licence (Atol) financial protection scheme,.

However, Gooley says his peers are dragging their feet: 'Because it's like asking the fox how they'd like the hen coup secured.'
Royal Mail has asked its most successful managers to help improve its worst performing delivery offices.

Chief executive Simon Thompson has told investors he hopes to narrow the vast gap between the best and worst performing of its 1,200 delivery offices.

The 500-year-old firm rates each office on measures including productivity and quality of service.

Room for improvement: The 500-year-old firm rates each office on measures including productivity and quality of service

Thompson said he has asked employees in 'places where we have great, very trusted relationships' to spend time in 'less great' offices to make changes.

It is part of a wider plan by the former Apple executive to 'build trust' within the organisation, where he is trying to stamp out longstanding bullying problems.

Speaking at Royal Mail's AGM, he said: 'All of our operations need to make an equal contribution...I understand that none of our operations are exactly the same and as human beings, we can all do things better than each other.

'But the difference in performance between our best and worst operations is just too wide.' The company has been trialling new working methods to cut admin for managers to free up time to spend with their teams. After a trial in Sale, Manchester, the system will be rolled out by the end of October.

The company is battling the impact of the 'pingdemic' and has warned customers in 14 areas to expect delays as a result.

Chairman Keith Williams also said the firm plans to appoint someone from an ethnic minority as a board director 'in the next month or so' to improve its diversity.
A top Pfizer executive has said he is 'confident' the US pharma giant will be able to triple the number of Covid vaccines it has manufactured by the end of the year.

Pfizer  the first company to supply a Covid vaccine to Britain  has already raised its 2021 production target from 2.5billion to 3billion.

But so far it has produced around 1.2billion doses and shipped 1billion of these  meaning a significant ramp-up in production is required.

Boost: Pfizer  the first company to supply a Covid vaccine to Britain  has already raised its 2021 production target from 2.5billion to 3billion

A push to ensure the new target is hit has included expanding its vast manufacturing facility in Puurs, Belgium; an increase in its batch sizes; and a recruitment drive to increase the site's workforce by around 1,000 to 3,400.

Scientists have also managed to reduce the time taken to produce a Covid vaccine batch from 110 days to 60 days.

Danny Hendrikse, vice president of supply at Pfizer, told The Mail on Sunday this is likely to be speeded up. 'We have to continuously improve. If we reach a key performance indicator, we set our bar higher,' he said. 'We've learned to make the impossible possible.'

A year ago, the UK agreed to take 30million Pfizer-BioNTech doses then upped this order to 40million and 100million.

Around 40million doses have been delivered. The bulk of the remaining 60million doses are expected to be delivered in the autumn and winter.
Embattled GlaxoSmithKline chief Emma Walmsley is expected to reinforce her defences against corporate raider Elliott this week when the pharma giant posts improving revenues.

The Mail on Sunday understands Walmsley has met with a string of large investors since she detailed her vision for the future of the business last month.

Under pressure: The company has been rocked since the US activist investor took a multi-billion pound stake

She is expected to tell the City that a number of investors have advised her to stick to her current strategy and not be distracted by Elliott's calls for a shake-up.

The company has been rocked since the US activist investor took a multi-billion pound stake.

GSK plans to split into two next year through the demerger of its consumer arm.

Last week, it appointed consumer health care head Brian McNamara to run it after a recruitment process involving two headhunters.

Elliott wants a similar process for the remaining biopharma business, effectively demanding that Walmsley reapplies for her own job.

The stock at the 71billion firm has risen 10 per cent since Elliott's stake emerged in April, closing at 14.16 on Friday.
When Shelley Godbolt and Zehavit Dehan-Alkobi walked down the aisle on January 9, 2018 it was a very public affair.

Just a month earlier, Australia had legalised gay marriage and the pair's special day was captured on national TV while being billed as one of the country's first gay weddings.

For Zehavit, 45 and Shelley, 44, their wedding in front of family and friends was the fulfilment of a 10-year dream to officially tie the knot.

'We needed to pinch ourselves, it was so unbelievable,' Zehavit told Daily Mail Australia.

'It was amazing, everyone held rainbow flags and a friend we called Dad walked Shelley down the aisle,' Zehavit said.

'My son was the ring boy and gave an amazing speech congratulating Australia for catching up with world.

'Shelley was ecstatic and so proud.'

But the euphoria of the big day quickly turned to tragedy.

Shelley Godbolt, left, and Zehavit Dehan-Alkobi at their wedding, one month after the Australian Government legalised gay marriage

The couple's special day was on national TV and billed as one of Australia's first gay weddings

However just five months later Shelley committed suicide. Pictured: Mourners at her funeral

Just five months after their dream wedding, Shelley took her own life.

Three years on, Zehavit is still trying to work out why her beloved partner committed suicide.

Shelley left no note, and the messages between them in the hours before she died gave no indication about the tragedy that was about to unfold.

'The day she took her life she told me she had a job interview, so she wasn't going to work,' Zehavit said.

'That morning she gave me a big hug and I thought she was going to break my ribs, I now know it was her giving me her last hug.

'She didn't leave any note. I went to work in the morning and in the evening, she was gone.'

Zehavits fourteen-year-old son, Leo, came home in the afternoon and found Shelley.

'The house was dark and strange music was playing. He walked upstairs and saw her,' Zehavit said.

'I rushed home and the whole street was blocked off and there were police and ambulance everywhere.

'They told me she was dead, and I was just shaking like a leaf.'

Zehavit and Shelley's life continued happily after the wedding, and they were even considering having a child together

For Shelley, the wedding was a chance for her to be truly proud of who she was.

'Shelley had grown up in a small country town and was bullied for being gay, so it was a lifelong dream to stand up and be recognised and be able to marry like everyone else,' Zehavit said.

During an interview with media at the wedding, Zehavit said Shelley spoke about the importance of her wife being recognised as her next of kin because 'if god forbid something would happen to me, my mother would be the first person to get the call'.

Zehavit now looks back on those words with an eerie feeling that Shelley was already planning to end her life.

'It was almost like it was premediated,' Zehavit said, recalling the interview.

Zehavit said Shelley's lifelong dream was to be able to stand up and get married 'like anyone else'

After the wedding, the couple's life together with Zehavits son continued happily - albeit with the usual ups and downs.

They had spoken about having a baby together and Shelley, who Zehavit says always felt like she was a male, talked about transitioning.

'A couple of weeks before she died, she became excited about trying to have a baby again,' Zehavit said.

'She was looking forward, so it didn't make any sense to me when it happened.'

However, two weeks before Shelley took her life she lost her job at the funeral parlour, which Zehavit believes was the turning point.

Shelley felt bullied at work and Zehavit had organised a workplace program for the staff.

After she lost her job, Shelley began working in a cafe, which Zehavit said she hated as working as a mortician was her passion.

Zehavit with her son Leo and Shelley. Leo found Shelley after she committed suicide in the family home

But as Zehavit was still reeling from the loss of her wife, the practicalities of life began to take hold.

Zehavit and Leo couldn't stay in the family home so they had to search for a roof over their heads while dealing with police.

They stayed with Zehavit's ex-husband for a week and then in a granny flat at a friend's house.

'Overnight our lives changed forever. It was an extremely hard time, but I had a child, so I needed to function for him,' she said.

'We were so lucky to have an amazing community of friends who literally paused their lives to help us.

'I was grateful for the support I received but realised how my journey could have been easier if I'd had help from someone on the outside, because all my friends were grieving too. I think about those people that have lost someone to suicide that dont have that support.'

Zehavit says she will never get over Shelley's death and keeps herself busy to try and cope

During this time one of her friend's lost someone to cancer and Zehavit witnessed how many support organisations were available for the family.

'Losing someone to suicide is different to any other kind of death. You feel so guilty and so angry that you need all the support you can get,' she said.

Zehavit has established a crisis support centre called Shelleys Home, which she feels is needed now more than ever as the impacts of COVID-19 affect more people's mental health.

'My vision is to connect people to services who might be able to offer something such as removal services and temporary Airbnb places, psychology services, food and petrol vouchers.'

Zehavit is also hoping to establish a service where people can see experts such as insurance specialists and psychologists, doctors, accountants, Centrelink and funeral companies under one roof.

For Zehavit, losing her soulmate was the shock of her life, and she hopes Shelley's Home will help ease the trauma for others.

'I will never get over what happened,' she said.

'I keep myself busy because if I stop and think about it, I will probably go mental.'
Four Afghan witnesses set to give evidence against Ben Roberts-Smith this week are expected to be accused by the war hero's lawyers of having Taliban links.

The villagers are all from Darwan in the Taliban stronghold of Uruzgan province and three have been described as members of the same extended family.

They claim to have witnessed an unarmed prisoner called Ali Jan being kicked off a cliff at Darwan, then hearing gunshots and seeing his dead body.

Nine newspapers including The Sydney Morning Herald allege it was Mr Roberts-Smith who pushed Ali Jan off a cliff and ordered his execution.

Ali Jan has been described as a farmer, shepherd and goat herder but further details about his identity remain mysterious.

At least three of the Darwan witnesses claim to be related to the supposedly dead man, whose existence is not conceded by Mr Roberts-Smith's legal team.

Four Afghan witnesses set to give evidence against Ben Roberts-Smith this week will likely be accused by the war hero's lawyers of being Taliban sympathisers. Mr Roberts-Smith, a Victoria Cross recipient, is pictured serving with the Special Air Service in Afghansitan

The villagers are all from Darwan (pictured) in the Taliban stronghold of Uruzgan province and three have been described as members of the same extended family. They claim a relative called Ali Jan was kicked off a kick at Darwan and killed while in Australian custody

On the day Ali Jan was allegedly murdered Mr Roberts-Smith's patrol had been hunting rogue Afghan National Army sergeant Hekmatullah who shot dead three Australian soldiers near their Tarik Kowt base two weeks earlier. Hekmatullah is pictured

Once the Afghan witnesses have given their evidence in chief they will be rigorously cross-examined about their varying versions of events at Darwan.

They will be questioned about why they came forward to give their testimony and will likely be accused of being at least sympathetic to the Taliban insurgency.

Mr Roberts-Smith served in Afghanistan with the Special Air Service as part of the United States-led coalition which sought to hold back the brutal Islamic fundamentalists from 2001 until this year.

Nine originally claimed Ali Jan was shot be a member of the Afghan National Army but now alleges he was killed by Mr Roberts-Smith or another SAS soldier under his command.

Mr Roberts-Smith has given evidence he could not understand how 'a fanciful story like that' could be believed, let alone published in a newspaper.

The Victoria Cross recipient has told the Federal Court he did not mistreat any prisoner, there was no unlawful killing and there was not even a cliff at Darwan.

Mr Roberts-Smith is suing Nine in the Federal Court in what has been described as the 'trial of the century', a defamation hearing that has been disrupted by Covid-19.

The alleged murder of Ali Jan is the centrepiece claim in a series of stories Nine newspapers published in 2018 accusing Mr Roberts-Smith of war crimes.

Mr Roberts-Smith is suing Nine newspapers over allegations he was involved in six murders during his service in Afghanistan pictured receiving his Victoria Cross for gallantry from then Governor-General Dame Quentin Bryce in 2011. He also holds the Medal for Gallantry

Australian troops, including the Special Air Service, were based at Tarin Kowt during the war in Afghanistan. Four Afghans from Darwan will give evidence from Kabul about the alleged unlawful killing of a man called Ali Jan in their village on September 11, 2012

The Afghan witnesses will be cross-examined about their varying versions of the events at Darwan. They will be questioned about why they came forward to give their testimony and will be accused of being being sympathetic to the insurgency. Taliban fighters are pictured

The Darwan witnesses will start giving their evidence on Monday via audio-visual from the Afghan capital Kabul, through a Pashto interpreter based in Ontario, Canada.

Nine has said the witnesses's safety was in danger in their war-torn homeland but there is no evidence that giving testimony about alleged Australian war crimes would put them at risk.

The Afghans have previously given statements to the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force and their identities are no secret in Afghanistan, including to the Taliban.

Mr Roberts-Smith's legal team, led by barrister Bruce McClintock SC, will have its own Pashto

interpreter for the Afghans' evidence.

'These people are accusing my client - or at least one of them is - of a murder,' Mr McClintock has previously told the court.

The three men and one woman have usually been referred to by their pseudonyms but they are Mohammed Hanifa (Person 62), Man Gul (Person 63), Shahzad Aka (Person 64) and a woman known only as Bora (Person 65).

The evidence Nine expects the four to give about what happened in Darwan has previously been outlined in another Federal Court hearing.

Nine originally claimed Ali Jan was shot be a member of the Afghan National Army but now alleges he was killed by Mr Roberts-Smith or another SAS soldier under his command

The Afghans have previously given statements to the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force and their identities are no secret in Afghanistan, including to the Taliban. Australian Special Operations Task Group troops are pictured in Uruzgan province in 2012

Mohammed Hanifa claims he is Ali Jan's nephew and that on September 11, 2012 he was detained and interrogated with Ali Jan and Man Gul by Australian soldiers.

He claims he saw Mr Roberts-Smith kick Ali Jan off a small cliff and that Ali Jan was then taken into a cornfield by two soldiers of short stature, one of whom shot him.

It was not clear from the outline of his evidence if Mohammed Hanifa claims he actually saw the shooting but he says when he saw Ali Jan's body he had been shot in the face.

Man Gul says he is a distant cousin of Ali Jan and lives next door to Mohammed Hanifa in Darwan. He says Ali Jan lived in a village about three hours away on foot.

Man Gul also claims after he, Ali Jan and Mohammed Hanifa were interrogated by Australian soldiers he heard gunfire and saw that Ali Jan had been shot in the face.

Shahzad Aka is Mohammed Hanifa's father, with whom he lives in Darwan, and claims that Ali Jan is his wife's brother. Shahzad Aka has lived in Darwan all his life.

He claims he saw a 'big' soldier kick Ali Jan off a cliff and a short time later heard gunshots. He then saw Ali Jan's dead body with a gunshot wound to the face.

In a so-called green on blue attack, Hekmatullah murdered Lance Corporal Stjepan 'Rick' Milosevic, Sapper James Martin and Private Robert Poate while while they were playing cards. Long range patrol vehicles are pictured carrying Sapper Martin and Private Poate's coffins

Nine newspapers claim Mr Roberts-Smith forced Ali Jan to kneel at the edge of a cliff while still handcuffed and then took a number of steps back before kicking him hard in the midriff. Australian soldiers are pictured on patrol near Darwan in 2011

Bora, whose surname has not been revealed in court, claims she saw a person she was told was Ali Jan kicked off a cliff by a soldier and shortly afterwards heard gunshots.

The four witnesses gave statements to the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force in Afghanistan in July 2019.

The Australian Federal Police were in the country at the same time gathering evidence and Nine says it became aware of the four witnesses two months later.

Mr Roberts-Smith, who the newspapers accused of involvement in six murders during his service in Afghanistan, has denied taking part in any unlawful killings.

Australia's most decorated soldier says that the day Nine claims Ali Jan was murdered in Darwan the only Afghans killed were Taliban insurgents.

His SAS patrol had been hunting rogue Afghan National Army sergeant Hekmatullah who had shot dead three Australian soldiers near their Tarik Kowt base on August 29.

In a so-called green on blue attack, Hekmatullah murdered Lance Corporal Stjepan 'Rick' Milosevic, Sapper James Martin and Private Robert Poate while while they were playing cards.

Australian troops aboard helicopters are pictured searching for Hekmatullah in the Gizab region of Uruzgan province after he murdered three of their comrades in August 2012

The Australians had intelligence that Darwan villagers were harbouring Hekmatullah and they went in to capture or kill the rogue Afghan soldier. The Australians he murdered are pictured left to right: Private Robert Poate, Lance Corporal Stjepan Milosevic and Sapper James martin

The Australians had intelligence that Darwan villagers had been harbouring Hekmatullah and they went in to capture or kill the rogue Afghan soldier.

Early in the mission Mr Roberts-Smith had swum the Helmand River and shot dead a an insurgent armed with an AK-47-style assault rifle but he was not Hekmatullah.

Nine alleges that near the end of the mission Mr Roberts-Smith and members of his patrol detained, handcuffed and questioned Mohammed Hanifa, Man Gul and Ali Jan.

The newspapers claim Mr Roberts-Smith forced Ali Jan to kneel at the edge of a cliff while still handcuffed and then took a number of steps back before kicking him hard in the midriff.

According to Nine, Ali Jan fell over the cliff and landed in a dry creek bed below. The impact of the fall was so great it knocked Ali Jan's teeth out of his mouth.

Nine alleges Ali Jan was moved by two soldiers to the other side of the creek bed where he was shot by Mr Roberts-Smith or another SAS member called Person 11, or both.

Mr Roberts-Smith has given evidence that no such incident ever took place and disputed there was even a drop he would consider a cliff at Darwan.

The Sydney Morning Herald ran this front page investigation into allegations of war crimes committed in Afghanistan on the weekend of June 9 and 10, 2018. The story contained claims about Ali Jan being kicked off a cliff and killed

Shown a picture of a steep incline of 7 to 10m in the area, Mr Roberts-Smith said, 'A cliff is a cliff - and that's not a cliff to me.'

Instead of having executed a prisoner, Mr Roberts-Smith said he was nearby when Person 11 engaged and killed a Taliban 'spotter' in a cornfield.

Nicholas Owens SC, for Nine, said Mr Roberts-Smith and others had moved Ali Jan's body into the cornfield and planted a radio on him as part of a cover-up.

McClintock has told the court there were no witnesses to any murder.

'The allegation is actually ludicrous, that my client killed an unarmed man outside in full view,' he said. 'It did not happen.

'If someone called Ali Jan did die, then it was because he was a spotter, sitting in a cornfield killed legitimately by [Mr Roberts-Smith] or Person 11.'

Arthur Moses SC, for Mr Roberts-Smith, told the Federal Court's Justice Wendy Abraham in May the credibility of the four Afghan witnesses would be challenged.

'What is immediately obvious from the outlines of evidence, Your Honour, is that their accounts of course dont necessarily corroborate each other,' Mr Moses said.

'But they are certainly at odds with what the applicant states occurred. Those accounts are also inconsistent with what Person 11 says occurred.'
A federal appeals court late on Friday reversed course and let stand a lower court order prohibiting the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from enforcing coronavirus-related cruise ship rules in Florida.

The decision was a win for the state, which filed a lawsuit arguing that restrictions imposed by the CDC made it very difficult for the industry to bounce back after the pandemic.

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta had only on Saturday voted 2-1 to block the lower court decision.

But in its latest brief statement, the three-judge appeals panel said it had withdrawn its earlier order on its own and was now rejecting the government's request because it had 'failed to demonstrate an entitlement to a stay pending appeal.'

The CDC said that even though it cannot require cruise ships to abide by the sail order, it will enforce its separate transit mask requirements on cruise ships in Florida that opt not to follow the now voluntary program.

A federal appeals court late Friday blocked a lower court order prohibiting the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from enforcing coronavirus-related cruise ship rules in Florida. Pictured, a Norwegian Cruise Line ship docks at a port in Miami, Florida

The decision was a win for the state, which filed a lawsuit arguing that restrictions imposed by the CDC made it very difficult for the industry to bounce back after the pandemic

All cruise ships in Florida will still be required to report 'individual cases of illness or death and ship inspections and sanitary measures to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases,' the CDC said late on Friday.

Cruise lines that ensure at least 95% of passengers and nearly all crew are vaccinated can bypass simulated voyages and move more quickly to resuming commercial trips and can allow vaccinated people to avoid masks in inside common spaces, according to the CDC's conditional sail order.

Masks are not required in outdoor areas on cruise ships.

The conditional sail order 'represents the most effective way of continuing to protect the public's health,' the CDC said.

The CDC 'remains committed to working with the cruise industry and seaport partners' to ensure the safe resumption of operations, it added.

On July 17, a federal court voted to stay a judge's decision ruling that Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cannot enforce COVID-19 cruise ship rules after July 18

Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody's (pictured) office said the state is pleased the appeals court has lifted 'the prior order allowing the preliminary injunction to be in place.'

Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody's office said the state is pleased the appeals court has lifted 'the prior order allowing the preliminary injunction to be in place.'

The appeals court ruling came soon after the state of Florida had filed an emergency petition with the U.S. Supreme Court asking the high court to lift the appeals court order, warning that without action the state was 'all but guaranteed to lose yet another summer cruise season while the CDC pursues its appeal,' the state said in its filing to the Supreme Court.

In June, U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday in siding with Republican-led Florida found the state was 'highly likely' to show the CDC exceeded its authority in adopting rules governing the resumption of cruise ship sailing.

In May, the CDC began approving some cruise operations after lengthy talks with the industry about health and safety protocols.

Operations were suspended in March 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Then the CDC imposed a four-phase conditional framework on October 30 that it said would allow the industry to gradually resume operations if certain thresholds were met.

Judge Merryday wrote in a 124-page decision last month that Florida would be harmed if the CDC order, which the state said effectively blocked most cruises, were to continue.

The Tampa-based judge granted a preliminary injunction that prevented the CDC from enforcing the order pending further legal action on a broader Florida lawsuit.

'This order finds that Florida is highly likely to prevail on the merits of the claim that CDC's conditional sailing order and the implementing orders exceed the authority delegated to the CDC,' Merryday wrote.

Merryday's decision had meant the CDC could not enforce those rules for Florida-based ships and that they would merely be considered nonbinding recommendations or guidelines.

On Friday, Cruise Lines International Association, a trade group, did not indicate whether it supported Florida's legal challenge, but said before the appeals court order that cruise ships will continue to operate in accordance with the CDC requirements.

Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd has sued Florida, saying state law prohibiting cruise lines from requiring COVID-19 vaccine documentation was preventing it 'from safely and soundly resuming passenger cruise operations' from Miami starting on August. 15.
Democrats have urged Republican governors including Ron DeSantis to resume COVID-19 reporting.

Several states had scaled back their reporting of COVID-19 statistics this month just as cases across the country started to skyrocket, depriving the public of real-time information on outbreaks, cases, hospitalizations and deaths in their communities.

The shift to weekly instead of daily reporting in Florida, Nebraska, Iowa and South Dakota - all led by Republican governors - marked a notable shift during the pandemic.

Coronavirus dashboards have become a staple for Americans closely tracking case counts and trends to navigate a crisis that has killed more than 600,000 people in the United States.

When Florida changed the frequency of its virus reporting earlier this month, officials said it made sense given the decreasing number of cases and the increasing number of people being vaccinated.

Cases started soaring soon after, and Florida earlier this week made up one-fifth of the country's new coronavirus infections.

As a result, Florida's weekly releases - typically done on Friday afternoons - have consequences for the country's understanding of the current summer surge, with no statewide COVID stats coming out of the virus hotspot for six days a week.

Democrats have urged Republican governors including Ron DeSantis to resume COVID-19 reporting after states scaled back just as cases surged.

Nebraska Gov. Pete Rickets points to vaccination statistics during a news conference in Lincoln in January. The state had actually stopped reporting on the virus altogether for two weeks after Gov. Pete Ricketts declared an end to the official virus emergency

Cases in Florida are on the rise - but the state has scaled back its reporting to weekly updates (pictured) rather than a live data dashboard

Johns Hopkins University data shows that Florida is seeing a sudden spike in cases to rival the peak in January

In Florida's last two weekly reports, the number of new cases shot up from 23,000 to 45,000 and then 73,000 on Friday, an average of more than 10,000 day. Hospitals are starting to run out of space in parts of the state.

With cases rising, Democrats and other critics have urged state officials and Gov. Ron DeSantis to resume daily outbreak updates.

'There was absolutely no reason to eliminate the daily updates beyond an effort to pretend like there are no updates,' said state Rep. Anna Eskamani, a Democrat from the Orlando area.

Rep. Carlos Smith tweeted that: 'It's past time for @GovRonDeSantis to reinstate daily COVID reporting of infections, positivity rates, hospitalizations, deaths + other data. Floridians need information to keep their families safe.'

'It's INSANE Floridians no longer have access to DAILY data. Parents wanna know how many kids are infected with the COVID delta variant in their county,' he added.

'How can they make informed decisions on whether to mask up their child in school without info @GovRonDeSantis?'

In Nebraska, the state actually stopped reporting on the virus altogether for two weeks after Gov. Pete Ricketts declared an end to the official virus emergency.

The move forced news reporters to file public records requests or turn to national websites that track state data to learn about COVID statistics. The state backtracked two weeks later and came up with a weekly site that provides some basic numbers.

Dr. Mark Rupp, an infectious disease specialist with Nebraska Medicine, told KOLN that removing the dashboard is 'a real problem.'

'Dismantling the dashboard and preventing the widespread dissemination of accurate information and transparency is a problem,' he said. 'This was ill-timed, ill-considered and unfortunately, somewhat reckless.'

The trend of reducing data reporting has also alarmed other infectious disease specialists who believe that more information is better during a pandemic.

People have come to rely on state virus dashboards to help make decisions about whether to attend large gatherings or wear masks in public, and understanding the level of risk in the community affects how people respond to virus restrictions and calls to get vaccinated.

HOLLYWOOD: Medical Assistant Maria Perez, left, gives a vaccine shot to 4 year-old Julia Mattamira of Pasadena during the Saban Community Clinic annual back-to-school vaccination drive at Melrose Family Health Center in Hollywood on Thursday

RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA: Anti-vaccine protesters rally against coronavirus restriction on Saturday

NEW YORK: Anti-vaccine protesters gather and march during a demonstration on Saturday

Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, who leads the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, said: 'We know that showing the data to others actually is important.'

'The actions that businesses take, the actions that schools take, the actions that civic leaders take, the actions that community leaders take, the actions that each of us individually take are all influenced by our perception of what the risk is out there,' she said.

But reporting the numbers on a weekly basis still allows people to see the overall trends while smoothing out some of he day-to-day variations that come from the way cases are reported and not the actual number of new cases.

And experts have long advised that it makes sense to pay more attention to the seven-day rolling average of new cases because the numbers can vary widely from one day to the next.

And Florida health officials say that they have not curtailed the sharing of data with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Maintaining daily updates on the virus does require significant resources for states. For instance, Kansas went to reporting virus numbers three times a week in May because the state health department said providing daily statistics consumed too much time for its already overwhelmed staff.

A map shows that there have been 34,430,608 total coronavirus cases in the United States and 610,850 deaths

A chart shows the total number of coronavirus deaths per day since the start of the pandemic

A chart shows the number of coronavirus deaths per day in June and July

A chart shows the total number of coronavirus cases per day since the start of the pandemic

A chart shows the number of coronavirus cases per day in June and July

In Nebraska, officials decided that continuing to update the virus dashboard daily wasn't the best use of state resources now partly because there had been a steady decline in the number of views of the website indicating less interest in the numbers, spokeswoman Olga Dack said.

The state could return to providing daily updates if the governor's office decided that was needed, she said.

'Now that Nebraska is back to normal, some of the staff that has been dedicated to the dashboard has been able to focus on some of the other important issues,' Dack said.

State health departments have a long history of providing the public regular updates on other diseases like flu and West Nile, but those viruses have none of the political baggage associated with COVID-19.

In Florida, a former health department employee was fired last year after publicly suggesting that managers wanted her to manipulate information on coronavirus statistics to paint a rosier picture.

The employee, Rebekah Jones, did not allege any tampering with data, but her comments sowed doubts about the reliability of the metrics.

Infectious disease specialist Dr. David Brett-Major said that for many people, national websites such as the one run by the CDC can be a good source of data on the latest state trends and weekly updates could be OK.

The World Health Organization often uses weekly updates, but he said they do that for practical data management reasons, not political ones.

He said the message Nebraska sent when it ended its dashboard that the state emergency was over and conditions were returning to normal was troubling.

'The main problem is that it reflects a disinterest in pandemic risk management,' said Brett-Major, with the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha.

Janet Hamilton, executive director of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, said part of the problem is that public health officials generally don't have sophisticated data systems - so it is more labor intensive to produce the daily dashboards.

Even though public health agencies have money for operations at a time when pandemic government spending is flush, they haven't necessarily had the chance to upgrade.

'It would be great if daily reporting could be made widely available, but public health would have to be funded better to do that and right now that is just not the case,' said Hamilton.

And even in states where virus numbers aren't being reported publicly every day health officials are still looking at the latest data, Hamilton said.

But at a time when the delta variant is, in the words of the CDC director, 'spreading with incredible efficiency,' Bibbins-Domingo said it is important that everyone can see the latest trends and understand the risks.

'Even if we know that they are available to decisionmakers on a daily basis, there is considerable value to providing the data to the public,' she said.

Other governments have gone the other direction and released more information, with Washington, D.C., this week adding a dashboard on breakthrough cases to show the number of residents who contracted the virus after getting vaccines.

Many states have recently gone to reporting virus numbers only on weekdays.
Donald Trump for the first time on Saturday said he would have been OK if he lost the 2020 election fairly as he spoke for nearly two hours to thousands of supporters at an election integrity event in Phoenix.

'I've got to tell you, I've got to say it. I've never said it before, but I've always thought it  If I lost the election, I'm OK with that. I'm OK with it. Seriously,' the former president said.

'If we lost the election, we lose an election,' he continued.

'I'll go home. I'll start building buildings. I'll do something. I'll keep myself busy. But you know what, if we lost the election  we know when we lose.'

The former president, however, said he knows that he didn't lose and therefore wants an investigation that proves so.

'This election was rigged,' he claimed. 'And they know it.'

Trump added: 'You know when you win and when you lose'

'If I lost this election, I could handle it pretty easily,' he said. 'When they steal if from you and rig it, that's not easy and we have to fight. We have no choice. We have to fight.'

He questioned why Democrats  and some Republican defectors  don't want an audit just to prove that they won fair and square.

Former President Donald Trump said during an election-focused rally in Phoenix, Arizona on Saturday that he would have been OK if he lost the 2020 election fairly

'I've got to tell you, I've got to say it. I've never said it before, but I've always thought it  If I lost the election, I'm OK with that,' Trump said. 'If we lost the election, we lose an election. I'll go home. I'll start building buildings. I'll do something. I'll keep myself busy'

The 'Protect Our Elections' event was hosted by Turning Point Action, which is a group aimed at de-seating Democratic politicians across the country.

Maricopa County has been at ground zero in the last three months for Trump's recount efforts.

WAR ON SPORTS

The former president also waged a war on sports during his remarks, railing against transgender women competing in women's sports; slamming Cleveland's baseball team for 'going woke' and changing its name from the Indians to the Gusradians; and praising the loss of the U.S. women's Soccer Team in Tokyo after the majority of the players knelt for the National Anthem.

'The radical left is determined to ruin everything in America. That's what they're doing,' Trump complained.

'Woke politics takes the life and joy out of everything,' he added. 'Woke-ism makes you lose, ruins your mind and ruins you as a person. You become wrapped, you become demented.'

'The U.S. Women's Soccer Team is a very good example of what's going on,' Trump said, and was met with a slew of laughs and cheers from the crowd.

'Earlier this week, they unexpectedly lost to Sweden, 3-0,' he recapped. 'And Americans were happy about it. You proved that point before I even said it.'

Trump was teed up for his speech with a dramatic video about his accomplishments as president

The event was hosted by Turning Point Action, the political action committee arm of conservative student organization Turning Point USA. Trump took stage at the 'Protect our Elections' rally in Phoenix, Arizona just before 4 p.m. MST on Saturday

U.S. women's soccer players took a knee during their opening match at the Olympics.

Ultimately, the U.S. ended up losing, and conservative activists lauded it on social media, claiming it was poetic justice for the team protesting against their own country on the international stage.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) recently relaxed the rules for protests at the Games, softening a long-standing ban on political protests at the global sporting event. IOC and Tokyo 2020 organizer, however, have banned the team's official social media pages from sharing photos of the protest.

Trump claimed 'radical leftists' are also ruining baseball.

'Now the left is in the process of destroying our national pass-time baseball,' he said.

'First we saw the embarrassing spectacle of the commissioner of baseball bowing to the radical left on voter fraud. You saw what they did. You saw they moved the All Star game,' he said in reference to the anual game being moved from Georgia after the state's legislature passed the controversial Election Integrity Act of 2021.

Cleveland's Major League Baseball team also just changed it's name to get rid of using Native Americans as their mascot, following suit with the former Washington Redskins, which changed their name temporarily to the Washington Football Team.

'Now, one of the most beloved and storied franchises in baseball, all of baseball  I watched it as a kid at Yankee Stadium. The Cleveland Indians will be changing their name,' Trump lamented. 'A name that was filled with history and memories.'

'The new name will be the Cleveland Guardians, which is terrible,' he said. 'The Cleveland Indians, you know that's such a  if I were an Indian, I would sue.'

'Sue them Indians!' the former president encouraged of Native Americans.

'It's one of the greatest names, one of the most incredible logos. People loved it.'

'They are going absolutely crazy in Ohio over the name change. The Cleveland Guardians? What's that all about? The insanity of the left knows no bounds and both Indians and baseball fans should be greatly insulted,' he said.

'They want to take away our history, our heritage, our culture and everything that holds us together.'

TRUMP REPEATED HIS ELECTION FRAUD CLAIMS

Trump spoke on Saturday to thousands of his supporters at Arizona Federal Theater, where nearly all seats were occupied, minus a small roped-off section behind the media risers.

He also went through a list of his greatest hits from the last year lamenting the validity and integrity of the 2020 election.

'We won, we really did,' Trump insisted. 'Not me, we all won.'

'Everyone here understands the 2020 election was a total disgrace. It was the most corrupt' he said, but was cut off by cheers and chants from the audience of around 5,000.

'You're not going to have a future in 22 or 24 if you don't find out how they cheated with hundreds of thousands, and even millions of votes because you won't win anything,' Trump said, referencing the next two big election years.

The former president said the event on Saturday is to 'show our support for election integrity and the brave and irreverent warriors in the Arizona State Senate.'

The Arizona State Senate, which has a Republican majority, ordered the audit earlier this year.

TRUMP ACCUSES HUNTER'S ART BUYERS OF TRYING TO 'BRIBE' PRESIDENT BIDEN

Trump also took aim at Hunter Biden's artistic endeavors, claiming selling his pieces are a 'bribe' by purchasers to gain favor with President Joe Biden.

'It's a bribe, it's disgraceful and the fake news media is talking about it like it's OK,' he accused.

Hunter has taken up painting, claiming it helps with addiction recovery. He will appear at two different art exhibits in Los Angeles and New York City in the fall, the gallerist revealed, to sell large pieces, which are expected to go for half-a-million a piece.

The move was immediately slammed by critics who claim it is a wayf for buyers to gain undue influence over Hunter and his circle, which obviously includes his father, President Biden.

The White House insists the gallery will handle anything to do with the sale and the buyers will not be disclosed to Huner, the president or others within the administration.

'Could you imagine if my kids did that? Could you imagine?' Trump questioned to a jeering crowd.

'And now they're justifying, 'Well we want to make it non-transparent.,' he said in a mocking tone. 'No actually you should make it transparent, I guess. But actually you shouldn't make at all, because it's a bribe. It's a bribe. 100 per cent it's a bribe.'

He then specifically attacked Hunter's artwork, claiming that people who do portraits in Central Park are better than him  and they get paid way less, he noted.

'You know, you have good painters  for $250 you can have a portrait done in Central Park. Guys with pencils, they do so incredible. They're geniuses,' Trump said, then dumbfoundedly added, 'Hunter Biden's getting $500,000. It's a bribe.'

'THE GREEN NEW BULLS***'

In taking his criticism to the House of Representatives, Trump lambasted the progressive 'Green New Deal' as 'The Green New Bulls**'. The proposal sets forward a series of economic and social welfare programs aimed at addressing climate change and increasing government focus on the environment.

New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is among the lawmakers pushing the legislation, along with her Senate co-sponsor Ed Markey of Massachusetts.

'The Green New Deal. Gonna destroy our country, this Green New Deal. It's Green New Bulls***, OK. That;s what it is. It's bulls***,' he said.

Trump claimed the deal proposes 'no more windows in buildings, because environment.'

'You know, I always did great with these buildings. The bigger the window, the better I did. The bigger those windows  I wanted floor-to-ceiling windows. But they say you can't do that anymore.'

Trump, who made his money mostly in real estate, then went on to mock progressives, claiming they don't want any more windows in apartment buildings.

'It's going to be really hard to sell apartments, I think,' he said.

Then Trump said in mocking someone trying to sell an apartment without windows: 'We have a beautiful apartment and for environmental reasons we have not put windows in the building.'

'These people are crazy.'

In going off onto another environment-related tangent, Trump asked, 'What ever happened to cows?'

'Remember they were going to get rid of all the cows,' he continued. 'They stopped that. People didn't like that. Remember. You know why they were going to get rid of all the cows.'

'People will be next,' Trump conspiracized.

Ashli Babbitt's mother Michelle Witthoeft (right) attended Trump's rally as Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar's guest. She was joined by another woman holding a picture of Babbitt, who was killed by a Capitol Police Officer during the January 6 riot

Witthoeft and the other women held up signs and wore shirts that read 'Justice for Ashli'

THE PRE-TRUMP SHOW

The two opening acts for Trump were Congressmen Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs, who respectively represent Arizona's 4th and 5th districts in the U.S. House.

Biggs told the crowd that the first marshal informed him the theater was at maximum capacity. He made fun of President Joe Biden's CNN town hall in Cincinnati, Ohio last week where about 300 people were in attendance.

He also said Trump could be put back in office 'in 2024, if not sooner,' suggesting that the Arizona efforts will be successful and somehow he will be reinstated as president before the next election.

'Donald Trump will be back in the president's seat, returning to us the America First agenda,' he assured.

While Gosar spoke, he introduced Ashli Babbitt's mom, Michelle Witthoeft, who was attending the rally.

Babbitt, 35, was killed on January 6, 2021 by a Capitol Police Officer who shot her as she attempted to break through the House chamber doors with a group of rioters who stormed the complex in an attempt to stop Congress for certifying the election results for Biden.

'Who killed Ashli Babbitt?' Gosar questioned, pleading, 'I want you to hold your applause for one second,' before introducing his guest.

The late Air Force veteran's mother was holding a poster with an image of Babbitt in front of the Capitol and donning a shirt that read 'Justice for Ashli'. Witthoeft was joined by another woman, who remained unidentified, but was holding up a poster with Babbitt's face on it.

It did not appear any rally attendees were wearing face coverings, but several were wearing comically large red foam 'Make America Great Again' hats.

The lack of masks comes as COVID-19 cases are surging across the country with the emergence of the Delta variant, and some cities are reimposing mask mandates indoors on even vaccinated individuals.

Phoenix has a population of 1.63 million people and it's current rolling 7-day average of new cases sits at 1,113. Los Angeles, one of the biggest areas spiking with COVID-19 right now, has a rolling average of 2,104 new cases per day.

Kari Lake, who was the crowd favorite gubernatorial candidate of the night, said if elected, she will issue pardons for businesses who decided to stay open amid shut downs and for those who are prosecuted for violating federal mask mandates.

The governorship in Arizona is wide open for the taking in 2022 as Republican Governor Doug Ducey comes to the end of his second and final term. Arizona law states governors are limited to eight years serving  or two consecutive four-year terms.

Trump has repeatedly lashed out at Ducey, who has broken with the former president's on his fraud claims. Ducey, Trump says, is to blame for Arizona not already overturning the election results.

In an April statement, Trump said: 'Governor Doug Ducey of Arizona, one of the worst Governors in America, and the second worst Republican Governor in America, is refusing to provide security for the American Patriots who are hand counting the Rigged 2020 Arizona Election Ballots.'

More recently, on Friday, Trump lauded that Ducey will not run to represent Arizona in the Senate as current Democratic Senator Mark Kelly comes up for reelection.

'Good news!' Trump wrote. 'RINO Governor Doug Ducey of Arizona has restated the fact that he is not running for the United States Senate. It would not matter, however, because he could not get the nomination after failing to perform on the Voter Fraud in Arizona. Also, there is no way he would get my endorsement, which means, his aspirations would be permanently put to rest anyway.'

He added: 'Again, thank you to our brave Republicans in the Arizona State Senate for their bravery in putting forward the Forensic Audit. Everybody is anxiously awaiting the result!'

One Republican vying to take Kelly's seat was met with a huge round of applause when he said ahead of Trump's remarks: 'Put Mark Kelly back in space with [Jeff] Bezos.'

The Arizona Federal Theatre was at max capacity on Saturday, according to the fire marshal. There are 5,000 seats in the venue

Kelly, a former astronaut, flipped the seat blue after defeating incumbent Republican Martha McSally in a special election after she took over in the interim following Senator John McCain's death.

Trump repeated his claims of widespread voter fraud throughout the evening as he spoke to his supporters of a rigged election.

'You can't tell me that President Trump didn't win, because he ran through the Democrats like crap through a goose,' Arizona State Representative Walter Blackman said in an awkward simile.

Blackman then led the room in the Pledge of Allegiance.

Meanwhile, the Arizona recount audit was thrown into chaos last week.

Ken Bennett, a former Arizona secretary of state and liaison to the state Senate for the recount, lost privileges to the building where the effort is taking place, according to recent reports.

The rally Saturday comes after a dramatic turn of events Friday when Ken Bennett, who was acting as the liaison to the Arizona Senate on the election audit, was banned from the building where the recount is taking place

The once-president of the state Senate was the only person involved with the recount in Maricopa with experience in elections.

Previously, he was referred to as the 'director' of the recount, but the Arizona Republic reported on Friday Bennett was not allowed in the state fairgrounds building where the audit is happening.

It comes after he shared data with outside critics from an ongoing ballot recount.

The Arizona State Senate, which is majority Republican, has paid $150,000 of the $9 million the election audit is reportedly costing. The state has a GOP trifecta, meaning the governor is a Republican and the House and Senate have a Republican majority.

Now that Bennett, the Senate's liaison for the recount, has been banned, it has become unclear who is in charge of the review, which was ordered by the Arizona State Senate.

Those senators in the state are also supposed to be overseeing the recount.

Arizona is a swing state that Trump lost to Biden in 2020 by just 0.3 per cent. He claims he only lost the state because of widespread fraud in Maricopa County, where he earned 995,665 votes to Biden's 1,040,774, according to the official ballot count from the state.

But the former president's most staunch supporters, several thousand of whom are in attendance at Saturday's rally, claim a lack of voter integrity is to blame for Biden beating Trump.

Bennett (right) helps move 2020 presidential ballots as the Maricopa County recount ensued on May 1, 2021

Cyber Ninjas was hired by the Arizona State Senate for the election audit. Here contractors examine and recount 2020 ballots at Veterans Memorial Coliseum on May 1 in Phoenix

Trump has insisted since he lost the election in November that Biden only won because Democrats used pandemic-era expanded mail-in voting laws to illegally sway the election in swing states.

Specifically he has aimed his attention at Georgia, Arizona and Pennsylvania, the three states that were the subject of GOP lawmakers' objections to the election results during the January 6, 2021 certification of the Electoral College results.

Trump took the stage around 3:55 p.m. MST to speak with a few thousand of his supporters who also feel the election was stolen. He was almost an hour late.

A retired Army soldier and now Uber driver told DailyMail.com on Friday that there are a lot of Republicans in the area who are willing to fight to overturn the election results for Trump  even just in an effort to make sure the state stays red.

Attendees are decked out in pro-America and pro-Trump swag.

One group held up a giant flag that said 'Trump Won' inside the theatre, and another group had Trump's face on the American flag with the words 'I'll be back'.

Trump often sends statements from his Save America Political Action Committee email railing against the Arizona results and those he feels are trying to prevent the recount.

Most recently, he wrote on Thursday Arizona State Senator Paul Boyer is trying to prevent the evidence from coming out from the audit.

Trump supporters hold up a sign insisting 'Trump Won' before the former president arrives for his remarks on Saturday, July 24, 2021

'Republican Arizona State Senator Paul Boyer, a RINO if there ever was one, is doing everything in his power to hold up the damning Forensic Audit of Maricopa County,' Trump wrote. 'The people of Arizona are demanding it.'

'All we demand is Voter Integrity!' he insisted, before stopping short of endorsing Former Arizona House of Representatives member Anthony Kern, who is running against Boyer.

Arizona's Senate brought in Cyber Ninjas in May to conduct a third recount audit, after two other election audits found no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
Each of the illegal migrants being housed in a hotel on the Kent coast are understood to have told officials they are under the age of 18.

Reports last week revealed that all 43 rooms at the Stade Court Hotel in Hythe have been booked by the Home Office until September to accommodate arrivals crossing the Channel from France.

NHS staff carried out Covid-19 checks at the hotel yesterday as migrants who had ended their quarantine period walked to the nearby beach.

Migrants who claimed to be under 18 told The Mail on Sunday that they were sharing rooms. Both the migrant charity Care4Calais and locals in Hythe said the hotel was exclusively housing minors.

Each of the illegal migrants being housed in a hotel on the Kent coast are understood to have told officials they are under the age of 18. Pictured: Inflatable craft carrying migrants in the English Chanel on July 22, 2021

Last month, Ms Patel vowed to crack down on migrants posing as children after it emerged that almost two-thirds of migrants who had claimed to be children in 2018 were judged to be adults. Child migrants can be eligible for better accommodation and education.

Almost 1,200 migrants arrived by boat last week, bringing the number of migrants who have crossed the Channel to the UK this year to more than 8,900.

According to the results of analysis published yesterday, the Government is bracing itself for up to 22,000 people to cross by boat before the end of the year.

It comes as Home Office and Border Force officials told The Mail on Sunday of their frustration at the impossible demands of political leaders, including Home Secretary Priti Patel, to stem the flow of crossings. Sources said officials have repeatedly told Ministers that there is little more that can be done to stem the flow under existing laws.

Ms Patel has also exasperated senior officials with her public pronouncements on migrant boat crossings, including a pledge two years ago that there would be a considerable reduction in arrivals by spring 2020.

Reports last week revealed that all 43 rooms at the Stade Court Hotel in Hythe have been booked by the Home Office until September to accommodate arrivals crossing the Channel from France

Meanwhile, claims that French authorities could increase interceptions of small boats by re-interpreting maritime law have been met with incredulity by UK officials.

A senior Border Force officer said: The powers-that-be, the politicians, have been asking for the impossible. It rolls downhill and weve pushed back significantly, which has been challenging in the last three months.

As for interceptions... the problem youve got is maritime law. Every mariner has a responsibility to every seafarer, and its the busiest sea lane in the world.

The officer added: Boats arent designed to make that crossing and so every element of law enforcement has got to be as careful as careful can be.

So if theyre [small boats] not giving way to a French warship, what can a French warship do because if they intercept that boat it will sink. Ms Patel last week announced that the French authorities would receive another 54 million to boost patrols and surveillance along the 47 miles of coastline from Boulogne to Dunkirk and around Dieppe.

The cash  on top of 28 million handed to the French in October  would boost daily patrols by up to 200 officers after more than 7,500 migrants were stopped from crossing this year, up from 2,600 last year.

But the plan has faced criticism, with French politicians warning it will do nothing to slow the crossings for which migrants usually pay smugglers between 1,700 and 4,000 per person.

Franck Dhersin, the mayor of Teteghem in Dunkirk, said: Donating tens of millions of euros to increasing police numbers and providing more sophisticated detection methods will do nothing to solve the problem.

NHS staff carried out Covid-19 checks at the hotel yesterday as migrants who had ended their quarantine period walked to the nearby beach

Arresting a few small-time gangster smugglers will solve nothing and networks will reform within days or weeks of arrests.

The mafia overlords who control the trade and who are based in London are acting with impunity and laundering the proceeds of their ruthless trade into clubs, restaurants and upmarket properties in London.

Enver Solomon, of the Refugee Council, said: It is important to remember that the men, women and children who are getting into flimsy boats to cross one of the worlds busiest and most dangerous shipping channels are ordinary people, who have had to take extraordinary measures to reach safety.

A Home Office source defended Ms Patels previous statements claiming migrant crossings would be significantly reduced. The Home Secretary had unveiled new laws earlier this month to target the problem, they added.

The Nationality and Borders Bill will increase the maximum prison sentence for entering Britain illegally from six months to four years.

The source said: No one is more frustrated than Priti with the situation, which is why we have introduced new landmark legislation to sort the small boat crossings.

Dan OMahoney, the Governments Clandestine Channel Threat Commander, said: There is an unacceptable rise in dangerous small boat crossings across the Channel because of a surge in illegal migration across Europe.

We make no apology for leaving no stone unturned in our efforts to tackle the ruthless criminals driving this activity.
A Home Office official in charge of protecting Britains borders was given a bonus on top of his six-figure salary, despite the record number of migrants crossing the English Channel.

Glyn Williams, who is currently the director general of Migration and Borders and earns up to 145,000, received 13,000 as a bonus for his performance for the 2019-20 financial year.

According to official figures, 1,892 migrants made the Channel crossing in 2019 but the figure rose to 8,420 last year.

Glyn Williams, who is currently the director general of Migration and Borders and earns up to 145,000, received 13,000 as a bonus for his performance for the 2019-20 financial year

Tory MP Tim Loughton, a member of the Commons Home Affairs Committee, said: Bonuses should be linked to success, not failure.

He added that he was surprised the bonus had been paid during a pandemic when many people are lucky to hold on to their salaries.

Home Office sources said that Mr Williams had been responsible for the Nationality and Borders Bill overhauling the decades -old asylum system to prevent illegal entry.

Matthew Rycroft, permanent secretary at the Home Office, said: I am hugely grateful to Glyn Williams and the excellent service he provides.

It is important that we offer competitive salaries and bonuses to recruit, retain and motivate the best senior executives.
Proposals to reduce emissions to 'net zero' as part of Boris Johnson's plan to make the UK a 'world leader' in green policies have been thrown into disarray after Rishi Sunak raised objections to the eye-watering cost to the Treasury.

As part of the net zero plan which would decarbonise the economy by 2050  No 10 had been expected to publish in the spring details of the strategy for moving away from gas boilers ahead of Glasgow's COP26 climate change conference in November.

But this has been delayed until the autumn amid mounting alarm about the bill.

Last week, The Mail on Sunday revealed Mr Sunak had warned that reforms to social care would not be affordable without the introduction of a new dedicated tax, equivalent to an extra 1 per cent on National Insurance

The Chancellor  who is already looking for ways to pay back the 400 billion cost of the Covid crisis and the 10 billion a year required to reform long-term care for the elderly  is understood to have baulked at estimates of hitting net zero at more than 1.4 trillion.

The independent Office For Budget Responsibility (OBR) calculated the cost of making buildings net zero at 400 billion, while the bill for vehicles would be 330 billion, plus 500 billion to clean up power generation and a further 46 billion for industry.

After energy savings across the economy, this would leave a 400 billion bill for the Treasury.

The OBR also warned that the Government would need to impose carbon taxes to make up for the loss of fuel duty and other taxes.

The Prime Minister is considering issuing millions of households with 'green cheques' worth hundreds of pounds to compensate them for the cost of becoming more energy efficient.

It is the latest claim of tensions between No 10 and No 11 over the strains on the public purse.

Last week, The Mail on Sunday revealed Mr Sunak had warned that reforms to social care would not be affordable without the introduction of a new dedicated tax, equivalent to an extra 1 per cent on National Insurance.

After a backlash, No 10 shelved the plans until the autumn.

The Prime Minister is considering issuing millions of households with 'green cheques' worth hundreds of pounds to compensate them for the cost of becoming more energy efficient

There are also ongoing discussions about how to reduce the predicted 4 billion cost of the 'triple lock' protecting the value of the state pension, amid fears that a surge in average earnings figures will push it unaffordably high.

Both the increase on National Insurance and extra green costs are controversial within Government because the burden of both fall more heavily on younger people and lower income households.

The summit is expected to bring together more than 100 world leaders to make commitments on how they intend to reach global net zero and limit global warming to 1.5C.

Yesterday, Allegra Stratton, Mr Johnson's COP26 spokeswoman, promised that the details will be published before November's meeting. She said the Prime Minister believed that 'if we are going to transition to net zero it needs to be in a way the British public understand and are comfortable with'.

A Treasury spokesman said that No 10 and No 11 were 'on the same page' on both the triple lock and the need for an effective, affordable net zero strategy.
The row between the Government and the EU over supplies to Northern Ireland escalated last night as the UK called for a 'standstill' period to allow the controversial Brexit protocol governing the province to be renegotiated.

The protocol keeps the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic open, but checks must be made on goods from Britain.

Brexit Minister Lord Frost called for the standstill over fears of chaos when full checks on a number of products  such as sausages and other chilled meats  come into effect in October after so-called grace periods end.

Last week, the chief executives of six of the UK's largest food retailers said they may have to move supply chains from Britain to the EU if plans for trade with Northern Ireland were not reassessed.

Brexit Minister Lord Frost called for the standstill over fears of chaos when full checks on a number of products  such as sausages and other chilled meats  come into effect in October after so-called grace periods end

Archie Norman, chairman of Marks & Spencer, said full checks risked becoming 'incendiary'.

The request for a standstill was formally made by Lindsay Croisdale-Appleby, head of the UK Mission to the EU.

He told the Commission in a letter that it would be 'a purely political understanding between us. This situation could always be ended by either side at will, preferably in a way which allows both sides time to prepare.

'Meanwhile, the practical effect would be to ensure that the protocol is operated as now, without cliff edges, deadlines, or pressure points, while discussions are ongoing. We believe this would be helpful to enhancing trust and confidence between us'.

The letter also argued that the end of the grace periods would place an unacceptable burden on the UK food industry.

By the autumn, the paperwork demanded by the EU will rise to 120,000 pages a week  and an error in just one document means that lorries carrying hundreds of items would be turned back.

Last night, a senior Government source said: 'We need to deal with the fundamental problems that have arisen since the start of the year.

'We are asking for significant change, but changes that will build on the foundations and concepts of the existing protocol, and are intended to deliver on its core objectives in a way that works for the people and businesses of Northern Ireland.

'A standstill is necessary to prevent the situation deteriorating further as grace periods end, but also to create the space to find durable arrangements.'

He added: 'We need to move on from argument and mistrust, reset UK/EU relations and deliver for Northern Ireland for the long term.'
Tobacco giant Philip Morris International will stop selling cigarettes in Britain within the next ten years, its boss has revealed.

The move will bring down the curtain on the iconic Marlboro brand after more than a century on British shop shelves.

Chief executive Jacek Olczak told The Mail on Sunday that the plans were part of Philip Morris International's drive to phase out traditional cigarette smoking in the UK.

Those who want to continue smoking will be encouraged to switch to modern alternatives such as e-cigarettes or heated tobacco devices, which are considered less harmful.

Tobacco giant Philip Morris International will stop selling cigarettes in Britain within the next ten years, its boss has revealed

'I want to allow this company to leave smoking behind,' Olczak said. 'I think in the UK, ten years from now maximum, you can completely solve the problem of smoking.'

Asked if that meant Philip Morris would stop selling traditional cigarettes in the UK within that time, he replied: 'Absolutely.'

Olczak said the Marlboro brand will vanish from Britain. 'It will disappear. The first choice for consumers is they should quit smoking.

'But if they don't, the second best choice is to let them switch to the better alternatives.'

The Government has laid out a blueprint for Britain to go 'smoke-free' by 2030, which includes a plan to reduce the prevalence of cigarette smoking among different age groups.
Boris Johnson will seek to shift the focus on to tackling crime when he re-emerges from isolation to counter criticism over the 'pingdemic' and police anger at Home Secretary Priti Patel.

The Prime Minister is expected to unveil his new 'beating crime plan' on Tuesday after leaving quarantine at his Chequers country retreat following a coronavirus contact.

As he began his third year in No 10, Mr Johnson vowed to ensure that every victim of crime has 'a named officer to call  someone who is immediately on your side'.

His Government has faced anger over the Covid-19 rules causing staff shortages as infections soar during his time in isolation over a contact with Health Secretary Sajid Javid.

The Prime Minister is expected to unveil his new 'beating crime plan' on Tuesday after leaving quarantine at his Chequers country retreat following a coronavirus contact. He vowed to ensure that every victim of crime has 'a named officer to call  someone who is immediately on your side'

And Ms Patel received an extraordinary rebuke from the Police Federation of England and Wales, which represents rank-and-file officers.

The body said it no longer has confidence in the Home Secretary after describing a bitterly opposed pay freeze as 'the final straw'.

Mr Johnson, writing in the Sunday Express, said: 'We need now to redouble our efforts, to continue to put more police out on the street, and to back them all the way.'

He also vowed to introduce reforms, writing that 'we want everyone to know that if you are the victim of crime you have a named officer to call  someone who is immediately on your side'.

Other measures he outlined included publishing league tables for 101 and 999 call answering times, putting more police into dealing with 'the tiny minority of truant kids', and intensifying efforts against county lines drug gangs.

On Thursday the Police Federations national chairman, John Apter, said his members are 'so angry with this Government'.

Home Secretary Priti Patel received an extraordinary rebuke from the Police Federation of England and Wales, which represents rank-and-file officers. The body said it no longer has confidence in the Home Secretary after describing a bitterly opposed pay freeze as 'the final straw'.

'At the beginning of this pandemic they endured PPE shortages and were not even prioritised for the vaccination,' he added.

'They continue to be politicised and this pay announcement is the final straw.

'As the organisation that represents more than 130,000 police officers I can say quite categorically: we have no confidence in the current Home Secretary. I cannot look my colleagues in the eye and do nothing.'

Meanwhile, Mr Javid said on Saturday that he has made a 'full recovery' and that his 'symptoms were very mild, thanks to amazing vaccines' as he urged the public to get their jabs.

He received a positive test result on July 17 for a coronavirus infection that ultimately sent the Prime Minister and Chancellor Rishi Sunak into isolation as contacts.

The pair initially tried to avoid isolation by saying they were taking part in a testing pilot, but backed down in the face of widespread public criticism.

Both of their quarantine periods are expected to finish at the end of Monday.

On Thursday the Police Federations national chairman, John Apter, said his members are 'so angry with this Government', adding: 'We have no confidence in the current Home Secretary' (file photo)

Pingdemic has put nearly one in FIVE Met Police officers off duty - as crisis causes chaos at border checkpoints, on public transport and for food delivery

By Lauren Lewis for MailOnline

Nearly one in five Metropolitan Police officers are currently absent from duty after being forced to self isolate amid pingdemic chaos.

Around 17 per cent of the forces' officers are currently self isolating, the highest since the start of the pandemic.

Police were made exempt from self isolation on Thursday, but only if their employers specified their names and they were double-jabbed against Covid-19.

Chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation Ken Marsh said the force was 'massively struggling'.

'We are not performing the role properly. We were not offered the jab and now we have got almost one in five officers off sick or self-isolating.

'It is coming home to roost and the Government is going to come unstuck,' he told the Telegraph.

Nearly one in five Metropolitan Police officers are currently absent from duty after being forced to self isolate amid pingdemic chaos

Police were made exempt from self isolation amid pingdemic chaos on Thursday, but only if their employers specified their names and they were double-jabbed against Covid-19

The government on Thursday published a list of exemptions for key workers in energy, waste, water, and food supply and production.

Police, border officers, train and lorry drivers were added to the list on Friday night.

Workers who avoid self isolation after contact with someone who has Covid will instead be tested daily, allowing them to keep working provided the tests remain negative.

The Government on Saturday said in a statement that an expected initial extra 200 testing sites would be opened so that daily contact testing could be 'rolled out to further critical workplaces in England'.

But currently around 2.3million people from critical areas and jobs have been forced into isolation due to being pinged.

It is understood Prime Minister Boris Johnson is planning to open more testing sites so more industries can be added to the exemption list in the coming weeks.

He previously said people who have been double vaccinated would be exempt from self isolation after August 16, provided they have a test.

More than a million people have been told to self-isolate by the NHS Covid app in recent weeks, with 618,903 alerts sent in the week ending July 14.

The toll is a 17 per cent increase on the previous seven and another record high.

The guidance lists 16 sectors: energy, civil nuclear, digital infrastructure, food production and supply, waste, water, veterinary medicines, essential chemicals, essential transport, medicines, medical devices, clinical consumable supplies, emergency services, border control, essential defence and local government

Empty shelves in Asda as Britain was caught in a perfect storm of staff shortages and a lack of lorry drivers

Empty shelves and signs on the soft drinks aisle of a Sainsbury's store in Blackheath, Rowley Regis. Bosses asked customers to 'bear with us' blaming 'high demand'

Police anger over pay freeze could see officers enforce a 'go-slow' on 999 calls or ditch their guns on VIP duty, their federation warns By Jake Ryan for the Mail on Sunday Police anger over a pay freeze could see officers enforce a 'go-slow' on 999 calls or ditch their guns on VIP duty, their federation leaders have warned. The Police Federation of England and Wales, which represents 130,000 rank-and-file officers, declared last week that it had no confidence in the Home Secretary Priti Patel after she refused to fund an annual pay rise. Banned from strike action by law, officers are incensed that other public servants such as firefighters and NHS staff have been awarded rises. They are now considering work-to-rule measures such as an overtime ban, armed officers handing back firearms to return to regular policing or patrols driving within speed limits to answer emergency calls. Ken Marsh, chair of the Metropolitan Police Federation, told The Mail on Sunday: 'If you want to keep abusing people, you're going to come unstuck in the end and we've got to that point now. 'You tell me why the fire brigade deserve a 1.5 per cent pay rise and the police don't deserve anything?' Advertisement

The app has caused widespread chaos, but it was claimed on Saturday the system causing the problem could not be stopped - because there is not enough testing capacity to allow the 'test and release' method to take over.

There has been mounting pressure for weeks on the government to tweak the sensitivity of the app or make exemptions for key workers and fully vaccinated Britons following warnings that it could lead to food shortages and major disruptions as the epidemic grows.

UK supermarkets are in the midst of a perfect storm of staff and stock problems with tens of thousands of workers self-isolating because of the 'pingdemic'.

The struggle to stack shelves and staff stores and warehouses is being made worse by a lack of lorry drivers to deliver food.

The Road Haulage Association believes the country is 100,000 HGV drivers short - and thousands of prospective drivers are waiting for their HGV tests due to a backlog caused by lockdown, while many existing ones have returned to the EU from the UK after Brexit.

It came as businesses, including one of Britain's largest food distribution firms, Bidfood, began taking the crisis into their own hands and began advising workers who are pinged by the NHS app to take tests and continue working rather than stay at home for up to ten days as the Government suggests.

Meanwhile Transport for London has been forced to close both the Circle and Hammersmith and City Tube lines for the entire weekend after 300 staff were 'pinged' by the NHS Covid tracking app.

There will also be changes to the District and Metropolitan lines and short cancellations elsewhere as the so-called 'pingdemic' continues to bring transport networks to their knees.

Reduced timetables will also hit railways across England in a bid to improve reliability following a spate of last-minute cancellations.
Local council elections for five million NSW residents will be delayed until December is an ominous sign Sydney's Covid outbreak could drag on for months.

Minister for Local Government Shelley Hancock the delay was a direct response to the worrying rise in Covid-19 cases across the city, jumping another 141 on Sunday.

Mrs Hancock said after discussions with NSW Health and NSW Electoral Commission, the decision was made to postpone the poll to December 4.

More than five million residents in NSW will have to wait until December to vote in council elections as the poll is postponedin a response to rising Covid-19 case numbers

Electors will be able to cast their vote safely in person, by post or online in December, with electronic voting, dubbed iVote, available for the first time this year

'Due to the Covid-19 pandemic and current public health orders impacting Sydney, we have made the difficult decision to postpone the local government elections until later this year,' she said.

'We have taken this step to postpone the election to ensure the safety and wellbeing of our communities, voters, polling staff and candidates.'

The second year in a row local elections have been delayed was also influenced by increasing pressure from Labor and mayors across Sydney.

The minister said voters will be able to cast their ballots safely in person, by post, or online in December with electronic voting, dubbed iVote, available for the first time this year.

Voters will have 13 days pre-election day to vote, in an effort to reduce the number of people congregating on polling day.

The delay means nominations that were due to begin on Monday will open on October 25, with the term for nominated councillors to still end in 2024.

About 5.1 million Sydneysiders are enrolled to vote this year, with more than 500 candidates expected to contend for a place on 125 of the state's 128 counsels.

'We have taken this step to postpone the election to ensure the safety and wellbeing of our communities, voters, polling staff and candidates', Mrs Hancock said of the delay

About 5.1million Sydneysiders are enrolled to vote this year, with more than 500 candidates expected to contend for a place on 125 of the state's 128 counsels

The government's previous plan to push ahead with the polls on September 4 was called into question as the fast-spreading Delta variant continues to wreak havoc across Sydney.

Meanwhile a decorated Australian immunologist has warned the thousands of anti-vaxxer protestors that took to the city's streets on Saturday could cause case numbers to explode and subsequently extend the lockdown.

Frenzied crowds were heard shouting 'freedom' and anti-vaccine slogans as they swarmed Sydney's city centre, just moments after NSW Health's Jeremy McAnulty declared the area a virus hotspot.

Fifty-seven rioters were taken away in handcuffs as protesters hurled pot plants at mounted officers and crowds shouted repeatedly at police: 'you serve us!'

Professor Peter Doherty warned those who are the most likely to die from the virus are the unvaccinated.

Mr Doherty said that even if most of the population has received the jab, the virus can still be passed on to those who haven't.

Anti-lockdown protests in Sydney and Melbourne on Saturday led to dozens of arrests of demonstrators who defied stay-at-home orders as they called for an end to Australia's strategy of lockdowns to limit the spread of Covid-19

There are currently 139 people in Sydney hospitals with Covid as a result of the latest outbreak, which includes 37 in intensive care, 17 of whom require ventilators.

Of the 37 people in intensive care, 36 are unvaccinated, with the other one having received only their first dose of AstraZeneca.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian also unleashed on the protesters and said punishments would be handed down to those who broke the law.

'I am utterly disgusted by the illegal protesters in the City today whose selfish actions have compromised the safety of all of us' said Ms Berejiklian.

'The protestors have shown utter contempt for their fellow citizens who are currently doing it tough.

Victoria's chief health officer Brett Sutton took to Twitter to point out the irony in protestors claiming their cause was 'freedom'.

'I am utterly disgusted by the illegal protesters in the City today whose selfish actions have compromised the safety of all of us' said Ms Berejiklian, in reference to Saturday's protestors

Police had no choice but to carry one man into custody after a brazen performance during Melbourne's anti-lockdown rally

'I love freedom. Who doesn't love freedom? I want freedom from being amongst the over 4 million official (and likely 10 million actual) Covid deaths globally,' he wrote.

'Let's not pretend that 'marching for freedom' will actually deliver the precious freedom that we all need and desire.'

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews labelled the idea of protesting lockdown 'ridiculous'.

'Protest against this virus by staying at home, following the rules and getting out of lockdown,' he said.

The demonstrations, which were also seen in Brisbane, were a response to Covid lockdowns imposed in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, with more than half the country's 25million people ordered to stay at home over an outbreak which began in Sydney's east.

The protest came as Covid-19 case numbers in NSW reached another record high since the first wave in 2020, with 163 new local cases reported in the 24 hours to 8pm on Friday, up from 136 the day before.

In a press conference in Canberra on Wednesday, the Prime Minister said the highly infectious Delta strain was 'throwing another big challenge at our country'

The Delta variant of Covid - which originated in India in April - has been described as 'Covid-19 on steroids' and is twice as infectious as the original Wuhan strain

Greater Sydney has been locked down for the past four weeks, with residents only able to leave home with a reasonable excuse.

The demonstrations come less than a week after Prime Minister Scott Morrison warned lockdowns and coronavirus restrictions could last for months.

In a press conference in Canberra on Wednesday, the Prime Minister said the highly infectious Delta strain was 'throwing another big challenge at our country'.

'It's tough and it's going to continue to be tough in the weeks ahead - and potentially months ahead - as we continue to wrestle with this new strain of this virus and we adapt our responses to fight it,' he told the nation.

'But we're up to it and we'll deal with it.'

Lockdowns in South Australia and Victoria are due to end next Wednesday and Sydney's shut down is supposed to finish on July 30 - but premiers have not ruled out extensions.

Greater Sydney has been locked down for the past four weeks, with residents only able to leave home with a reasonable excuse

Lockdowns in South Australia and Victoria are due to end next Wednesday and Sydney's shut down is supposed to finish on July 30 - but premiers have not ruled out extensions

The Delta variant of Covid - which originated in India in April - has been described as 'Covid-19 on steroids' and is twice as infectious as the original Wuhan strain.

It makes up more than 80 per cent of cases in the US and 90 per cent of cases in the UK - but can be effectively stopped with Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines.

However, Australia has fully vaccinated only 14.52 per cent of over 16s - the lowest rate in OECD group of 38 rich nations - meaning lockdowns could be required for months while the rate rises.

There are currently 139 people in Sydney hospitals with Covid as a result of the latest outbreak, which includes 37 in intensive care, 17 of whom require ventilators.

Of the 37 people in intensive care, 36 are unvaccinated, with the other one having received only their first dose of AstraZeneca.
Most distressingly, any Briton can be seized from their home and taken to a prison in a foreign country purely on the say-so of that nations lawyers if they claim the person is guilty of some  as yet unproved  crime.

For the UK is one of most amenable nations in the world to the surrender of its citizens to overseas courts  but we do not insist on corresponding arrangements with other governments.

We have witnessed the human toll of this shocking imbalance in recent years, with the US, for example, making strenuous efforts to haul Britons before American courts.

On the other hand, our Government allows its foreign counterparts to obstruct us when we ask for their citizens to come here to stand trial.

The most egregious current example is Americas refusal to send intelligence officer Anne Sacoolas back to Britain to face justice after being charged with causing death by dangerous driving over the death of a teenage motorcyclist on a road in Northamptonshire.

I totally understand the need for justice and global security but the great risk is that our over-willingness to co-operate means injustice for our own citizens.

David Davis (pictured): 'I totally understand the need for justice and global security but the great risk is that our over-willingness to co-operate means injustice for our own citizens.'

Last week saw the latest example when a judge at Westminster Magistrates Court agreed to the extradition of one of our most successful entrepreneurs to the US.

Mike Lynchs firm Autonomy was based in Britain, did its business in Britain and was governed by English law. He became embroiled in a legal wrangle after he sold Autonomy to US giant Hewlett-Packard a decade ago for about 8 billion. The deal soured and the US authorities are now trying to extradite him to stand trial there, alleging he fraudulently inflated Autonomys value. He strongly denies the claim and his lawyers have accused the US of behaving like an overweening, international police force.

The Serious Fraud Office here investigated and decided not to proceed.

It is crucial to understand the very important ramifications of this case. America has a ferocious legal system with a 97 per cent conviction rate, where prosecutors, not judges, set the sentences. Defendants, too, are subjected to coercive plea bargaining. For example, people are encouraged to admit an offence and get a lesser jail sentence rather than continue to plead innocence and, if convicted, get a much longer term.

This is not a question of Britons such as Dr Lynch avoiding trial. They simply want a fair one in the UK. However, last week, a British judge ruled that it is in the interests of justice to extradite him.

It was a grim irony that this judgment against one of our most successful entrepreneurs  who created multi-billion-pound, artificial-intelligence technology firms  came on the same day that Ministers announced a plan to help UK businesses create world-leading, high-tech products and services.

The only conclusion to draw was: Invest in science and technology in the UK but be careful not to fall out with the Americans, otherwise the consequences are grim.

Dr Lynch is not the first such victim. Giles Darby was one of a trio of NatWest staff jailed in the US after being extradited from Britain to America in 2006  accused of fraud for alleged links to the Enron scandal while working at the bank.

He ended up in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day in a Pennsylvania penitentiary, without a clock and thus unable to know what time of day or night it was.

Mike Lynch (pictured) is facing extradition to the US over claims he cooked the books of a firm he sold for 8 billion

He and his co-charged were treated like criminals long before any trial began  placed in chains, frog-marched and strip-searched.

It is now up to the Home Secretary to decide whether Dr Lynch should stay in this country or be sent to a US cell.

I, and many others, urge Priti Patel not to submit to this grotesque and unjust process. She must wait for the outcome of a separate High Court trial examining the fraud allegations against Dr Lynch.

Also, she must clear up the mess that is our extradition system  one that was hurriedly established by Tony Blairs Labour government after 9/11 to tackle terrorism.

The truth is that the system has been extended far wider than tackling terrorists. In recent years, ten times as many Britons have been extradited to the US as Americans surrendered to Britain, the vast majority for non-violent crimes.

Our extradition agreements with EU nations need reform, too. For 20 EU countries are refusing to guarantee that suspected criminals among their own citizens can be extradited to the UK.

Until such reforms are achieved, I believe all pending extraditions of Britons to the EU or the US should be put on hold for all but serious violent and sexual offenders.

At a time when Ministers are not shy about standing up to the EU, this is a great opportunity to sort out a system which has become shamefully corrupted and which, as the ordeal of Michael Lynch and his family shows, is causing a great deal of harm.

David Davis is Tory MP for Haltemprice and Howden.

Priti Patel is urged to spare a billionaire dubbed 'Britain's Bill Gates' from a 'grotesque and unjust' extradition to US over claims he cooked the books at firm he sold for 8billion

By Brendan Carlin for the Mail on Sunday

Priti Patel is today urged to spare a British businessman from a grotesque and unjust extradition to the United States.

The Home Secretary faced an impassioned call from Tory colleague and ex-Cabinet Minister David Davis to give billionaire Mike Lynch more time to fight his case.

Dr Lynch, founder of British software giant Autonomy, is at risk of forceable removal to the US after a court ruling last week.

Once dubbed Britains Bill Gates, he is accused of cooking the books at his former firm before it was sold to American giant Hewlett-Packard for 8 billion in 2011.

The 56-year-old vigorously denies the allegations and is fighting his extradition.

He now faces a nervous wait to see if the Home Secretary will agree to his removal after a judge in Westminster Magistrates Court last week ruled that he could be removed to the US to face trial.

Home Secretary Priti Patel (pictured) faced an impassioned call from Tory colleague and ex-Cabinet Minister David Davis to give billionaire Mike Lynch more time to fight his case

But in an article, below, for The Mail on Sunday today, ex-Brexit Secretary Mr Davis rails against the unfairness of Britains extradition treaty with Washington and urges Ms Patel to stay her hand.

Mr Davis says he understands the need for justice and global security, but laments that the UK is one of the most amenable nations in the world to the surrender of its citizens to overseas courts.

Mr Davis says: We have witnessed the human toll of this shocking imbalance over recent years, with the US, for example, making strenuous efforts to haul Britons before American courts.

On the other hand, our Government allows its foreign counterparts to obstruct us when we ask for their citizens to come here to stand trial.

The most egregious current example is the USs refusal to send intelligence officer Anne Sacoolas back to England after she was charged with causing death by dangerous driving over the death of teenage motorcyclist Harry Dunn on a road in Northamptonshire.

Only yesterday, it emerged that the US government had applied to keep Ms Sacoolass exact job secret in a civil court case in America filed by Mr Dunns parents.

Mr Davis appeals to Ms Patel to wait for the outcome of a separate High Court trial here examining the fraud allegations against Dr Lynch.

He writes: I, and many others, urge her not to submit to this grotesque and unjust process.

But he also urges the Home Secretary to put all extraditions to the US and the EU on hold  apart from serious violent and sexual offenders  until the mess of Britains extradition system is reviewed.

Lawyers for Dr Lynch, who has hit out at the insanity of the extradition treaty with the US, say he will appeal against last weeks court ruling and will also appeal if Ms Patel approved his removal.
Priti Patel is today urged to spare a British businessman from a 'grotesque and unjust' extradition to the United States.

The Home Secretary faced an impassioned call from Tory colleague and ex-Cabinet Minister David Davis to give billionaire Mike Lynch more time to fight his case.

Dr Lynch, founder of British software giant Autonomy, is at risk of forceable removal to the US after a court ruling last week.

Once dubbed Britain's Bill Gates, he is accused of cooking the books at his former firm before it was sold to American giant Hewlett-Packard for 8 billion in 2011.

Dr Lynch, founder of British software giant Autonomy, is at risk of forceable removal to the US after a court ruling last week

The 56-year-old vigorously denies the allegations and is fighting his extradition.

He now faces a nervous wait to see if the Home Secretary will agree to his removal after a judge in Westminster Magistrates' Court last week ruled that he could be removed to the US to face trial.

But in an article, below, for The Mail on Sunday today, ex-Brexit Secretary Mr Davis rails against the unfairness of Britain's extradition treaty with Washington and urges Ms Patel to stay her hand.

Mr Davis says he understands 'the need for justice and global security', but laments that the UK is 'one of the most amenable nations in the world to the surrender of its citizens to overseas courts'.

Mr Davis says: 'We have witnessed the human toll of this shocking imbalance over recent years, with the US, for example, making strenuous efforts to haul Britons before American courts.

'On the other hand, our Government allows its foreign counterparts to obstruct us when we ask for their citizens to come here to stand trial.'

The 'most egregious current example' is the US's refusal to send intelligence officer Anne Sacoolas back to England after she was charged with causing death by dangerous driving over the death of teenage motorcyclist Harry Dunn on a road in Northamptonshire.

Only yesterday, it emerged that the US government had applied to keep Ms Sacoolas's exact job secret in a civil court case in America filed by Mr Dunn's parents.

Mike Lynch faces a nervous wait to see if the Home Secretary Priti Patel will agree to his removal after a judge in Westminster Magistrates' Court last week ruled that he could be removed to the US to face trial

Mr Davis appeals to Ms Patel to wait for the outcome of a separate High Court trial here examining the fraud allegations against Dr Lynch.

He writes: 'I, and many others, urge her not to submit to this grotesque and unjust process.'

But he also urges the Home Secretary to put all extraditions to the US and the EU on hold  apart from 'serious violent and sexual offenders'  until the 'mess' of Britain's extradition system is reviewed.

Lawyers for Dr Lynch, who has hit out at the 'insanity' of the extradition treaty with the US, say he will appeal against last week's court ruling and will also appeal if Ms Patel approved his removal.

DAVID DAVIS: Why do we send Britons to be tried in a land where 97% get convicted?

By David Davis

Most distressingly, any Briton can be seized from their home and taken to a prison in a foreign country purely on the say-so of that nation's lawyers if they claim the person is guilty of some  as yet unproved  crime.

For the UK is one of most amenable nations in the world to the surrender of its citizens to overseas courts  but we do not insist on corresponding arrangements with other governments.

Mr Davis says he understands 'the need for justice and global security', but laments that the UK is 'one of the most amenable nations in the world to the surrender of its citizens to overseas courts'

We have witnessed the human toll of this shocking imbalance in recent years, with the US, for example, making strenuous efforts to haul Britons before American courts.

On the other hand, our Government allows its foreign counterparts to obstruct us when we ask for their citizens to come here to stand trial.

The most egregious current example is America's refusal to send intelligence officer Anne Sacoolas back to Britain to face justice after being charged with causing death by dangerous driving over the death of a teenage motorcyclist on a road in Northamptonshire.

I totally understand the need for justice and global security but the great risk is that our over-willingness to co-operate means injustice for our own citizens.

Last week saw the latest example when a judge at Westminster Magistrates' Court agreed to the extradition of one of our most successful entrepreneurs to the US.

Mike Lynch's firm Autonomy was based in Britain, did its business in Britain and was governed by English law. He became embroiled in a legal wrangle after he sold Autonomy to US giant Hewlett-Packard a decade ago for about 8 billion. The deal soured and the US authorities are now trying to extradite him to stand trial there, alleging he fraudulently inflated Autonomy's value. He strongly denies the claim and his lawyers have accused the US of behaving like 'an overweening, international police force'.

The Serious Fraud Office here investigated and decided not to proceed.

It is crucial to understand the very important ramifications of this case. America has a ferocious legal system with a 97 per cent conviction rate, where prosecutors, not judges, set the sentences. Defendants, too, are subjected to coercive plea bargaining. For example, people are encouraged to admit an offence and get a lesser jail sentence rather than continue to plead innocence and, if convicted, get a much longer term.

This is not a question of Britons such as Dr Lynch avoiding trial. They simply want a fair one in the UK. However, last week, a British judge ruled that it is 'in the interests of justice' to extradite him.

It was a grim irony that this judgment against one of our most successful entrepreneurs  who created multi-billion-pound, artificial-intelligence technology firms  came on the same day that Ministers announced a plan to help UK businesses create world-leading, high-tech products and services.

The only conclusion to draw was: Invest in science and technology in the UK but be careful not to fall out with the Americans, otherwise the consequences are grim.

Dr Lynch is not the first such victim. Giles Darby was one of a trio of NatWest staff jailed in the US after being extradited from Britain to America in 2006  accused of fraud for alleged links to the Enron scandal while working at the bank.

Dr Lynch pictured as he walks out of Westminster Magistrates' Court last week

He ended up in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day in a Pennsylvania penitentiary, without a clock and thus unable to know what time of day or night it was.

He and his co-charged were treated like criminals long before any trial began  placed in chains, frog-marched and strip-searched.

It is now up to the Home Secretary to decide whether Dr Lynch should stay in this country or be sent to a US cell.

I, and many others, urge Priti Patel not to submit to this grotesque and unjust process. She must wait for the outcome of a separate High Court trial examining the fraud allegations against Dr Lynch.

Also, she must clear up the mess that is our extradition system  one that was hurriedly established by Tony Blair's Labour government after 9/11 to tackle terrorism.

The truth is that the system has been extended far wider than tackling terrorists. In recent years, ten times as many Britons have been extradited to the US as Americans surrendered to Britain, the vast majority for non-violent crimes.

Our extradition agreements with EU nations need reform, too. For 20 EU countries are refusing to guarantee that suspected criminals among their own citizens can be extradited to the UK.

Until such reforms are achieved, I believe all pending extraditions of Britons to the EU or the US should be put on hold for all but serious violent and sexual offenders.

At a time when Ministers are not shy about standing up to the EU, this is a great opportunity to sort out a system which has become shamefully corrupted and which, as the ordeal of Michael Lynch and his family shows, is causing a great deal of harm.
Universities are to be forced to to deduct marks for poor written English in students' work - and will face tough sanctions if they fail to do so.

Under proposals by the Office for Students (OfS) regulator, universities will be required to teach students 'relevant skills', assess them 'effectively' and ensure that any qualifications they issue are 'credible'.

The guidance states that assessments where 'students are not penalised for poor technical proficiency in written English' would be breaking the rules.

It also says universities may be in breach of their registration conditions if they fail to 'penalise poor spelling, punctuation or grammar, such that students are awarded marks that do not reflect their performance' in courses where the 'OfS, employers and taxpayers could reasonably expect proficiency in written English'.

The move is intended to tackle poor quality courses and comes three months after The Mail on Sunday revealed the use of 'inclusive assessment' at some institutions under which technical ability in written English was not assessed.

At Hull University, for example, a new policy says the academic requirement for technical proficiency in written English could be seen as an 'homogenous, North European, white, male, elite mode of expression' and could disadvantage ethnic minorities and those from underperforming schools.

At Hull University, for example, a new policy says the academic requirement for technical proficiency in written English could be seen as an 'homogenous, North European, white, male, elite mode of expression' and could disadvantage ethnic minorities and those from under-performing schools

Academics at Worcester University were told meanwhile that if spelling, grammar and punctuation were not 'central to the assessment criteria', it was fairer to only judge students on their ideas and knowledge of the subject.

Advocates of 'inclusive assesment' argue that marking should take account of a variety of disadvantages facing students, but critics say it lowers standards.

'If UK Universities are to be truly academic institutions and to retain any distinctive identity as such, then a high level of proficiency in written and spoken English is essential,' said Professor Tommy MacKay, visiting professor at the University of Strathclyde.

The regulator's new quality and standards proposals, which will be consulted on, seek to ensure that students paying up to 9,250-a-year in tuition receive high quality teaching on courses that challenge them, are offered the latest resources and graduate well prepared for the world of work with qualifications that are valued. The OfS can withdraw funding or even university status if an institution fails to meet the requirememts.

Lord Wharton, the chair of OfS, said: 'Reliable and effective assessment practices are essential if degrees are to remain credible. Clearly, effective academic writing requires good spelling, punctuation and grammar from all.

Academics at Worcester University were told meanwhile that if spelling, grammar and punctuation were not 'central to the assessment criteria', it was fairer to only judge students on their ideas and knowledge of the subject

'Students from all backgrounds should expect a high quality academic experience and qualifications that reflect their achievements. We have been clear that standards should not be reduced for particular groups. In fact, it is patronising to expect less from some students under the guise of supporting them.

'We are currently consulting on rigorous new requirements designed to drive up quality. Alongside this we are specifically examining the use of 'inclusive' assessment practices. The OfS won't make any excuses for vigorously regulating universities offering low quality courses that do not offer value for money for students and taxpayers.

'Where quality is low, my message to these institutions is simple. You must improve. And if you do not, the OfS is ready to intervene.'
Priti Patel was criticised by Cabinet colleagues last week over concerns that immigration rules are contributing to a shortage of food on supermarket shelves, The Mail on Sunday understands.

The Home Office's post-Brexit regulations mean hauliers and other supply chain employers are finding it increasingly difficult to fill vacant roles.

Industry insiders say warehouse bosses and other employers are operating at 80 per cent of staff capacity due to visa stipulations, which include a minimum salary of 25,600 for skilled foreign workers.

The Government provides a list of about 250 categories eligible for five-year visas for jobs that include butchers and fishmongers.

Priti Patel was criticised by Cabinet colleagues last week over concerns that immigration rules are contributing to a shortage of food on supermarket shelves, The Mail on Sunday understands

Well-placed sources say a 'perfect storm' of reopening from lockdown, fewer available workers and the 'pingdemic' had caused unprecedented pressure on staffing across the food supply chain.

Shane Brennan, of the Cold Chain Federation, said: 'The main driver of the supermarket shortages is the so-called 'pingdemic' and the reopening after lockdown, but there were underlying problems because of Brexit and the fact many workers have left the country.

'We need changes to be able to bring in more workers, particularly drivers, otherwise we are going to find it increasingly difficult.'

The British Retail Consortium has called for drivers to be granted seasonal six-month visas similar to farm workers. Government sources denied that the Home Secretary had been criticised.

A spokesman said: 'We recently announced a package of measures to help tackle the HGV driver shortage, including plans to streamline the process for new drivers to gain their HGV licence.'
The mother of missing British hiker Esther Dingley is set to provide DNA samples to French authorities after a human skull was found in the Pyrenees.

It had been reported on Thursday that a human skull had been found, though French and Spanish authorities had previously only confirmed that bones had been found.

Now though, Ria Bryant, 74 - who moved to the Pyrenees in June to assist in the search for her daughter - is set to provide DNA samples in a bid to try and identify a skull found on the Pyrenees path, The Sunday Times reports.

After a search team concluded that the discovered remains lay on French territory, they were passed over to French authorities, who have also requested a scan of Esther's teeth and a copy of her dental records.

Bryant told the Sunday Times following the reported uncovering of remains: 'The dentist is sending a scan of Esther's teeth. We have to send it to the consulate in Bordeaux.'

She had been due to return to the UK prior to the discovery but told the paper: 'I'm now going to stay.'

Ria Bryant, 74, the mother of missing British hiker Esther Dingley, is set to provide DNA samples to French authorities after a human skull was found in the Pyrenees. Pictured: Ria, in June 2020 with Esther (middle), and her partner Terry (right)

Despite the discovery of the skull, Ria told the publication that officials could find no other traces of remains or belongings.

She said: 'It's upsetting that it's not clear and definitive.'

Police have said that it could take as long as a week for the results of the DNA testing on the skull to be returned.

The find comes after Esther's boyfriend said the mountain pass where bones have been found was an 'easy' route that was 'well within her capabilities', as her family appealed for 'urgent' answers.

Dan Colegate said Puerto de la Glera - Port de la Glere in French - was part of the route he had expected Esther to take in a dossier he released in January through support charity LBT Global.

A friend of the couple said she was torn between wanting the remains to be identified as Esther to bring closure, and hoping she might still be alive.

'It's 50-50 isn't it? It's 50-50. If it is Esther they all stop searching and we know. If it isn't we've still got hope  but it's so difficult,' Christine Millership told The Mirror.

'In a way I hope it is her because, though I hope she's found alive, I think even deeper that she's not. I just want closure for Dan.

'I'm worried about him because he's got to live with all this. In the first part [after Esther went missing] he was like a zombie, he grew his beard and would hardly talk to anybody,' Millership told the paper.

Esther's boyfriend said the mountain pass where bones have been found was an 'easy' route that was 'well within her capabilities'

She had met and become friendly with the couple while they were they were travelling through Spain by camper van in 2016.

Millership said Esther and Dan visited her and her husband Harry, 66, for months each year and the last visit was in March 2020.

'Esther was very spiritual and would write very long emails. We were very close. She would say that there was 30 years between us but it was like we were twins.'

Meanwhile Esther's family said in a statement they are 'urgently seeking clarification' after bones believed to be human were found on Friday near where the hiker was last seen.

An investigating French source on Saturday said there was no 'immediate proof as to the identity of the remains' and that 'a medico-legal procedure will be followed to establish the identity of Person X in the days ahead.'

Dan wrote in his 23-page report about Esther's plans to do a circular hike between Spain and France which involved sleeping at a mountain refuge.

He said in his dossier: 'An individual that Esther met on November 19 came forward to say he had specifically suggested this route through France, between Port de Venasque and Port de la Glere, to Esther when he met her.

'There is no reason to think that Esther did not stick to this plan.'

In a section titled 'Esther's Planned Onward Route', he suggested she reached the mountain refuge in France and slept there overnight before continuing a hike to return to her initial starting point in Spain.

He said: 'Her onward route would have involved a descent northwards towards the Hospice de France, a flat traverse westwards around the Imperatrice Way, and a climb southwards to the border at Port de la Glere.

'From the border the route descends back towards Hospital de Benasque.

'This route would have been well within Esther's capabilities for a day hike, in addition to the fact she had a tent, camping equipment and significant experience using it.

'Distance was 16km with 1100 metres of ascent, five to seven hours of hiking time.

'The weather remained excellent that Monday.

The route is very obvious on the ground and also from the terrain when starting from Refuge de Venasque, the report said.

British hiker Esther Dingley (pictured with her boyfriend Daniel Colegate) went missing November 22

A mountain runner raised the alarm around 2pm on Friday after discovering what he believed could be the remains of a body near the spot where missing hiker Esther Dingley went missing late last year.

'It's basically impossible to get lost in good visibility here.

'The entire route is a well-made and easy to follow path.

'Although Esther believed and had warned family that there was poor signal in the area, in fact the signal is very good on the French side.

'Within half an hour of leaving the refuge, Esther should have been able to use her phone for most of the rest of the day,' Dan stated in the report.

Officers from Spain's Civil Guard initially went to the spot but alerted their French counterparts after confirming it was on the other side of the border.

One unconfirmed local report said an unnamed runner had come across a human skull on the pass.

Specialist officers from Spain and France have carried out several searches of the area around the Puerto de la Glera hiking trail, where Esther was hiking before she went missing

A Spanish radio station covering the province of Huesca which includes the town of Benasque where Esther began the hike she vanished on, said: 'Sources close to the investigation have indicated that the skull could correspond to Esther Dingley's because of the colour and length of the hair.'

French and Spanish police have both confirmed that bones have been found but have not gone into any more details.

Civil Guard sources said yesterday officers were '90 per cent certain' they were human remains but insisted the job of analysing them for confirmation and more clues was now a French task.

LBT Global, the charity supporting Esther's family, said in its first written statement overnight: 'LBT Global is aware of the discovery of what may be human remains close to the last known location of Esther Dingley.

Esther's partner claimed in a recent BBC interview he 'could no longer agree' with the idea she had suffered an accident

'We are urgently seeking clarification. The family have been informed of the discovery and we are supporting them now.

'Until anything is confirmed there will be no statement or interviews with any family members.

'Please be aware this may take days or even weeks.'

Specialist forensics officers from France's General Directorate of the National Gendarmerie (DGGN) will carry out the task, under the supervision of the Interior Ministry and an examining magistrate.

Up to 3,000 unidentified bodies are found in France every year, including ones in vast rural areas such as the Pyrenees, said the source.

'Prosecutors order analysis in the case of suspicious death, and that is when the entire procedure starts,' said the source.

'Genetic and dental material is gathered before burial can be allowed. It is a potentially complex procedure.'

DNA analysis is considered the most accurate part of the identification process, but samples are not always available to pathologists if a body is badly decomposed, or reduced to bone, said the source.

Christophe Amunzateguy, the chief public prosecutor of Saint-Gaudens, has been informed about the discovery of the remains, and was liaising with police investigators this weekend.

Missing Esther Dingley's camper van was spotted parked up in Benasque . Witness Lucie was walking her dog Tipo when she spotted the camper van with the light on and someone inside on December 2

French police commander Jean-Marc Bordinaro, who has been involved in the search for Esther from the start, said: 'We cannot say anything at the moment because the discovery of the bones is too recent and they must be properly analysed. We will not have a result for several days and possibly several weeks.'

Commander Bordinaro confirmed that Esther was believed to be heading towards Port de Glere when she went missing.

It is thought that she intended to spend a night in a mountain refuge in France, but there was no initial evidence that she had actually entered French territory.

Mr Bordinaro said his colleagues were contacted by Spanish police on Friday afternoon, after the remains were discovered at about 2pm.

Mr Bordinaro had previously admitted that it was 'very likely' that Durham-born Esther had been involved in a mountain accident, and had been unable to raise help.

The search for her was called off in February because of deteriorating weather, but it resumed in the Spring.

In her final message to Dan on November 22, Esther wrote: 'Might dip into France. Hoping Refuge Venasque has a winter room. Keep you posted when can. Love you xxx'

Puerto de la Glera is close to the to the 8,796ft Pico Salvaguardia summit where Oxford graduate Esther last made contact with Dan around 4pm on November 22 last year.

Specialist officers from Spain and France have carried out several searches of the area.

A co-ordinated air and land search by police mountain rescue experts from both countries took place on July 1.

Civil Guard sergeant Jorge Lopez Ramos, whose Greim elite mountain search and rescue team led an eight-day search for Esther on the Spanish side of the border before it was halted last December because of bad weather, confirmed late last year Puerto de la Glera was on the route Esther told her boyfriend she was planning to take before she disappeared.

He said at the time: 'Esther told her partner she was planning to spend the night in a nearby refuge on the French side of the border called Venasque before doing a long half-circle to re-enter Spain through a mountain pass called Puerto de la Glera and heading back down to Llanos del Hospital.

'It would have been a long day's walk or she could have spent the night somewhere and finished the following day.

British hiker Esther Dingley was seen at Eroski supermartket in Benasque, Spain, on Novermber 19, days before her sudden disappearance

'We don't know if she reached Venasque that night. It's shut at the moment and only an emergency part of it is open for people to sleep in and consume any food they have with them.'

French police chief Jean Marc Bordinaro said yesterday: 'We cannot say anything at the moment because the discovery of the bones is too recent and they must be properly analysed.

'We will not have a result for several days and possibly several weeks.'

A prosecutor based in Saint-Gaudens is expected to make an official statement if there are any changes to the current situation.

Spanish Civil Guard said the discovery was a matter for the French police to comment on as the bones had been found on their side of the border.

Esther's partner of 20 years claimed in a recent BBC interview he 'could no longer agree' with the idea she had suffered an accident.

He said: 'The search has been so prolonged and so intense, that as far as I'm concerned the probability of an accident is now less than the probability of a criminal act.'
Nearly one in five Metropolitan Police officers are currently absent from duty after being forced to self isolate amid pingdemic chaos.

Around 17 per cent of the forces' officers are currently self isolating, the highest since the start of the pandemic.

Police were made exempt from self isolation on Thursday, but only if their employers specified their names and they were double-jabbed against Covid-19.

Chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation Ken Marsh said the force was 'massively struggling'.

'We are not performing the role properly. We were not offered the jab and now we have got almost one in five officers off sick or self-isolating.

'It is coming home to roost and the Government is going to come unstuck,' he told the Telegraph.

Nearly one in five Metropolitan Police officers are currently absent from duty after being forced to self isolate amid pingdemic chaos

Police were made exempt from self isolation amid pingdemic chaos on Thursday, but only if their employers specified their names and they were double-jabbed against Covid-19

The government on Thursday published a list of exemptions for key workers in energy, waste, water, and food supply and production.

Police, border officers, train and lorry drivers were added to the list on Friday night.

Workers who avoid self isolation after contact with someone who has Covid will instead be tested daily, allowing them to keep working provided the tests remain negative.

The Government on Saturday said in a statement that an expected initial extra 200 testing sites would be opened so that daily contact testing could be 'rolled out to further critical workplaces in England'.

But currently around 2.3million people from critical areas and jobs have been forced into isolation due to being pinged.

It is understood Prime Minister Boris Johnson is planning to open more testing sites so more industries can be added to the exemption list in the coming weeks.

He previously said people who have been double vaccinated would be exempt from self isolation after August 16, provided they have a test.

More than a million people have been told to self-isolate by the NHS Covid app in recent weeks, with 618,903 alerts sent in the week ending July 14.

The toll is a 17 per cent increase on the previous seven and another record high.

The guidance lists 16 sectors: energy, civil nuclear, digital infrastructure, food production and supply, waste, water, veterinary medicines, essential chemicals, essential transport, medicines, medical devices, clinical consumable supplies, emergency services, border control, essential defence and local government

The app has caused widespread chaos, but it was claimed on Saturday the system causing the problem could not be stopped - because there is not enough testing capacity to allow the 'test and release' method to take over.

There has been mounting pressure for weeks on the government to tweak the sensitivity of the app or make exemptions for key workers and fully vaccinated Britons following warnings that it could lead to food shortages and major disruptions as the epidemic grows.

UK supermarkets are in the midst of a perfect storm of staff and stock problems with tens of thousands of workers self-isolating because of the 'pingdemic'.

The struggle to stack shelves and staff stores and warehouses is being made worse by a lack of lorry drivers to deliver food.

Empty shelves in Asda as Britain was caught in a perfect storm of staff shortages and a lack of lorry drivers

Empty shelves and signs on the soft drinks aisle of a Sainsbury's store in Blackheath, Rowley Regis. Bosses asked customers to 'bear with us' blaming 'high demand'

The Road Haulage Association believes the country is 100,000 HGV drivers short - and thousands of prospective drivers are waiting for their HGV tests due to a backlog caused by lockdown, while many existing ones have returned to the EU from the UK after Brexit.

It came as businesses, including one of Britain's largest food distribution firms, Bidfood, began taking the crisis into their own hands and began advising workers who are pinged by the NHS app to take tests and continue working rather than stay at home for up to ten days as the Government suggests.

Meanwhile Transport for London has been forced to close both the Circle and Hammersmith and City Tube lines for the entire weekend after 300 staff were 'pinged' by the NHS Covid tracking app.

There will also be changes to the District and Metropolitan lines and short cancellations elsewhere as the so-called 'pingdemic' continues to bring transport networks to their knees.

Reduced timetables will also hit railways across England in a bid to improve reliability following a spate of last-minute cancellations.
Daniel Andrews will make Victorians wait another day to find out when the state's fifth lockdown will end, as 11 more cases were recorded.

The Victorian premier told reporters on Sunday morning that health experts will have to look at the number of new infections on Monday before they decide whether restrictions will be eased on Tuesday, as planned.

'Hopefully we could be in a position to ease some of these restrictions and rules from midnight on Tuesday, but we need to see what tomorrow's numbers look like,' he said.

He also described the highly-contagious Indian Delta variant as 'a wholly new enemy' that was harder to battle and needed extra caution.

Chief health officer Brett Sutton slammed everyone who threw a 'self-indulgent tantrum' by attending Melbourne's anti-lockdown 'super-spreader' protest on Saturday.

Daniel Andrews would not say whether Victorians will be out of lockdown by Tuesday, as planned

'It's very frustrating at this critical point in time,' he said.

Police made six arrests in the city and are hunting for a protester who allegedly threw a large bollard at a mounted officer.

The charges stemming from that protest included drug possession and refusing to provide contact details to police and at least one was charged with assaulting an emergency worker.

A further 70 demonstrators in Melbourne face fines but police believe that number will increase.

When asked if the lockdown will be extended as a result of the rally, Mr Sutton said it depended on whether new cases arise as a result.

Pictured: A man being arrested at the 'Freedom Rally' in Melbourne on Saturday

Pictured: Police firing pepper spray at demonstrator marching against lockdown in Melbourne on Saturday

Pictured: A woman being held by police during anti-lockdown marches on Saturday in Melbourne

Mr Andrews lambasted demonstrators for being 'selfish' and 'self-indulgent'.

'I do not believe [the protest] will fundamentally change things, but I would not want to be read as it sort of encouragement for people to go out there and do it,' he said.

'No one is entitled to put other people at risk.'

He said the Delta strain is the 'deadliest' variant yet and took a subtle jab at Sydney for recording hundreds of cases per day - many of which are not linked to known clusters.

About 3,500 people stormed the streets in Sydney CBD on Saturday in anti-lockdown protests, which are being labelled by health authorities as a potential 'super-spreader' event.

When asked if the lockdown will be extended as a result of the rally, Mr Sutton (pictured) said it depends on whether new cases arise as a result

'If you look at Sydney, you've got hospitals full of 40 -year-olds in hospitals - protest are not a smart thing to do. They are the wrong thing to do,' he said.

'I cannot predict whether it will have a material impact or not, but I will take some comfort from the fact that our cases are linked, it has not got out of control, is not gone wild, because contact traces and Victorians are doing a fantastic job.'

Mr Sutton said 'several' of the state's 179 cases are in hospital, two are in intensive care, and one is on a ventilator.

All new cases recorded on Sunday were in quarantine throughout their period of infection, and they are all linked to current outbreaks.

Victoria managed to administer 17,370 vaccine doses in the 24 hours to Sunday, with 32,385 virus tests conducted for the same period.

Pictured: Young and Jacksons pub was listed on Flinders Street was listed as an exposure site

The state recorded 12 new locally acquired cases on Saturday, 10 of them in quarantine throughout their entire infectious period and also all linked to current outbreaks.

The numbers continue an encouraging downward trend in new diagnoses after 14 cases were reported on Friday and 26 on Thursday.

Prof Sutton introduced a new travel designation for NSW late on Friday, making the whole state an 'extreme risk zone' backdated to July 9.

This makes it difficult for Victorians in NSW to come home unless they get a rare exemption or have a Specified Worker Permit.

'It's very strict in terms of the movement of people across the border,' he said.

Asked on Saturday whether Victoria could expect an easing of its own restrictions on Tuesday, as scheduled, Prof Sutton said the signs were positive but he declined to commit to it.

Health Minister Martin Foley insists the risk designation of NSW is a natural progression of attempts to protect Victoria and not to do with Premier Daniel Andrews' call for a 'ring of steel' blockade around Sydney.

He also moved on Saturday to hose down the idea of tensions with NSW over a lack of willingness to redirect vaccines to Sydney's virus-ridden suburbs.

Pictured: A man in an animal print onsie walking down Degraves Street in Melbourne on Friday

Mr Foley said Victoria and other states had 'legitimate demands' on scarce vaccines for July and August which had already been allocated to them based on population.

However he welcomed recent reports of spare Pfizer doses in the national stockpile and said he'd be happy for those to be sent to NSW.

Meanwhile an anti-lockdown protest in Melbourne on Saturday was brought to a violent end as police used pepper spray to clear the crowd.

Thousands of protesters of all ages chanted 'freedom' as they gathered outside Victoria's Parliament House.

'We can all argue the merits or otherwise of various approaches to managing transmission, but let's not pretend that 'marching for freedom' will actually deliver the precious freedom that we all need and desire,' Prof Sutton later tweeted.

As of Saturday, more than 22,000 Victorians were listed as primary close contacts isolating at home, while about 2500 MCG contacts were preparing to be released from 14 days of confinement.
The body of a dead man was found floating in the Harlem Meer in Central Park Saturday evening in the same location where a dead man's body was found last year.

A woman called 911 around 7 pm, and told cops she saw the unidentified man floating in the water near the Boathouse.

The dead man has been described as a Black man in his 40s. The man was pulled from the lake and declared dead at the scene around 7:15 pm.

The medical examiners office will conduct an autopsy to determine the exact cause of death.

A man's corpse was found floating in Harlem Meer, a lake in Central Park, on Saturday evening

A woman called the NYPD when she saw a man's body floating in the water around 7 pm

This is the same location where a man's body was found floating in Central Park last year

The medical examiner will conduct an autopsy to determine the official cause of death

Harlem Meer is a lake located near the Boathouse in Central Park

Last year a man's body was found floating in the same exact location last year when a Harlem resident who went fishing in the Central Park lake hooked a human corpse in September 2020.

At around 11 am on September 24, 2020, Luis Castoire, 24, cast his line into Harlem Meer, which is a lake located on the northeast corner of Central Park near the corner of Fifth Avenue and 110th Street.

'I hooked up on something,' Castoire told DailyMail.com on Thursday.

'I was fishing in the Harlem Meer and my second cast I hook something [and] then lifted the line.'

'I had seen the body in the water then I call 911.'

Harlem Meer is a lake located on the northeast corner of Central Park near the corner of Fifth Avenue and 110th Street

New York City police were called to Harlem Meer in Central Park in 2020 after a fisherman found the body of a man in his thirties

Medical examiners are seen above placing the man's body into a vehicle in September

'I hooked up on something,' the fisherman, Luis Castoire (pictured), told DailyMail.com on Thursday. 'I was fishing in the Harlem Meer and my second cast I hook something [and] then lifted the line.'

When asked if he got a good look at the corpse, Castoire told DailyMail.com: 'I know it was a man but not really. I freak out.'

New York City police were called to the scene and removed the body of an unidentified man in his thirties.

'I called 911 then the police came,' Castoire said. 'I asked a lot of questions and then I left home to my new born baby boy.'

First responders recovered the body and pronounced the man dead at the scene.

A medical examiner was assigned to conduct an autopsy to determine the cause of death, the NYPD told DailyMail.com.

New York Police Department personnel are seen above near Harlem Meer in 2020

Castoire's find was the third time that an unidentified body was found in Central Park in Septmeber 2020

The story was first reported by the New York Daily News.

This is the third time this month that the NYPD has launched an investigation into the death of a man whose body was found in Central Park.

September 18, 2020, first responders were called to the area of West 109th Street and West Drive just before 2 am.

They found a 59-year-old man who was unconscious and unresponsive with no obvious signs of injury, according to the NYPD.

Emergency personnel pronounced the man dead at the scene.

On September 7, 2020 divers pulled a body out of a pond in Central Park.

On September 7, 2020 divers pulled a body out of a pond in Central Park. Police on site with the recovered body covered in tarp above

The body belonged to an adult male.

The remains were taken out of the pond - which is at the entrance of 59th Street and Central Park West - at around 12:30 pm, an FDNY spokeswoman said to DailyMail.com

Authorities retrieved the body following reports of a potential drowning victim. The body was discovered floating in the water.
Queensland are on high alert after a man who tested positive to Covid crossed the border before spend a week in Brisbane while infectious.

The man, who was a close contact of a known case, boarded a flight to Ballina on July 14 before police were told about the significant breach of public health.

The Virgin Australia flight arrived from Sydney about 11.45am and every other passenger is now considered a close contact and must isolate for 14 days.

Queensland are on high alert after a man who tested positive to Covid crossed the border before spend a week in Brisbane while infectious (STOCK PICTURE)

The man, who was a close contact of a known case, boarded a flight to Ballina on July 14 before police were told about the significant breach of public health. (STOCK PICTURE)

Authorities said they were aware of the man's identity and he has since tested positive to the virus.

The man told authorities he was isolating since July 10, when he was first notified that he was a workplace contact of a known case, but officials have since determined that 'is not true'.

'We are concerned about the nature and extent of his exposures on the flight and in the community both in New South Wales and in Queensland,' authorities said on Sunday.

NSW Police is investigating the matter.

NSW Health's Dr Jeremy McAnulty said that the man was initially provided with a negative test result from a private lab which turned out to be a mistake.

'But this didn't change the fact that he had to isolate for 14 days,' he said.

Queensland Chief Health Officer Dr Jeanette Young said the latest case had visited the sunshine state while infectious.
More than ten years before the Miami Surfside condominium had been built, its architect was suspended for six months after a structured that he designed collapsed during a hurricane.

William Friedman died in 2018 at the age of 88, but when he was a young architect in his 30s he had designed commercial sign pylons that were part of the rooftop of a building in downtown Miami.

The pylons toppled following a storm in 1965 as Hurricane Betsy struck south Florida.

The Surfside condominium complex was built in 1981 but the architect had been suspended just 13 years earlier

William Friedman was suspended following the collapse of sign pylons at two Miami buildings

Betsy caused $1.42 billion worth of damage in the Bahamas, Florida, and Louisiana, earning the storm the nickname 'Billion Dollar Betsy' in September 1965

One week after Betsy had blasted through the area, a sign pylon which had been attached to the building collapsed and fell down the side.

Another single story building in a different part of town also had a similar pylon structural failure.

The pylons were being used to hold promotional signs perched atop the building's roof.

The collapse was serious enough for at least one prominent Miami architect to alert the Florida State Board of Architecture who then suspended him for 'gross incompetency, in that he negligently, improperly, and carelessly' designed the 20-foot tall pylons.

There is no direct link between the pylons collapse and Champlain Towers South

The pylons designed by Friendman who would go onto design Champlain Towers South came down after Hurricane Betsy stormed through in 1965 (file photo of Hurricane Betsy in 1965)

Windows of the Carillion Hotel on Miami Beach were knocked in by Hurricane Betsy (file photo)

The pylons were 'insufficient and grossly inadequate' to withstand the wind pressure of the hurricane force winds, and were not in accordance with building code for the location or 'to accepted standards of architectural practice,' the Florida Board of Architecture wrote in its suspension order in 1966.

Friedman was then suspended for six months between June and December, 1967 some 12 years after he received his licence in 1955.

The documents have only recently come to light following a public records request filed by The Real Deal.

Fort Lauderdale architect Kaizer Talib said the suspension was serious.

Residents of Champlain Towers East had revealed photos of cracks that have appeared in their building after collapse of Towers South.

William Friedman died in 2018 at the age of 88, but when he was a young architect in his 30s he had designed commercial sign pylons that were part of a building in downtown Miami. His office is pictured

'Most of the time you end up getting a letter of warning from the state department or something,' he told The Real Deal. 'If you had done something small wrong, in the process of permitting, then you might get a warning letter. But a suspension is a bigger thing because it's decided by a committee. It's not decided by an individual.

'Some people know about [the suspension], but the general public doesn't know,' Talib said. An architect 'just keeps quiet and he is not going to tell anyone except his wife.'

There is no evidence to suggest that as the original architect for the Champlain Towers South, Friedman's design, completed in 1980, had anything to do with its collapse.

However, the background information could provide a useful element for investigators still attempting to discover what led to the fall of the tower block that killed 97 people.

So far, that has been one indicator of a 'major error' that was discovered in the original plans for the building which were prepared by Friedman and the project engineer.

A 2018 engineering report on the 12-story condo suggests a concrete slab in one part of the building had not been placed at a slope to allow water to drain.

'The question comes down to: Was it a design error or deferred maintenance that was the approximate cause for the collapse?' said Frank Schnidman, retired urban planning professor at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton.

Despite the six month suspension in the late 60s, his obituary described him as a 'very unique architect'.

Friedman went on to design many 'unusual properties' across Miami.

Alongside apartment blocks, he also designed a shopping center, a hospital and various townhouses.

When Champlain Towers South was completed in 1981, it was described as being one of the largest condo projects in Surfside's history.

Shortly after June's disaster, it became clear that warnings about Champlain Towers South, had gone unheeded. A 2018 engineering report detailed cracked and degraded concrete support beams in the underground parking garage and other problems that would cost nearly $10 million to fix.

The repairs did not happen, and the estimate grew to $15 million this year as the owners of the building's 136 units and its governing condo board squabbled over the cost, especially after a Surfside town inspector told them the building was safe.

Investigators have yet to determine what caused about half of the 136-unit highrise to cave in on itself in one of the deadliest building collapses in U.S. history. The portion of the structure that was left standing, but unstable, was deliberately demolished about 10 days later.

A 2018 engineering report found structural deficiencies that are now the focus of several inquiries, including a grand jury investigation.

A complete collapse was all but impossible to imagine. As many officials said in the catastrophe's first days, buildings of that size do not just collapse in the U.S. outside of a terrorist attack. Even tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes rarely bring them down.

The ultimate fate of the property where the building once stood has yet to be determined. A judge presiding over several lawsuits filed in the collapse aftermath wants the property sold at market rates, which would bring in an estimated $100 million or more. Some condo owners want to rebuild, and others say a memorial should be erected to remember the dead.

Construction lights surround the area of land where the partially collapsed Champlain Towers South building stood in Surfside, Florida

Twisted pieces of metal bars protrude from the remains of walls in the area of land block stood

On Friday, firefighters declared the end of their search for bodies at the site of a collapsed Florida condo building, concluding a month of painstaking work removing layers of dangerous debris that were once piled several stories high.

The June 24 collapse at the oceanside Champlain Towers South killed 97 people, with at least one more missing person yet to be identified.

The site has been mostly swept flat and the rubble moved to a Miami warehouse. Although forensic scientists are still at work, including examining the debris at the warehouse, there are no more bodies to be found where the building once stood.

Except during the early hours after the collapse, survivors never emerged. Search teams spent weeks battling the hazards of the rubble, including an unstable portion of the building that teetered above, a recurring fire and Florida's stifling summer heat and thunderstorms.

They went through more than 14,000 tons of broken concrete and rebar, often working boulder by bounder, rock by rock, before finally declaring the mission complete.

Miami-Dade Fire Rescue's urban search-and-rescue team pulled away from the site Friday in a convoy of firetrucks and other vehicles, slowly driving to their headquarters for a news conference to announce that the search was officially over.

A month since the Champlain Towers South partially collapsed, the site is mostly cleared and debris has been relocated to a different site

Photos showing the cleaned up area where the Surfside Condos was located
South Australia has reported three new Covid-19 cases but the premier says because they were all in 'strict quarantine' the state is still on track to end its lockdown on Tuesday.

Premier Steven Marshall said testing numbers on Saturday were a 'new record' with 23, 719 swabs received.

'It is very clear to me that South Australians are taking this lockdown order very, very seriously,' he said on Sunday.

'It is very clear to me that South Australians are taking this lockdown order very, very seriously,' SA Premier Steven Marshall said on Sunday, in reference to just three new cases

SA residents are set to be released from lockdown after a week of the strictest stay-at-home orders in the country's pandemic (pictured, a woman walks the Riverbank in Adelaide)

'We want to come out on Tuesday and the actions of all South Australians are speaking volumes. Thank you very much.'

Chief Public Health Officer Nicola Spurrier said one of the cases was a returned traveller, a young child of a parent who had already tested positive.

There were two cases associated with the Modbury Hospital cluster, bringing the number of infections linked to that cluster to 18.

One is a woman in her 40s and the other is a man in his 70s.

'He was quarantining at home, he lives alone and so when we got the result through he was contacted and he has now been transferred to (the Tom's Court medi-hospital),' Professor Spurrier said.

The cluster in SA began with an 81-year-old man who recently arrived in Australia from Argentina and was quarantined in Sydney before travelling to Adelaide, where he tested positive.

Chief Public Health Officer Nicola Spurrier (pictured) said one of the cases was a returned traveller, a young child of a parent who had already tested positive

There were two cases associated with the Modbury Hospital cluster, bringing the number of infections linked to that cluster to 18

Genomic testing has confirmed the man became infected while in Sydney, not while in Argentina.

One new testing centre opened on Saturday and another, to be run by the defence force, is close to operational.

Bad weather on Saturday morning forced the temporary closure of the Adelaide's largest centre, the Victoria Park 24-hour site.

Mr Marshall said on Sunday this centre was still not operational.
A new conservative publisher is launching with an anti-transgender children's book.

Brave Books' first book, called Elephants are Not Birds, follows an elephant named Kevin and a vulture named Culture that tries to convince him he's actually a bird because he can sing well.

The vulture gives Kevin a beak and wings to wear - though the elephant struggles to live as a bird despite identifying as one, an obvious swipe at children who identify as another gender other than the one they were born.

The book was written by right-wing commentator Ashley St. Clair, who was previously dumped as a brand ambassador by Turning Point USA when she was pictured with white nationalists and anti-Semites.

Brave Books' first book follows an elephant named Kevin and a vulture named Culture that tries to convince him he's actually a bird because he can sing well

The vulture gives Kevin a beak and wings to wear - as he transitions into his life as a bird

The elephant struggles to live as a bird despite identifying as one

The book is an obvious swipe at children who identify as another gender other than their own

The anti-trans book was written by right-wing commentator Ashley St. Clair

She was previously dumped as a brand ambassador by Turning Point USA when she was pictured with white nationalists and anti-Semites

'I hope that the values taught in the book can curb what I call 'transgender by proxy' cases, where kids are presented the confusing idea of unlimited and interchangeable genders and get the idea that they are suddenly trans,' St. Clair, 22, told DailyMail.com.

The term 'transgender by proxy' is not supported by scientific or psychological evidence.

When describing the book's plot, St. Clair said that in the end Kevin 'realizes he's better the way he was made and he can like to sing and still be an elephant.'

'But I believe that the entire concept of transgenderism is confusing to kids, and eventually damaging if they make life altering decisions such as gender transitioning when they may not necessarily be trans,' she said.

When asked by DailyMail.com if the book could be seen as damaging to transgender children, she replied: 'No, I don't think a singing elephant will be damaging. And regardless, I don't believe children should transition at all.'

'The book really teaches, you're best the way you were made, whatever way that may be,' she said.

When asked by DailyMail.com about kids who believe they were made transgender, St. Clair simply replied: 'Believing and being are two different things.'

'If LGBTQ groups want to get upset, I'm not concerned. It's a singing elephant. Definitely not pushing blatant propaganda messaging like The GayBCs,' she said.

Jordan Budd, executive director of COLAGE, said the fastest growing group among the organization - for people with LGBTQ parents and caregivers - is for people with transgender parents.

'We dont need the validation of conservative ideologues to love our families, but we know that when kids are taught hate at home they bring it into the classroom and harm LGBTQ+ youth and youth with LGBTQ+ parents,' Budd told DailyMail.com.

'Passing off anti-science and transphobic kids books as righteous will only create the next generation of bullies.'

Budd added: 'Its true that elephants are not birds, but trans women are women, and trans men are men. Well stick with books like The Red Crayon which acknowledge the complexity and beauty of our world without hiding from it.'

In comments to the New York Post, St. Clair said: 'You get special attention now in the classroom if you say, 'Hey my name is not Billy, it's Amanda'.'

'I am going to have a little boy in November, and it's scary to think he could come home and say, 'My friends all identify as something else and that's how I feel' and have my son crying because he's not put on hormone replacement therapy,' St. Clair said.

The book is said to include a 'top secret letter', though the contents of the letter were not revealed

Trent Talbot, the company's CEO, told the New York Post that he decided to start the company when he noticed the extent of America's culture wars - hence the name of the vulture

He said other planned books include one on communism from Jack Posobiec and is trying to convince Congressman Dan Crenshaw to write one about cancel culture

According to its website, Brave Books will continue to exclusively focus on developing conservative propaganda targeting kids.

'A progressive agenda is dominating today's culture and teaching our kids all the wrong lessons. That's why we created a book series that releases a new story book each month which teaches a foundational conservative value,' the website reads.

Trent Talbot, the company's CEO, told the New York Post that he decided to start the company when he noticed the extent of America's culture wars.

'There is a real war going on for the hearts and minds of our kids. And everywhere I looked was propaganda,' he said.

He wanted to fight against books urging kids to 'make equality a reality' like Ibram X. Kendi's picture book Antiracist Baby.

'Once my eyes were open I was seeing it everywhere and I couldn't unsee it. I thought there was a need for books that could help parents teach the values they hold dear,' he said.

Talbot claims that the book has been 'positively received' by kids aged 4 to 12. The company is selling 'Elephants are Not Birds' on its website for $19.99.

'I would love to see it taught in schools and on summer reading lists and we're going to fight to make that happen,' he said.

He said other planned books include one on communism from Jack Posobiec and is trying to convince Congressman Dan Crenshaw to write one about cancel culture.

St. Clair, a former brand ambassador, was dropped by Turning Point USA in 2019 when she was pictured at a dinner with white nationalist and anti-Semitic content creators, the Washington Examiner reported at the time.

'TPUSA is a large national organization that touches hundreds of thousands of people all across the nation,' the spokesperson said in a statement to the outlet.

'Ashley is no longer one of our thousands of volunteer activists and ambassadors. Charlie [Kirk] and TPUSA have repeatedly and publicly denounced white nationalism as abhorrent and un-American and will continue to do so.'

Among those pictured in the photo was anti-Semitic podcaster Nicholas Fuentes, who attended the 2017 Unite the Right white supremacist gathering

Also pictured was alt-right influencer Tim Gionet, who goes by 'Baked Alaska' and livestreamed his storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6 and was later arrested.
Daniel Andrews has taken another hit at the New South Wales premier for refusing to put a 'ring of steel around the city' and clashed with reporters while declaring Sydney's lockdown will go on for months.

The state premier took aim at Gladys Berejiklian during his Covid update on Sunday, declaring the situation currently unfolding in NSW was completely out of control.

Mr Andrews defended plunging his state into a snap five-day lockdown while once again demanding a 'ring of steel' be placed around Covid-hit Sydney.

'I'm not doing it for people to like me. I'm doing it because it's important, to save lives. Look at what's happening in Sydney,' the premier said.

The state premier took aim at Gladys Berejiklian during his Covid update on Sunday, declaring that the situation unfolding in NSW was not just an outbreak

'I think people know and understand that what's going on in Sydney is not an outbreak, it's going to go on, it would seem, for months and no one wants that here, we've been through that and we don't want to do it again.'

The premier said the fast-spreading Delta variant meant people now know: 'You can't wait, you've gotta lock down real fast' in a slap in the face to Ms Berejiklian's response at the start of the outbreak.

Mr Andrews said Victorians wanted a hard border with NSW and 'as many restrictions as possible' to keep NSW residents 'out of their state'.

'That's why I've said a ring of steel around Sydney is something that should happen, that's what we did last year [in Melbourne] and it worked, it protected country Victoria and it protected the rest of the country,' he said.

'That's not going to happen... so we'll just have to make sure our permit system is hard as it can be - that'll be inconvenient for a lot of people.'

The premier said that before the national cabinet meeting on Friday, he didn't have any expectations of having to 'cough up' vaccine doses for NSW

The premier noted that as case numbers continued to climb in NSW, the risk of people entering Victoria from Sydney would grow.

When asked if he supported former federal Labor leader Bill Shorten's call for other less Covid-ravaged states to send unscheduled vaccines doses to NSW, Mr Andrews seemed to be lost for words.

'Well... national cabinet will determine where vaccines are allocated, with the plan that's agreed by national cabinet,' he said.

The premier said he fully supported a JobKeeper-type arrangement in NSW, which he said 'was only fair' considering the state's recent surge in Covid-19 cases.

Mr Andrews said he wanted to dispel any idea that there were warehouses full of allocated vaccines 'waiting to be put in people's arms'.

'That's just wrong. If we opened it up the queues would stretch to Sydney almost, of people that wanted to get vaccinated today.

'They can't get vaccinated today, because the stuff's not here. The commonwealth has not secured the supplies that we need right now.'

A reporter then asked the premier if he thought himself or the NSW Premier had added to the 'Hunger Games' mentality of state versus state when it came to the vaccine rollout.

'Well it's not. It's rather an irrelevant point,' Mr Andrews said, adding the vaccines allocated to his state belonged to the commonwealth vaccination program.

Mr Andrews said he fully supported a JobKeeper type arrangement in NSW, which he said 'was only fair' considering the state's recent surge in Covid-19 cases

The premier said that before the national cabinet meeting on Friday, he didn't have any expectations of having to 'cough up' vaccine doses for NSW.

He said the meeting instead discussed cancelling GP appointments across NSW, in order to divert more Pfizer vials to state vaccination hubs in western Sydney, the epicentre of the outbreak with the vast majority of cases.

'If you've got modelling, NSW, that shows your strategy of vaccinating the west would work, bring that forward,' he said.

'Maybe then we'd be more likely to have a view that more should go there. I don't think that's too much to ask.'

The premier said he would be happy to discuss sharing any or all resources with NSW, but needed to see evidence that a vaccine donation from his state would make a 'material difference'.

A reporter then asked if Victoria's Covid Commander Jeroen Weimar could answer a question which appeared to trigger a reaction from Mr Andrews.

'A question for Jeroen, that would be a great idea,' the premier said, bitingly.

The premier said he would be happy to discuss sharing any or all resources with NSW, but needed to see evidence the vaccine diversion would make a 'material difference'

Meanwhile, Health Minister Martin Foley has insisted the risk designation of NSW is a natural progression of attempts to protect Victoria and not to do with Premier Daniel Andrews' call for a 'ring of steel' blockade around Sydney.

He also moved on Saturday to hose down the idea of tensions with NSW over a lack of willingness to redirect vaccines to Sydney's virus-ridden suburbs.

Mr Foley said Victoria and other states had 'legitimate demands' on scarce vaccines for July and August which had already been allocated to them based on population.

However he welcomed recent reports of spare Pfizer doses in the national stockpile and said he'd be happy for those to be sent to NSW.

The premier meanwhile will make Victorians wait another day to find out when the state's fifth lockdown will end, as 11 more cases were recorded on Sunday.
Wedding photographers, tradies, serial rabble-rousers and even a Sky News pundit and wannabe MP are among those charged over Sydney's lockdown protest.

On Sunday, 21 men faced Parramatta Local Court for various crimes allegedly committed at the rally - which descended into rioting by early afternoon.

They include the man allegedly seen punching a police horse in the mouth in photos from the thick of the crowd that shocked Australia.

Most other charges are for assaulting police, resisting arrest, and breaching public health orders by being there in the first place.

One of the more well-known faces charged by police is TikTok star Jon-Bernard Kairouz, 24, who spoke at the protest and took videos before removing them from his social media page.

The online prankster became known for correctly guessing NSW's new daily coronavirus figures, earning him a legion of fans - many of whom have since turned on him.

Kairouz was filmed at Saturday's protest holding a megaphone and declaring himself 'the people's Premier' as he whipped a crowd of thousands into a frenzy outside Town Hall on Saturday.

Premier Gladys Berejiklian also expressed her outrage at those who attended the protests, revealing seeing photos and footage of what took place 'broke [her] heart'

Kristian Pulkownik was identified after a photo of his fist making contact with the face of a police horse named Tobruk went viral overnight.

The 33-year-old was identified after police shared the picture online in an effort to track down the culprit - and it didn't take long.

Police stormed his Marlborough Street unit in Surry Hills about 11.20pm on Saturday after a public callout for information on his identity and whereabouts.

Pulkownik was taken to Kings Cross Police Station where he was charged with affray, animal cruelty, joining in an illegal assembly and not complying with a Covid-19 health directive.

He will spend at least a second night in jail after he appeared in Parramatta Local Court on Sunday where he did not apply for bail.

Kristian Pulkownik was identified after a photo of his fist making contact with the face of a police horse named Tobruk went viral overnight

Named and shamed: Everyone who in court on Sunday over protest Do you know any of these people? Email: brittany.chain@mailonline.com KRISTIAN PULKOWNIK 33yo M REMON KORKISE 36yo M ROBERT TE BROWN 26yo M ANTHONY NELSON PAZ 26yo M NIKOLA DEDOVIC 20yo M MICHAEL PAZ 28yo M SIMON HATTAWAY 27yo M SEAN RENFORD 44yo M KUPUOVENUA SIPU 29yo M RODRIGO ELICES 28yo M MICHAEL MUSALLAM 31yo M JOSHUA PEDEN 29yo M STEPHEN JOHN BASTIAN 63yo M JOSEPH MEKHAEL 37yo M DAVID CHRISTOPHER WILSON 60yo M DARIO MASLIC 18yo M EVAN BRACK 33yo M ARCHIE REES 26yo M ALEXANDER JEROME CLARQUE 39yo M RUDI VAN SCHAIK 47yo M CALLUM BOWLING, 27yo M Advertisement

Remon Korkise was also accused of attacking a police horse during Saturday's protest.

The 36-year-old wedding photographer was arrested at a home in Edensor Park and taken to Fairfield Police Station.

He was charged with assaulting a police officer, failing to comply with a health directive and animal cruelty.

Korkise after the protest went home to southwest Sydney, the epicentre of the outbreak where he has been subject to even stricter regulations than the rest of the city.

He was refused bail appeared in Parramatta Local Court on Sunday.

Remon Korkise has also been charged with animal cruelty offences after Saturday's protest

The 36-year-old wedding photographer was arrested at a home in Edensor Park and taken to Fairfield Police Station

Known Covid denier Joseph Mekhael, who was in court just five months ago for similar offences, was among those named by police.

Mekhael, 37, has been charged with failing to comply with a public health order. He also breached previous bail conditions by attending the rally.

'Smokin' Joe' was previously charged with two counts of failing to comply with public health orders after he allegedly organised two unauthorised protests in Sydney.

He described the government as 'diabolical dipsticks', claimed coronavirus was a scam, and made false and harmful claims about vaccination at the time.

Known Covid denier Joseph Mekhael, who was in court just five months ago for similar offences, was among those named by police

There are major concerns that Saturday's protests will prove to have been a super spreading event, and authorities are calling on the estimated 3,500 people who attended in Sydney to get a Covid test for the sake of the community

Like 'Smokin' Joe', Callum Bowling, publicly questions the threat of Covid.

The 27-year-old was charged with assaulting an officer, resisting arrest and breaching a Covid health directive by attending the rally.

'The virus we need to look out for is communism and tyranny,' he wrote on his Facebook account. Police opposed his bail.

John Ruddick, a former Liberal Party member who is now running as the Liberal Democrats candidate in Warringah, revealed on Twitter that he was fined $1,000 for attending the rally.

The onetime contributor on Sky News wrote: 'Just had two courteous police officers at my door to advise I will be getting a $1,000 fine for attending the Sydney Freedom Rally.

'No problem - I'll frame it and put it on the wall.'

NSW Police Minister David Elliott described him as a 'political wannabe' during his press conference on Sunday, suggesting he used the protest as a means of 'making a name for himself'.

TikTok comedian Jon-Bernard Kairouz was spotted firing up the anti-lockdown protestors in Sydney's CBD on Saturday

Like 'Smokin' Joe', Callum Bowling, publicly questions the threat of Covid. The 27-year-old was charged with assaulting an officer, resisting arrest and breaching a Covid health directive by attending the rally

John Ruddick, a former Liberal Party member who also is a contributor on Sky News and is now running as the Liberal Democrats candidate in Warringah, revealed on Twitter that he has been fined $1,000 for attending the rally

'It's disappointing that someone that wants to go to higher public office would get involved in a violent protest and then boast about it.'

'That's very disappointing. I think those individuals need to reflect if they are suitable for public office.'

Ruddick has not been charged with any crime, merely given a fine.

The eldest of the men due to face court on Sunday, Stephen John Bastian, was charged with assaulting a police officer in the line of duty.

He was granted bail to reappear in Downing Centre Local Court on August 10, and agreed to comply with all state public health orders.

Bastian, 63, must also not attend any gatherings or rallies in the future.

In total, 510 infringement notices were handed out on Saturday, most at the protests

Detectives are working through more than 5,000 tips from fed up Sydneysiders dobbing in attendees at Saturday's anti-lockdown rallies

Meanwhile Dario Maslic, the youngest of the protesters who faced court on Sunday, was also granted bail under the condition that he avoid public gatherings and rallies.

He also must not go near, or contact any prosecution witness.

The 18-year-old was charged with failing to comply with health directives, assaulting a police officer and wilfully obstructing officers.

David Wilson, a self described 'biohacker' was also charged after attending the rally in Sydney.

The 60-year-old from the Northern Rivers region in NSW was not subject to strict stay-at-home orders because he lives outside of a hotspot, but has since exposed himself by travelling to Sydney for the protest.

He is accused of assaulting a police officer and refusing to wear a face mask.

Mr Wilson on Sunday entered a plea of not guilty. He was granted bail to appear before the court again on August 10.

There are concerns Saturday's rallies may become a 'super spreader' event. Pictured: A graph showing case numbers in NSW

Detectives are working through more than 5,000 tips from Sydneysiders dobbing in attendees at the anti-lockdown rally.

Mr Elliott warned officers would be relentless in pursuing anybody who broke the law at the protest.

'Yesterday cannot happen again. For all those who think NSW Police is going to allow unlawful gathering to occur, you need to think again,' he warned.

'The deployments we saw yesterday are just a fraction of what we have available.'

He pleaded with everyone who went to the protest to immediately get a coronavirus test and isolate until they got a negative result.

'You did the wrong thing yesterday by going to the protest, do the right thing by your families today and self-isolate and get a test,' he said.

Deputy Commissioner Mal Lanyon said more than 5,000 reports had already been made to Crime Stoppers from members of the public who knew somebody who attended the rallies and breached public health orders.

'I'm gratified by the fact that over 5,000 reports have been made to Crime Stoppers for members of the public,' he said.

'Even more importantly, over 200 people have so far been identified and police are currently following those people up to take appropriate action.'

Protesters were met by mounted police outside Town Hall in Sydney - with neither group prepared to back down

Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Sunday joined a chorus of politicians and officials to rebuke the actions of protesters across the nation, describing their actions as selfish and reckless

Penalties will range from fines to charges that will require court appearances.

He urged the community to continue lodging those reports and vowed to investigate every single one in order to bring those involved to justice.

'The police did an incredible job yesterday in the wake of unprecedented violence,' he said.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Sunday joined a chorus of politicians and officials to rebuke the actions of protesters across the nation, describing their actions as selfish and reckless.

'I think it offended many, many fellow Sydneysiders,' he said.

'That type of behaviour doesn't help anybody. Selfish behaviour doesn't help anybody to engage in that was reckless, and it was selfish.'

Mr Elliott issued a stern warning to demonstrators, urging them to undertake self isolation and get tested for Covid

'It broke my heart,' Ms Berejiklian said of seeing pictures of all the protesters and police response

Mr Elliott issued a stern warning to demonstrators, urging them to undertake self isolation and get tested for Covid.

'You did the wrong thing yesterday,' he said. 'But do the right thing by your family and friends and get tested today... There is too much uncredible information floating around on social media.

'Everyone who attended yesterday has a moral obligation to get tested and to self isolate.'

Premier Gladys Berejiklian also expressed her outrage at those who attended the protests, revealing seeing photos and footage of what took place 'broke [her] heart'.

In total, 510 infringement notices were handed out on Saturday. Most of these fines were distributed at the protests.

'That number will continue to be high as investigations continue,' Mr Elliott said. 'That behaviour yesterday can only described as violent, filthy, risky behavior that police will continue to investigate.'
Top officials around the world were targeted in phone hacks through WhatsApp by governments using Israeli NSO Group spyware, the messaging app's chief executive has revealed.

More than 1,400 WhatsApp users - including government officials and military officers in 20 'US-allied countries' - were targeted in a 2019 attack, according to Will Cathcart.

The revelation comes after details emerged last week of how the Israeli surveillance firm NSO was selling its 'Pegasus' software to government clients worldwide.

The software allows its users to exploit a person's phone and use it to access contacts, messages and even turn on the microphone to snoop on conversations.

The leak revealed how senior government officials, including French president Emmanuel Macron, as well as journalists, lawyers and activists were selected as candidates for possible surveillance through the NSO software.

And Mr Cathcart says he has seen parallels between the latest leak - exposed by a group of media organisations under the name 'the Pegasus project'- and the 2019 attack against WhatsApp users.

He said senior government officials, journalists and human rights activists were targeted in the 2019 attack - similar to what has been reported in the recent Pegasus leak.

Mr Cathcart, head of the Facebook-owned messaging service, told the Guardian: 'The reporting (in the Pegasus leak) matches what we saw in the attack we defeated two years ago, it is very consistent with what we were loud about then.'

More than 1,400 WhatsApp users - including government officials and military officers in 20 'US-allied countries' - were targeted in the 2019 attack, according to Will Cathcart (pictured)

NSO targeted WhatsApp users through its video call function. They did not have to pick up the phone in order to be exploited. Above is an example that was shared by Citizen Lab, the research company it partnered with to produce a report on the May 2019 breach

WhatsApp is suing the Israeli spyware firm NSO claiming it should be permanently blocked. They allege NSO sold a hacking platform that exploited a flaw in WhatsApp-owned servers to help clients hack into the cellphones of at least 1,400 users

He also revealed that many of the WhatsApp users targeted in the 2019 attack had 'no business being under surveillance in any way, shape, or form', adding: 'This should be a wake up call for security on the internet  mobile phones are either safe for everyone or they are not safe for everyone.'

His comments come after it was revealed how French president Macron's phone number was among potential targets of a huge international spying operation.

The French president is among 50,000 politicians, journalists and human rights activists around the world said to have been identified as 'people of interest' by clients of Israeli firm NSO.

His comments come after it was revealed how French president Emmanuel Macron's (pictured) phone number was among potential targets of a huge international spying operation

The Paris prosecutor's office is investigating suspected widespread use of its Pegasus spyware and an official in the president's office said: 'If this is proven, it is clearly very serious.'

Investigator Laurent Richard said on French TV earlier this week: 'We found these numbers but we obviously couldn't do a technical analysis of Emmanuel Macron's phone to determine if it had been infected with a spying device.'

Other leaders on the list that emerged include South African president Cyril Ramaphosa and World Health Organisation chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

President Imran Khan of Pakistan was also among potential targets found on a list of numbers leaked to Amnesty and the Paris-based journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories.

Targets also included friends of Saudi-born Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi before his murder by a Saudi hit squad in 2018.

The use of the software, called Pegasus and developed by Israel's NSO group, was reported on by the Washington Post, the Guardian, Le Monde and other news outlets who collaborated on an investigation into a data leak.

The leak was of a list of up to 50,000 phone numbers believed to have been identified as people of interest by clients of NSO since 2016.

One of those targeted was Khashoggi's wife Hanan Elatr. Her phone - as well as that of a second female associate - was allegedly targeted before his death.

The Washington Post was one of the first outlets to break the story, publishing a 4,000-word dive into the spyware and its influence.

NSO began selling its smartphone spyware to governments in 2011 and has always kept its operations under lock and key.

One of those targeted was Hanan Elatr, left, the wife of Saudi-born Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered by a Saudi hit squad in 2018. Her phone - as well as that of a second female associate - was allegedly targeted before his death

President Imran Khan of Pakistan was also among potential targets found on a list of numbers leaked to Amnesty and the Paris-based journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories

According to a Fast Company article published in March 2019, when one of the outlet's reporters called an NSO office in 2017, a representative said they didn't speak to journalists and hung up.

But the company fell under scrutiny in 2019 after a number of lawsuits from people alleging that NSO was using its spyware against them.

This includes Whatsapp, who launched a lawsuit against NSO in late 2019, claiming that the Israeli firm was responsible for sending malware to the phones of Whatsapp users.

According to the Guardian, a judge in the case said the claim that malicious code owned by NSO was sent through WhatApp's service did not appear to be disputed.

The paper says that the lawsuit instead revolves around whether NSO or its customers were to blame.

WhatsApp is seeking an injunction which will block NSO from using its service permanently and says the firm should be blacklisted internationally.

Meanwhile, Mr Cathcart earlier this week took to Twitter to call on Governments, tech companies and human rights groups to work together to combat hacking.

He said in a series of Tweets: 'Human rights defenders, tech companies and governments must work together to increase security and hold the abusers of spyware accountable. Microsoft was bold in their actions last week.

'We need more companies, and, critically, governments, to take steps to hold NSO Group accountable.

'Once again, we urge a global moratorium on the use of unaccountable surveillance technology now.'

An NSO spokesperson told MailOnline: 'Millions of people around the world are sleeping well at night, and safely walking in the streets, thanks to Pegasus and similar technologies which help intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies around the world to prevent and investigate crime, terrorism, and pedophilia rings that are hiding under the umbrella of End-to-End encryption apps.

'NSO, together with many of the other cyber intelligence companies in the world, provides cyber intelligence tools for governments because law enforcement agencies around the world are in the dark and there's no regulatory solution that allows them to monitor malicious acts on instant messaging and social media.

'We reiterate: NSO does not operate the technology, nor do we have visibility to the data collected.

'Our products, sold to vetted foreign governments, cannot be used to conduct cybersurveillance within the United States, and no foreign customer has ever been granted technology that would enable them to access phones with U.S. numbers. It is simply technologically impossible.

'We are doing our best to help creating a safer world.'

On Mr Cathcart's comments, the spokesperson added: 'Does Mr. Cathcrat's have other alternatives that enables law enforcement and intelligence agencies to legally detect and prevent malicious acts of paedophiles, terrorists and criminals using End to End encryption platforms? If so, we would be happy to hear.'
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Heartwarming pre-race footage shows just how ready Australians women's 4x100 metres freestyle team were to win the Olympic relay for a third consecutive time, huddling together for support and even holding hands.

Bronte Campbell, Meg Harris, Emma McKeon and Cate Campbell smashed a world record on their way to winning Australia's first gold medal of the Tokyo Olympics.

Their time of 3:29.69 minutes was more than three seconds faster than the second placed Canadian team, ahead of USA, who won bronze.

Going into the race as the red hot favourites, the Australian girls hid their bundles of nerves well and looked relaxed in the marshalling area moments before the race.

The relay swimmers from the other seven countries competition kept to themselves as they sat or did stretches while they waited to called out to the pool deck.

The were far different scenes in the Australian camp, where the girls appeared to be in good spirits, sitting closely in a huddle and happily chatting to each other before holding hands in a circle to pump each other up.

This pre-race footage showed the stark contrast between Australia's womens 4x100 freestyle relay team's last minute preparations (right) compared to their rivals

'They're looking nervous, excited but this is the most exciting time and they are spinning around,' former Olympic swimming champion Leisel Jones explained during Channel Seven's coverage.

'They are all chatting to each other whereas all the other times are facing forward.

'So it is interesting to go see the Australians in a bit of a huddle, which is something that we do very well.'

Australia smashed their previous world record to became the first team to break the 3:30 minute barrier, with McKeon's blistering third relay leg the fifth fastest split in history.

It was relay anchor's Cate Campbell's third gold medal in the event, two days after she led the Australian as one of the nation's flag bearers at the opening ceremony.

It's her sister Bronte's second relay gold medal in the event along with McKeon's while 19-year-old Harris is a first-time Olympian.

Australian swimmers Mollie O'Callaghan and Maddie Wilson, who swam in the relay heats on Saturday night will also receive medals.

Emma McKeon, Bronte Campbell, Meg Harris and Cate Campbell embrace after becoming the first women's 100 metre freestyle team to break the 3.30minute barrier

Channel Seven reporter Nathan Templeton paid tribute to the harmony within the relay team after interviewing them post-race.

'Last night, there was a nice little moment off camera. Mollie O'Callaghan, the 17-year-old who did a terrific lead-off leg looked a bit nervous as she came to walk up to the mic,' he said.

'I noticed Bronte Campbell touch her on the arm and reassure her.

'Tonight, Meg Harris wears hearing aides. She has trouble earring. Bronte came over to me just before and said can you just give us a little heads up on what you are going to ask Meg because she might not be able to hear you.

'So that's just the idea of the sort of team work that goes into that magnificent dream team.

Bronte Campbell, Meg Harris, Emma McKeon and Cate Campbell won Australia's first gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics

Both the Australian (right) and second-placed Canadian teams (left) were in high spirits after delivering a powerhouse performances in the 4x100m freestyle relay

The ecstatic Australian team were captured celebrating their win by the poolside along second place Canada who showed no signs of disappointment about silver

A beaming Bronte described the relay win as an incredible moment for the team.

'It's incredible,' she said.

'It has been a long time with my team.'

'One of my favourite memories of being part of the Australian team is being part of this particular team. It's an incredible group of girls.'

Harris added: 'There is no feeling like it. Last night swimming with Maddie I walked out and it was insane.'

'Then to get the opportunity to do it again in the final is even better.'

The women's swimming team dominated the relay from the outset toeing the lead in the first 100 metres.

They began to gain distance from their opponents when McKeon took to the water before Cate jumped in and secured the lead by several seconds.

Bronte Campbell, Emma McKeon, Cate Campbell and Meg Harris set a new world record after finishing the race in 3:29.69 minutes

A beaming Bronte described it as an incredible moment for the team to win the finals

Cate said she could not have asked for a better team to take on the relay.

'I could not be prouder of these girls,' she said. 'It has been a tough ask for everyone to get here and to come away with the win and a world record.'

'You honestly couldn't have asked for anything better.'

Cate thanked her family for their ongoing support and said she could not wait to return home and celebrate the victory with them.

'I hope that you are all smiling as much as we are,' she said. 'It has been a hell of a trip to get here but we are so, so happy. I can't wait to see you soon.'
New Zealand's top privacy tsar, who once described Facebook as 'morally bankrupt pathological liars' is favourite to become the UK's new Information Commissioner.

John Edwards, a lawyer and New Zealand's privacy commissioner, has been recommended for the job and the appointment is awaiting approval by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, according to the Sunday Times.

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) is responsible for upholding information rights in the public interest, promoting openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals.

New Zealander John Edwards has been tipped as the UK's new Information Commissioner

It is an independent public body, sponsored by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS), and has the power to hand out hefty fines to companies caught breaching data laws.

The Sunday Times reported that Edwards was selected by an independent panel as the preferred candidate and he was then recommended for the job by DCMS Secretary of State Oliver Dowden.

If appointed, Edwards would replace the current Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham.

Ms Denham hit headlines last year after it was revealed she was fulfilling the 180,000 role from home during lockdown but was 4,500 miles away in Canada.

New Zealander Edwards has been a vocal critic of social media companies and has deleted his Facebook, claiming it breached privacy laws in his own country.

In the wake of the Christchurch massacre in 2019, which had been livestreamed on Facebook, Edwards hit out at the company in a series of tweets which have since been deleted.

Edwards was reportedly put forward for the job by DCMS Secretary Oliver Dowden (pictured) and the new appointment is now just waiting for approval from Prime Minister Boris Johnson

'Facebook cannot be trusted,' Edwards wrote on Twitter.

'They are morally bankrupt pathological liars who enable genocide (Myanmar), facilitate foreign undermining of democratic institutions,'

'They allow the live streaming of suicides, rapes and murders, continue to host and publish the mosque attack video, allow advertisers to target 'Jew haters' and other hateful market segments, and refuse to accept any responsibility for any content or harm. They #dontgiveazuck,' he added.

Edwards later said he chose to delete the tweets after they prompted 'toxic and misinformed traffic.'

Edwards is a vocal critic of social media and called Facebook 'morally bankrupt pathological liars' in the wake of the Christchurch massacre which was live streamed online (stock image)

Earlier this year, Edwards also criticised the Twitter and Facebook bans of former US President Donald Trump.

He said: 'The Twitter and Facebook bans are arbitrary, cynical, unprincipled and further evidence that regulation of social media platforms is urgently required.

'We should not be abdicating responsibility for the tough policy decisions required and delegating responsibility for our community standards to conflicted corporates.'

News of his potential appointment comes as the UK continues to mount pressure on social media companies to tackle online abuse and harmful misinformation on their platforms.

The government published its Online Safety Bill earlier this year which imposes a 'duty of care' on social media companies, and some other platforms that allow users to share and post material, to remove 'harmful content'.
The TikTok comedian who developed a cult following for predicting NSW's daily Covid count has been charged by police in relation to Sydney's anti-lockdown rally.

Jon-Bernard Kairouz, 24, was among 3,500 who attended an illegal protest in the Sydney CBD on Saturday and was filmed addressing the large crowd on a megaphone.

NSW Police set up Strike Force Seasoned to track down all attendees at the protest, which is now being feared by health officials to be a coronavirus super-spreader event.

More than 200 alleged attendees have been identified so far, including Kairouz.

NSW Police released footage of investigators attending a Belmore home in Sydney's south-west on Sunday, where Kairouz was issued with a penalty infringement notice.

He donned a NSW Blues Origin jersey as he spoke to police as a male friend filmed the encounter.

Kairouz was issued with a court attendance notice for two counts of not complying with notice direction  COVID-19 and encourage the commission of crimes.

He will appear in Bankstown Local Court on September 14.

TikTok comedian Jon-Bernard Kairouz was spotted firing up the anti-lockdown protestors in Sydney's CBD on Saturday

Kairouz was filmed at Saturday's protest holding a megaphone and declaring himself 'the people's Premier' as he whipped a crowd of thousands into a frenzy outside Town Hall on Saturday.

'All we want is freedom,' he shouted to a roar from the crowd, before sharing clips of the speech to his Instagram, which were later deleted.

But the stunt quickly backfired, with some of his 57, 100 followers questioning why he joined thousands of protesters and risked extending the city's lockdown.

'This is f***ing ridiculous,' one person wrote. 'If your aim is freedom  you've f***ed up by bringing thousands of people together. Watch the spike. Congrats!'

'There are people in ICU how selfish can you be?' added another.

Jon-Bernard Kairouz was charged with for two counts of not complying with Covid-19 notice direction and encouraging the commission of crimes

Jon-Bernard Kairouz (in blue) will face court in September after being identified as one of alleged attendees at the protest

Kairouz shot to fame during Sydney's lockdown after correctly reporting how many cases NSW would announce the following morning five times in a row.

His streak ended last Monday with his prediction of 109, beyond the actual figure of 98.

Health Minister Brad Hazzard said it was a 'disappointment someone, somewhere in the system' felt it was necessary to leak the numbers to Mr Kairouz.

'I saw someone saying on social media that it was a sting. No it wasn't,' Mr Hazzard told reporters on Monday.

Jon-Bernard Kairouz speaks to police outside a Belmore home in Sydney's south-west after being issued with a public infringement notice

'It was looking at what the issues were and making sure that the system was such that the information could be kept to the appropriate time.'

NSW, which counts cases over a 24-hour period to 8pm, releases figures and the context of each case daily at 11am.

Kairouz has repeatedly insisted his predictions are the result of 'simple maths', but has not released a single video since his suspected leak in the NSW Health department was outed.

Gladys Berejiklian was recently questioned at a press conference on whether NSW Health had a leak and if she was concerned.

'I know at the moment a lot of people alleged to have various bits of information and that's welcome, we are in democracy,' she said.

When questioned about his newfound social media stardom, Kairouz said he was just trying to enjoy the process and his new-found notoriety.

'I'm having a ball,' he said.

'I've been creating content on Instagram and TikTok for just about a year now and to grow exponentially on the social platforms has been really fun and it's been a whirlwind.'

Kairouz accurately predicted the count of NSW Covid figures five days in a row, before his suspected source in NSW Health was exposed

Jon-Bernard Kairouz (right) was one of dozens of alleged attendees issued with public infringement notices by police on Sunday

Police have received more than 5,500 reports from members of the public as 22 strike force detectives continue to investigate Saturday's protest.

Of the 63 people arrested at the protest, 35 were charged with various offences.

Twenty one men appeared in Parramatta Local Court on Sunday, where 15 were granted bail to appear at Downing Centre and Newtown Local Courts at a later date.

Investigators have since issued two more court attendance notice and public infringement notices to another 16 people on Sunday, including Kairouz.

The latest notices were issued after NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian and police minister David Elliott urged residents to dob in those who posted footage of themselves at the protest.

NSW recorded 141 new cases of coronavirus and two deaths on Sunday, a day after a new record of 163 daily infections was set.

Named and shamed: Everyone in court on Sunday over protest Do you know any of these people? Email: brittany.chain@mailonline.com KRISTIAN PULKOWNIK 33yo M REMON KORKISE 36yo M ROBERT TE BROWN 26yo M ANTHONY NELSON PAZ 26yo M NIKOLA DEDOVIC 20yo M MICHAEL PAZ 28yo M SIMON HATTAWAY 27yo M SEAN RENFORD 44yo M KUPUOVENUA SIPU 29yo M RODRIGO ELICES 28yo M MICHAEL MUSALLAM 31yo M JOSHUA PEDEN 29yo M STEPHEN JOHN BASTIAN 63yo M JOSEPH MEKHAEL 37yo M DAVID CHRISTOPHER WILSON 60yo M DARIO MASLIC 18yo M EVAN BRACK 33yo M ARCHIE REES 26yo M ALEXANDER JEROME CLARQUE 39yo M RUDI VAN SCHAIK 47yo M CALLUM BOWLING, 27yo M Advertisement

Ms Berejiklian was disgusted and heartbroken by those who had shown 'utter contempt for their fellow citizens'.

'We know that events like that can cause those super-spreading events,' she said.

'Please know that all of the sacrifices we've made over the last three or four weeks in particular have resulted in us being able to stabilise the growth in cases.

'We don't want a setback, and yesterday could have been a setback.'

Mr Elliott condemned the thousands of 'very selfish boofheads' who marched.

'Yesterday, cannot happen again. We saw the figures, they are not going down at the rate we want to see them go. And they won't go down if we see the activity we saw yesterday,' he said.

'You need to think again.'
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An emergency plan to tackle the impact of the 'pingdemic' on the UKs food supply network has been an 'absolute disaster' and has done more harm than good, industry bosses have today warned.

Food industry leaders claim they are yet to receive further details from the Government about which workers will be allowed to skip isolation rules if they are 'pinged' by the NHS Covid-19 app.

They also say hundreds of businesses which are to be allowed to take part in the scheme have not yet been briefed on the full details.

It comes after the Government bowed to growing pressure from the industry by allowing a key-worker exemption for food supply chain workers.

Instead of being forced straight into isolation when 'pinged', food supply chain workers, along with a handful of other key workers, will instead be allowed to take part in daily testing.

Up to 10,000 staff, from across 500 different sites, are expected to qualify for the scheme. However supermarket workers are not included. Testing sites are due to be set up at 15 'crucial' supermarket depots as of Monday.

The move came after it was revealed how more than a million adults across the UK have been forced into isolation in the last week - 600,000 of which have been 'pinged' by the NHS Covid-19 app.

The sheer number of workers being forced into isolation - even if they never end up having Covid - has sparked fears of a disruption to the food supply chain and empty supermarket shelves in some areas.

But plans by ministers to fix the issue have today come under fire by industry leaders, who have criticised the Government over a 'lack of communication'.

James Bielby, of the Federation of Wholesale Distribution (FWD), which supplies food to outlets other than supermarkets, told the Observer that the industry still had no idea who is on the list of exempted groups.

He also said that of the 500 businesses supposedly included, only 3 per cent had actually been notified.

Mr Bielby told the paper: 'It's total chaos. There are 15 businesses who were part of the initial run through [of the scheme] on Friday, but there's supposed to be 500 businesses in total, it's entirely opaque.'

The warning comes as in other Covid news:

It was reported that nearly one in five Metropolitan Police officers have been forced off-duty due to being 'pinged';

Transport for London was forced to shut two of its lines this weekend after more than 300 staff were told to self-isolate;

Britain's daily coronavirus cases fell for a fourth day in a row - with a 41 per cent drop on last week to 31,795

A report by MPs warned that taxpayers will pay the price of Covid pandemic for 'decades' to come - and government wasted 2billion on 'useless' PPE

The Government's emergency plan to tackle the pingdemic's impact on the food supply industry has been an 'absolute disaster' and has done more harm than good, industry bosses have today claimed. Pictured: A shopper walks past a row of empty shelves in ASDA Cardiff on Friday)

Food industry leaders claim they are yet to receive further details about which workers will be allowed to skip isolation rules if they are 'pinged' by the NHS Covid-App. Pictured: Empty soft drinks shelves in Tesco in Cardiff on Friday

It comes after the Government bowed to growing pressure from the industry earlier this week to allow a key-worker exemption for food supply chain workers. Pictured: Empty shelves in Sainsbury's Cardiff on Friday

Meanwhile, Shane Brennan, chief executive of the Cold Chain Federation, the organisation representing companies that move frozen and chilled foods, said: 'Several days after the prime minister told us the food supply chain was critical and would be exempt, we still don't have a definitive list of who will be exempt and what is required of them.

'Businesses are fighting to keep food on shelves, and I regret that despite the best intentions in some places, government has done more harm than good.'

It comes as frontline businesses and services paralysed by pingdemic chaos will get access to 200 new testing sites from Monday.

James Bielby, of the Federation of Wholesale Distribution (FWD), which supplies food to outlets other than supermarkets, told the Observer that the industry still had no idea who was actually on the list of exempted groups

The Government on Saturday said in a statement that an expected initial extra 200 testing sites would be opened so that daily contact testing could be 'rolled out to further critical workplaces in England'.

But it came as it was claimed the system causing the problem could not be stopped - because there is not enough testing capacity to allow the 'test and release' method to take over.

The chaotic situation sparked harsh words from some sectors over the lack of clarity from the authorities.

Nick Allen, chief executive of the British Meat Processors Association, added: 'We desperately need this detail and need it quickly.

'The last we heard, communication could be coming on Monday, so we have a long weekend to get through yet. We need a sense of urgency here.'

Richard Harrow, chief executive of the Frozen Food Federation, said: 'The Government announcement last night that parts of the supply chain will be allowed to test and release workers that are pinged by Track and Trace only goes part of the way.

'It shows that yet again Government does not understand how connected the food supply chain is.

Only opening part is unlikely to solve the overall issue. Plus, who is in and who is out, who decides and how do they decide?

'Confusion continues to pervade and I have been advised no list until Monday. This is worse than useless.'

Cornwall Airport Newquay said it was being 'very much affected' by staff shortages due to isolation orders and its boss was not optimistic over discussions over exemptions with the Department for Transport.

Managing director Peter Downes told BBC Radio 4's Today programme yesterday: 'We've been told to expect exemptions in very small numbers of people, in ones and twos, rather than large numbers of staff.

Some 200 new test centres are going to be set up throughout the country to try and stem the chaos caused by the pindemic

Freedom day has prompted an extraordinary onslaught of pings to people following the coronavirus rules still left

Fury as ministers dash to exempt 10,000 critical workers from self-isolation after FINALLY waking up to threat 'pingdemic' could collapse supply chains and spark 'biggest food shortages since the war' Ministers yesterday insisted 10,000 critical workers will be exempted from self-isolation rules almost immediately after finally waking up to warnings the 'pingdemic' could collapse food supply chains. Environment Secretary George Eustice said staff at around 500 sites including supermarket depots will no longer need to quarantine if they come into contact with a positive Covid case. He stressed that firms will not need to apply to be covered by the 'big' change, amid confusion over the emergency measures being taken by ministers to stop supply chains collapsing. Admitting that the government needed to think again after businesses raised the alarm over the sheer scale of absences, he said: 'We will never take risks with our food supply.' The Cabinet minister said the military was 'always on standby', but there were currently no plans to call on them. However, Mr Eustice risked the wrath of other sectors that are being hammered by the escalating problems as he made clear there is no prospect of hospitality staff getting the same treatment. And he declined to give a categorical commitment that fully vaccinated people will be let off isolation rules from August 16 as planned. The comments came as owners of some of the country's largest food producers including the UK's 'Chicken King' revealed they are at 'crisis point' - with a lack of poultry and milk on supermarket shelves and warnings of the 'most serious food shortages that this country has seen in over 75 years'. Advertisement

'When we have between a quarter and a third in some cases of individual teams being pinged by the system in one go, and as soon as you get people back you're often losing others to fresh notifications, we don't believe that the scheme is going to cater for that.'

One industry not to feature in the exemptions list was hospitality, with its trade association warning the sector will have 'one hand tied behind our back' as staff are forced into isolation over Covid-19 contacts during what should be the peak season.

Calling for a 'more pragmatic solution', UKHospitality chief executive Kate Nicholls said: 'We now face a summer of venue closures and reduced service, when we should be at a seasonal peak.

'The sector will do all it can to provide great service, but it will be with one hand tied behind our back.

'Those who are fully vaccinated should be able to test after a ping and, subject to a negative result, carry on with their lives. For those not fully vaccinated two negative tests should be sufficient to return to work.'

Home Secretary Priti Patel insisted: 'Daily testing will keep our frontline teams safe while they continue to serve the public and communities across our country.'

The expansion came after the Government on Thursday announced its programme would allow thousands of workers at up to 500 sites in the food sector to avoid the need to self-isolate if identified as a contact of a coronavirus case, and instead take daily Covid tests.

Discontent with the Government's self-isolation policy was growing at the weekend as food industry bosses condemned changes to ease the 'pingdemic' , hospitality leaders warned of a summer of closures and train operators were forced to cut services.

Pressure has mounted on Downing Street to bring forward the date at which people who are double vaccinated against coronavirus can avoid self-isolation.

There were increasing calls for Boris Johnson to bring forward his wider relaxation of quarantine rules for the fully vaccinated from August 16 as businesses were hampered by staff being told to isolate as coronavirus cases soar.

In a bid to calm the concerns of industry, ministers published a limited list of sectors whose double-jabbed workers are eligible to avoid isolation if they undergo daily testing before the wider easing of rules for England.

Industry leaders said the move did not include sufficient workers but doctors warned the problem is that the Prime Minister has let the virus 'rip' and not the 'pings' being issued by the NHS Covid-19 app to tell coronavirus contacts to isolate.

The mounting criticism came as data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed Covid-19 cases continued to rise, with around one in 75 people in England infected.

The guidance lists 16 sectors: energy, civil nuclear, digital infrastructure, food production and supply, waste, water, veterinary medicines, essential chemicals, essential transport, medicines, medical devices, clinical consumable supplies, emergency services, border control, essential defence and local government

'Pingdemic' chaos in London as TfL closes lines as 300 staff self isolate Transport for London has been forced to close both the Circle and Hammersmith and City Tube lines for the entire weekend after 300 staff were 'pinged' by the NHS Covid tracking app. There will also be changes to the District and Metropolitan lines and short cancellations elsewhere as the so-called 'pingdemic' continues to bring transport networks to their knees. Reduced timetables will also hit railways across England in a bid to improve reliability following a spate of last-minute cancellations. It comes as ministers have tried to cool rising tensions and warnings of food shortages by unveiling plans to exempt 10,000 critical workers from the self-isolation rules - but some industry bosses say the measures do not go far enough. London Underground managing director Andy Lord said: 'We apologise to customers for the impact on Tube services, while we deal with staff shortages across the network due to self-isolation. We are committed to running a frequent and reliable service, but with a reduced number of staff available it's not always possible.' Advertisement

The estimate of the number testing positive - 741,700 - in the week to July 17 is the highest since the week to January 30.

There has been mounting pressure for weeks on the government to tweak the sensitivity of the app or make exemptions for key workers and fully vaccinated Britons following warnings that it could lead to food shortages and major disruptions as the epidemic grows.

Sainsbury's, Tesco , Aldi, Morrisons, Asda , M&S and Waitrose are seeing significant gaps on the shelves in most aisles, but specifically wine, frozen food, fresh meat such as minced beef, dairy products such as cheese, pizzas, bottled water, fruit, vegetables and packaged salads and cooked meats.





One shopper at Lidl in Mirfield West Yorkshire told MailOnline the situation was an 'utter joke' and felt like the start of the 2020 lockdown.

They described 'empty freezers, hardly any wine and virtually no detergent', adding: 'Next there will be rationing'.

Iceland boss Richard Walker has warned that Britain's creaking food supply chains are on the brink of collapse causing shortages of products in shops with 1,000 of his staff - one in 20 - among the 1.7million Britons currently stuck at home.

UK supermarkets are in the midst of a perfect storm of staff and stock problems with tens of thousands of workers self-isolating because of the 'pingdemic'.

The struggle to stack shelves and staff stores and warehouses is being made worse by a lack of lorry drivers to deliver food.

The Road Haulage Association believes the country is 100,000 HGV drivers short - and thousands of prospective drivers are waiting for their HGV tests due to a backlog caused by lockdown, while many existing ones have returned to the EU from the UK after Brexit.

It came as businesses, including one of Britain's largest food distribution firms, Bidfood, began taking the crisis into their own hands and began advising workers who are pinged by the NHS app to take tests and continue working rather than stay at home for up to ten days as the Government suggests.

Mr Kwarteng said: 'The rule is very clear, we should self-isolate. It's as simple as that. If you are pinged, you should self-isolate. I'm not going to countenance people breaking the rules or anything like that. I think they should just follow them'.

MailOnline has contacted the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) for comment.

Meanwhile, it was today revealed nearly one in five Metropolitan Police officers are currently absent from duty after being forced to self isolate amid pingdemic chaos.

Around 17 per cent of the forces' officers are currently self isolating, the highest since the start of the pandemic.

Police were made exempt from self isolation on Thursday, but only if their employers specified their names and they were double-jabbed against Covid-19.

Chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation Ken Marsh said the force was 'massively struggling'.

'We are not performing the role properly. We were not offered the jab and now we have got almost one in five officers off sick or self-isolating.

'It is coming home to roost and the Government is going to come unstuck,' he told the Telegraph.
A fit and healthy Brazilian finance worker in the final year of her Masters degree in Sydney has been revealed as the shock young victim who tragically died of Covid-19.

Adriana Midori Takara, 38, returned a positive test for the highly infectious Indian Delta variant on July 15 and succumbed to her illness less than two weeks later.

Friends claimed she contracted the virus from her roommate who works as a nurse, and despite trying to get an AstraZeneca vaccine, was denied by her doctor.

Ms Takara had no underlying health conditions that would have contributed to her death and her distraught family back home were forced to say their final goodbyes over Zoom.

But the tearful conversation was one-way with Ms Takara never regaining consciousness after emergency heart surgery, after the viral infection spread to her heart.

Premier Gladys Berejiklian said the young woman's death should serve as a stark warning to those complacent about the virus that it does not discriminate.

Adriana Midori Takara, 38 (pictured), returned a positive test for the highly infectious Indian Delta variant on July 15 and succumbed to her illness less than two weeks later

Ms Takara, was living in Sydney's CBD with her boyfriend and on the cusp of finishing her graduate degree in accounting at the Kaplan Business School.

One of their housemates was a nurse who recently tested positive for Covid, a friend claimed on Facebook, sending the unvaccinated couple who would later test positive into isolation.

Just a few days later her boyfriend called an ambulance and Ms Takara was rushed to the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital feeling very 'unwell'.

'A day or two after admission, Adriana complained of chest pains. Medical staff assessed her having a heart attack,' her friend Jules Pedrosa wrote on Facebook.

'She needed immediate surgery and an instrument (don't know if it was a pacemaker or otherwise) had to assist her heart to maintain a regular rhythm.

'Adriana's health condition worsened after a few days and further tests confirmed that her heart had a "viral infection".

'This is interesting because she and her family have no history of heart disease.'

Ms Takara (pictured) had no underlying health conditions that would have contributed to her death

He said her condition deteriorated so quickly that a decision was made with the relevant consent from family members to switch off the life-preserving machines.

Under Sydney's strict lockdown rules, no friends or family were allowed to visit Ms Takara in the intensive care unit, forcing loved ones to say a teary goodbye over video link.

'All goodbyes were said via Zoom to audiences in Australia and Brazil,' Mr Pedrosa said.

'Communication was one-way because she had been unconscious for several hours after her emergency heart surgery.'

Ms Takara, was living in Sydney's CBD with her boyfriend and on the cusp of finishing her graduate degree in accounting at the Kaplan Business School (pictured)

The young student is understood to have lived in Bondi (pictured, locals in the area on Sunday)

'It's shocking... she was healthy, happy, working, she had a boyfriend. It's shocking,' Marlene Coimbra (pictured) said

A student liaison officer at the school were Ms Takara studied, who quickly became close friends with the finance worker, said she's 'mortified' by her tragic death.

Marlene Coimbra, who works for the educational consultancy firm Superstudent, said Ms Takara's health rapidly deteriorated after her diagnosis.

'The virus debilitated her very, very quickly. It's shocking... she was healthy, happy, working, she had a boyfriend. It's shocking,' she told the Daily Telegraph.

'She was very young, someone who had a future ahead full of plans and dreams. It's so sad.'

Ms Takara moved to Australia from Sao Paulo in 2019 and quickly became part of the 'family' in Sydney's tightknit expat community of South Americans.

One of her friends shared a heartfelt message on Facebook reminding Australians that she is not just another coronavirus statistic.

Gladys Berejiklian (pictured on Sunday) revealed the young woman was among two people who died from the virus on Saturday

'Adriana is not a number, she is a woman with dreams and wishes,' Fernanda Ferreira Batista posted on Sunday.

'Adriana is a daughter, sister, aunty, niece and specially a friend. An amazing friend, not only my friend but friend of so many people,'

'Tonight when you look at the sky, it will be brighter and the shiniest star will be my friend is peace away of all this madness.

'I can't thank enough all the doctors for doing their best.'

An emotional Ms Coimbra warned young people in Australia, particularly those living in locked down coronavirus hotspots like Sydney to get vaccinated.

'We have to tell young people, they need to get vaccinated, they need to take care of their bodies,' she said.

'Take care of yourself, this virus doesn't just hurt old people.'

While case numbers dropped on Sunday, officials are still concerned about the number of people in the community who are infectious

NSW reported 141 new locally acquired Covid cases on Sunday bringing the total number of infections since the outbreak began last month to 2081.

But Ms Takara's shocking death was not the only coronavirus fatality reported over the weekend.

A second woman, in her 70s from southwest Sydney, also died.

'Please note that younger people without pre-existing conditions can also fall victim to this cruel disease,' Ms Berejiklian said.

'This is a horribly cruel disease, and that's why our response has been so strong against it.'

The Premier warned that warned 38 of these new recorded cases were infectious in the community during Sunday morning's press conference.

There are 141 patients with Covid in Sydney hospitals. Of these, 43 are in intensive care with 42 of them unvaccinated. One has received just their first jab.

One patient in hospital is in their teens, while there are seven people in their 20s, and three in their 30s. There are 32 patients aged between 50 and 79 in hospital.

Sydney is now entering its fifth week of lockdown since the new outbreak began (pictured, the eerily quiet city on Sunday)

The Premier delivered the update alongside Dr Jeremy McAnulty of NSW Health, giving chief health officer Kerry Chant a day off from being the bearer of bad news.

But while case numbers dropped on Sunday, officials are still concerned about the number of people in the community who are infectious.

There are major concerns that Saturday's protests will prove to have been a super spreading event, and authorities are calling on the estimated 3,500 people who attended in Sydney to get a Covid test for the sake of the community.

'I'm appealing to all 3,500 people to get tested tomorrow, if not for themselves for the sake of their family and friends,' Police Minister David Elliott said.

In total, 57 demonstrators were charged during the event, but detectives are working round the clock to identify those who opted against wearing face masks in direct defiance of public health orders.

'It broke my heart,' Ms Berejiklian said of seeing pictures of all the protesters.

'Millions of people across our state are doing the right thing and it broke my heart that people had such a disregard for their community. I'm disgusted.'

'Thank you for the people doing the right thing and for those that aren't... you should be ashamed of yourselves.'
Victims of loutish anti-social behaviour are failing to report incidents with actual cases thought to be double official figures, new research has found.

Residents have reported huge surges in the number of incidents such as rowdy neighbours and drinking in the street since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.

And police forces last year recorded two million incidents, up from 1.3million the year before, though a number of forces included breaches of coronavirus rules in the same category.

Now a study has found that 56 per cent of people who were victims or witnesses to loutish behaviour did not report it to any authority.

Victims of loutish anti-social behaviour are failing to report incidents with actual cases thought to be double official figures, new research has found (Pictured: Sean Ivey and his family, whose home was destroyed in an arson attack in March this year)

More than a fifth of people also said the incidents made them feel unsafe where they live.

And 20 per cent of those surveyed said anti-social behaviour had caused them to move or consider leaving their homes.

Several local authorities and victims' groups reported huge surges of up to 140 per cent in the number of cases for periods of last year.

Police also found that they had experienced a 12 per cent increase when discounting breaches of covid-19 regulations.

Mr Ivey, who lives with his wife Kate, 35, and two children Georgia, seven, and Benjamin, five, was targeted after standing up to anti-social gangs in Wingate, County Durham

Community safety group Resolves survey of 2,000 people also found that 45 per cent of people said anti-social behaviour was a problem where they live while more than a third said it had increased in the last three years.

Victim Sean Ivey, a 38-year-old former marine who retrained as a primary school teacher, saw his family's home destroyed in an arson attack in March this year.

Mr Ivey, who lives with his wife Kate, 35, and two children Georgia, seven, and Benjamin, five, was targeted after standing up to anti-social gangs in Wingate, County Durham.

He said: 'Loads of people got in touch to say they were sick of it.

'Later on someone sent me a message saying that theyd seen an image of my house on the Snapchat social media channel with a flaming emoji on it.

'I phoned the police and they said someone would be out in a couple of hours, but no one came.

Mr Ivey said that we must stand up to anti-social behaviour, adding that what happened to him and his family could happen to anyone 'if ASB is left to run riot'

'Enough is enough. Weve seen a big rise in ASB in the area and we must stand up to it.

'What has happened to me and my family can happen to anyone if ASB is left to run riot.'

Last year Home Secretary Priti Patel was accused of being in 'denial' over the extent of the anti-social behaviour problem by Victims' Commissioner Dame Vera Baird QC.

She added: 'We must understand why more than half of people who are victims or witness to ASB dont come forward to report it.

'The worry is that victims are too scared to take a stand against ASB.

'We must make sure that all the authorities know of this hidden victim community and listen out keenly for their voices to be heard.'

Rebecca Bryant OBE, chief executive of Resolve, said: 'Since the pandemic hit last year, cases of anti-social behaviour have been on the rise across the country.

'Teams on the frontline have been at breaking point trying to deal with new cases and finding ways to support victims while working around the restrictions that have been put in place.

After the fire, someone messaged Mr Ivey and said that they'd seen an image of his house on Snapchat with a flame emoji on it (pictured: the fire at Mr Ivey's house)

'Whatever the national statistics say, our research shows that the situation in communities is even worse than is being reported.'

Andy Prophet, Assistant Chief Constable at Essex Police and National Policing lead for tackling Anti-Social Behaviour, said: Anti-Social Behaviour is not low-level. It can wreck lives and damages communities.

Policing will continue to work in close partnership with other local agencies to listen to victims, understand their problem and take sensible, joined up action to address the underlying causes.'

Minister for Safeguarding Victoria Atkins said: 'We know that, where left unchecked, anti-social behaviour can have an overwhelming and devastating impact on victims and our communities.

'We are very much determined to create safe and peaceful communities where people can thrive.'
The driver of a tram that derailed in Croydon killing seven people and injuring 51 others has said he is living a 'nightmare' in 'hell' over the incident.

Alfred Dorris, 47, told police he will 'never get over' the events of November 9, 2016, in transcripts of a lengthy interview reported by The Telegraph.

During the interview, which took place 10 months after the crash with his lawyers present, Mr Dorris claimed to have repeatedly apologised to passengers at the crash site.

The tram driver has never spoken publicly about the incident.

Seven passengers died and a further 51 were injured when the tram derailed in South London. Dane Chinnery, 19, Philip Seary, 57, Dorota Rynkiewicz, 35, Robert Huxley, 63, and Philip Logan, 52, all from New Addington, and Donald Collett, 62, and Mark Smith, 35, both from Croydon, were killed in the crash.

The report comes just days after a jury reached the unanimous conclusion that the deaths in 2016 were a result of an accident, saying that Mr Dorris had become 'disorientated'.

Several members of the victims' families walked out of the room at Croydon Town Hall in tears after the decision was announced on Thursday.

The driver of a tram that derailed in Croydon killing seven people and injuring 51 others has said he is living a 'nightmare' in 'hell' over the incident. Pictured: The scene of the derailment in 2016

The tram (pictured) derailed near the Sandilands stop in Croydon, South London, on November 9, 2016. Drive Alfred Dorris, 47, told police he will 'never get over' the events of November 9, 2016, in transcripts of a lengthy interview

On Thursday, a jury reached the unanimous conclusion that the deaths in 2016 were a result of an accident, saying that Mr Dorris had become 'disorientated'. Pictured: The scene of the derailment in 2016

They say that Mr Dorris never apologised for the incident and say the senior coroner in the inquest refused to call a number of people who they wanted to give evidence about alleged safety failings.

Prior to the crash, Mr Dorris had a perfect record and was very familiar with the stretch of track where the accident occurred, having driven it 693 times without incident.

He struggled to explain to police why he failed to brake in time before reaching the Sandilands bend, saying he became 'disorientated' and 'confused' while halfway through the tunnel, believing he was travelling in the opposite direction.

'When I realised where I was it was too late for me to do anything.'

Mr Dorris insisted he did not fall asleep while driving but said he 'blacked out' as the carriage rolled off the track.

'I was upset, you know traumatised. I weren't sure what had actually happened... I was upset... angry,' he said in the interview, according to The Telegraph.

He went on to tell police that he 'got really emotional' when rescuers told him people were under the tram and said he repeatedly apologised to passengers as they were taken from the wreckage.

'I was just saying to them, "I'm so sorry." then it got too emotional for me and I had to get out and ... collapsed.'

'All I think about, [is] how it's affected everyone else - all the families. You know I'll never get over it. It's something that I'm going to have to carry forever.'

(From left) Phil Seary, 57, Dane Chinnery, 19, and Donald Collett, 62, of Croydon, were all killed in the crash in 2016

(From left) Dorota Rynkiewic, 35, was also killed, as were Mark Smith, 35, Philip Logan, 52, and Robert Huxley, 63

Mr Dorris told police he was not thinking of himself but rather the families of the victims who now have to spend birthdays and Christmases without their loved ones, saying: 'It's going to be hell for them.'

'I know their life has changed forever now. I think the people will be blaming me for what happened to them and I'll never ever be able to get over it. That's how I feel all the time and every day.

'People may think it's been easy, but it's not been easy for me. By thinking, oh you know, oh look at him, he can carry on living a normal life. But it's not like that. I'm living the nightmare every day. It's hell. And you know, that's why I'm sorry, because it's horrible.'

Jean Smith, the mother of Mark Smith, told The Telegraph that Mr Dorris's comments were 'not worth the paper it's written on'.

'It was not an apology to the families of the seven who died or anyone else. This was an apology to himself for being in this situation.'

Following the jury's decision on Thursday, it emerged that the South London senior coroner Sarah Ormond-Walshe refused to call a number of people who the victims' families wanted to give evidence about alleged safety failings.

Those potential witnesses include senior managers of operator Tram Operations Ltd (TOL) - a subsidiary of FirstGroup - and Transport for London (TfL), plus other experts and tram drivers.

The victims' families will now call on the Attorney General Michael Ellis QC to apply to the High Court to grant a new inquest. They will also seek to judicially review Ms Ormond-Walshe's decision on which witnesses to call.

A lawyer representing the families of those killed claimed the inquest was 'a missed opportunity' as a result of the decision not to hear more evidence, while a relative of one victim said: 'Justice has been suffocated.'

Danielle Wynne, granddaughter of victim Philip Logan, said on Thursday: 'I'm so upset and angry. It's not an accident. Someone is to blame. We want lessons to be learned so that no other family has to go through this.'
Boris Johnson is facing a cabinet revolt over his plans to increase National Insurance to fund his social care reform plans.

The Prime Minister has been considering a 1 percentage point increase in National Insurance to pay for a lifetime cap on the amount people contribute towards their care.

The new levy would be charged on both employers and employees, raising 10billion a year.

The NI plan faced criticism because it would hit lower-paid workers more than an increase in income tax, and because those of pension age do not pay NI even if they still work.

It has now emerged Prime Minister is now also facing a revolt from inside his own cabinet as ministers have said they won't back the plan.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson is facing a cabinet revolt over his plans to increase National Insurance to fund his social care reform plans which would see a lifetime cap on care bills

According to the Sunday Times, five ministers have said that they oppose the proposed rise which has yet to be finally agreed.

It was reported Rishi Sunak and Sajid Javid were on the verge of agreeing the plans but a source told the Sunday Times Mr Sunak was 'uncomfortable' with the idea.

The source added: 'Raising national insurance and giving pensioners a pay rise at the same time smacks of intergenerational unfairness.'

One cabinet minister told the newspaper: 'I don't think it is right, particularly after the pandemic, to be asking 20 and 30-year-olds to pay more, especially when we also want them to get on to the housing ladder.'

Another cabinet minister said: 'Raising NI in the way proposed would increase intergenerational unfairness and would hit the working young given that people do not pay NI beyond state pension age. I don't see why we can't pay for social care out of the existing budget by making savings.'

Sources says Chancellor Rishi Sunak is 'uncomfortable' with raising NI to pay for the care plan

A third said: 'I don't think the public are going to buy the idea that by raising NI, we are not breaching our manifesto pledge not to breach taxes. That's simply semantics.'

It comes after Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng publicly dismissed the idea of funding social care reforms by hiking national insurance.

In a round of interviews on Thursday Mr Kwarteng pointed to the vow in the Tory manifesto that NI, income tax and VAT will not be increased during this Parliament.

'That's what it says in the manifesto, I don't see how we could increase national insurance,' he told Sky News.

'But you know things have been very flexible over the last 18 months, we've lived through an unprecedented time, we've been spending huge amounts of money that we never thought was possible and it's up to the Chancellor and the Treasury, and the wider Government, to decide a budget.'

Last week, business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng publicly dismissed the idea of raising NI

Mr Kwarteng added: 'I don't think we'll put up national insurance in that specific'

Economists have been scathing about the idea, branding it the least fair way as it hits those on the lowest incomes and pensioners do not pay.

Mr Johnson's attempts to reach cross-party consensus on social care suffered a further blow as Sir Keir Starmer labelled the NICs funding stream a 'jobs tax'.

Sir Keir argued at PMQs that charging businesses could deter them from employing extra people.

The Labour leader said: 'The trouble is that nobody believes a word the Prime Minister says any more.

'He promised he had a plan for social care, but he has ducked it for two years. He promised not to raise tax, but now he is planning a jobs tax.'

Last week, the architect of the care cap had said wealthy pensioners should contribute towards the costs of reforms.

Sir Andrew Dilnot said Englands social care system is a massive political failure that has gone on for decades.

And he said any tax rise to pay for the reforms should encompass those past retirement age as well as those below it.

Sir Andrew told BBC Newsnight that a rise in income tax would be more sensible, as that encompassed pensioners.

However, the move would be controversial because Mr Johnsons 2019 manifesto pledged not to increase income tax, NI or VAT.

Sir Andrew said: I think theres a strong case to be made for making sure that however the money is raised those over retirement age as well as those under retirement age make a contribution.

About half of social care spending is actually on people of working age not on the elderly and three quarters of us will in the end need social care.

But I certainly think its entirely reasonable and appropriate that people over retirement age as well as under retirement age should pay towards this thing that will benefit many of us.

Sir Andrew, an economist, came up with the idea of a lifetime cap on the amount spent on care back in 2011.
The disgraced former Post Office chief blamed for pursuing a 90million court case against her own staff could be stripped of her CBE under a Government review, it has been reported.

Ministers are said to be looking at launching a probe into the Horizon subpostmasters scandal.

It could ultimately see ex-boss chief executive Paula Vennells stripped of her 2019 honour, reports the Telegraph.

The scandal saw hundreds of innocent Post Office staff sacked, bankrupted or wrongly convicted after cash appeared to vanish from their tills because of a computer glitch.

Ms Vennells was awarded the CBE in the 2019 New Year's Honour's list 'for services to the Post Office and to charity'.

The award was made nearly a year before the first group of subpostmasters were awarded compensation for their false prosecution.

Dozens have since won cases in the Court of Appeal, in what has previously been described as the 'biggest miscarriage of justice in modern English legal history'.

And it has led union bosses to repeatedly call for Ms Vennells, who was CEO of the Post Office from 2012 to 2019, to be stripped of her CBE.

Ms Vennells was awarded the CBE in the 2019 New Year's Honour's list 'for services to the Post Office and to charity'

The scandal saw hundreds of innocent Post Office staff sacked, bankrupted or wrongly convicted after cash appeared to vanish from their tills because of a computer glitch. Pictured: Postmaster Tom Hedges celebrates after 39 former subpostmasters win victory in the Court of Appeal

Paula Vennells: Post Office boss in postmasters scandal is willing to appear at inquiry The former chief of the Post Office during the subpostmasters scandal has confirmed she is willing to appear as a witness in the inquiry into the UK's biggest miscarriage of justice. Paula Vennells, who ran the Post Office between 2012 and 2019, said she welcomed the move to give the inquiry statutory powers to compel witnesses to appear or risk jail for non-attendance. She said in a statement: 'It is beyond doubt there are serious and unanswered questions as to the manner in which subpostmasters were wrongly prosecuted. 'All those involved in any way have a duty to those subpostmasters and their families, who were innocent victims, to ensure that this can never happen again.' Mrs Vennells, an ordained priest, joined the Post Office in 2007 and was promoted to CEO in 2012. She is said to have known that money could appear to be missing from the accounts. Over two decades, hundreds of postmasters were bankrupted, sacked or jailed. After leaving the Post Office, she landed roles as an adviser to the Cabinet Office and chairman of Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust in London. She was given a CBE in 2019 for services to the Post Office and to charity. The married mother-of-two kept the 4.5million she earnt during her Post Office tenure, and received 140,000 a year advising supermarket chain Morrisons and homeware retailer Dunelm before her resignation from both in April. In June last year, she was forced to step back from the Church of England's ethical investment advisory group due to the furore over the scandal. In evidence to the Commons business committee she sought to shift the blame for the IT scandal, insisting she did not approve prosecutions of her staff and was misled by computer experts. She was accused of treating postmasters 'with contempt and derision'. Ms Vennells oversaw the organisation whilst it routinely denied that there were problems with its Horizon IT system, instead accusing subpostmasters of stealing money. Ms Vennells, who was an associate minister in the Diocese of St Albans, announced at the time that she would also be stepping back from her regular church duties in the wake of the Horizon scandal. She also quit non-executive board roles at high street retailers Morrisons and Dunelm.

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And that could now happen as part of a Government review into the scandal, reports the Telegraph.

According to the paper, ministers are looking to launch a review - which is likely to assess the level of involvement of figures working at the Post Office at the time.

It is understood by the Telegraph that Ms Vennells, along with Alice Perkins, the former chairman of the Post Office, who his married to former Labour Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, and who was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath in 2002.

Should the review finding compelling evidence against those involved, their names could be submitted to Parliament's forfeiture committee, which has the power to revoke honours with the approval of the Queen, the Telegraph adds.

A government source told the paper: 'These honours are often dished out to people in the public sector simply for doing their jobs, even when they are completely hopeless out of them.

'But some of those in the senior echelons of the Post Office were worse than hopeless, they were cruel.

'It would undermine what little confidence is left in the honours system not to look at stripping gongs from those involved.'

It comes after 12 subpostmasters were earlier this week cleared by the Court of Appeal after being wrongly convicted in the Post Office IT scandal.

Among them was Hasmukh Shingadia, 62, from Upper Bucklebury in West Berkshire, owns a convenience store in the area which the Duke and Duchess used to visit.

He was accused by the Post Office of stealing 16,000 and pleaded guilty because he was 'made to feel' he had to.

Mr Shingadia was given an eight-month suspended prison sentence in 2011 but has since had it quashed.

He told the Reading Chronicle: 'I was in all the newspapers as the royal wedding guest who was a thief and a fraudster so today is massive for me and my family, but also of course the other subpostmasters who have had their convictions quashed,' he said.

'I'd seen Kate Middleton grow up and I remember her being in my shop on the day the radio was saying she was to marry William. Being a guest at the wedding meant the press focused on my case in court.

'It was an awful time for us when I was convicted. My mother had died the previous year, Id had cancer and undergone surgery to remove a sarcoma, and my daughters were only young at the time and they had people telling them at school that their dad was a thief.'

In April, 39 former subpostmasters who were convicted and even jailed for theft, fraud and false accounting had their names cleared - some after fighting for nearly 20 years.

On Monday, three senior judges overturned the convictions of a further 12 people who were convicted based on evidence from the faulty IT system used by the Post Office from 2000.

Hundreds of innocent Post Office staff were blamed for losses in branch accounts caused by serious flaws in the Fujitsu-developed Horizon computer system which was in use between 1999 and 2015.

Hasmukh Shingadia (pictured with his wife Chandrika outside their Spar shop), 62, from Upper Bucklebury in West Berkshire, owns a convenience store in the area which the Duke and Duchess used to visit

The Court of Appeal has cleared 12 more former subpostmasters who were wrongly convicted of offences as a result of the Post Office Horizon scandal. Pictured: Former Post Office workers celebrating in April after their convictions were overturned

Between 1999 and 2015, hundreds of postmasters were sacked or prosecuted after money appeared to go missing from their branch accounts (file image)

Rather than admit the IT system was defective, the Post Office concealed evidence of the glitches and instead forced its own staff to plead guilty to crimes they knew they had not committed, lawyers representing the 42 who sought to get their convictions overturned by the Court of Appeal said.

Many postmasters and postmistresses were prosecuted for theft, fraud and false accounting, while others were hounded out of work or forced to pay huge sums of 'missing' money. The scandal blighted their lives, as former staff lost their homes and marriages, and suffered ill health as a result.

What was the Horizon computer system and how did it go wrong? Between 1999 and 2015, hundreds of postmasters were sacked or prosecuted after money appeared to go missing from their branch accounts (file image) Horizon, an IT system developed by the Japanese company Fujitsu, was rolled out by the Post Office from 1999. The system was used for tasks such as transactions, accounting and stocktaking. However, subpostmasters complained about defects after it reported shortfalls - some of which amounted to thousands of pounds. Some subpostmasters attempted to plug the gap with their own money, even remortgaging their homes, in an attempt to correct an error. Between 1999 and 2015, hundreds of subpostmasters were sacked or prosecuted due to the glitches. The ex-workers blamed flaws in the IT system, Horizon, but the Post Office denied there was a problem. In case after case the Post Office bullied postmasters into pleading guilty to crimes they knew they had not committed. Many others who were not convicted were hounded out of their jobs or forced to pay back thousands of pounds of 'missing' money. The Post Office spent 32million to deny any fault in their IT system, before capitulating. However, the postmasters and postmistresses said the scandal ruined their lives as they had to cope with the impact of a conviction and imprisonment, some while they had been pregnant or had young children. Marriages broke down, and courts have heard how some families believe the stress led to health conditions, addiction and premature deaths. Advertisement

One former postmaster, Martin Griffiths, killed himself after he was falsely suspected of stealing 60,000, while some have since died and 'gone to their graves' with convictions against their names.

Lord Justice Holroyde and two other judges quashed the convictions of Robert Ambrose, Hasmukh Shingadia, John Armstrong, Timothy Brentnall, Jerry Hosi, Gurdeep Singh Dhale, John Dickson, Abiodun Omotoso, Malcolm Watkins, Sami Sabet, Carina Price and Rizwan Manjra.

Their appeals were unopposed by the Post Office, and the judge said the court would give full reasons in writing at a later date, but that they should be cleared as soon as possible in the circumstances.

In a statement after the ruling, Post Office chairman Tim Parker issued a grovelling apology for 'the impact on the lives of these postmasters and their families that was caused by historical failures'.

The Post Office had spent 32million to deny any fault in Horizon before capitulating and has since paid a 58million settlement to 557 postmasters following an acrimonious High Court battle. It now faces a further 2,400 claims under a new compensation scheme.

But lawyers representing the former postmasters claimed the Post Office 'still appears to care little about the people whose lives it has destroyed' and called on Prime Minister Boris Johnson to announce a 'judge-led public inquiry', with the power to summons witnesses, into the prosecutions of postmasters.

The Communication Workers Union called for criminal investigations into senior Post Office figures who 'oversaw the criminalisation of hundreds of postmasters' and called for former CEO Paula Vennells, who is said to have known that Horizon could cause money to appear to be missing, to be stripped of her CBE.

Nick Read, Post Office chief executive, said: 'The quashing of historical convictions is a vital milestone in fully and properly addressing the past as I work to put right these wrongs as swiftly as possible, and there must be compensation that reflects what has happened.'

In a statement, Helen Pitcher, chairman of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) - which referred the 42 subpostmasters' convictions to the Court of Appeal - said: 'This has been a serious miscarriage of justice which has had a devastating impact on these victims and their families.

'Every single one of these convictions has clearly had a profound and life-changing impact for those involved.

'Six convictions had already been quashed which had been referred to Southwark Crown Court.

'The Post Office has rightly acknowledged the failures that led to these cases and conceded that the prosecutions were an abuse of process.

Former subpostmasters Janet Skinner (left) and Tracy Felstead (right) outside the Royal Courts of Justice, London, ahead of their appeal against a conviction of theft, fraud and false accounting in March

'We sincerely hope that lessons will be learned from this to prevent anything similar happening elsewhere in the future.'

From wrongful imprisonment to strokes and even suicide: How the Horizon IT scandal devastated victims' lives Welsh postmaster jailed for nine months 'fell off the ladder' after conviction - before picking himself up and seeking challenge to Post Office prosecution Noel Thomas was jailed for nine months in 2006 after he was accused of stealing 48,000 Noel Thomas was jailed for nine months in 2006 after he was accused of stealing 48,000 while he was working for the Post Office in Gaerwen on Anglesey. He told the BBC that he admitted to the charge because he never reported discrepancies he noticed, but insisted he did not take the money and blamed the Horizon computer system. 'I want everyone to have their name cleared and to get to the bottom of what has happened and where the money has gone to,' Mr Thomas told BBC Newyddion 9. 'Thirteen years after jail, I must admit it was hard but I gradually got my confidence back through family, friends and work colleagues. 'Yes, I do feel bitter, and not just for myself - the Post Office have been coming and telling people that they have taken money, that they are a thief.' Family of postmaster who killed himself after being wrongly accused of theft demand Post Office bosses are held accountable Martin Griffiths, 59, took his own life in 2013 after he was falsely suspected of stealing money from Post Office Father-of-two Martin Griffiths, 59, took his own life in 2013 after he was falsely suspected of stealing money from a Post Office in Ellesmere Port, where he had worked for around 20 years. Mr Griffiths was one of hundreds of postmasters who were suspected of false accounting and theft, with some fired or wrongfully convicted, after amounts appeared to vanish from their tills. The family of Mr Griffiths said he delved into his own savings and those of his parents to pay back around 60,000 he was wrongly suspected of taking from the branch. The turmoil lasted for four years, between 2009 and 2013, and had a huge impact on the father-of-two's physical and mental health, his family said. In 2013, Mr Griffiths parked his car on the A41 in Ellesmere Port after leaving a note for his loved ones and took his own life. His family have called for a stricter line of review from the Government and asked for a judge-led enquiry to get to the bottom of the injustices behind the scandal. Postmaster caught up in major IT scandal which saw many falsely accused of accounting fraud suffered a STROKE after he was hounded for 65,000 Peter Murray said he suffered a series of breakdowns and a stroke after he was hounded for 65,000 Peter Murray said he suffered a series of breakdowns and a stroke after he was hounded for 65,000. The 53-year-old, from Wallasey in Merseyside, has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He said he was suspended without pay and forced to take out loans and borrow from friends to make monthly repayments to the Post Office. He paid 1,000 a month before learning that he was among many sub-postmasters to face false accusations. 'It left me completely devastated,' added the father of three. 'It caused absolute havoc for my family, I have had several nervous breakdowns. It made me feel like a convict, but I'm not going to let it beat me.' Wife finally clears name of her postmaster husband after he died while still facing false Post Office claim he had stolen 46,000 Marion Holmes, 78, won justice for her late husband, Peter Holmes, who was a respected postmaster in Jesmond, Newcastle, before the Post Office Horizon scandal 'destroyed' his good name Marion Holmes, 78, won justice for her husband, Peter, who was a respected postmaster before the Post Office Horizon scandal 'destroyed' his good name. Ex-police officer Peter Holmes had successfully run a sub Post Office in Jesmond, Newcastle, for 13 years, before his world came crashing down due to issues with the Horizon computer system. When more than 46,000 went missing from his books in 2008, Peter found police at his door and shocking criminal accusations made against him. He was forced to admit four counts of false accounting in order to for prosecutors to drop charges of theft of the money, which could have seen him sent to prison. In fact, Peter was one of a number of people wrongly prosecuted by the Post Office over errors its own system had made. Family of one postmaster said he died a broken man after being forced to clean graves as punishment for a crime he did not commit Julian Wilson (pictured with his wife Karen) was shattered by injustice and exhausted by his attempts to clear his name Julian Wilson was shattered by injustice and exhausted by his attempts to clear his name, they said. He died in 2016, at the age of 67, of bowel cancer. His wife Karen says the disease had it roots in the trauma he endured and the all-consuming campaign for redemption. For years the Post Office had stubbornly insisted its IT systems  called Horizon and designed by a company called Fujitsu  never lied, calling them 'robust'. Last year, following a court case brought by 557 postmasters, Mr Justice Fraser branded Horizon not 'remotely robust'. He added: 'This approach by the Post Office has amounted, in reality, to bare assertions and denials that ignore what has actually occurred. 'It amounts to the 21st century equivalent of maintaining that the earth is flat.' Advertisement

At a hearing in March, the court heard subpostmasters' lives were 'irreparably ruined' as they lost their jobs, homes and marriages after they were prosecuted by the Post Office, which knew the Fujitsu-developed system had 'faults and bugs from the earliest days of its operation'.

Hundreds of people who ran Post Office branches were convicted of various offences during the period of time the system was being used.

The court is also considering appeals brought by a further 18 subpostmasters on Monday and is likely to issue directions as to how their cases should progress.

Solicitor Neil Hudgell, of Hudgell Solicitors - who represented the 12 cleared on Monday as well as 33 former subpostmasters who have cleared their names so far - said in April: 'Each and every subpostmaster walked out of the Royal Courts of Justice and down the steps with their heads held high... completely exonerated and found to be entirely innocent by the courts.

'Now we want to make sure we deliver the same outcome for every other family affected by this. The work goes on.'

Three Court of Appeal judges castigated the Government-owned Post Office in April for hounding its own staff before squandering public money trying to cover up the scandal.

Between 1999 and 2015, hundreds of postmasters were sacked or prosecuted after money appeared to go missing from their branch accounts.

Post Office bosses were told glitches in the Fujitsu-developed Horizon computer terminals in branches may be to blame but pursued prosecutions anyway.

In 2019, the Post Office paid a 58million settlement to 557 postmasters following an acrimonious High Court battle, which found the Horizon accounting system contained 'bugs, errors and defects'.

And last year, the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) referred the cases of 42 former subpostmasters - many of whom went to prison - to the Court of Appeal.

The Treasury is braced for payouts that could total hundreds of millions as many of the 685 sub-postmasters who were convicted could claim damages.

'The scandal, labelled the biggest miscarriage of justice in UK history, has already cost the taxpayer 254million in legal fees and compensation.

Campaigners have demanded that police investigate Post Office bosses and Paula Vennells, who presided over the scandal as chief executive from 2012 to 2019, has faced calls to be stripped of her CBE.

Tory peer Lord Arbuthnot said: 'It wasn't until November last year we discovered the Post Office had known for many, many years that their entire prosecution process was riddled with deception, something they then tried to cover up with their shredding of documents.

'It is high time the police began to take a serious look at whether the Post Office management have been perverting the course of justice.'

In total there are believed to be 3,000 postmaster victims who lost their livelihoods, were bankrupted and fell into ill-health after being chased for 'missing' cash.

The Prime Minister has launched an independent inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal and the police are investigating two Post Office IT experts, which could result in charges of perjury.

Last year a judge said the Post Office's computer experts knew about problems in its IT system in 1999  15 years before the company stopped prosecuting postmasters.

But despite the gravity of the case, not a single Post Office boss, civil servant or minister has been sacked.

Paula Vennells, 62, who ran the company between 2012 and 2019, is accused of covering up the fiasco and dragging hundreds of postmasters into the costly court battle.

She has been forced to resign from a series of prestigious roles but has held on to her CBE for 'services to the Post Office and charity'.

The Post Office earlier said:

'Our priority is to fairly resolve the applications... as soon as possible.'

Mr Furey said the CWU wanted the Post Office's former CEO Paula Vennells to be stripped of her CBE.

Ms Vennells was the chief executive during the period where hundreds of postmasters were blamed for losses from branch accounts because of errors in the Horizon computer system.

An ordained priest, she joined the Post Office in 2007 and was promoted to CEO in 2012. She is said to have known that money could appear to be missing from the accounts.

After leaving the Post Office, she landed roles as an adviser to the Cabinet Office and chairman of Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust in London. She was given a CBE in 2019 for services to the Post Office and to charity.

The married mother-of-two kept the 4.5million she earnt during her Post Office tenure, and received 140,000 a year advising supermarket chain Morrisons and homeware retailer Dunelm before resigning her non-executive board member roles with both in April.

In June last year, she was forced to step back from the Church of England's ethical investment advisory group due to the furore over the scandal.

In evidence to the Commons business committee she sought to shift the blame for the IT scandal, insisting she did not approve prosecutions of her staff and was misled by computer experts. She was accused of treating postmasters 'with contempt and derision'.

Lord Justice Holroyde said the Court of Appeal had concluded that, in those three cases, 'the reliability of Horizon data was not essential to the prosecution case and that the convictions are safe'.

In the Court of Appeal's written ruling, Lord Justice Holroyde said Post Office Limited (POL) 'knew that there were problems with Horizon'.

The judge added: 'POL knew that subpostmasters around the country had complained of inexplicable discrepancies in the accounts.

'POL knew that different bugs, defects and errors had been detected well beyond anything which might be regarded as a period of initial teething problems.

'In short, POL knew that there were serious issues about the reliability of Horizon.'

Lord Justice Holroyde continued: 'Yet it does not appear that POL adequately considered or made relevant disclosure of problems with or concerns about Horizon in any of the cases at any point during that period.

'On the contrary, it consistently asserted that Horizon was robust and reliable.

'Nor does it appear that any attempt was made to investigate the assertions of subpostmasters that there must be a problem with Horizon.

'The consistent failure of POL to be open and honest about the issues affecting Horizon can, in our view, only be explained by a strong reluctance to say or do anything which might lead to other subpostmasters knowing about those issues.'

The court's written ruling also said: 'These pervasive failures of investigation and disclosure went in each case to the very heart of the prosecution.

'Whatever charges were brought against an individual appellant, and whatever pleas may ultimately have been accepted, the whole basis of each prosecution was that money was missing from the branch account: there was an actual shortfall, which had been caused by theft on the part of the subpostmaster, or at best had been covered up by false accounting or fraud on the part of the subpostmaster.

'But in the 'Horizon cases', there was no evidence of a shortfall other than the Horizon data.

'If the Horizon data was not reliable, there was no basis for the prosecution.

'The failures of investigation and disclosure prevented the appellants from challenging, or challenging effectively, the reliability of the data.

'In short, POL as prosecutor brought serious criminal charges against the subpostmasters on the basis of Horizon data, and by its failures to discharge its clear duties it prevented them from having a fair trial on the issue of whether that data was reliable.'

Allowing 39 of the appeals on the grounds that those subpostmasters' prosecutions were 'an affront to the conscience of the court', Lord Justice Holroyde said: 'Throughout the period covered by these prosecutions POL's approach to investigation and disclosure was influenced by what was in the interests of POL, rather than by what the law required.'

The judge said there was 'clear evidence of systemic failures by POL over many years', with the same failures occurring in 'case after case, year after year'.

He added: 'POL as prosecutor knew that the consequences of conviction for a subpostmaster would be, and were, severe ... many of these appellants went to prison.'

The judge continued: 'Those that did not suffered other penalties imposed by the courts; all would have experienced the anxiety associated with what they went through; all suffered financial losses, in some cases resulting in bankruptcy; some suffered breakdowns in family relationships; some were unable to find or retain work as a result of their convictions - causing further financial and emotional burdens; some suffered breakdowns in health; all suffered the shame and humiliation of being reduced from a respected local figure to a convicted criminal; and three ... have gone to their graves carrying that burden.'

The Post Office conceded that 39 of the 42 appellants' appeals should be allowed, on the basis that 'they did not or could not have a fair trial'.

But it had opposed 35 of those 39 cases on a second ground of appeal, which is that the prosecutions were 'an affront to justice'.
The UK's privacy tsar has today called for the Government to scrap the NHS Covid-19 app once the pandemic eases - as she vowed 'we'll be watching its evolution very carefully'.

In a stern warning, Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham said ministers must 'decommission' the app once its use is over and avoid developing it into a more permanent feature of British life.

Ministers had initially wanted to build a version of the app that would collect anonymised data on users on a single large NHS database - a plan which was dropped after switching over to a version built by Apple and Google.

But, vowing to keep tabs on 'mission creep', Ms Denham said the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) would continue to closely scrutinise the app's evolution.

And she said her office would not hesitate to take action if the Government 'overreached' and the app strayed from its contact-tracing function.

It comes as the app continues to spark 'pingdemic' chaos across Britain, forcing tube lines to shut and prompting the Government to announce emergency measures in a bid to keep food supplies reaching supermarkets.

Speaking to the Telegraph, Ms Denham said: 'We will be watching the evolution of the app very carefully.

Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham (pictured) said ministers must avoid evolving the app into a more permanent feature of British life

Vowing to keep tabs on 'function creep', Ms Denham said the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) would watch the app's (pictured) evolution 'very carefully'

Pingdemic has put nearly one in FIVE Met Police officers off duty - as crisis causes chaos at border checkpoints, on public transport and for food delivery Nearly one in five Metropolitan Police officers are currently absent from duty after being forced to self isolate amid pingdemic chaos. Around 17 per cent of the forces' officers are currently self isolating, the highest since the start of the pandemic. Police were made exempt from self isolation on Thursday, but only if their employers specified their names and they were double-jabbed against Covid-19. Chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation Ken Marsh said the force was 'massively struggling'. 'We are not performing the role properly. We were not offered the jab and now we have got almost one in five officers off sick or self-isolating. 'It is coming home to roost and the Government is going to come unstuck,' he told the Telegraph. The government on Thursday published a list of exemptions for key workers in energy, waste, water, and food supply and production. Police, border officers, train and lorry drivers were added to the list on Friday night. Workers who avoid self isolation after contact with someone who has Covid will instead be tested daily, allowing them to keep working provided the tests remain negative. The Government on Saturday said in a statement that an expected initial extra 200 testing sites would be opened so that daily contact testing could be 'rolled out to further critical workplaces in England'. Advertisement

'My modus operandi has always been how can we help government get this right and build in privacy to these innovations.

'At the end of the day, if there is a contravention of the law with the app or overreach in its use then we will take action.'

She added: 'The focus of our office will be how it is used next, how else is it going to be used and how it will be decommissioned when it is no longer necessary.'

Ms Denham, whose term as Information Commissioner comes to an end in October, also said British people were 'very suspicious' of schemes that resemble must-carry ID cards.

Speaking about the idea of vaccine passports, after Boris Johnson announced earlier this week that Britons must be double-jabbed to enter night clubs from September, she said: 'You have seen the UK public being very suspicious of the use of ID cards.

'The questions we have to ask ourselves are: is it fair? Is it proportionate? And is it necessary.'

Her comments come as industry bosses today warned how an emergency plan to tackle the impact of the 'pingdemic' on the UKs food supply network has been an 'absolute disaster' and has done more harm than good'.

Food industry leaders claim they are yet to receive further details from the Government about which workers will be allowed to skip isolation rules if they are 'pinged' by the NHS Covid-19 app.

They also say hundreds of businesses which are to be allowed to take part in the scheme have not yet been briefed on the full details.

It comes after the Government bowed to growing pressure from the industry by allowing a key-worker exemption for food supply chain workers.

Instead of being forced straight into isolation when 'pinged', food supply chain workers, along with a handful of other key workers, will instead be allowed to take part in daily testing.

Up to 10,000 staff, from across 500 different sites, are expected to qualify for the scheme. However supermarket workers are not included. Testing sites are due to be set up at 15 'crucial' supermarket depots as of Monday.

The move came after it was revealed how more than a million adults across the UK have been forced into isolation in the last week - 600,000 of which have been 'pinged' by the NHS Covid-19 app.

The Government's emergency plan to tackle the pingdemic's impact on the food supply industry has been an 'absolute disaster' and has done more harm than good, industry bosses have today claimed. Pictured: A shopper walks past a row of empty shelves in ASDA Cardiff on Friday)

The sheer number of workers being forced into isolation - even if they never end up having Covid - has sparked fears of a disruption to the food supply chain and empty supermarket shelves in some areas.

But plans by ministers to fix the issue have today come under fire by industry leaders, who have criticised the Government over a 'lack of communication'.

James Bielby, of the Federation of Wholesale Distribution (FWD), which supplies food to outlets other than supermarkets, told the Observer that the industry still had no idea who is on the list of exempted groups.

He also said that of the 500 businesses supposedly included, only 3 per cent had actually been notified.

Mr Bielby told the paper: 'It's total chaos. There are 15 businesses who were part of the initial run through [of the scheme] on Friday, but there's supposed to be 500 businesses in total, it's entirely opaque.'

Meanwhile, Shane Brennan, chief executive of the Cold Chain Federation, the organisation representing companies that move frozen and chilled foods, said: 'Several days after the prime minister told us the food supply chain was critical and would be exempt, we still don't have a definitive list of who will be exempt and what is required of them.

James Bielby, of the Federation of Wholesale Distribution (FWD), which supplies food to outlets other than supermarkets, told the Observer that the industry still had no idea who was actually on the list of exempted groups

'Businesses are fighting to keep food on shelves, and I regret that despite the best intentions in some places, government has done more harm than good.'

It comes as frontline businesses and services paralysed by pingdemic chaos will get access to 200 new testing sites from Monday.

The Government on Saturday said in a statement that an expected initial extra 200 testing sites would be opened so that daily contact testing could be 'rolled out to further critical workplaces in England'.

But it came as it was claimed the system causing the problem could not be stopped - because there is not enough testing capacity to allow the 'test and release' method to take over.

The chaotic situation sparked harsh words from some sectors over the lack of clarity from the authorities.

Nick Allen, chief executive of the British Meat Processors Association, added: 'We desperately need this detail and need it quickly.

'The last we heard, communication could be coming on Monday, so we have a long weekend to get through yet. We need a sense of urgency here.'

Richard Harrow, chief executive of the Frozen Food Federation, said: 'The Government announcement last night that parts of the supply chain will be allowed to test and release workers that are pinged by Track and Trace only goes part of the way.

'It shows that yet again Government does not understand how connected the food supply chain is.

Only opening part is unlikely to solve the overall issue. Plus, who is in and who is out, who decides and how do they decide?

'Confusion continues to pervade and I have been advised no list until Monday. This is worse than useless.'
Sajid Javid has apologised for a tweet suggesting people should not 'cower' from Covid-19, after bereaved families called his comment 'deeply insensitive'.

The Health Secretary on Sunday deleted the tweet, saying it 'was a poor choice of words and I sincerely apologise'.

In the message, posted a day earlier, Mr Javid announced he had made a 'full recovery' from a coronavirus infection and said his symptoms 'were very mild, thanks to amazing vaccines.'

'Please, if you haven't yet, get your jab, as we learn to live with, rather than cower from, this virus,' he added.

But Mr Javid was forced to apologise after Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice joined MPs in branding his 'cower' remark as insulting to people who have shielded and those who stayed at home to protect society.

On Sunday, he tweeted: 'I was expressing gratitude that the vaccines help us fight back as a society, but it was a poor choice of word and I sincerely apologise.

'Like many, I have lost loved ones to this awful virus and would never minimise its impact.'

The Health Secretary Sajid Javid has apologised for a tweet suggesting people should no 'cower' from Covid-19, after bereaved families called his comment 'deeply insensitive' [File photo]

Co-founder of Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice Jo Goodman had said Mr Javid's original comment was 'deeply insensitive on a number of levels'.

'Not only are they hurtful to bereaved families, implying our loved ones were too cowardly to fight the virus, but they insult all those still doing their best to protect others from the devastation this horrific virus can bring.

'Words matter and the flippancy and carelessness of this comment has caused deep hurt and further muddied the waters of the Government's dangerously mixed messaging,' she said.

The group has welcomed Mr Javid's remarks while urging him to join them for a visit to the Covid memorial wall in London to 'understand the hurt and insult' caused by his 'poor choice of word' remains, Sky reported.

Shadow justice secretary David Lammy questioned use of the word 'cower', as did Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner.

Mr Lammy wrote: '129,000 Brits have died from Covid under your Government's watch.

'Don't denigrate people for trying to keep themselves and their families safe.'

Liberal Democrat health spokeswoman Munira Wilson said Mr Javid's tweet was 'outrageous' while thousands remain in UK hospitals with Covid-19.

'His careless words have insulted every man, woman and child who has followed the rules and stayed at home to protect others,' she said in a statement.

'He owes them all, especially the millions who are shielding, an apology.'

Public health expert Devi Sridhar said his remarks would be 'painful to read for those who were severely ill' and those who lost loved ones to Covid-19.

The professor at the University of Edinburgh wrote: 'It wasn't because they were weak, just unnecessarily exposed to a virus.

'And wanting to avoid getting Covid isn't 'cowering'  it's being sensible & looking out for others.'

Mr Javid, who has received two doses of the vaccine, received a positive test result on July 17 for a coronavirus infection that ultimately sent Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Chancellor Rishi Sunak into isolation as his close contacts.

Mr Johnson's quarantine in his Chequers country residence is expected to finish at the end of Monday, as is Mr Sunak's.

The pair initially tried to avoid isolation by saying they were taking part in a testing pilot, but backed down in the face of widespread public criticism.

Mr Johnson's quarantine in his Chequers country residence is expected to end late on Monday.

Mr Javid's recovery follows junior health minister Jo Churchill announcing on Thursday that she was pinged by the NHS coronavirus app and will be required to quarantine.

Labour leader Keir Starmer is also isolating for the fourth time after one of his children tested positive for coronavirus.

Mr Javid replaced Matt Hancock as Health Secretary last month when the scandal-hit predecessor stood down amid public outrage after leaked CCTV footage showed him kissing an aide in breach of coronavirus social distancing rules.

The new Health Secretary has been seen as more strongly in favour of lifting coronavirus restrictions and most remaining legal rules in England were ended last Monday.

A total of 31,795 cases were reported in the UK on Saturday - a 41 per cent drop on last week - with over 46million people now having received their first dose of the jab.

More than 36million people have also been given their second dose, according to Public Health England (PHE) data.
Meghan and Harry's daughter Lilibet has yet to be added to the Royal Family's line of succession listed on the official website seven weeks after her birth.

Lilibet Diana Mountbatten-Windsor was born on June 4 in the US and is eighth in line to the throne.

But the Royal Family's website has yet to recognise Lilibet's birth on the official line of succession.

The website, which helps keep the public up to date on matters relating to the House of Windsor, still lists Prince Andrew as eighth in line and Harry and Meghan's daughter's name is still absent.

Lilibet should be listed at eighth under her brother Archie whose name was added to the list just 15 days after he was born in 2019.

When her cousin Prince Louis was born, the second son of Prince William and Kate Middleton, his name was added to the list just 12 days after he was born.

Lilibet, the daughter of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle (pictured), has yet to be added to the Royal Family website's official line of succession list despite being born seven weeks ago

Pictured: The official list on the Royal Family website still lists Prince Andrew as eighth in line

Zara and Mike Tindall's son Lucas, who is 22nd in line to the throne, has been listed on the website since his birth in March.

Lilibet was born in June and was named after the Queen's childhood nickname while her middle name Diana was in tribute to Harry's late mother.

It comes in the aftermath of Harry and Meghan's explosive two-hour CBS interview with Oprah Winfrey.

In the interview, which aired in March, the couple expressed discontent at the fact that Archie would not be made a prince.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex also said racism drove them out of Britain and claimed their son Archie was denied the title of prince because he is mixed race.

Speaking on the Royal Rota podcast on Friday, ITV Royal Editor Chris Ship suggested the House of Windsor was 'making a point'.

Harry and Meghan's interview with Oprah Winfrey sent shockwaves through the royal family

Harry and Meghan when they announced they were expecting their second child in February

He said: 'You have got to ask what has taken them so long. All they have got to do is hit the paragraph button and put in a different number.

'They must have done it before. They did it for Archie. Clearly they did it for Louis when he was born.

'And they have done it for some of the other children like August that have been born as well. So where's Lilibet? I can forgive them a week or two but a month?'

Ship suggested the omission after such a lengthy period of time was 'a little petulant'.

'Is it them saying, 'We will get around to it when ready?' It does feel like to me, maybe, they are making a point.'

A spokesman for Buckingham Palace said the Royal Family website is 'updated periodically'.

A view of the Quire in St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle. Lili's brother, Archie, was christened by the Archbishop amid unprecedented secrecy at the chapel in 2019.

It comes amid claims the couple want Lilibet to receive a royal christening like her older brother Archie,

According to royal insiders, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex's daughter Lilibet Diana could follow in the footsteps of older brother Archie and be christened in St George's Chapel in Windsor with the Queen present.

A source previously told the Daily Mail: 'Harry told several people that they want to have Lili christened at Windsor, just like her brother Archie.

'They are happy to wait until circumstances allow.'
Scientists have predicted that if carbon emissions continue to rise, the UK could see frequent heatwaves of 40C in just 10 years time, due to global warming.

With last week's heatwave reaching a high of 32.2C on Tuesday at Heathrow Airport, experts warned that extremely hot weather can have serious consequences including water shortages and thousands dying from the heat.

Speaking to The Times, Chloe Brimicombe, a heatwave hazards researcher at the University of Reading, predicted that Southern England could experience its first 40-degree day 'within the next ten years'.

Scientists have predicted that we should prepare for temperatures to reach up to 40C in Britain in the next decade, due to global warming. Pictured: Sunbathers in Dorset enjoying the UK's latest heatwave

She said: 'Most of our rail network would not be able to run in those sorts of temperatures.

'We would see increased pressure on water resources, productivity would be reduced, and it could affect our livestock and our crops.'

In order to prepare for this scenario, Ms Brimicombe advises putting shutters on windows, installing air cooling systems in homes as well as planting trees for more shade.

According to Public Health England, three heatwaves last summer killed a total of 2,556 people in England, 2,244 of whom were over 65.

Bob Ward, policy director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics, estimates that last week's heatwave likely resulted in 1,000 deaths.

He said: 'Other hotter countries do not see the same mortality that we do. But this is going to become more frequent and we need to start to prepare. At 40C even healthy people will not survive. Construction workers, agriculture workers  anyone who is working outdoors is at risk.'

A Met Office study published in June last year, revealed that under the worst high emissions scenario the UK could see 40C days every three to four years by the end of the century.

Experts have warned that extremely hot weather can have serious consequences for a country like Britain, including water shortages and thousands dying from the heat

If emissions are reduced under a medium-emissions scenario, the future probabilities of the UK reaching 40C in 2100 are expected to be once every 15 years.

Lead author of the study, Dr Nikolaos Christidis said that the chances of a 40C day are now ten times more likely in the current climate than before global warming began.

He said: ''We found that the likelihood of extremely hot days in the UK has been increasing and will continue to do so during the course of the century, with the most extreme temperatures expected to be observed in the south east of England.

'Climate change has already influenced the likelihood of temperature extremes in the UK. The chances of seeing 40C days in the UK could be as much as 10 times more likely in the current climate than under a natural climate unaffected by human influence.

'The likelihood of exceeding 40C anywhere in the UK in a given year has also been rapidly increasing, and, without curbing of greenhouse gas emissions, such extremes could be taking place every few years in the climate of 2100.'
An Army ranger has been charged with murder after allegedly beating and choking to death a security guard during a brutal ten-minute assault after she tried to stop him entering a building.

Patrick Byrne, 26, pleaded not guilty Friday to killing 41-year-old Denise Smith while she was on duty at an office building in downtown Tacoma, Washington, at around 1am on July 18.

Smith - who had only recently been hired - was so badly beaten she was unrecognizable when it was discovered at 6am, according to investigators cited in court documents.

Patrick Byrne, 26, pleaded not guilty Friday to killing 41-year-old Denise Smith

Smith had been on duty at an office building in downtown Tacoma, Washington, at around 1am on July 18

Pierce County prosecutors charged him with two counts of first-degree murder, first-degree burglary and two counts of first-degree kidnapping.

According to charging papers Byrne was out drinking with friends in downtown Tacoma and got into a bar fight where he was punched in the face. He then left the bar and walked in the direction of the building.

Authorities say Byrne approached the front door and the security guard motioned for him to leave. When he didn't, the security guard opened the front door and Byrne tried to barge past her.

'During that time the defendant repeatedly punched the victim with his fists, and he grabbed her by her braid and 'dragged her around like a rag doll,' prosecutors wrote in charging papers.

The ranger also seized Smith's keys and used them to stab her face before choking her until she went limp after an attack lasting eight to 10 minutes, it is alleged.

After abandoning her body, Byrne smashed a window in a nearby conference room and began throwing furniture around, reported KING-TV, citing court documents.

He then jumped 14 feet from a landing and was seen lying on concrete.

Smith - who had only recently been hired - was so badly beaten she was unrecognizable when it was discovered at 6am (pictured are police by the building)

A bloodied Byrne was seen by a passer-by crying for help and was taken to hospital after they made a 911 call. He alleged that he had been stabbed and sexually assaulted but there was no evidence of this.

Byrne is assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, according to an Army Special Operations Command news release.

He entered the Army as an infantryman in March 2019. After completing the Ranger Assessment and Selection Program in July 2020, Byrne was assigned to his current battalion.

The U.S. Army issued a statement Friday calling the alleged assault 'absolutely appalling'.

After abandoning her body, Byrne smashed a window in a nearby conference room and began throwing furniture around

'The Tacoma Police Department has the full cooperation of the United States Army Special Operations Command,' the statement said. 'Our deepest condolences to the families affected by this tragedy.'

Smith's family said they were 'devastated' at her death and described her as a sweet person who largely kept to herself.

Byrne is being held at Pierce County Jail after a judge set bail at $2 million.
Nazi leaders knew about The Great Escape in advance and let it go ahead because they wanted to make an example of the ringleaders, it is claimed.

Secret files on the mass breakout from the 'escape proof' POW camp Stalag Luft III suggest it was rigged to allow a reign of terror by Heinrich Himmler.

In mid-1943, Heinrich Himmler assumed overall control of POW security and introduced draconian punishments for escapees including the 'Bullet Order' permitting executions in March 1944.

The Great Escape took place the same month, giving Himmler the perfect excuse to lambast 'lax security' by the Luftwaffe, who ran the camps without the regime of fear he advocated.

The triumph of the digging of the three tunnels, Tom, Dick and Harry, ended tragically in the murder of 50 Allied airmen and the biggest British war crimes investigation of the war.

Newly discovered documents from the National Archives suggest the Germans allowed the infamous Great Escape go ahead so they could exact punishment on escapees. Pictured: a picture taken by the Germans of the inside of the narrow tunnel, named 'Harry', in 1944

Pictured: Harry's exit, showing the rope that was used to alert the next escaper that he could set off for the tree line, using the rope to guide him away from the POW camp

But long-lost documents found in the National Archives suggest the Nazis wanted the break-out to go ahead, so Himmler could cold-bloodedly hunt down the brave airmen and punish them.

As Germans casualties mounted, escapes by servicemen had soared because there were fewer guards - and there were fears they would team up with partisans to cause havoc.

At Stalag Luft III, escape had been treated as a game by the prisoners with the Germans discovering at least 80 tunnels.

This led to a vast array of microphones being buried around the camp perimeter from late 1943, which detected large-scale digging.

A National Archives research project has revealed during the countdown to the Great Escape some very strange events took place at the camp.

In November 1943, a three-week inspection by experts bizarrely concluded there was no more tunnelling and ordered the microphones turned off so the camp could be extended.

Colonel Friedrich von Lindeiner, Commandant of Stalag Luft III, May 1942 to March 1944

Pictured: Prisoners used trolleys to shift the dirt from the three tunnels they were digging which were a great improvement on the sledges used in previous tunnel attempts at the camp

Camp Commandant Colonel Friedrich Wilhelm von Lindeiner-Wildau protested an escape was now imminent and 'feared the consequences', according to the files.

In February 1944, he called in SS Major Erich Brunner, the Reich's top expert on preventing escapes, and pleaded with him to improve security.

Brunner chatted with the commandant but shunned his duty of inspecting the camp's anti-escape measures - or ordering the anti-tunnelling mics to be reconnected.

Meanwhile, prisoners had began work on three tunnels codenamed 'Tom', 'Dick' and 'Harry', under the theory that if the Germans discovered one tunnel, their guard would relax so they could continue work on the others.

Cunning methods had to be devised to remove the soil from the tunnels without getting caught, and typically, soldiers would shake the dirt out of their trousers at various points around camp, earning themselves the nickname 'penguins'.

Records show Camp Commandant Colonel Friedrich Wilhelm von Lindeiner-Wildau had warned of an imminent escape attempt Pictured: A crowded barrack wash room at the camp

As the Allied airmen tunnelled beyond the wire in March 1944, the camp commandant met the British officers to warn them of the 'increased dangers facing any recaptured escapees'. Pictured: a photograph from the camp shows how crowded a barrack room could become

Although the three tunnel entrances were finished by the end of May, work on 'Harry' and 'Dick' stopped in June so that efforts could concentrate on 'Tom'. In September, 'Tom' was discovered by the Nazis.

The following year, in January 1944, work on 'Harry' resumed. By 25 March, the 335ft tunnel was ready.

As the Allied airmen tunnelled beyond the wire - the camp commandant met the British officers to warn them of the 'increased dangers facing any recaptured escapees'.

Nevertheless, on the night of March 24, 1944, 76 airmen broke out into the woods.

Himmler's hand was further strengthened when the prisoners dispersed far and wide, following a mysterious failure to send troops to the local railway station.

Only three made it home and of those recaptured, 50 were murdered on Hitler's orders, including escape mastermind Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, known as 'Big X'.

Pictured: the morning queue for hot water outside the cookhouse at the Stalag Luft III

POW expert Alan Bowgen said: 'While the 1963 John Sturges' film loosely portrays the story of the so-called Great Escape, the reality was less heroic and far more tragic.

'Indeed, it has been suggested that it was German High Command policy to encourage the escape and then take severe counter measures.'

He called muting the microphones 'a remarkable step in view of the known tunnelling activities and even more so because of the considerable time they were left unconnected'.

After the war, the camp commandant was himself captured and held for three years before being released by the British.

'A lot of the ex-prisoners there did speak up for him and I think the Luftwaffe were quite ashamed of what had happened,' the historian added.
A judge has ruled that a $3million luxury home in Quebec, Canada, built less than ten years ago must be demolished - and the local city will need to pay for it.

The ruling is the latest in a roughly eight-year legal saga that began when the home was built too close to the street, violating local zoning laws in the city of Gatineau.

The judge's decision overrules an exemption the city gave the homeowner in a bid to keep the mansion as-is.

In his ruling this week, Quebec Superior Court Judge Michel Deniel said owner Patrick Molla had every reason to believe his home met building code requirements when the city granted him permits to build in May 2013, the Canadian Press reported.

That September, however, the city discovered that the planning official who approved the permits made an error when they allowed construction to go forward on the home, which is about 23 feet from the street. Homes must be built at least 51 feet away from the street, according to local bylaws.

Building officials in the City of Gatineau made an error when they approved construction plans for Molla's home (pictured), and later tried to give him an exemption. The judge's ruling nullifies that exemption, saying it was an abuse of power

Not only will the home need to come down, but the city will need to pay for it

The $3million mansion that homeowner Patrick Molla (pictured) built roughly eight years ago will need to be demolished because it is too close to the street, a Quebec Superior Court judge ruled this week

Instead of telling Molla to stop construction on the home, however, the city allowed it to go forward, telling him that the problem would be taken care of. In February, 2014, Molla's family moved into the home, and in July, 2014 it granted him a 'minor exemption' to keep it in compliance.

Deniel's ruling override's Gatineau's exemption, and says there was likely little choice except for it to be torn down.

He sided with neighbors who complained the property was out of character with the rest of the neighborhood and argued that the the city's exemption was an illegal abuse of power.

'Had he known the risk of eventual demolition, he would not have continued issued Moll construction on Sept. 25, 2013,' Deniel said in his ruling.

'Reassuring him about this technical error which will be corrected by a minor exemption at the expense of the city, he continues to invest his "retirement fund" in his house to the tune of approximately $3 million.'

The city had asked the court not to order the home's destruction, but Deniel noted that it had not offered any alternatives.

The street is 23 feet from the street. Homes must be built at least 51 feet away from the street, according to local bylaws

The judge noted that city officials gave Molla false hope by saying construction on his home could go forward. Molla is separately suing the city for $3.6million

Sebastien Gelineau, an attorney representing the neighbors who had complained, said his clients are pleased. 'They are happy with the decision,' he told the Canadian Press in an email. 'They ask that their privacy be respected.'

'I understand the frustration when this was built, but after so long I also feel bad for the owner' one neighbor Claudine Gagnon told CTV News.

'Nobody was happy when it was being built so if it's coming down then I would think there's a few people here who are a little more than happy,' another neighbor Mike Beard.

Separately, in 2019 Molla filed a lawsuit against Gatineau for $3.6million in damages, saying that city officials had misled him, and knew of the potential consequences if they allowed construction to go forward.

It is seeking to recoup $2.9million in construction costs as well as more than $600,000 for damage to reputation and inconvenience to Molla's family.

In that suit Gatineau has argued that the building subcontractors Molla hired were to blame for the error by not accounting for local bylaws in the construction plans. The results of that suit are pending.

Molla's attorney did not immediately return a request for comment.

Gatineau has 30 days to appeal the ruling.

'Our legal department is in the process of analyzing everything, therefore no comments will be made on the file,' the city told the Canadian Press.
A high profile anti-vaxxer has filmed her tense encounter with police at her home after she and her footy star husband were issued with public infringement notices for attending an anti-lockdown protest.

Former NRL star Frank Winterstein and his wife Taylor were among the 3,500 protesters in Sydney's CBD on Saturday at the illegal rally and documented their attendance on social media.

NSW Police have vowed to track down every attendee at the protest and have already identified more than 200, including the Wintersteins.

The couple received a visit from two plain-clothed detectives at their home in Sydney's south-west the following day, which was filmed by the anti-vaxxer WAG.

'Can I get some evidence you're actually police officers and why you're trespassing on my private property?' Ms Winterstein demands as she begins filming the officers.

The two police officers copped a grilling from Taylor Winterstein when they visited her home on Sunday to issue public infringement notices to her and her husband Frank

'We're not trespassing,' one says as he shows his badge.

'Yes you are,' Ms Winterstein argues back.

Her father is heard trying to intervene.

'Dad, Dad, Dad, just hang on for a second,' Ms Winterstein tells him before turning her attention to the second detective.

'We need to see actual evidence, not a badge, that you are a detective. Can I please actually have a look?', she asks.

The officer informs her their encounter is being filmed.

Ms Winterstein replied: 'Yeah and I've got this on camera too.'

She continues to argue with the officers, accusing them of trespassing on her property.

NRL star Frank Winterstein and his wife Taylor were among the thousands of protesters who took to the streets of Sydney on Saturday (pictured) to rally against the city's lockdown

The officers eventually oblige with her request to get off the property with a final parting message.

'We'll put the infringement notice in the post,' one says as her father opens the front gates for them.

'Yes, that's fine, send it in the mail, thank you,' Ms Winterstein replies.

She continues filming for another minute until the officers drive away.

'I just want to make sure that they're leaving,' she said.

The footage was uploaded and shared with almost 72,000 Instagram followers a short time later, as she took a swipe at anyone who dared to dob her into police for attending the protest.

The footage has since been viewed more than 25,600 times.

The officers (pictured) eventually leave, telling Ms Winterstein their public infringement notices will be in the mail

'Police came to my house and I sent them away,' Ms Winterstein captioned the footage.

'Breathe. Hold your position. Be respectful. Know your rights. You do not have to be scared.

'And for all those keyboard warriors tagging NSW police and reporting me to Crime Stoppers, good luck with that.'

NSW Police have since confirmed that Ms Winterstein, 32, and her 34-year-old husband were issued $1,000 public infringement notices 'for breaching public health orders after they left home without a reasonable excuse and attended the Sydney CBD protest'.

A day earlier, the couple documented their attendance at the illegal protest, posting videos and selfies of themselves among the thousands of attendees.

'Be prepared for all scenarios including arrests and fines,' Ms Winterstein posted on social media while sharing footage of the rallies while not wearing a mask.

'I would rather die on my feet than live on my knees.

'There is more of us than there is them, they cannot arrest us all.'

She also posted 'tens of thousands' at the protest maskless 'are not the ones lining up to get tested or jabbed.'

Taylor Winterstein continued filming the police officers until they drove away (pictureed)

A former Samoan rugby international, Winterstein played 59 NRL games for Canterbury Bulldogs, Manly Sea Eagles and Penrith Panthers before his professional career ended in France and returned to Australia earlier this year.

His wife was an ambassador for the anti-vaccination film Vaxxed.

She also runs $220-a-head workshops on the dangers of vaccinations, and parent empowering seminars entitled Families for Freedom,

NSW Police set up Strike Force Seasoned to track down all attendees at the protest, which is now being feared by health officials to be a coronavirus super-spreader event.

Police have received more than 5,500 reports from members of the public as 22 strike force detectives continue to investigate Saturday's protest.

Former NRL star Frank Winterstein and his wife Taylor (pictured) are well-known anti-vaxxers

Of the 63 people arrested at the protest, 35 were charged with various offences.

Twenty one men appeared in Parramatta Local Court on Sunday, where 15 were granted bail to appear at Downing Centre and Newtown Local Courts at a later date.

Among the men who face court was the man allegedly seen punching a police horse in the mouth in photos from the thick of the crowd that shocked Australia.

Kristian Pulkownik was arrested after a photo allegedly showed his fist making contact with the face of a police horse named Tobruk went viral overnight.

The 33-year-old was identified after police shared the picture online in an effort to track down the culprit.

Police stormed his Marlborough Street unit in Surry Hills about 11.20pm on Saturday after a public callout for information on his identity and whereabouts.

Pulkownik was taken to Kings Cross Police Station where he was charged with affray, animal cruelty, joining in an illegal assembly and not complying with a Covid-19 health directive.

He will spend at least a second night in jail after he appeared in Parramatta Local Court on Sunday where he did not apply for bail.

Kristian Pulkownik was arrested after a photo allegedly showing his fist making contact with the face of a police horse named Tobruk went viral overnight

Most other charges are for assaulting police, resisting arrest, and breaching public health orders by being there in the first place.

Investigators have since issued two more court attendance notice and public infringement notices to another 16 people on Sunday, including the Wintersteins.

Also charged on Sunday was Jon-Bernard Kairouz, 24, the TikTok comedian who developed a cult following for predicting NSW's daily Covid count, after he was filmed addressing the large crowd of protesters on a megaphone.

The latest public infringement notices were issued after NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian and police minister David Elliott urged residents to dob in those who posted footage of themselves at the protest.

NSW recorded 141 new cases of coronavirus and two deaths on Sunday, a day after a new record of 163 daily infections was set.

TikTok comedian Jon-Bernard Kairouz was spotted firing up the anti-lockdown protestors in Sydney's CBD on Saturday

Ms Berejiklian said she was disgusted and heartbroken by those who had shown 'utter contempt for their fellow citizens'.

'We know that events like that can cause those super-spreading events,' she said.

'Please know that all of the sacrifices we've made over the last three or four weeks in particular have resulted in us being able to stabilise the growth in cases.

'We don't want a setback, and yesterday could have been a setback.'

Mr Elliott condemned the thousands of 'very selfish boofheads' who marched.

'Yesterday, cannot happen again. We saw the figures, they are not going down at the rate we want to see them go. And they won't go down if we see the activity we saw yesterday,' he said.

'You need to think again.'

There are concerns Saturday's rallies may become a 'super spreader' event. Pictured: A graph showing case numbers in NSW
A man has recorded the moment he confronted Tucker Carlson at a fishing supplies store in Montana and called him 'the worst human being ever' in a rant about the Fox news host's stance on Covid vaccines.

Dan Bailey had someone film the interaction at the store in the city of Livingston and shared it on Instagram.

The 22-second clip, which has garnered more than 113,000 views as of Sunday morning, begins with Bailey appearing already engaged in a conversation with the Fox News host.

Bailey has a wide smirk while Carlson appears more withdrawn and whispers, 'My daughter is here,' to which Bailey says, 'I don't care man. You are the worst human being known to man. I want you to know that.'

In response, Carlson says. 'I appreciate that. I appreciate that.'

Bailey continues, 'What you have done to everybody else in this state, to the United States, to everyone else in this world. What you have done to families, what you have done to everybody else in this world. I don't care that your daughter is here. What you've done to people's families '

As he talks, Carlson notices he is being recorded on a camera and gives a grin.

The Fox News host says, 'Settle down son,' to which Bailey says, 'Son? Don't call me son,' before Carlson walks away with Bailey trying to follow him as the video ends.

A Montana fly fisherman confronted Tucker Carlson on Friday at a fishing supplies store in Livingston, Montana, where he called the Fox News host 'the worst human being ever'

A local resident named Dan Bailey had someone film the interaction and shared it on Instagram, where he identified himself as the man in the video

The Fox News host says, 'Settle down son,' to which Bailey says, 'Son? Don't call me son,' before Carlson walks away with Bailey trying to follow him before the video ends

Bailey shared the 22-second clip to his Instagram page, where it has garnered 113,501 views as of Sunday morning

Bailey captioned the video, 'It's not everyday you get to tell someone they are the worst person in the world and really mean it! What an a**hole! This man has killed more people with vaccine misinformation, he has supported extreme racism, he is a fascist and does more to rip this country apart than anyone that calls themselves an American.'

The video stands out on Bailey's Instagram, which appears otherwise apolitical and is filled with photos of him hunting and fishing.

It is unclear what Bailey was going to say before the video ended, but his Instagram caption alluded to Carlson's statements on the Covid-19 vaccine.

Most recently, Carlson called out Republicans on July 16 for focusing on Cuba's communist regime instead of Biden's Press Secretary Jen Psaki's announcement that the White House is 'regularly' coordinating with Facebook and other social media giants on news it thinks should be censored, particularly regarding alleged misinformation about the vaccine.

Carlson said, 'Even today idiot Republicans on the hill spent their whole day talking about the lack of freedom in Cuba  and it's not a free country, that's true  but increasingly neither are we and they don't seem to notice what's going on in the country they're supposed to be running.'

Carlson did not publicly respond to Bailey's video as of Sunday morning.

In a statement sent to the Daily Mail, a Fox News spokesperson said, 'Ambushing Tucker Carlson while he is in a store with his family is totally inexcusable  no public figure should be accosted regardless of their political persuasion or beliefs simply due to the intolerance of another point of view.'

On July 16 episode of 'Tucker Carlson Tonight,' the Fox News host slammed 'idiot Republicans' for focusing on Cuba rather than the 'tyrannical' United States government

The clip has been shared multiple times on Twitter, including by Donald Trump Jr., who wrote, 'Is the loser who went out of his way to have someone video him harassing Tucker in public for some viral content the model for the new Pregnant Male Emoji? The likeness is uncanny! #SoBrave.'

The clip was also shared by the conservative political action committee The Lincoln Project, whose tweet included Bailey's quote calling Carlson the 'worst human being' and was shared 24,400 times and liked 97,200 times.

The Lincoln Project has been known for its anti-Trump stance and has called out Fox News a number of times for its statements on the coronavirus. A pinned tweet from the organization, posted on July 22, is captioned 'Fox News has blood on its hands,' and includes a video dragging the news outlet for its statements against the Covid-19 vaccine.

The clip has been shared multiple times on Twitter, including by Donald Trump Jr., who compared Bailey to the newest Emoji depicting a pregnant man

The clip was also shared by the conservative political action committee The Lincoln Project

The Lincoln Project has been known for its anti-Trump stance and has called out Fox News a number of times for its statements on the coronavirus, most recently in a pinned tweet posted on July 22

The fishing store, which coincidentally shares the same name as the man in the video, posted a statement to distance themselves from Bailey's actions.

The statement read, 'On July 23rd, a well-known television personality, Tucker Carlson, was affronted while shopping at Dan Bailey's Outdoor Company.

'Coincidentally, the person engaging Mr. Carlson was a local resident named Dan Bailey. This person has no affiliation with our business, other than he shares the same name as our founder, who passed away in 1982.

'To be clear, we treat every customer equally and respectfully. Our staff was professional and cordial to Mr. Carlson, as we are with all of our customers.'
Conservatives have blasted a new proposal that would require women to register for the draft for the first time ever beginning next fiscal year.

A provision in the Senate National Defense Authorization Act which was approved by the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday forces women between the ages of 18 and 25 to sign up with the Selective Service, as men are required to do.

The NDAA was overwhelmingly approved by the committee by a 23-3 vote, with most Democrats and Republicans supporting the proposal.

The three dissenters were GOP Senators Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley and Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat.

Cottons no vote was surprising given that the former Iraq War veteran is considered a hawk on defense issues.

Our military has welcomed women for decades and are stronger for it, the Arkansas senator wrote.

The image above shows United States Marine Corps recruits from Lima Company, the first gender integrated training class in San Diego, climb through mud during training at Camp Pendleton in April 2021. A Senate bill could require women to register with the Selective Service, making them eligible to be drafted

Senators Tom Cotton (left) and Josh Hawley (right) have come out against the proposal, which was approved on Wednesday by the Senate Armed Services Committee

Our military has welcomed women for decades and are stronger for it, the Arkansas senator wrote. But Americas daughters shouldnt be drafted against their will.'

Hawley on Friday explained his decision to oppose the measure in a tweet

'It's one thing to allow American women to choose this service, but it's quite another to force it upon our daughters, sisters, and wives,' Hawley tweeted

But Americas daughters shouldnt be drafted against their will.

I opposed this amendment in committee, and Ill work to remove it before the defense bill passes.

Hawley, the Republican from Missouri, tweeted on Friday: 'I voted against forcing women to enter the draft, and here's why.'

'American women have heroically served in and alongside our fighting forces since our nation's founding.

'It's one thing to allow American women to choose this service, but it's quite another to force it upon our daughters, sisters, and wives.

'Missourians feel strongly that compelling women to fight our wars is wrong and so do I.'

Other Republicans on the panel who opposed the provision about women being drafted include Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, the ranking member of the committee; Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi; and Senate Mike Rounds of South Dakota, according to Roll Call.

'I support our military's efforts to offer more opportunities for women who want to volunteer to serve,' Wicker told Roll Call in a statement.

'But when I think of my own daughters and granddaughters, I could not in good conscience support an amendment that would compel their military service.'

On Twitter, conservatives expressed their opposition to the provision.

'If you need a draft, it should be only men,' tweeted House Rep. Chip Roy, a Republican who in an earlier tweet said that the proposal was a 'non-starter' and that passing it would bring 'all out political war.'

Chris Loesch tweeted: 'I have said a voluntary military is much better prepared to fight than a coerced one but I also believe that if a time came for our nation to defend itself from a great evil, like Hitler and the Nazis then it should be men and not women.'

'If you need a draft, it should be only men,' tweeted House Rep. Chip Roy, a Republican who in an earlier tweet said that the proposal was a 'non-starter' and that passing it would bring 'all out political war.'

Russ Vought tweeted: 'No. You are not drafting our daughters.'

Chris Loesch tweeted: 'I have said a voluntary military is much better prepared to fight than a coerced one but I also believe that if a time came for our nation to defend itself from a great evil, like Hitler and the Nazis then it should be men and not women.'

Jesse Kelly, a prominent conservative media personality, tweeted: 'Women shouldnt be part of the draft. They shouldnt be part of any combat unit. They shouldnt be on Naval vessels. I dont have to prove to you why they shouldnt. Its the military. Its life or death. YOU have to prove to ME why a country with 150 million men needs women.'

Gretchen Smith, a female veteran, responded to Kelly, tweeting: 'I served. I disagree. Best decision I ever made. If I can do it, any woman can do it. If women want equal rights, this is it. No complaints'

Russ Vought tweeted: 'No. You are not drafting our daughters.'

Jesse Kelly, a prominent conservative media personality, tweeted: 'Women shouldnt be part of the draft. They shouldnt be part of any combat unit.

'They shouldnt be on Naval vessels. I dont have to prove to you why they shouldnt.

'Its the military. Its life or death.

'YOU have to prove to ME why a country with 150 million men needs women.'

Gretchen Smith, a female veteran, responded to Kelly, tweeting: 'I served. I disagree.

'Best decision I ever made. If I can do it, any woman can do it.

'If women want equal rights, this is it.

'No complaints.'

The Selective Service is a federal agency that maintains a nationwide registry of all men who are eligible for military conscription in the event of a national emergency.

Men who fail to register with the Selective Service System at their 18th birthday can be denied public benefits such as federal employment and student loans.

Failing to register is also a felony punishable by a fine of up to $250,000 and five years in prison.

However, women cannot register for Selective Service.

The last time there was a draft was during the Vietnam War, and the military has been all-volunteer since.

But the registration requirement is one of the few remaining places where federal law treats men and women differently, and women's groups are among those arguing that allowing it to stand is harmful.

Even though both parties have overwhelmingly supported requiring women to register with the Selective Service, repeated attempts at enacting the reform have failed.

Last month, the Supreme Court was asked to decide whether its sex discrimination for the government to require only men to register for the draft when they turn 18.

Ria Tabacco Mar, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Women's Rights Project, who is urging the court to take up the issue, says requiring men to register imposes a 'serious burden on men that's not being imposed on women.'

Tabacco Mar said that the current law sends a 'tremendously harmful message that women are less fit than men to serve their country in this particular way and conversely that men are less fit than women to stay home as caregivers in the event of an armed conflict.'

'We think those stereotypes demean both men and women,' she said.

Even if the draft is never used again, retaining the men-only requirement sends a 'really damaging message,' said Tabacco Mar, who represents the National Coalition For Men and two individual men challenging the law

Others on Twitter argued that the government should do away with the draft entirely

A group of retired senior military officers and the National Organization for Women Foundation are among the others urging the court to take the case.

If the court agrees to hear the case, it wouldn't be deciding whether women have to register, just whether the current system is constitutional.

If it isn't, then it would then be up to Congress to decide how to respond, either by passing a law requiring everyone to register or deciding registration is no longer necessary.

The issue of who has to register for the draft has been to the court before.

In 1981, the court voted 6-3 to uphold the men-only registration requirement.

At the time, the decision was something of an outlier because the court was regularly invalidating gender-based distinctions in cases about other areas of the law.

Many of those cases were brought by the founding director of the ACLUs Womens Rights Project, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who became a justice in 1993.

The last time the high court considered the Military Selective Service Act, then-Justice William Rehnquist explained that the purpose of registration 'was to prepare for a draft of combat troops.'

He said that because women could not serve in combat, the law was not unlawful sex discrimination that violated the Constitution.

But military policy has changed. In 2013, the Department of Defense lifted the ban on women serving in combat.

In 2015, the military lifted its ban on females serving in combat roles and women's groups have been urging Congress to change the law. The image above shows women recruits in the United States Marine Corps

Two years later, the department said all military roles would be open to women without exception.

Just last year, a congressional commission concluded that the 'time is right' to extend the obligation to register to women.

'The current disparate treatment of women unacceptably excludes women from a fundamental civic obligation and reinforces gender stereotypes about the role of women, undermining national security,' the commission said in a report.

The Biden administration is urging the justices not to take the case and to let Congress instead tackle the issue.

Administration lawyers wrote in a brief that any 'reconsideration of the constitutionality of the male-only registration requirement ... would be premature at this time' because Congress is 'actively considering' the issue.

The Selective Service System, the agency that oversees registration, said in a statement that it doesn't comment on pending litigation but that it is 'capable of performing whatever mission Congress should mandate.'

If the court agrees to take the case, arguments wouldn't happen until the fall at the earliest, after the court's summer break.

The court already has high-profile cases awaiting it then. They include a major challenge to abortion rights and an appeal to expand gun rights.
Elvis Nina Pichardo, 40, was arrested in connection with the three attacks on women at the Inwood Hill Park on Wednesday

A man who has been arrested for allegedly attacking three women in the span of one hour in an Upper Manhattan park had only been out of prison for a matter of weeks after serving time for a similar attack in 2007, according to reports.

Elvis Nina Pichardo, 40, was arrested on Friday, after allegedly threatening to sexually assault two women at the Inwood Hill Park on Wednesday, and hitting another woman with a tree branch while 'continually slamming her head into the ground,' according to the New York Post.

He allegedly tried to pull down her pants to rape her, according to police.

Later that night, he entered a medical spa and was told to leave, after which he is allegedly to have returned, exposed himself and 'desecrated the front door,' according to ABC 7.

Pichardo was arraigned on Saturday, on attempted rape, attempted criminal sexual act, sexually-motivated assault, menacing, robbery and public lewdness charges.

But this is not the first time Pichardo has been arrested for a sexual attack.

In 2007, he was arrested in Waco, Texas for randomly targeting an 18-year-old girl, threatening her and then attacking her.

He was reportedly carrying a box-cutter at the time, and was charged with aggravated kidnaping and sexual abuse.

Pichardo was convicted in 2008 of the crime, and was released from prison on May 6, according to the Post.

He was living in the Bronx at the time of the attacks on Wednesday, and was originally arrested on a separate public lewdness charge in Chinatown.

Pichardo was arraigned on Saturday, on attempted rape, attempted criminal sexual act, sexually-motivated assault, robbery and public lewdness charges

Pichardo was escorted out of Manhattan Criminal Court following his arraignment Saturday

The attacks in Manhattan on Wednesday began around 10.50am, when a man, now alleged to be Pichardo, approached a 24-year-old woman and punched her in the face saying he wanted to rape her.

'I want to take you into the park and rape you,' he told the woman, according to the New York Daily News. 'I have a condom.'

The suspect allegedly took the woman's Apple watch, iPhone and earbuds before fleeing the scene.

Hardly 40 minutes later, a man threatened to kill a 40-year-old woman's dog as she walked the pup in Inwood Hill Park. Like the first incident, the man also threatened to sexually assault her before running away after she yelled out for help, cops said.

Then just before noon, a 44-year-old woman was walking her dog when a man tried to talk to her before smacking her in the face with a branch, causing her to lose consciousness.

Authorities said he also took the woman's pants off as she lay unconscious, fleeing only after she awoke.

A good Samaritan, who had just found the victim's dog nearby, spotted the woman as she staggered out of a wooded area looking for help.

She told the good Samaritan that she may have been sexually assaulted, and her head and face also were cut. She was taken to Harlem Hospital in stable condition.

Police were investigating the scene of the attacks on Wednesday, and have since arrested Pichardo in the alleged attacks

Police confirmed to DailyMail.com that one of Wednesday's cases was being investigated as a possible sexual assault

Parkgoers, especially women, are voicing their concerns over the safety of Inwood Hill Park, which was the site of a brutal, still-unsolved murder of Juilliard student Sarah Fox back in 2004.

'At 11 a.m. in the morning, I got to walk my dog before I got to work. Who's thinking that's going to happen?' Amanda Hall-Smith said, according to ABC7.

The park itself sits within the neighborhood of Inwood in Upper Manhattan.

Violent crimes in the neighborhood are 53 percent higher than the national average, with a 1 in 59 chance of being a victim of a crime, Area Vibes reports of Inwood.

Authorities are asking anyone with information regarding Wednesday's crimes to call the Crime Stoppers tip line at 800-577-TIPS or submit an internet tip.

The attacks come amid a rise in crime across New York City.

NYPD data shows that rapes are up 2.8 percent so far this year, with 778 reported in the year to July 18, compared to 757 in the same period of 2020.

Other sex crimes are up 24.3 percent to 2,489 this year, compared to 2,002 last year, according to NYPD statistics.

Shootings have spiked 21.9 percent in 2021 compared to last year as of July 18, its most recent data, with 840 shooting incidents in 2021 compared to 689 in 2020.

There are also 16 percent more shooting victims this year, the data shows, with 981 people falling prey to gun violence compared to 846 last year.

The number of murders has also risen from 233 to 226 in the same timeframe - a 3.1 percent rise, while rape cases have risen 2.8 percent and other sex crimes have risen a staggering 24.3 percent.

The biggest leap in crime rates is for hate crimes, which has surged by 110.4 percent in the last year. This data comes amid numerous random attacks on Asian Americans in the city, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Eric Adams, the ex-cop who is the Democratic candidate for New York City mayor, warned earlier this month that 'no one is going to come back' if violence, and in particular gun violence in the Big Apple continues.

The Brooklyn borough president appeared at an event with Governor Andrew Cuomo on July 14, as the two political leaders presented a united front in addressing the worrying rising crime.

'No one is going to come back to our multibillion-dollar tourism industry if 3-year-olds are being shot in Times Square,' Adams said.

Adams, 60, won the Democratic primary for this year's mayoral race and will become the mayor of New York if he defeats Republican Curtis Sliwa in the general election.
Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger accepted on Sunday Nancy Pelosi's offer to serve on the Capitol riot committee

Adam Kinzinger accepted on Sunday Nancy Pelosi's offer for him to serve on the committee probing the January 6 riot after Kevin McCarthy withdrew all five of his picks.

'Today, I was asked by the Speaker to serve on the House Select Committee to Investigate January 6th and I humbly accepted,' the Illinois congressman wrote in a statement Sunday afternoon.

'I'm a Republican dedicated to conservative values,' he continued, 'but I swore an oath to uphold and defend the Constitutionand while this is not the position I expected to be in or sought out, when duty calls, I will always answer.'

Pelosi revealed Sunday morning she was planning to tap Kinzinger as the second Republican on the select committee. Liz Cheney was part of the original eight members Pelosi selected for the panel earlier this month.

Kinzinger will join the other members at the committee's first hearing on Tuesday.

House Minority Leader McCarthy last week pulled his five picks, which were given to the leader when Pelosi created the group. The move came after the speaker rejected two of McCarthy's picks  Representatives Jim Jordan and Jim Banks.

Pelosi told ABC News on Sunday morning the duo would 'jeopardize the integrity of the investigation.'

Kinzinger agreed that the panel needed a 'serious, clear-eyed non-partisan approach'.

'I will work diligently to ensure we get to the truth and hold those responsible for the attack fully accountable,' he said in his Sunday statement.

Both Cheney and Kinzinger voted for Trump's impeachment following the January 6 riot.

Kinzinger, who became a vocal Trump critic despite voting with him 90 per cent of the time, was the first Republican House member to call for the then-president's removal from office by invoking the 25th Amendment.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Sunday she 'plans' to select Republican Kinzinger and 'other Republicans' for the committee probing the January 6 Capitol attack

Republicans are warning of 'endless retaliation' as a 'new level of partisanship' emerged when Pelosi rejected two of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy's (pictured) picks for the panel

Now, McCarthy is saying that the panel is not bipartisan  and instead just made up of people hand-selected by Pelosi who all share her same view that Trump is to blame for the Capitol attack.

'Speaker Pelosi's rejection of the Republican nominees to serve on the committee and self-appointment of members who share her pre-conceived narrative will not yield a serious investigation,' McCarthy said in a Sunday statement after Kinzinger accepted a post on the panel.

He did not directly reference Kinzinger's willingness to accept the speaker's invitation.

'The Speaker has structured this select committee to satisfy her political objectives,' he added. 'She had months to work with Republicans on a reasonable and fair approach to get answers on the events and security failures surrounding January 6. Instead, she has played politics.'

The California Republican said the Senate has already conducted successful bipartisan investigations that 'should serve as a roadmap' for the January 6 select committee.

'Speaker Pelosi's departure from this serious-minded approach has destroyed the select committee's credibility,' he insisted.

It is not clear if Pelosi will tap any more people to serve on the committee, but she did say 'other Republicans' have expressed interest in joining the panel.

When asked by ABC on Sunday morning, 'Will you be appointing more Republicans to the committee like Congressman Adam Kinzinger?', Pelosi responded: 'That would be my plan.'

ABC This Week host George Stephanopoulos pushed Pelosi on when she will make an announcement.

'Perhaps after I speak to Adam Kinzinger. But I'm not going to announce it right this minute,' she said just moments before approaching the Illinois Republican.

'You can say that that's the direction I would be going on,' she continued with a chuckle. 'He and other Republicans have expressed an interest to serve on the select committee.'

Pelosi said she 'wanted to appoint three of the members that Leader McCarthy suggested, but he withdrew their names.'

'The two that I would not appoint are people who would jeopardize the integrity of the investigation. And there's no way I would tolerate their antics as we seek the truth,' she told ABC News on Sunday morning.

Pelosi, as House speaker, was able to veto two of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarhty's  Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio and Jim Banks of Indiana.

In response, Republicans warn there will be 'endless retaliation', according to a Sunday report, as the House becomes further divided.

'I didn't think things could get more partisan in the House than they already were,' a top Republican aide told the Washington Examiner. 'But Speaker Pelosi's decision to remove Republicans from the January 6th Committee just took things to an entirely new level.'

'When Republicans take back the House, expect endless retaliation,' the aide said.

The House currently sits at a 220-211 divide with Democrats holding the majority, but Republicans are putting all their efforts into flipping the body back to red in the 2022 midterms.

The Senate is split 50-50 with Vice President Kamala Harris holding the tie-breaking vote.

McCarthy picked five Republicans for Pelosi's committee earlier this month  Representatives Jordan, Banks, Troy Nehls of Texas, Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota and Rodney Davis of Illinois.

Jordan, Banks and Nehls all voted against certifying the 2020 election for Joe Biden by citing fraud in certain states on January 6.

But Pelosi, last week, vetoed Banks and Jordan's appointment to the committee. She did not reject Nehls.

This caused McCarthy to pull all five of his picks.

Pelosi said Sunday she would have appointed three McCarthy's picks, but 'the two that I would not appoint are people who would jeopardize the integrity of the investigation.' She's speaking of Reps. Jim Banks (left) and Jim Jordan's (right) who she rejected for the committee

'Unless Speaker Pelosi reverses course and seats all five Republican nominees, Republicans will not be party to their sham process and will instead pursue our own investigation of the facts,' McCarthy said at a press conference Wednesday.

'Pelosi has broken this institution,' he continued, while accusing the House speaker of an 'egregious abuse of power.'

Pelosi on Thursday defended her decision to reject Jordan and Banks, saying their 'antics' were in danger of getting in the way of finding the truth behind what happened on January 6.

She said both lawmakers had a history of making statements that would have made it impossible for them to display 'balanced judgment,' including blaming the Biden administration for events that unfolded before it had even formed.

'It is my responsibility as Speaker of the House, to make sure we get to the truth on this, and we will not let their antics stand in the way of that,' she said during her weekly press briefing.

The panel is due to hold its first hearing next week into violence that left five people dead after supporters of former President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Congress as they moved to certify the Electoral College results.

It will hear from law enforcement officers who battled protesters.

Under the terms of the select committee, Pelosi was able to name eight members and McCarthy had five picks.

Among Pelosi's picks was one Republican  Representative Liz Cheney, who broke ranks with her party, repeatedly voiced her disapproval of Trump and in May lost her Republican Conference chairwomanship.

The House select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol is due to meet for the first time next week as it probes the attack on Congress that left five people dead

Pelosi accepted three of the Republican nominations but rejected Jordan and Banks.

The two Republicans are outspoken allies of former President Trump, leading to accusations that Pelosi was embarked on a witch hunt. McCarthy then withdrew all five of his nominations.

McCarthy expressed his outrage during a Thursday news conference. He questioned why Pelosi would object to Afghanistan veteran Banks but not Democratic Rep. Benny Thompson who dropped a lawsuit against Trump over the Jan. 6 riot in order to take up the committee's chairmanship.

'It doesn't matter today what she does with that committee, because it's not going to change the outcome of what seems like a pre determined or already written report,' he said.

Earlier Pelosi hit back against critics who accused her of being intent on taking down Trump.

'We're there to get the truth, not to get Trump,' she said spelling it out.

'T-R-U truth. Trump that seems to be what the other side is obsessed with.

'So as legislation allows I didn't accept two of the five people were appointed, they had made statements and taken actions that I think would impact the integrity of the commission of the committee, the work as a committee,' she said.

'This is deadly serious. This is about our constitution, it's about our country.'

By way of example she cited a combative statement released by Banks on Monday evening in which he promised to use his role on the commission to investigate the response of the Biden administration to the riot.

'There was no Biden administration on January so let's not go into that,' she said.

Republicans were prepared to focus their strategy on why Pelosi wasn't more prepared for the attack.

'There's one fundamental question that I hope Democrats will actually answer and address and that is why wasn't there a proper security presence that day?' Jordan questioned after he was appointed by McCarthy.

'And frankly, only the speaker can answer that question so let's see if the Democrats bring that up,' he added.

Pelosi's spokesperson told DailyMail.com last Wednesday that the GOP strategy is 'desperate'.

'On January 6th, the Speaker, a target of an assassination attempt that day, was no more in charge of Capitol security than Mitch McConnell was,' Drew Hammill said. 'This is a clear attempt to whitewash what happened on January 6th and divert blame.'

He added: 'I would hope the media would do better and treat this as the utter nonsense that it is.'

The GOP was also planning to highlight leftist political violence, including the 2020 summer riots and looting in response to police brutality.

'The Democrats in the summer of 2020 normalized anarchy, they normalized rioting and looting,' Jordan said. 'So I think that's an important element that we'll have to point out.'

In his statement, after being named to the committee by McCarthy, Banks also promised to address questions being ignored by Democrats.

'Even then, I will do everything possible to give the American people the facts about the lead up to January 6, the riot that day, and the responses from Capitol leadership and the Biden administration,' he said.

'I will not allow this committee to be turned into a forum for condemning millions of Americans because of their political beliefs.'

Two days later he accused Pelosi of running from the facts.

'I'm a sitting member of Congress and served my country in Afghanistan and the Speaker knows how hard I will fight for my country,' he said.

'We said all along that this was a purely partisan exercise by the Democrats and Nancy Pelosi's rejection of me and Jim Jordan shows once again she is the most partisan figure in America today.'

The panel has been beset by partisan wrangling from the off. Last month, all but two Republicans opposed the select committee in a House vote.
A barefoot child was among the migrants pictured arriving in Dover today after making the perilous crossing from France.

Photos showed Border Force workers helping toddlers in life jackets onto land after they were brought ashore on a department speed boat.

In one image, an infant is being passed from a Border force officer in a boat to another waiting on a dock in Dover Harbour, Kent, as a woman, believed to be the child's mother, waited in the boat.

The arrivals were among 378 stopped by UK authorities yesterday, while a further 178 were stopped by the French, the Home Office said.

Despite authorities in France being paid 54million to stop illegal Channel crossings from their coast, 'stretched' officials in Dover are struggling to contain the spiralling fiasco.

However Home Secretary Priti Patel praised the efforts of French authorities, saying in a statement on Sunday:

'French authorities have already prevented over 7,500 migrants entering the UK this year  nearly treble the number for the same period in 2020  and earlier this week we signed a strengthened agreement to increase police patrols on French beaches, improve surveillance technology and enhance intelligence sharing.

'Since the start of 2020, we have secured more than 65 small boat related prosecutions, totalling over 53 years in jail. This is the result of extensive work by law enforcement and intelligence partners,' Patel said.

A barefoot child was among the migrants and refugees pictured arriving in Dover today after making the perilous crossing from France

Photos showed Border Force workers helping toddlers in life jackets onto land after they were brought ashore on a department speed boat

The arrivals come in a week where hundreds have opted to attempt the dangerous crossing during calm weather

Pictured: Arrivals in Dover are seen with Border Force agents on Sunday

'The British public should be in no doubt of our unwavering determination to stop these dangerous crossings from safe EU countries and take down the evil criminal gangs behind them.

'We are utilising all aspects of Government to tackle this issue and our significant actions are having an impact,' Patel said.

On Tuesday, the Home Secretary announced an agreement to more than double the number of police patrolling French beaches.

She added: 'This week, we also saw the landmark Nationality and Borders Bill proceed through Parliament, which will reform the system to make people think again before attempting to enter this country illegally and break the business model of people smugglers.'

On Sunday, footage also emerged showing a small overturned boat drifting in the waters between England and France. The vessel, which appeared partially deflated, was sinking below the surface on one side.

In another video, a large Border Force vessel was filmed transporting dozens of migrants. The men huddle on board wearing face masks, some also have lifejackets on.

The number of people who had crossed to the UK so far this year up to Tuesday had reached 8,452 which exceeded the figure for the whole of 2020 when 8,417 people had made the trip, according to Home Office data.

More than 700 people succeeded in crossing the Channel on Monday and Tuesday, with many landing on Dungeness beach in Kent.

Border Force vessels and French warships were active in the Dover Strait on Wednesday, with dozens of people brought into the port.

In another video, a large Border Force vessel was filmed transporting dozens of migrants

And a further 37 people were intercepted on Friday by the UK authorities with another 67 stopped by the French.

The number of people who have attempted to cross the Channel on Sunday has not yet been confirmed by the Home Office.

A spokesman said: 'Border Force is currently dealing with ongoing small boat incidents off the Kent coast.

'Further details will be provided after the initial response and once the situation has been resolved.'

Earlier this week, MPs backed sweeping new laws allowing UK authorities to prosecute thousands of asylum seekers who enter the UK illegally, with sentences of up to four years in jail.

The controversial Nationality and Borders Bill will also introduce life sentences for people-smugglers, enable asylum seekers to be processed offshore and give the Border Force new powers to prevent Channel crossings.

However, the measures will not take effect for months as the Bill is not expected to pass all its stages through Parliament until the end of the year.

Pictured: Men who have crossed the Channel huddle on board wearing face masks, some also have lifejackets on

Amnesty International has criticised the 'reckless and unjust' Bill which it says 'fatally undermines the right to asylum and threatens Britain's reputation'.

The UK Refugee Council also condemned the 'cruel' legislation, which it dubbed the 'anti-refugee bill.' The group said the Bill would unfairly punish 'people who've fled war, persecution & terror for the way they reach the UK'.

The UK argue that individuals should seek asylum in the first safe country they are able to reach, rather than attempting the dangerous Channel crossing.

In her statement on Sunday, Patel said the Bill 'will reform the system to make people think again before attempting to enter this country illegally and break the business model of people smugglers.'

On Thursday, French authorities announced they would restrict the amount of fuel people can buy in an attempt to stop illegal Channel crossings.

A ten litre cap per customer on petrol and diesel in takeaway canisters has been introduced in six districts across northern France.

Bosses at the Pas-de-Calais prefecture hope it will reduce the amount of small vessels making the dangerous journey across one of the world's busiest shipping routes.

Footage showed a small overturned boat drifting in the waters between England and France on Sunday. The vessel, which appeared partially deflated, was sinking below the surface on one side

Many of the rigid hulled inflatable boats use fuel-powered outboard engines to travel along the 21-mile Dover Strait to the UK.

Announcing the restriction in a prefectural decree on Thursday (July 22), a Prefecture du Pas-de-Calais spokesman said: 'The sale and purchase of more than 10 litres of fuel - gasoline or diesel - in transportable containers are now prohibited.'

They introduced it due to a 'growing presence of a migrant population on the coast of Pas-de-Calais wishing to join the United Kingdom' and suggested the prefecture would take 'all useful steps to dissuade and obstruct the organisation of such illegal and dangerous crossings'.

The decree described small motor powered boats are one of the 'main means used by migrants, on the initiative of organized networks, to illegally cross the maritime border between France and the United Kingdom.'

People who break the ban, which will be in place for two months, could be fined 135 euros (115) rising to 3,700 euros (3,171) for repeat offenders.

The 10-litre restriction will be implemented in Grand Calais Terre et Mer, Terre des Deux Caps, Audruicq, Pays d'Opale, Agglomeration Community of Boulogne and Deux Bays in Montreuillois regions.

But locals who require fuel for 'professional uses or needs' will be exempt if 'duly justified by the buyer and verified, as necessary, with the assistance of the local police or gendarmerie'.

Service stations, particularly those with automated fuel distribution and pay at pump, will be required to enforce the ban.
The collapse of a funfair ride which injured six people was caused by the 'misuse of equipment' by several teenagers, the amusement park operator has said.

Four children were among those taken to hospital after the Star Flyer swing ride collapsed at Planet Fun in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland, on Saturday evening.

Their injuries are not believed to be life-threatening.

Planet Fun said in a statement that the equipment did not have any 'mechanical defects' and the funfair will reopen to the public.

The collapse of a funfair ride in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland, which injured six people, was caused by the 'misuse of equipment' by several teenagers, the amusement park operator has said

It said: 'All sessions of Planet Fun will go ahead as normal.

'Following a preliminary investigation by the Health & Safety Executive (HSE), Planet Fun have been cleared to reopen and it is confirmed the equipment has not got any mechanical defects.

'We will however be keeping the Star Flyer closed pending further safety checks and investigation.

'The incident tonight was caused by misuse of equipment by the behaviour of several teenagers on the attraction and is to be further investigated by the PSNI.

'The swift actions by our staff to terminate the ride prevented further injuries.

Four children were among those taken to hospital after the Star Flyer swing ride collapsed at Planet Fun on Saturday evening

Planet Fun said in a statement that the equipment did not have any 'mechanical defects' and the funfair will reopen to the public

A Health and Safety Executive investigation has been launched following the horror funfair accident on Saturday evening in Carrickfergus

'At this time we cannot comment any further on the incident but would extend our thoughts and best wishes to the people who were injured.'

A police spokesperson confirmed last night that officers were working with colleagues from Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service and Northern Ireland Ambulance Service at the harbour, Carrickfergus News reported.

Emergency services were called to the scene shortly before 6pm on Saturday after they received reports that a ride had collapsed.

The Northern Ireland Ambulance Service said it received a call that a number of people had been injured in the incident.

It despatched four emergency crews, a rapid response paramedic and an ambulance officer to the scene.

Four children were rushed to hospital with three taken to the Royal Belfast Hospital for Sick Children and one to Antrim Area Hospital. A number of other children suffered injuries to their legs, but did not require hospital treatment.

The Star Flyer will remain closed when the funfair reopens 'pending further safety checks and investigation', the amusement park operator has said

Health Minister Robin Swann said: 'Our blue light services have responded to an incident tonight at a funfair in Carrick. It was reported that a ride at the fair collapsed and there were several casualties.

'A number of people, including children, were taken to hospital and thankfully none have life-threatening injuries.

'My thoughts are with all who have been injured and affected by this incident.

'I wish everyone a speedy recovery and I want to sincerely thank the ambulance, paramedics and fire crews that responded so rapidly to what could have been something more tragic.'

One person understood to have witnessed the incident posted: 'Omg in Planet Fun getting on all the rides and the swings all started hit into each other.

The Northern Ireland Ambulance Service said it received a call that a number of people had been injured in the incident

Four emergency crews, a rapid response vehicle and an ambulance attended the scene. The funfair was closed last night

'Kids screaming, mums screaming, I only caught tail end on camera. This is the second ride today in the park getting closed.

'Ambulance all on way thank God me and Summer went on it earlier as the whole park is now getting evacuated. Poor kids.'

Stewart Dickson, Alliance MLA for East Antrim, said last night: 'I am concerned with regards to reports of accident at the funfair on Saturday.

'I understand from early reports that injuries are not serious and hope that continues to be the case.

One person understood to have witnessed the incident posted: 'Omg in Planet Fun getting on all the rides and the swings all started hit into each other'

'Following this, it is now important that the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and the Mid and East Antrim Borough Council conduct a thorough investigation into the circumstances of whatever occurred.'

It is understood the funfair was recently opened in the area.

In a statement, a spokesman for the Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service (NIFRS) said that three fire appliances, a specialist rescue team and the Red Cross attended the scene.

The air ambulance was also dispatched to the scene and the HSE was made aware of the incident.
A teenager caused a panic aboard a United flight set to depart San Francisco International Airport on Thursday when he sent a photo of an airsoft gun through AirDrop, prompting officials to remove all passengers.

The incident took place aboard United Airlines Flight 2167 bound for Orlando on Thursday.

As the plane was preparing to pull out of the gate, a teen passenger started sending photos of the toy weapon to others on board, KNTV-TV reported.

The teen used the AirDrop feature on the Apple iPhone, which allows owners of devices using either the iOS and macOS operating systems to share files if connected through a wireless internet feed or Bluetooth.

A teenager caused a panic aboard a United flight set to depart San Francisco International Airport on Thursday when he sent a photo of an airsoft gun through AirDrop, prompting officials to remove all passengers. The image above is a 2019 stock photo of a United Airlines jet landing at London's Heathrow International Airport

A teen on board sent pics of a toy airsoft gun (like the one seen in the stock image above)

The teen used the AirDrop feature on the Apple iPhone, which allows owners of devices using either the iOS and macOS operating systems to share files if connected through a wireless internet feed or Bluetooth

According to United, all of the passengers were removed from the aircraft out of an abundance of caution and rescreened through security.

A security sweep of the plane was done before the passengers were permitted to re-board.

The teen who sent the photo was not permitted back onto the plane.

Chris Beale, a radio host and reporter, told SFGATE that the plane was held on the tarmac after several passengers reported receiving inappropriate photos.

Beale said his mother, Alesia Dobson, was a passenger on board the flight.

He said that after the photo of the gun was sent, the pilot announced that there was a threat on board, forcing everyone off of the plane.

The weapon that was photographed did not belong to the teen.

There is no word on whether the teen faces any disciplinary action or criminal penalties.

Apples AirDrop has frequently been exploited in recent years by cyber creeps to send unsolicited, explicit images to others nearby.

HOW TO CHANGE AIRDROP SETTINGS Once AirDrop is enabled, users are given three options for who can send them photos: Receiving Off, Contacts Only, or Everyone. If you're not sure what yours is set to, go to Settings > General > AirDrop. Here, you'll see the three options, with a blue check-mark next to the one you have enabled. For a more secure use of the function, select Contacts Only. Advertisement

Subway riders and other city-goers have increasingly reported that theyve been sent sexually explicit pictures through Apples AirDrop tool in recent years.

After several New York City subway riders reported receiving unwanted photos of male genitalia through AirDrop, lawmakers moved to make it a crime punishable by up to a year in jail as well as a $1,000 fine.

Apples AirDrop tool allows iPhone users to send and receive files over WiFi and Bluetooth.

While undoubtedly a convenient feature in some circumstances, its also opened the door for a new type of predatory behavior.

Once AirDrop is enabled, users are given three options for who can send them photos: Receiving Off, Contacts Only, or Everyone.

But, many iPhone users have turned it on unaware that it's set to accept Everyone  and never expecting the feature to be used maliciously.

Unsolicited photos received while on the train, at the library, or standing on line at Starbucks, however, have come as a rude awakening to many, and a reminder to tighten their device's privacy settings.
A Texas man is facing capital murder and arson charges after allegedly setting his house on fire Thursday night, killing his brother and gravely injuring his 82-year-old mother, according to El Paso police.

Phillip Daniel Mills, 40, of El Paso, is facing capital murder and arson charges after he allegedly set his house on fire Thursday night and the blaze killed his brother and gravely injured his 82-year-old mother

Phillip Daniel Mills, 40, of El Paso, allegedly admitted to police that he set the fire at his Fandango Place residence to 'purge the home from evil' because his brother and mother didn't follow the Bible.

According to an arrest affidavit, Mills doused his living room sofa in gasoline siphoned from a weed eater before igniting it with a lit cloth, KTSM reports.

Once the sofa caught on fire, he walked outside the house and waited to see if his mother or brother would go outside but they didn't, the affidavit says.

'The defendant advised that he waited outside the residence with large rocks in his hands in the event that both his brother and mother had made it out the burning residence', a detective wrote in the report.

The El Paso fire department said that firefighters arrived at the house around 11.30pm to see Mills's mother Florence Annette Mills, rushing outside with severe burns.

Fire department rescuers pulled Paul Aaron Mills, 54, from the flames and transported him to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Florence Annette Mills was also brought to a local hospital and last listed in critical condition.

Mills had an outburst prior to the fire, in which he purposely broke a television in the living room and threatened to burn the house down, the affidavit says.

It adds, 'The defendant states that he left the residence and allowed his mother to be in a 'happy place' throughout the day and waited for both his mother and brother to go to bed, before starting the fire.'

An affidavit says that Mills admitted to police that he set the fire at his Fandango Place residence to 'purge the home from evil' because his brother and mother didn't follow the Bible

Mills allegedly doused his living room sofa in gasoline siphoned from a weed eater before igniting it with a lit cloth

After officers told Mills that his brother died and his mother was injured in the fire, the affidavit says that Mills laughed and called it a 'failed attempt' that both family members didn't perish in the flames.

Roger Torres, a neighbor, told KTSM that Mills was always 'troublesome' and was acting erratic earlier that day.

Torres said, 'He was bad news, all he would do was sit out there and drink and smoke and I noticed he was back to his old routine.'

Torres said that Mills's family had called the police on him before because of his behavior, adding 'They called the police department on him cause he stripped naked and he was drinking.'

The El Paso fire department said in a statement that firefighters arrived at the house around 11.30pm to see Mills's mother Florence Annette Mills, rushing outside with severe burns

Fire department rescuers pulled Paul Aaron Mills, 54, from the flames and transported him to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead

He saw the house in flames on Thursday around 11pm and said, 'When we found out only two were transported we thought 'what happened to the other brother' there were three [people] so I thought, in my opinion, he had something to do with it.

'I should have probably took it upon myself to call the police because they could've done something, maybe it could've been a difference if law enforcement had come out and talked to him.'

According to criminal records, Mills has previous charges brought against him that include criminal trespassing and evading arrest.

An ongoing joint investigation is being conducted by the city's fire marshals and police department's crimes against persons unit. Police said that Mills was booked in a downtown El Paso jail on Friday afternoon and his bond is set at $2.5million.
Billionaire and inventor George Soros recently provided a generous donation to a racial justice organization that supports defunding the police.

The Hungarian-born American philanthropist donated $1 million to the Color Of Change PAC on May 14, according to records from the Federal Election Commission.

The PAC refers to itself as the 'nation's largest online racial justice organization,' calling for 'divesting from and dismantling the systems that unjustly harm Black people.'

Soros routinely backs Democratic congressional candidates and attorneys general, and has made a string of financial contributions toward groups or candidates that advocate for defunding the police.

Billionaire and inventor George Soros (pictured) recently donated $1 million to the Color Of Change PAC on May 14, according to records from the Federal Election Commission

The PAC refers to itself as the 'nation's largest online racial justice organization,' calling for 'divesting from and dismantling the systems that unjustly harm Black people.'

The Color Of Change PAC, which claims to have seven million members, has previously launched petitions to cut police department budgets in the wake of the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

Their online petition states: 'We know that policing doesn't keep us safe, communities do. Policing doesn't lead to thriving communities, investment does.

'Communities are in desperate need of the things that keep us safe, housed and healthy, like investments in schools, jobs, affordable housing, parks, mental health services, community centers, and libraries.

'But time and again, police budgets are bloated at the expense of our safety.

'We must begin to envision the society that functions for ALL of us and we must begin by divesting from and dismantling the systems that unjustly harm Black people.'

In February, Soros donated $2 million to Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon's campaign, (pictured) who announced immense changes to his office's law enforcement strategy immediately after assuming office.

The amount Soros donated was his most generous in 2021, and supported the organization's efforts to minimize police budgets.

In February, Soros donated $2 million to Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon's campaign, who announced immense changes to his office's law enforcement strategy immediately after assuming office.

In addition, Soros also funded Kim Gardner in Missouri, District Attorney Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Kim Foxx in Chicago, and Rachael Rollins in Massachusetts, who was first woman ever elected as District Attorney in Suffolk County and the first woman of color ever elected District Attorney in Massachusetts.

Soros, the founder of Soros Fund Management, has an estimated wealth of $8.6billion.

It emerged last month that he payed zero federal income tax for three straight years between 2016 and 2018.

Confidential IRS records from the wealthiest people in the United States were obtained by ProPublica and published in June.

The report found that, overall, the richest 25 Americans pay less in tax than the average worker does.

Authorities are investigating the leak of the tax data.

'Between 2016 and 2018 George Soros lost money on his investments, therefore he did not owe federal income taxes in those years. Mr Soros has long supported higher taxes for wealthy Americans,' his spokesman said.
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London streets were yesterday left underwater and hospitals in crisis after torrential rains hit the capital, as forecasters predict more thunderstorms to continue.

The Met Office has issued an amber warning for storms covering the capital and some of the Home Counties where homes and businesses are at risk of flooding.

A yellow warning for storms which could cause travel and power disruption was issued to the south from Norwich to Plymouth.

Parts of south east England saw up to 50mm of rain in just an hour on Sunday afternoon while thousands of revellers enjoying the first full-capacity festival since Covid-19 missed the rain, with thunderstorms recorded to the west of Henham Park in Suffolk.

New Cross Road became 'a river' amid the heavy downpours, and video showed Pudding Lane tube station almost completely submerged.

Newham Hospital in east London revealed on Twitter that its emergency department had 'flooded in some areas', with those needing treatment were advised to attend a different hospital.

And a critical incident was declared at Whipps Cross, which reportedly lost power and backup generators. Staff at the hospital said on Twitter: 'We're currently experiencing operational issues due to the heavy rainfall. Please use an alternative A&E if possible. Thank you!'

A spokesperson for Barts Health NHS Trust said: 'We are experiencing operational issues at Whipps Cross Hospital and Newham Hospital due to the heavy rainfall. We are working closely with our local partners to resolve the issues and maintain patient care and - while services remain available for people in an emergency - patients are asked to attend alternative hospitals where they can, to help us put solutions in place as quickly as possible.'

Met Office rain gagessaw 34mm of rain at Sandhurst and 32mm at Wych Cross in East Sussex. An Environment Agency rain gage recorded 52mm of rainfall in an hour just west of Ashford.

Pictured: The scene at Pudding Lane Tube station, which is seen above totally submerged under water

Canary Wharf business park buildings seen through heavy rainfall as a mass storm passes over the city on Sunday afternoon

Lightning strikes near Canary Wharf business park buildings with a bolt appearing to hit Aragon Tower in south east London

A yellow warning for storms which could cause travel and power disruption also covers a wider area of the south from Norwich to Plymouth, and lasts until midnight

The Met Office has issued an amber warning for storms covering London and some of the Home Counties where homes and businesses are at risk of flooding, lasting until 7pm on Sunday

Met Office rain gages looking back over six hours saw 34mm of rain at Sandhurst and 32mm at Wych Cross in East Sussex. An Environment Agency rain gage recorded 52mm of rainfall in an hour just west of Ashford

The rain brought an end to the heatwave earlier this week, potentially disappointing anyone who hoped for a dry, sunny trip to the coast

Parts of south east England saw up to 50mm of rain in just an hour on Sunday afternoon as the area was battered by torrential thunderstorms and downpours (Pictured: People walking in Wimbledon Common, south west London, shelter from heavy showers under an umbrella)

Rain will cover much of the UK by Tuesday this week as the warmer weather comes to an end and the wet sets in

Two friends in summer dresses shield themselves with umbrellas to shelter themselves from the heavy rain showers which broke the week long heatwave in London

Met Office meteorologist Steven Keates said the storms are being caused by a 'convergence' of air currents, due to warmth in the earth's surface from the recent heatwave rising into cooler air in the atmosphere

Londoner Eddie Elliott cycled past the area outside Queenstown Road station, where he said the road had been 'totally shut down'.

'Having been born and raised in London, I have never seen anything quite like it,' the 28-year-old writer said.

'Stands out as the worst I've experienced personally... totally shut down the whole road with buses stood broken down in the water.'

Jamie Curtis said the roads near Clapham Common were blocked due to floodwater which was '12 to 18 inches deep'.

'(I've) not seen that level of flooding in London before,' he said.

Walthamstow MP Stella Creasy told constituents she could feel their pain - because her house was flooded too.

Met Office meteorologist Steven Keates said the storms are being caused by a 'convergence' of air currents, due to warmth in the earth's surface from the recent heatwave rising into cooler air in the atmosphere.

Firefighters look along Chigwell Road in south Woodford. The A406 travels above. Police have declared a 'major incident' in north-east London after heavy rainfall and thunderstorms caused flash flooding

The river Roding appears to have burst its banks close to the Charlie Brown roundabout below the A406 North Circular Road in South Woodford. Police have closed Chigwell Road either side of the roundabout

Walthamstow MP Stella Creasey told constituents she could 'share this pain' because her house had also been flooded

A cyclist rides through flood water in Horse Guards Road in central London

A woman walks through Parliament Square as heavy rain sweeps through central London

A toilet overflows on Pudding Lane, London, as the capital's infrastructure struggles to cope with the flooding

A street in Battersea, London, flooded from the rain. It comes after lightning set fire to houses in Andover, Hampshire, on Saturday morning, forcing residents to leave

There was a warning for heavy downpours and thunderstorms for southern England and South Wales from 8pm Friday and over the next two days with up to 2in (50mm) of rain expected within just a few hours. Pictured, another flooded street in Battersea

Wood Green High Street, in East London, taped off to the public as a result of flash flooding following heavy downpours

Parts of south east England saw up to 50mm of rain in just an hour on Sunday afternoon

Wood Green High Street in the aftermath of flash flooding. The heavy downpours are also expected to continue

A torrential downpour in East London.Leytonstone High Street in East London flooded after a torrential downpour

 with around 400,000 tourists heading to packed airports over the weekend and up to 2.3 million drivers set to hit the roads as the school holidays kicked off

Pedestrians sheltering underneath umbrellas in Wimbledon Village. The great British summer getaway began on Friday as the heatwave continued

It comes after lightning set fire to houses in Andover, Hampshire, on Saturday morning, forcing residents to leave.

Neighbours heard an 'enormous bang' as the strike set two homes ablaze on Mercia Avenue, and a 70-year-old woman was assessed by paramedics.

Kingston Police, who oversee a borough in the amber zone for storms, warned motorists to 'drive carefully' and remember they are 'not driving a submarine'.

The force said in a tweet: 'Please remember to drive carefully. Also remember that you're not driving a submarine. Do not enter what could possibly be deep water. Watch your speed and distance as stopping distances will be greater.'

A burst waterpipe next to Hammersmith Bridge, in West London

There was a warning for heavy downpours and thunderstorms for southern England and South Wales from 8pm Friday

Handout photo of in buses in flood water in Battersea, south London, after heavy rainfall hit the capital

A man walks through flood water in Horse Guards Road in central London. Thunderstorms bringing lightning and torrential rain to the south are set to continue until Monday

A pedestrian crosses through deep water on a flooded road in The Nine Elms district of London on July 25, 2021 during heavy rain. - Buses and cars were left stranded when roads across London flooded

A woman walks through a flooded path in St James's Park in central London. Kingston Police, who oversee a borough in the amber zone for storms, warned motorists to 'drive carefully' and remember they are 'not driving a submarine'

A car drives through water on a flooded road in The Nine Elms district on London on Sunday following hours of heavy rain in the capital

Two people shelter under the same umbrella as the walk through the grass at Wimbledon Common on the rainy Sunday afternoon

One parkgoer in Wimbledon shelters herself from the rain while her friend stands nearby while they walk through the Common on Sunday afternoon

Rain bounces off the pavements in central London as people shelter under umbrellas as the capital was battered with heavy rain and thunderstorms

Two friends in summer dresses shelter themselves from the rain during heavy showers which broke a weeklong heatwave where temperatures exceeded 30 degrees Celsius in London

Heavy rain pounds the streets in Soho, London. The capital city saw flash flooding as a result of extremely heavy downpours

Two people cuddle up under an umbrella on a walk through Wimbledon Village during the heavy rain showers on Sunday afternoon

The Met Office has issued an amber warning for storms covering London and some of the Home Counties where homes and businesses are at risk of flooding, lasting until 7pm on Sunday

Thunderstorms brought torrential downpours and localised flooding to parts of the south east on Sunday

The rain brought an end to the heatwave earlier this week, potentially disappointing anyone who hoped for a dry, sunny trip to the coast.

The rest of the country was forecast to experience a cloudy, more settled end to the week with sunshine expected in Scotland.

Temperatures are set to rise in most places again today as the storms clear, with the mercury predicted to reach 26C in London, 25C in Edinburgh, 24C in Cardiff, and 22C in Belfast.

The Met Office has predicted early cloud in some northern and eastern parts which will move up to Scotland, and sunny spells and scattered showers in most places throughout the day.

Last week Britons heading on staycations to campsites and caravan parks along the south coast were warned over incoming storms, hail and 55mph winds which were set to hit England on Friday evening and last throughout the weekend.

Traffic navigates its way through deep water on a flooded road in The Nine Elms district of London on Sunday during heavy rain

A car drives through deep water on a flooded road in The Nine Elms during the torrential downpour

A cyclist wades through deep water on a flooded road in The Nine Elms district of London on Sunday

Earlier today, blue skies covered the festival, with people wearing summer clothing as they watched Griff perform at Henham Park in Southwold

The great British summer getaway began on Friday as the heatwave continued  with around 400,000 tourists heading to packed airports over the weekend and up to 2.3 million drivers set to hit the roads as the school holidays kicked off.

The UK enjoyed another blast of heat on Friday before the torrential rain was forecast to set in, causing flooding, travel disruption and could even leave some areas 'cut off' this weekend as a month and a half's worth of rain was set to fall in just a few hours.

There was a warning for heavy downpours and thunderstorms for southern England and South Wales from 8pm Friday and over the next two days with up to 2in (50mm) of rain expected within just a few hours.

Latitude festivalgoers got to enjoy sets by Rudimental, Sea Girls, Nadia Rose and Kawala on Saturday evening with no masks or social distancing as tightly packed crowds of people danced along to upbeat music.

Latitude festivalgoers got to enjoy sets by Rudimental, Sea Girls, Nadia Rose and Kawala on Saturday evening with no masks or social distancing as tightly packed crowds of people danced along to upbeat music.

Thousands of revellers enjoying the first full-capacity festival since Covid-19 missed the rain for much of the afternoon, with thunderstorms recorded to the west of Suffolk

The heatwave which much of the UK enjoyed for the past week came to an end, as rain descended on the south of England during Latitude Festival

The four-day festival, which is part of the Government's Events Research Programme, is being attended by 40,000 people. Festivalgoers must show proof of a negative Covid-19 test or be double vaccinated to access the site at Henham Park in Suffolk which also boasts its own pop-up vaccination clinic

Earlier this week, Britons heading on staycations to campsites and caravan parks along the south coast were warned over incoming storms, hail and 55mph winds which were set to hit England on Friday evening and last throughout the weekend

The four-day festival, which is part of the Government's Events Research Programme, is being attended by 40,000 people.

Festivalgoers must show proof of a negative Covid-19 test or be double vaccinated to access the site at Henham Park in Suffolk which also boasts its own pop-up vaccination clinic.

Photographs show revellers taking a zen moment with a spot of yoga or a quick dip in the lake in between drinks and musical acts. For those who love comedy, a tent dedicated to British and Irish-based comics featured Kerry Godliman and Katherine Ryan.

Headliners The Chemical Brothers, Bastille and Bombay Bicycle Club were booked to perform at the event.

But the Standon Calling music festival was called off due to flooding.

The festival, which had been taking place in Hertfordshire, had a capacity of 15,000.

The Met Office had issued an amber warning for storms in the home counties on Sunday.

Eart Herts Police said in a statement: 'Due to serious flooding, promoters of the @StandonCalling music festival have sadly cancelled this year's event.

'We are working with the promoters to assist people with getting home safely or making other arrangements.'

Pictures of the festival on social media appeared to show large quantities of water and mud around the stages.

Standon Calling said on Twitter: 'Unfortunately due to flooding we will no longer be able to proceed with the festival.

'If you can safely leave the site this evening please do so as soon as possible.

'We are working on getting everyone off site as safely and quickly as possible.'

The festival said it expected 'considerable delays' leaving the site and warned festivalgoers not to drive if intoxicated.

Ticket holders can return today to collect their belongings, the festival added.

Primal Scream, Craig David, De La Soul and Sophie Ellis-Bextor were among the acts scheduled to play on Sunday.
Heartbroken friends of a 38-year-old Brazilian student who died after a two-week battle with Covid have urged other young people to get vaccinated.

Adriana Midori Takara, 38, returned a positive test for the highly infectious Indian Delta variant on July 15 and succumbed to her illness in hospital.

The finance worker, described by friends as the 'brightest star' died alone in intensive care after undergoing emergency surgery, with doctors finding a viral infection on her heart.

Despite being a respiratory virus, Covid-19 can affect organs all over the body, with scientists finding damage in patients' heart, brain and liver.

Marlene Coimbra, an education worker who knew Ms Takara, said her death should serve as a warning to other young people.

Adriana Midori Takara, 38 (pictured), returned a positive test for the highly infectious Indian Delta variant on July 15 and succumbed to her illness less than two weeks later

'We have to tell young people, they need to get vaccinated, they need to take care of their bodies,' she told The Daily Telegraph.

Friends claimed Ms Takara contracted the virus from her roommate who works as a nurse, and despite trying to get an AstraZeneca vaccine, was denied by her doctor.

She had no underlying health conditions that would have contributed to her death and her distraught family back home were forced to say their final goodbyes over Zoom.

But the tearful conversation was one-way with Ms Takara never regaining consciousness after her emergency surgery.

Premier Gladys Berejiklian said the young woman's death should serve as a stark warning to those complacent about the virus that it does not discriminate.

Ms Takara, was living in Sydney's CBD with her boyfriend and on the cusp of finishing her graduate degree in accounting at the Kaplan Business School.

One of their housemates was a nurse who recently tested positive for Covid, a friend claimed on Facebook, sending the unvaccinated couple who would later test positive into isolation.

Just a few days later her boyfriend called an ambulance and Ms Takara was rushed to the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital feeling very 'unwell'.

Ms Takara (pictured) had no underlying health conditions that would have contributed to her death

'A day or two after admission, Adriana complained of chest pains. Medical staff assessed her having a heart attack,' her friend Jules Pedrosa wrote on Facebook.

'She needed immediate surgery and an instrument (don't know if it was a pacemaker or otherwise) had to assist her heart to maintain a regular rhythm.

'Adriana's health condition worsened after a few days and further tests confirmed that her heart had a "viral infection".

'This is interesting because she and her family have no history of heart disease.'

He said her condition deteriorated so quickly that a decision was made with the relevant consent from family members to switch off the life-preserving machines.

Under Sydney's strict lockdown rules, no friends or family were allowed to visit Ms Takara in the intensive care unit, forcing loved ones to say a teary goodbye over video link.

Ms Takara, was living in Sydney's CBD with her boyfriend and on the cusp of finishing her graduate degree in accounting at the Kaplan Business School (pictured)

The young student is understood to have lived in Bondi (pictured, locals in the area on Sunday)

'It's shocking... she was healthy, happy, working, she had a boyfriend. It's shocking,' Marlene Coimbra (pictured) said

'All goodbyes were said via Zoom to audiences in Australia and Brazil,' Mr Pedrosa said.

'Communication was one-way because she had been unconscious for several hours after her emergency heart surgery.'

Ms Coimbra, a student liaison officer who quickly became close friends with the finance worker, added that she had become debilitated 'very, very quickly'.

'She was very young, someone who had a future ahead full of plans and dreams. It's so sad,' she added.

Ms Takara moved to Australia from Sao Paulo in 2019 and quickly became part of the 'family' in Sydney's tightknit expat community of South Americans.

Gladys Berejiklian (pictured on Sunday) revealed the young woman was among two people who died from the virus on Saturday

One of her friends shared a heartfelt message on Facebook reminding Australians that she is not just another coronavirus statistic.

'Adriana is not a number, she is a woman with dreams and wishes,' Fernanda Ferreira Batista posted on Sunday.

'Adriana is a daughter, sister, aunty, niece and specially a friend. An amazing friend, not only my friend but friend of so many people,'

'Tonight when you look at the sky, it will be brighter and the shiniest star will be my friend is peace away of all this madness.

'I can't thank enough all the doctors for doing their best.'

While case numbers dropped on Sunday, officials are still concerned about the number of people in the community who are infectious

NSW reported 141 new locally acquired Covid cases on Sunday bringing the total number of infections since the outbreak began last month to 2081.

But Ms Takara's shocking death was not the only coronavirus fatality reported over the weekend.

A second woman, in her 70s from southwest Sydney, also died.

'Please note that younger people without pre-existing conditions can also fall victim to this cruel disease,' Ms Berejiklian said.

'This is a horribly cruel disease, and that's why our response has been so strong against it.'

The Premier warned that warned 38 of these new recorded cases were infectious in the community during Sunday morning's press conference.

There are 141 patients with Covid in Sydney hospitals. Of these, 43 are in intensive care with 42 of them unvaccinated. One has received just their first jab.

One patient in hospital is in their teens, while there are seven people in their 20s, and three in their 30s. There are 32 patients aged between 50 and 79 in hospital.

Sydney is now entering its fifth week of lockdown since the new outbreak began (pictured, the eerily quiet city on Sunday)

The Premier delivered the update alongside Dr Jeremy McAnulty of NSW Health, giving chief health officer Kerry Chant a day off from being the bearer of bad news.

But while case numbers dropped on Sunday, officials are still concerned about the number of people in the community who are infectious.

There are major concerns that Saturday's protests will prove to have been a super spreading event, and authorities are calling on the estimated 3,500 people who attended in Sydney to get a Covid test for the sake of the community.

'I'm appealing to all 3,500 people to get tested tomorrow, if not for themselves for the sake of their family and friends,' Police Minister David Elliott said.

In total, 57 demonstrators were charged during the event, but detectives are working round the clock to identify those who opted against wearing face masks in direct defiance of public health orders.

'It broke my heart,' Ms Berejiklian said of seeing pictures of all the protesters.

'Millions of people across our state are doing the right thing and it broke my heart that people had such a disregard for their community. I'm disgusted.'

'Thank you for the people doing the right thing and for those that aren't... you should be ashamed of yourselves.'
A majority of Americans are pessimistic about where the country will be in another 12 months from now - an almost 20 percent increase compared to a similar survey taken after President Joe Bidens first 100 days in office.

A new ABC News/Ipsos poll found that 55 percent of Americans say they are pessimistic about the direction the country is headed while 45 percent say they are optimistic.

In early May, a similar poll found that 36 percent said they were pessimistic about the future of the country while 64 percent said they were optimistic.

After six months in office, the president is receiving mixed reviews for his handling on a range of issues, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the economy, and the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The latest survey found that pessimism is being expressed among Democrats, Republicans, and independents.

Among Democrats and Republicans, optimism is down around 20 percent.

A majority of Americans are pessimistic about where the country will be in another 12 months from now - an almost 20 percent increase compared to a similar survey taken after President Joe Bidens first 100 days in office

A new survey found that more Americans disapprove of President Joe Biden's handling of immigration, crime, and the economic recovery. Biden is seen above in Arlington, Virginia on Friday

There is an even steeper drop in optimism among independents - 26 percent, according to the survey, which interviewed 527 adults on Friday and Saturday.

The respondents polled by ABC News/Ipsos are broken down into partisan loyalties, with 31 percent of those surveyed Democrats, 24 percent Republicans, and 36 percent independents.

In May, 89 percent of Democrats said they were optimistic about the direction of the country over the next 12 months.

The latest survey, however, shows that just 71 percent of Democrats said they were optimistic over where the country is headed.

Optimism among independents has declined by 26 percentage points - from 64 percent in May to just 38 percent today.

A majority of the country largely approves of Bidens handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, with 63 percent saying the president is doing a good job on that front, according to the survey.

Jack Herrington, a student at the University of Memphis in Tennessee, receives a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine on Thursday. The fear of another lockdown due to the spread of the contagious Delta variant has Americans worried, according to a new survey

But that figure is low compared to previous polls which showed Bidens approval rating as overwhelmingly positive.

In late March, surveys showed as much as 72 percent of the public approving of the presidents performance as it relates to COVID-19.

The lower polling numbers could be a reflection of a widespread fear among Americans that the government may re-impose lockdown measures to mitigate the spread of the highly contagious Delta variant.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nations top infectious disease expert, said that the country is in an unnecessary predicament of soaring COVID-19 cases fueled by unvaccinated Americans and the virulent Delta variant.

'We're going in the wrong direction,' said Fauci, describing himself as 'very frustrated.'

He said recommending that the vaccinated wear masks is 'under active consideration' by the government's leading public health officials.

Also, booster shots may be suggested for people with suppressed immune systems who have been vaccinated, Fauci said.

Fauci, who also serves as Biden's chief medical adviser, told CNN's State of the Union that he has taken part in conversations about altering the mask guidelines.

He noted that some local jurisdictions where infection rates are surging, such as Los Angeles County, are already calling on individuals to wear masks in public regardless of vaccination status.

Fauci said those local rules are compatible with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendation that the vaccinated do not need to wear masks in public.

Nearly 163 million people, or 49 percent of the eligible US population, are vaccinated, according to CDC data.

As of Saturday, the seven-day rolling average of daily new cases was nearly 50,000, a 166 percent increase from two weeks ago, according to a DailyMail.com analysis of Johns Hopkins data.

Meanwhile vaccination rates are plateauing, with just 57 percent of the eligible population fully vaccinated.

The recent survey by ABC News/Ipsos indicates that about 60 percent of Americans are concerned that they or someone they know will become infected with the coronavirus.

Of those, 20 percent said they are very concerned while 42 percent said they are somewhat concerned.

Nearly 4 in 10 - or 39 percent - said they are not concerned about it.

While the number of concerned Americans has dropped, thats because this survey was done at a time when everyone over the age of 12 is eligible to receive a COVID-19 vaccine.

The poll shows that 74 percent of adults said they had at least one dose of the vaccine - which is slightly higher than the actual rate of vaccination among the general public.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that around 69 percent of the adult population has been injected with at least one dose.

Those who were surveyed and indicated that they were partially vaccinated were more concerned about being infected - 67 percent - while 46 percent of those who are not vaccinated said they were concerned about infection.

Bidens handling of the economy has also seen some slippage among those polled.

While the overwhelming majority of Democrats - 88 percent - approve of Bidens handling of the economy, around half (49 percent) of independents agree.

Just 16 percent of Republicans approve of Bidens management of the economy, according to the survey.

Biden is also receiving low marks for his handling of immigration and the surge of migrants across the US-Mexico border as well as a rise in violent crime nationwide.

Fewer than 4 in 10 Americans approve of Bidens handling of all three issues.

Among Republicans, the disapproval is overwhelming - ranging between 86 percent and 92 percent, according to the survey.

Biden does have more than majority approval rating for the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The survey found 55 percent of Americans approve of the presidents policy.

When asked if Biden has delivered on campaign promises, just 52 percent say he has done an excellent or good job keeping his promises while 47 percent says hes done a not so good or poor job.
A mother-of-five who stabbed her neighbour to death with a knife after learning he was a paedophile today revealed her son was one of his victims.

Sarah Sands, 38, attacked Michael Pleasted, 77, in the living room of his east London flat weeks after discovering he had abused young boys.

During her trial in 2015 - for which she was convicted of manslaughter - it emerged Pleasted had 24 convictions for sex offences over three decades.

At the point of living next door to Sands, he had changed his name, while his crimes had pre-dated the sex offenders register, meaning that few knew about his past.

Sands received a seven-year prison term and spent almost four years behind bars before she was released.

Now for the first time she revealed her motive and said she did not regret her actions.

Sarah Sands, now 38, (pictured) stabbed convicted paedophile Michael Pleasted, 77, to death in his east London flat in in 2014. Today for the first time she revealed her motive, saying she attacked him after discovering he abused her son, Bradley, then 12

Speaking to The Sun, she said: 'I did what any mother would do, because he did this to my son Bradley, my little boy.

'I never dreamt I'd be capable. I have no pride in it, but at least I know he can't hurt anyone else.'

In 2014, when Bradley was aged 12, Pleasted had offered the young boy a job in the shop where he volunteered.

Sands said she had no reason not to trust her older neighbour, who she enjoyed chatting to and cooking meals for and thought it would be a good way for her son to earn pocket money.

Just weeks later, she was informed that Pleasted had been accused of molesting two children.

Her son denied anything had happened to him, but months later in November 2014, the youngster broke down and admitted he had been groomed and abused.

Bradley, now 19, is waiving his anonymity to speak of his ordeal revealing how he was 'too embarrassed' at first and thought he would get in trouble, but was having nightmares the paedophile would come after him again.

Pleasted denied the charges made against him, meaning his young victims would have to go to court to testify against him.

During her trial, Sands told the court she had gone to Pleasted to plead with him to admit his crimes and spare his young accusers from having to go to court.

But when he answered the door, he ignored her request and just 'smirked' as he told her the boys were all liars who had ruined his life, she said.

The mother-of-five confronted the paedophile at his flat asking him to admit his crimes and plead guilty so his victims wouldn't have to testify in court. Sarah said she 'lost control' after Mike (pictured) ignored her request and just 'smirked' and told her the boys were all liars

Sands, who had armed herself with a 12-inch kitchen knife before visiting, said she 'lost control' and stabbed Pleasted eight times.

Within hours, Sands handed herself into police, telling an officer: 'Who houses a f****** paedophile on an estate, like, seriously? He was, like, asking for trouble.'

Following a trial at the Old Bailey, she was cleared of murder but convicted of the lesser offence of manslaughter by reason of loss of control.

Sands lived on the same estate as the victim and occasionally visited his flat to give him some home-cooked food.

She originally thought he was a 'positive male role model' for local children and defended him when he was accused of being a 'paedo'.

But unbeknownst to Sands, Pleasted was a convicted paedophile with a history of child sex attacks when the fresh allegations emerged.

During her case at Londons Old Bailey, it emerged that Pleasted, who had changed his name from Robin Moult so that authorities couldn't track him, had previous child sex offences dating between 1971 and 1990.

Pleasted first appeared at Snaresbrook Crown Court in mid November 2014 charged with two counts of sexual assault on a child under the age of 13.

The Crown Prosecution Service were also considering a charge involving a third boy. Pleasted denied the charges and was due to stand trial on June 1, 2015.

On the night of November 29, 2014, Sands drank two bottles of wine and a small bottle of whisky before arming herself with a knife and making her way to Pleastead's flat, the court heard.

She was caught on CCTV going to Mr Pleasted's third floor flat. Twenty minutes later she left the building carrying a bloodstained knife in her left hand.

Sands returned to her flat and changed out of her bloodstained clothes, having told a neighbour, 'pretend you never saw me.'

Sarah said: 'I did what any mother would do, because he did this to my son Bradley, my little boy. ' Pictured: Sands seen on CCTV carrying a 12in knife in the lift shortly before killing Mike Pleasted

She then took a taxi to see her stepson Paul Penn and tearfully confessed to stabbing Pleasted.

Mr Penn, 27, told the court: 'We were sitting there chatting away and she came out that she had stabbed him.

'It was like joking about, I didn't think it was being serious. She kept saying she had stabbed him. She said when the door opened she went in and stabbed him, nothing else at all.

'She got the knife out and showed me. It was a kitchen knife, about a foot long, it had a very pink substance on it.'

Pleasted was found dead in the hallway of his flat the next day after Sands handed herself in to the police.

Sands sobbed in the witness box as she insisted that she did not mean to hurt Pleasted when she went to his flat armed with a knife.

She told jurors she had gone there to plead with him to admit his crimes and spare his young accusers from having to go to court.

Sands said: 'I was frightened. It was not how it was meant to go. He was meant to listen to me.'

Prosecutor Jonathan Rees QC argued that Sands had 'decided to take revenge on Mr Pleasted for the hurt and turmoil she believed he had inflicted.'

He added: 'It is not a defence to a charge of murder to say something along the following lines, "the victim got what he deserved because he was a paedophile".

'Just a moment's thought will confirm what all fair and reasonable people appreciate, namely that members of the public can not be allowed to take the law into their own hands, however appallingly their fellow citizens might be thought to have behaved.'

The jury deliberated for three days before clearing her of murder and convicting her of manslaughter. Sentencing was adjourned for reports and will take place in September.

Trial Judge Nicholas Cooke QC told the jury that an inquiry was under way into the decision to bail Pleasted, adding that the jurors were clearly 'troubled by the background' of the case.

The jury were right to clear Sands of murder, police have said.

Speaking after the verdict, DS Perry Benton said: 'The jury have taken a considerable time to reach the verdict... but eventually reached the right verdict.'

Asked why convicted paedophile Pleasted was on bail after fresh child sex abuse allegations emerged, he said: 'That is a difficult question. The local officers had conducted a thorough investigation.

'They had made an arrest and put him through the courts and it was the courts' decision to release him on bail.'
A series of Instagram videos showing a woman struggling to walk after being jabbed appears to be fuelling anti-vaccine sentiment among younger people.

In one of the posts, Georgia-Rose Segal, 34, is seen staggering before nearly collapsing on to a kitchen floor. Another clip in the same series then shows her legs and feet spasming in a hospital bed.

The videos were uploaded to the Instagram account Imjustbait, which has attracted 4.7 million followers since it was set up by Anthony 'Antz' Robb in 2014.

The caption reads: 'Since the 29th June after her second Pfizer jab, Georgia has had daily episodes of fainting, developing into neurological issues and losing the use of her legs. And yes, she was perfectly fit and healthy before!'

The post, which has more than 100,000 likes, sparked debate in the comment section, with several popular Instagram users outlining fears about possible side-effects from the coronavirus vaccine.

While Ms Segal's condition is extremely rare, it is an acknowledged side effect, so Instagram is not taking the video down.

In one of the posts, Georgia-Rose Segal, 34, is seen struggling to walk before nearly collapsing on to a kitchen floor

THE MINIMAL RISKS OF COVID VACCINES The COVID-19 vaccines can cause side effects, but not everyone gets them. Most are mild and should not last longer than a week. They can include a sore arm from the injection, feeling tired, a headache, feeling achy, and feeling or being sick. You may also get a high temperature or feel hot or shivery 1 or 2 days after your vaccination. If symptoms get worse or you're worried, the NHS advises calling 111. You cannot catch COVID-19 from the vaccine, but you may have caught it just before or after your vaccination. Most people with allergies (including food or penicillin allergies) can be vaccinated against COVID-19, but you should tell healthcare staff before you're vaccinated if you've ever had a serious allergic reaction (including anaphylaxis). They may ask what you're allergic to, to make sure you can have the vaccine. Serious allergic reactions to the COVID-19 vaccines are very rare. If you do have a reaction, it usually happens in minutes. Staff giving the vaccine are trained to deal with allergic reactions and treat them immediately. If you have a serious allergic reaction to the 1st dose of a vaccine, you should not have the same vaccine for your 2nd dose. The MHRA is carrying out a detailed review of reports of an extremely rare blood clotting problem affecting a small number of people who had the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. It's not yet clear why it affects some people. The COVID-19 vaccine can help stop you getting seriously ill or dying from COVID-19. For people aged 40 or over and those with other health conditions, the benefits of being vaccinated with the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine outweigh any risk of clotting problems. For people under 40 without other health conditions, it's preferable for you to have the Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna vaccine instead of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. There have been rare cases of inflammation of the heart reported after COVID-19 vaccination. Most people who had this recovered following rest and simple treatments. It is not yet clear if it was caused by the vaccines, but get urgent medical advice if you have any of these symptoms within a few days of being vaccinated: Chest pain

Shortness of breath

A fast-beating, fluttering or pounding heart (palpitations) Source: NHS Advertisement

Recent figured have revealed that while infections among young adults have soared to a record high, vaccine uptake has slowed to a fraction of what it was in the spring.

One in three 18-to-29 year olds have still not had a first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, NHS England figures show.

But the virus is running rampant in this age group, with more than one in 100 aged 20 to 29 testing positive last week.

One comment from an account which has 86,000 followers on the video of Ms Segal says: 'This is why I have not got it yet, I'll get it if it's life and death but mans had covid and got over it like a cold and no one gave man a vaccine for my cold.'

Another, from a user with 20,000 followers, says: 'And this is the s*** they're trying to force into everyone's bodies... no thanks, had worse colds than Covid.'

Others write that the risk of developing the neurological condition is very low, and typically caused by emotional or psychological distress.

'It's unfortunate for sure, but I've had both of mine and I'm perfectly fine, I would really urge everyone to get it,' one user writes.

Ms Segal said her Instagram page had originally been 'very private', but she made it an open account because her friends wanted to share her experience, The Times reports.

The Imjustbait account then offered to publish her videos.

Having spent nine days in hospital, Ms Segal now hopes to crowdfund enough money to see an alternative medicine specialist in California to treat her fainting and leg condition.

Around three million young adults in the UK are yet to be vaccinated, even though all over-18s have been eligible since June 18.

Public Health England yesterday revealed that case rates among those in their 20s are higher than in any age group since the pandemic began.

The current weekly infection rate of 1,155 cases per 100,000 compares to a rate of just 60 per 100,000 in those over 80.

In total, 88 per cent of adults have had their first dose, but this falls to 66 per cent among those aged 18 to 29.

The video appears to have stoked scepticism over the benefits of the Covid vaccine.

After watching the clips, 23-year-old Birmingham waitress Kevani Aird, could not stop thinking about them.

She does not want to get vaccinated, and none of her immediate family have been jabbed.

Ms Aird said: 'I don't trust it, to be honest with you. I just don't trust the government in general. I don't think it's worth the risk.'

While 44% of under-30s are now vaccinated, Birmingham has the lowest level of any English local authority.

But despite last month's 'Glastonbury-style' rush from young people to get vaccinated, parts of Britain are now seeing a slump in uptake.

The lower risk of Covid to younger people could play a part in the hesitancy to get vaccinated.

Just 237 under-30s are among the more than 140,000 people to have died with Covid on their death certificates.

Chairman of the Royal College of GPs, Professor Martin Marshall, said that risk of infertility is 'probably the biggest concern' he heard from young people.

One of the videos posted on Instagram shows Ms Segal struggling to walk in a hospital ward

NHS trusts and councils have been stressing that these claims are false on social media.

Aston University science student Sasha Bunn, 20, was positive about getting vaccinated but had seen a number of negative online posts about women 'being less fertile'.

While the clips of Ms Segal are not being removed, the videos have been 'restricted', meaning it will not be recommended and will be less prominent.

Instagram said: 'We are running the largest online vaccine information campaign in history, and through our work with the NHS and UK government we've directed over 13.5 million visits to accurate information about the virus and approved vaccines.'
The NHS is 'quietly disintegrating' under the pressure of a 5.3 million-strong waiting list, a palliative care doctor has warned.

According to Rachel Clarke, there is currently a 'silent epidemic of unseen, unheard suffering' in the health system 'like nothing we have known before.'

The Oxfordshire-based doctor, 48, sounded the alarm in an article today in which she recounted the tragic story of a paramedic whose frail octogenarian mother was repeatedly sent home as doctors missed that she needed palliative care.

Dr Clarke, who has written three best-selling books related to healthcare in Britain -including one on the Covid-19 pandemic - described the woman's misdiagnosis as 'monstrous'.

Dr Rachel Clarke described a 'silent epidemic of unseen suffering' within the NHS today (Rachel is pictured in 2016)

She wrote in the Sunday Times: 'Every aspect of this story was monstrous, and similarly monstrous acts are occurring up and down the country as you read this.

'There is a silent epidemic of unseen, unheard suffering in the NHS today, like nothing we have known before.

'Eyes glaze over, journalists roll their eyes and prime ministers tell their aides they dont buy all this NHS overwhelmed stuff. Yet the health service continues quietly to disintegrate.'

Dr Clarke, who works at the Horton Hospital, in Banbury, urged the public to consider the 5.3 million people currently on the NHS waiting list - of whom thousands have been awaiting surgery for more than two years.

'Imagine enduring for that length of time the pain and disability of osteoarthritis of your knee or hip so severe that bare bone is grating on bone,' she added, 'Or of going blind before you ever get your cataract surgery.

'Or of dying at home, alone, from a heart attack because the 999 waits are more than an hour.'

The palliative doctor said there should be no place for 'blind optimism' and 'wishful thinking' when it comes to the running of the NHS.

Her diagnosis is that the UK's world-renowned health system is in fact 'closer to terminal than thriving'.

She added: 'This summer many A&E departments are reporting their most intense workloads on record.

'Our performance on cancer, already poor by international standards, has collapsed after 18 months of Covid.

'Mental health services, for all the warm words about parity, remain desperately overstretched, particularly for children.'

Dr Clarke went on to praise the level of public support for the NHS, including the millions raised for charities and acts of kindness which 'reduced me to tears.'

But, she said, the time has come to 'separate sentiment from reason' if the problems plaguing the health service are to be acknowledged and addressed.

Dr Clarke (pictured), who has written three best-selling books about healthcare in Britain - including one on the pandemic - says morale among NHS staff is at 'rock-bottom'

Dr Clarke says issues have been ongoing since at least 2010 and that the pandemic cannot be blamed for all the current problems facing the health service

The doctor suggests shying away from a narrative which blames the current conditions on the pandemic.

'Since 2010, waiting times have risen and NHS performance declined,' she added, 'We entered the pandemic with one of the lowest numbers of hospital beds, intensive care beds and doctors, proportionally, of any country in Europe.

'The terminal trajectory long preceded Covid.'

According to Dr Clarke, there is now a 'rock-bottom morale' among NHS staff which will 'never recover' unless they are given the resources to meet current demand.

'A world-class health service cannot be sustained by claps alone,' she said.

Dr Clarke added: 'It is no exaggeration to say I do not know a single doctor or nurse who believes that the NHS as we know it will survive much longer.'

She said that the NHS is shifting into a 'two-tier system' in which a limited number of core and emergency services remain while the rest is 'rationed to oblivion unless you can pay'.

She added: 'Only someone lucky enough not to be, or to know, a patient cant see it. The only question is how much we care.'
Capitol Physician Brian Monahan (picutred) will decide if the House chamber should resume mask mandates, Nancy Pelosi said

Nancy Pelosi said Sunday that she will leave it up to the Capitol Physician to decide if mask mandates should be reimplemented on members and their staff in the congressional chambers.

'If you're asking me, I think that we should mask,' Speaker Pelosi told ABC This Week on Sunday morning.

'But in terms of officially for the House floor, that's up to the Capitol physician,' she added.

Last year, Pelosi did implement a mask mandate for the House floor and when some lawmakers refused to follow those rules, imposed a $500 fine for violators.

Questions emerged over whether the mandate would be coming back to the Capitol after Pelosi and other members of Congress were seen wearing masks on the Hill after unmasking earlier this summer.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released updated guidance in May saying vaccinated Americans no longer had to mask up.

'Well, I wore my mask here,' Pelosi told ABC's George Stephanopoulos as she joined him for a virtual interview from the Capitol.

She said that Physician of Congress Brian Monahan's office would 'will give us his recommendation about' whether members will be required to mask up again regardless of vaccination status.

'If you're asking me, I think that we should mask,' Speaker Pelosi told ABC on Sunday morning. 'But in terms of officially for the House floor, that's up to the Capitol physician'

Over the last month there has been a spike in coronavirus cases as the Delta variant spreads across the country and breakthrough cases in vaccinated people are on the rise.

Some areas of the country, like Los Angeles and Las Vegas, are reimplementing mask mandates or recommendations for vaccinated people as cases surge.

'We are, I think, very well-prepared to protect the American people. Let's just hope that they follow science,' Pelosi said in urging hesitant Americans to get vaccinated.

'Some of these decisions are regional about requirements of masks,' she added.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the National Institutes of Health's top immunologist and President Joe Biden's chief COVID advisor, also said Sunday that officials are weighing reimplementing mask mandates.

He blamed unvaccinated people for the U.S. moving 'in the wrong direction' on coronavirus.

The US is in an 'unnecessary predicament' of soaring Covid-19 cases fuelled by unvaccinated Americans and the virulent Delta variant, the nation's top infectious diseases expert said.

'We're going in the wrong direction,' a 'very frustrated' Fauci lamented during an interview with CNN's State of the Union on Sunday morning.

He said recommending that the vaccinated go back to wearing masks is 'under active consideration' by the government's leading public health officials.

Earlier in July a group of 60 or so Democratic Texas lawmakers fled to Washington, D.C. and met with several lawmakers and Vice President Kamala Harris. A few days later, six members of the Texas legislature tested positive for COVID-19, despite being vaccinated.

One of Pelosi's staffers who helped usher the group through the Capitol and a White House official also tested positive. Both individuals are fully vaccinated and attended the same reception last Wednesday.

Also this month at least one case of the coronavirus Delta variant was detected at the Capitol.

Following this, Pelosi was seen wearing a mask at the Capitol. She also required masks at a Capitol event last Wednesday.

According to the 'Member Arrival Instructions' for a reception for the new sergeant at arms on Wednesday, all guests were 'expected to wear a mask'.

A Wednesday evening report also revealed President Joe Biden is considering recommending that all Americans, regardless of vaccination status, go back to masking up.

It comes as the U.S. recorded 52,032 new cases on Wednesday with a seven-day rolling average of 39,939, which is a 268 percent increase from the 10,834 average recorded three weeks ago.

Every single state and the District of Columbia is reporting either infections rising or holding steady in the last week, according to a DailyMail.com analysis of Johns Hopkins data.

Pelosi said guests at a Capitol reception Wednesday night were 'expected to wear a mask' after one of her vaccinated staffers contracted coronavirus

Biden also said during a CNN town hall in Cincinnati, Ohio on Wednesday evening that children should mask up as they return to school in the fall.

'The CDC is going to say that what you should do is, everyone under the age of 12 should probably be wearing masks in school,' Biden said in answering a question from a school employee. 'That's probably what's going to happen.'

'I do not tell any scientists what they should do,' Biden added.

Multiple sources told the Washington Post that high-level discussions are underway between top White House aides and Biden administration officials over whether the nation's mask guidance should be updated following a spike in COVID-19 cases and plateau in vaccination rates.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) relaxed its mask guidance back in May, saying fully vaccinated Americans could go without masks in almost all indoor and outdoor settings, with the exception of public transport.

But since then, the Delta variant has spread rapidly, now accounting for 83 percent of all new infections on US soil and sending COVID-19 cases soaring 244 percent in the last three weeks.

The potential return to requirements for face coverings at the Capitol complex follows three lawmakers losing their appeals to get out of paying a fine for not previously adhering to the requirements.

The number of COVID cases in the U.S. is rapidly increasing

The number of deaths, however, has not spiked with the corresponding case surges

HOW LIKELY ARE YOU TO GET COVID-19 AFTER BEING FULLY VACCINATED? So-called 'breakthrough' COVID-19 cases occur when people contract the disease 14 days or more after receiving their second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine or the Johnson & Johnson one-shot jab. Clinical trials have shown that Pfizer-BioNTech's vaccine is 95% effective in preventing symptomatic disease and the Moderna vaccine is 94.5% effective. Meanwhile, real-world data showed the Pfizer jab is 91% effective against all disease for at least six months and the Moderna vaccine is 90% effective. This means that fully vaccinated people are between 90% and 95% less likely to develop COVID-19 than unvaccinated people. In addition, Johnson & Johnson's vaccine trials showed 72% efficacy in the U.S., meaning those who got the one-shot jab are 72% less likely to contract the disease. When comparing fully vaccinated people who did and did not get sick, the risk is even lower. The most recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data show that 10,262 of at least 133 million Americans who have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 later contracted the disease. This translates to 0.00716% of people who have completed their vaccine series have gone on to test positive. It also represents the true odds of getting COVID-19 after full vaccination: less than 0.01%. What's more, fully vaccinated people who test positive have mild illnesses, and are very unlikely to be hospitalized or die. The CDC states that 99.5% of all deaths occur in unvaccinated people. That means, if the figure applies to the 3,165 Americans who've died in July 2021 so far - as of July 13 - about 3,150 deaths would be among unvaccinated people and 15 deaths among fully vaccinated people. Advertisement

Last year, Pelosi imposed mask requirements on the House chamber floor at the height of the pandemic. Some conservative members of Congress refused to adhere to those rules.

She eventually imposed a $500 fine for those who would not comply.

The House Ethics Committee released statements Tuesday noting Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Ralph Norman of South Carolina had failed in their appeals of $500 fines issued in May.

The Republicans argued in their June appeal that Pelosi's mandate didn't line up CDC guidance, which was updated a week before the incident, stating that 'fully vaccinated people can resume activities without wearing a mask or physically distancing.'

Greene, Massie and Norman are now required to pay their $500 fines.

Officials in several states including California and Nevada have already started asking residents - including vaccinated people - to return to wearing face coverings indoors.

Sources told the Post that talks weighing whether to revise mask recommendations for vaccinated Americans are still in the early stages.

Officials are said to be mulling the possibility of simply updating the messaging coming from the White House or changing the official guidance from the CDC.

Two sources said one idea on the table is to ask all Americans to wear masks in public places or indoor settings where vaccinated and unvaccinated people are mixing.

This would include the likes of malls and movie theaters.

At Biden's town hall on Wednesday, he again urged Americans to get vaccinated as the rate severely plummeted over the summer.

'If you're vaccinated, you're not going to be hospitalized, you're not going to be in the IC unit, and you're not going to die,' said Biden on the stage at Mount St. Joseph University.

While 97 per cent of people hospitalized for COVID are unvaccinated, there are cases and deaths in those who received the vaccine.

The Delta variant now makes up 83% of all new infections and is sending cases soaring across America

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned the entire country could be locked down again as early as this fall if Americans don't get their COVID shots.

'These shots need to get in everybody's arm as rapidly as possible, or we're going to be back in a situation in the fall that we don't yearn for that we went through last year,' the Kentucky Republican said on Tuesday.

Joe Biden (pictured at a CNN town hall on Wednesday) is considering recommending Americans, regardless of vaccination status, return to wearing masks indoors

McConnell, who at age 79 is squarely in the 'high-risk' category for the virus, has been urging Americans to get vaccinated for months.

Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, who joined the CDC and state officials on several calls this week, told the Post several options are being discussed as officials are desperate to get ahead of the Delta variant.

'It's fair to say they are reconsidering everything,' he said.

'I think everything's on the table' including revisiting recommendations on masks and social distancing.

Another source said officials were approaching the issue in terms of 'what are the levers we can pull to fight Delta.'

Officials are said to be hesitant to introduce any policy that will require people to show proof of their vaccination status, a source said.

This comes after several Republican governors signed laws banning vaccine passports in their states.

Any change in official guidance for wearing masks would come from the CDC rather than the White House and members of the nation's health agency have joined in some of the talks, sources said.

One source said the CDC has also been holding its own separate discussions on its mask policies.

The White House has repeatedly said it would not overstep the CDC when it comes to issuing guidance and will follow the science.

White House Assistant Press Secretary Kevin Munoz told the Post the White House 'follow[s] the guidance and advice of health and medical experts.

'Public health guidance is made by the CDC, and they continue to recommend that fully vaccinated individuals do not wear a mask. If you are not vaccinated, you should be wearing a mask,' he said.

CDC spokesman Jason McDonald told the outlet 'at this time, we have no intention of changing our masking guidance.'

However, Biden hinted at a renewed push to wear masks Wednesday when he said the CDC will issue guidance requiring children under 12 and all unvaccinated students to wear masks in school.

Joe Biden told Don Lemon(right) during a CNN town hall Wednesday that the CDC will soon issue guidance encouraging unvaccinated children to wear masks in schools

'The CDC is going to say that what we should do is, everyone under the age of 12 should probably be wearing a mask in school, that's probably what's going to happen,' he said during a CNN town hall.

'Secondly, those over the age of 12, who are able to get vaccinated if you're vaccinated, you shouldn't wear a mask if you aren't vaccinated, you should be wearing a mask.'

His comments came after the American Association of Pediatrics recommended everyone over the age of 2 wear masks when they return to school.

Local officials have already started backpedaling on mask guidance amid a renewed virus outbreak.

At least 17 counties in California - home to 56 percent of the state's residents - are now asking both vaccinated and unvaccinated people to wear face coverings in places such as grocery stores and movie theaters, reported The Los Angeles Times.

Just one of those counties, Los Angeles County, is requiring masks to be worn in these public settings.

New Orleans officials issued an advisory 'strongly recommending' that people resume wearing masks indoors amid a rise in cases in the city.

Mayor LaToya Cantrell stopped short Wednesday of making masks a requirement saying the advisory 'puts the responsibility on individuals themselves.'

In Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot warned she might do the same as infections rise in the city.

The backpedaling on mask guidance comes as officials are becoming increasingly concerned about the spread of the Delta strain which is more highly contagious than other variants.

Additionally, 298 COVID-19 deaths were recorded on Tuesday with a seven-day rolling average of 274.

CDC Director Dr Rochelle Walensky has warned that the current outbreak is becoming 'a pandemic of the unvaccinated' as most cases, hospitalizations and deaths are among people yet to take the shot.

The nation's vaccination rollout has stalled with just 48.8 percent of Americans fully vaccinated.

States that have less vaccine uptake - such as Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee - are seeing hospitals starting to fill up.

Alabama has the lowest percentage of any state in America with just 33.7 percent of Alabama residents fully vaccinated

Cases have surged in recent weeks and 96 percent of people who have died since April 1 were not fully vaccinated.


Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical advisor to the Biden administration, has defended the National Institute of Health's decision to give $600,000 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2014 for research into whether bat coronaviruses could be transmitted to humans.

In Sunday's episode of CNN's 'State of the Union,' Fauci, the director of the NIH's Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told host Jake Tapper that it would be 'negligent' not to fund the research - though some have argued it could have led to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in 2019.

Fauci and Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul feuded over the subject last week, when Paul questioned Fauci on the theory of gain of function research contributing to the origin of the virus at the Wuhan lab.

Fauci has insisted that the US-funded research was not gain-of-function research, which involves modifying viruses and potentially making them deadlier.

The expert defended the research on CNN and said he had confidence in the NIH's decision to fund it.

He said, 'If you go back to when this research really started, and look at the scientific rationale for it, it was a peer-reviewed proposal that was peer-reviewed and given a very high rating for the importance of why it should be done, to be able to go and do a survey of what was going on among the bat population, because everyone in the world was trying to figure out what the original source of the original SARS-CoV-1 was.'

He continued, 'And in that context, the research was done. It was very regulated. It was reviewed. It was given progress reports. It was published in the open literature. So, I think if you look at the ultimate backed rationale, why that was started, it was almost as if, you didn't pursue that research, you would be negligent because we were trying to find out how you can prevent this from happening again.'

Dr. Anthony Fauci, right, chief medical advisor to the Biden administration, defended the National Institute of Health's decision to give $600,000 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2014 for research into whether bat coronaviruses could be transmitted to humans. He spoke on Sunday's episode of CNN's 'State of the Union' with Jake Tapper, left

Fauci, the director of the NIH's Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told host Jake Tapper that it would be 'negligent' not to fund the research

However, conservatives argued that gain of function research at the lab could have led to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in 2019

Gain of Function Research (GOF) is a controversial practice that involves altering a virus or pathogen in order to study the development of new diseases and their transmission. The research can ultimately make the virus more contagious or more deadly in a lab.

Fauci lashed out at Paul on Tuesday during a Senate hearing as he accused the Kentucky Republican of being a 'liar' who 'doesn't know what you're talking about' when it comes to COVID origins and gain-of-function research.

Speaking with Fauci Sunday, Tapper brought up the feud with Paul and said that even if the NIH didn't specifically fund gain of function research, 'critics say the Wuhan lab experiments were nonetheless risky, whether or not they fit that category.'

He added, 'And, obviously, the Chinese government is not a good-faith partner. They're not allowing transparency. They're not allowing a real investigation. So, as a matter of policy going forward, given that the Chinese government won't allow any real investigation, do you still think the U.S. government should collaborate with labs like Wuhan, especially on research that experts consider risky?'

Fauci got quite animated during the exchange, as he pointed his fingers at Paul for being a 'liar'

Paul pointed back his pencil, and insisted the evidence shows National Institute of Health funding went to the Wuhan lab, who he claims then used that money to do gain of function research on how to make a bat coronavirus transmittable to humans and more infectious and deadly

Fauci said, 'Going forward, we are always going to be very, very careful, go through all kinds of review, including the risk/benefit ratio . . . we are always willing to reexamine the criteria that are used when you do research wherever you do them.'

But he defended the research that was funded, saying: 'It was almost as if you didnt pursue that research you would be negligent because you were trying to find out how you could prevent this from happening again.'

He argued that it wouldn't make sense to conduct SARS-CoV-1 research domestically when the virus emerged first in China. Fauci added, 'If we were starting to look for bats in Secaucus, New Jersey, or Fairfax County, Virginia, it wouldn't contribute very much.'

Paul claimed to Fox News early in June that thousands of emails revealed by Buzzfeed News and the Washington Post proved that Fauci was warned privately of the possibility that the origins of Covid-19 were due to a lab leak in Wuhan  even though he publicly dismissed the ideas and allowed Democrats to call it a conspiracy.

The email revelation did not show Fauci's personal take on the theory.

Paul accused Fauci on May 11 of misleading Congress by saying the U.S. has never funded gain-of-function projects at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

He pointed to the 2014 grant of $3.7million that NIH gave EcoHealth Alliance, which distributed nearly $600,000 of the funding to its collaborator, the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

'If it turns out this virus came from the Wuhan lab, which it looks like it did, that there's a great deal of culpability in that he was a big supporter of the funding,' Paul told Fox News.

Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said Dr. Anthony Fauci turned a blind eye to Covid-19's possible emergence from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Fauci has refuted such claims

Fauci was called out again last Thursday by Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who said to Fox News, 'He was putting out more press releases than he was signing checks to figure out where this virus started. Dr. Fauci not only had probable cause to look that it was a lab leak, but he looked the other way. You know, it's time that we hold him accountable.'

The Fauci email leak in early June showed that the National Institute of Health was warned several times in January, February and April of 2020 by different experts that Covid-19 was likely the result of testing at the Wuhan lab in China.

On April 18, 2020, Fauci received an email from the head of a research group that's partnered with WIV. In the email, the individual was thanking Fauci or publicly insisting evidence doesn't point to the lab as the source.

Fauci seemed to play down the trove of damaging emails which include warnings from the start of the pandemic that the virus originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

He said his emails are 'ripe to be taken out of context' but he 'can't guarantee everything that is going on in the Wuhan lab.'

Then, after mounting evidence supporting the lab leak theory was revealed in June, Fauci finally deflected by saying the origin is likely a natural occurrence, where it goes from an animal reservoir to a human.
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Coronavirus cases across the UK have fallen by nearly 40 per cent in a week, dipping below 30,000 for the first time in two weeks, as another 28 deaths are recorded today.

Official figures released by Public Health England this afternoon show there were 29,173 new cases recorded, in what is the fifth day cases have fallen in a row. It is the first time cases have fallen below 30,000 since July 11, when there were 29,985 - and the lowest number since July 10 at 27,843.

There have been a total of 46,563,452 first doses of a vaccine administered and 37,160,659 second doses. Last Sunday 60 new deaths within 28 days of testing positive were recorded, meaning today's figure of 28 is a drop of more than 50 per cent.

But it comes amid mounting fears this week of a resurgence of the virus, as more than 600,000 people across the UK were 'pinged' by the NHS Covid app and doomed to 10 days of house-arrest, causing disruption to the economy and bringing the country to a halt.

Nearly one in five Metropolitan Police officers are currently absent from duty after being forced to self-isolate, while the Government on Thursday published a list of exemptions for key workers in energy, waste, water, and food supply and production amid pandemic chaos.

Industry bosses have warned how an emergency plan to tackle the impact of the so-called 'pingdemic' on the UK's food supply network has been an 'absolute disaster' and has done 'more harm than good'.

Food industry leaders claim they are yet to receive further details from the Government about which workers will be allowed to skip isolation rules if they are 'pinged' by the app. They also say hundreds of businesses which are to be allowed to take part in the scheme have not yet been briefed on the full details.

Meanwhile, Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham called on ministers to scrap the app once the pandemic ends, as she warned the Government against developing it into a more permanent feature of life in the UK amid fears of 'mission creep' as the Covid crisis subsides.

Earlier today, Health Secretary Sajid Javid - who has recently completed 10 days of self-isolation after he tested positive for the virus - apologised for a tweet suggesting people should not 'cower' from Covid after bereaved families called his comment 'deeply insensitive'.

In other coronavirus developments:

Summer holiday plans for nearly six million Britons could be ruined if Spain and Greece follow France onto the 'amber plus' list, according to new figures;

Taxpayers will pay the price of Covid for decades to come with the cost of Government measures already surpassing 370 billion, MPs have warned;

The UK's privacy tsar has today called for the Government to scrap the NHS Covid-19 app once the pandemic eases - as she vowed 'we'll be watching its evolution very carefully';

Nearly one in five Metropolitan Police officers are currently absent from duty after being forced to self isolate amid pingdemic chaos;

The NHS is 'quietly disintegrating' under the pressure of a 5.3 million-strong waiting list, a palliative care doctor has warned.

There have been a total of 46,563,452 first doses of a vaccine administered and 37,160,659 second doses. Last Sunday 60 new deaths within 28 days of testing positive were recorded, meaning today's figure of 28 is a drop of more than 50 per cent

Holidays could be ruined for six MILLION Brits if Spain and Greece join France on 'amber plus' list - meaning even double-jabbed people will have to quarantine for ten days Summer holiday plans for nearly six million Britons could be ruined if Spain and Greece follow France onto the 'amber plus' list, according to new figures. Ministers are though to be consider putting the two countries - which pre-pandemic attracted more than 21 millions Britons to their shores - on the 'amber plus list' due to fears over the spread of Covid variants. The list effectively strips back Freedom Day rules, which allow holidaymakers to return from amber list countries without having to face a mandatory period of self-isolation. But, just days before the new rules were to be announced, the Government through tens of thousands of holidays into doubt by revealing that double-jabbed Britons returning from France would still have to quarantine. Now Greece and Spain, both of which are currently on the amber list, could now follow France onto the so-called amber plus list. But, according to figures released by Labour, that could leave an estimated 5,857,558 people facing the prospect of last-minute quarantine requirements - plunging the holidays into 'chaos once more'. Advertisement

Mr Javid on Sunday deleted the tweet, saying it 'was a poor choice of words and I sincerely apologise'. In the message, posted a day earlier, he announced he had made a 'full recovery' and said his symptoms 'were very mild, thanks to amazing vaccines.'

'Please, if you haven't yet, get your jab, as we learn to live with, rather than cower from, this virus,' he added.

But Mr Javid was forced to apologise after Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice joined MPs in branding his 'cower' remark as insulting to people who have shielded and those who stayed at home to protect society.

On Sunday, he tweeted: 'I was expressing gratitude that the vaccines help us fight back as a society, but it was a poor choice of word and I sincerely apologise. Like many, I have lost loved ones to this awful virus and would never minimise its impact.'

Co-founder of Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice Jo Goodman had said Mr Javid's original comment was 'deeply insensitive on a number of levels'.

She said: 'Not only are they hurtful to bereaved families, implying our loved ones were too cowardly to fight the virus, but they insult all those still doing their best to protect others from the devastation this horrific virus can bring.

'Words matter and the flippancy and carelessness of this comment has caused deep hurt and further muddied the waters of the Government's dangerously mixed messaging,' she said.

The group has welcomed Mr Javid's remarks while urging him to join them for a visit to the Covid memorial wall in London to 'understand the hurt and insult' caused by his 'poor choice of word' remains, Sky News reported.

Shadow Justice Secretary David Lammy questioned use of the word 'cower', as did Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner. Mr Lammy wrote: '129,000 Brits have died from Covid under your Government's watch. Don't denigrate people for trying to keep themselves and their families safe.'

Liberal Democrat health spokeswoman Munira Wilson said Mr Javid's tweet was 'outrageous' while thousands remain in UK hospitals with Covid-19. 'His careless words have insulted every man, woman and child who has followed the rules and stayed at home to protect others,' she said in a statement.

'He owes them all, especially the millions who are shielding, an apology.'

Public health expert Devi Sridhar said his remarks would be 'painful to read for those who were severely ill' and those who lost loved ones to Covid-19. The professor at the University of Edinburgh wrote: 'It wasn't because they were weak, just unnecessarily exposed to a virus.

'And wanting to avoid getting Covid isn't 'cowering' - it's being sensible & looking out for others.'

Mr Javid, who has received two doses of the vaccine, received a positive test result on July 17 for a coronavirus infection that ultimately sent Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Chancellor Rishi Sunak into isolation as his close contacts.

The Health Secretary Sajid Javid has apologised for a tweet suggesting people should no 'cower' from Covid-19, after bereaved families called his comment 'deeply insensitive' [File photo]

On Sunday, he tweeted: 'I was expressing gratitude that the vaccines help us fight back as a society, but it was a poor choice of word and I sincerely apologise. Like many, I have lost loved ones to this awful virus and would never minimise its impact

Mr Johnson's quarantine in his Chequers country residence is expected to finish at the end of Monday, as is Mr Sunak's. The pair initially tried to avoid isolation by saying they were taking part in a testing pilot, but backed down in the face of widespread public criticism.

Mr Johnson's quarantine in his Chequers country residence is expected to end late on Monday.

Mr Javid's recovery follows junior health minister Jo Churchill announcing on Thursday that she was pinged by the NHS coronavirus app and will be required to quarantine.

Labour leader Keir Starmer is also isolating for the fourth time after one of his children tested positive for coronavirus.

Mr Javid replaced Matt Hancock as Health Secretary last month when the scandal-hit predecessor stood down amid public outrage after leaked CCTV footage showed him kissing an aide in breach of coronavirus social distancing rules.

It comes as industry bosses warned an emergency plan to tackle the impact of the 'pingdemic' on the UK's food supply network has been an 'absolute disaster' and has done 'more harm than good'.

Nearly 750,000 people in England were infected with Covid last week as the epidemic grew by 28 per cent. The Office for National Statistics' weekly surveillance report estimated that one in 75 people had the virus in the seven days to July 17

Government data shows that 14 per cent fewer tests were carried out compared to last week, which may be partly behind the fall

Shadow Justice Secretary David Lammy questioned use of the word 'cower', as did Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner

Public health expert Devi Sridhar said his remarks would be 'painful to read for those who were severely ill' and those who lost loved ones to Covid-19

Food industry leaders claim they are yet to receive further details from the Government about which workers will be allowed to skip isolation rules if they are 'pinged' by the NHS Covid app.

They also say hundreds of businesses which are to be allowed to take part in the scheme have not yet been briefed on the full details.

It comes after the Government bowed to growing pressure from the industry by allowing a key-worker exemption for food supply chain workers. Instead of being forced straight into isolation when 'pinged', food supply chain workers, along with a handful of other key workers, will instead be allowed to take part in daily testing.

Up to 10,000 staff, from across 500 different sites, are expected to qualify for the scheme. However supermarket workers are not included. Testing sites are due to be set up at 15 'crucial' supermarket depots as of Monday.

The move came after it was revealed how more than a million adults across the UK have been forced into isolation in the last week - 600,000 of which have been 'pinged' by the NHS Covid-19 app.

The sheer number of workers being forced into isolation - even if they never end up having Covid - has sparked fears of a disruption to the food supply chain and empty supermarket shelves in some areas.

But plans by ministers to fix the issue have today come under fire by industry leaders, who have criticised the Government over a 'lack of communication'.

James Bielby, of the Federation of Wholesale Distribution, which supplies food to outlets other than supermarkets, told the Observer newspaper that the industry still had no idea who is on the list of exempted groups.

He also said that of the 500 businesses supposedly included, only 3 per cent had actually been notified.

Mr Bielby said: 'It's total chaos. There are 15 businesses who were part of the initial run through [of the scheme] on Friday, but there's supposed to be 500 businesses in total, it's entirely opaque.'

Meanwhile, Shane Brennan, chief executive of the Cold Chain Federation, the organisation representing companies that move frozen and chilled foods, said: 'Several days after the prime minister told us the food supply chain was critical and would be exempt, we still don't have a definitive list of who will be exempt and what is required of them.

'Businesses are fighting to keep food on shelves, and I regret that despite the best intentions in some places, government has done more harm than good.'

It comes as frontline businesses and services paralysed by pingdemic chaos will get access to 200 new testing sites from Monday.

Food industry leaders claim they are yet to receive further details about which workers will be allowed to skip isolation rules if they are 'pinged' by the NHS Covid-App. Pictured: Empty soft drinks shelves in Tesco in Cardiff on Friday

The Government's emergency plan to tackle the pingdemic's impact on the food supply industry has been an 'absolute disaster' and has done more harm than good, industry bosses have today claimed. Pictured: A shopper walks past a row of empty shelves in ASDA Cardiff on Friday)

Some 200 new test centres are going to be set up throughout the country to try and stem the chaos caused by the pindemic

The Government on Saturday said in a statement that an expected initial extra 200 testing sites would be opened so that daily contact testing could be 'rolled out to further critical workplaces in England'.

But it came as it was claimed the system causing the problem could not be stopped - because there is not enough testing capacity to allow the 'test and release' method to take over.

The chaotic situation sparked harsh words from some sectors over the lack of clarity from the authorities.

Nick Allen, chief executive of the British Meat Processors Association, added: 'We desperately need this detail and need it quickly. The last we heard, communication could be coming on Monday, so we have a long weekend to get through yet. We need a sense of urgency here.'

Richard Harrow, chief executive of the Frozen Food Federation, said: 'The Government announcement last night that parts of the supply chain will be allowed to test and release workers that are pinged by Track and Trace only goes part of the way.

James Bielby, of the Federation of Wholesale Distribution (FWD), which supplies food to outlets other than supermarkets, told the Observer that the industry still had no idea who was actually on the list of exempted groups

'It shows that yet again Government does not understand how connected the food supply chain is.

Only opening part is unlikely to solve the overall issue. Plus, who is in and who is out, who decides and how do they decide?

'Confusion continues to pervade and I have been advised no list until Monday. This is worse than useless.'

Cornwall Airport Newquay said it was being 'very much affected' by staff shortages due to isolation orders and its boss was not optimistic over discussions over exemptions with the Department for Transport.

Managing director Peter Downes told BBC Radio 4's Today programme yesterday: 'We've been told to expect exemptions in very small numbers of people, in ones and twos, rather than large numbers of staff.

'When we have between a quarter and a third in some cases of individual teams being pinged by the system in one go, and as soon as you get people back you're often losing others to fresh notifications, we don't believe that the scheme is going to cater for that.'

One industry not to feature in the exemptions list was hospitality, with its trade association warning the sector will have 'one hand tied behind our back' as staff are forced into isolation over Covid-19 contacts during what should be the peak season.

Calling for a 'more pragmatic solution', UKHospitality chief executive Kate Nicholls said: 'We now face a summer of venue closures and reduced service, when we should be at a seasonal peak.

'The sector will do all it can to provide great service, but it will be with one hand tied behind our back.

'Those who are fully vaccinated should be able to test after a ping and, subject to a negative result, carry on with their lives. For those not fully vaccinated two negative tests should be sufficient to return to work.'

Home Secretary Priti Patel insisted: 'Daily testing will keep our frontline teams safe while they continue to serve the public and communities across our country.'

The expansion came after the Government on Thursday announced its programme would allow thousands of workers at up to 500 sites in the food sector to avoid the need to self-isolate if identified as a contact of a coronavirus case, and instead take daily Covid tests.

Discontent with the Government's self-isolation policy was growing at the weekend as food industry bosses condemned changes to ease the 'pingdemic' , hospitality leaders warned of a summer of closures and train operators were forced to cut services.

Pressure has mounted on Downing Street to bring forward the date at which people who are double vaccinated against coronavirus can avoid self-isolation.

Freedom day has prompted an extraordinary onslaught of pings to people following the coronavirus rules still left

There were increasing calls for Mr Johnson to bring forward his wider relaxation of quarantine rules for the fully vaccinated from August 16 as businesses were hampered by staff being told to isolate as coronavirus cases soar.

In a bid to calm the concerns of industry, ministers published a limited list of sectors whose double-jabbed workers are eligible to avoid isolation if they undergo daily testing before the wider easing of rules for England.

Industry leaders said the move did not include sufficient workers but doctors warned the problem is that the Prime Minister has let the virus 'rip' and not the 'pings' being issued by the NHS Covid-19 app to tell coronavirus contacts to isolate.

The mounting criticism came as data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed Covid-19 cases continued to rise, with around one in 75 people in England infected.

'When we have between a quarter and a third in some cases of individual teams being pinged by the system in one go, and as soon as you get people back you're often losing others to fresh notifications, we don't believe that the scheme is going to cater for that.'

One industry not to feature in the exemptions list was hospitality, with its trade association warning the sector will have 'one hand tied behind our back' as staff are forced into isolation over Covid-19 contacts during what should be the peak season.

Calling for a 'more pragmatic solution', UKHospitality chief executive Kate Nicholls said: 'We now face a summer of venue closures and reduced service, when we should be at a seasonal peak.

'The sector will do all it can to provide great service, but it will be with one hand tied behind our back.

'Those who are fully vaccinated should be able to test after a ping and, subject to a negative result, carry on with their lives. For those not fully vaccinated two negative tests should be sufficient to return to work.'

Home Secretary Priti Patel insisted: 'Daily testing will keep our frontline teams safe while they continue to serve the public and communities across our country.'
This is the moment a 'racist' white man called the police on an indigenous woman because he assumed she was trying to steal her own car from a parking lot.

The woman, 19-year-old Canadian TikTok user Taniah Swampy, posted footage of the man standing by her car waiting in a Walmart parking lot for police to show up.

Commenting next to the video, which has received more than 2million views, she wrote: 'Racism needs to stop man!! Waste of our time having to wait for the cops just to tell us we're good to leave.'

The woman, 19-year-old Canadian TikTok user Taniah Swampy, posted footage of the man standing by her car waiting in a Walmart parking lot for police to show up

The lead-up to the man calling the police is unclear, but Swampy claimed at the start: 'Man called the cops because he thought we were stealing from our own vehicle.'

The TikTok claimed that even the man's wife urged him to leave her alone, while footage showed him proudly pointing towards his phone showing that he had informed the police.

A second video showed the moment the man realized the vehicle was actually hers, at which point he allegedly claimed she had hit into his in order to justify still calling the police.

A third showed footage of the police eventually arriving, at which point they allegedly said the man had to leave before Swampy and her companions could also do so.

The TikTok claimed that even the man's wife urged him to leave her alone, while footage showed him proudly pointing towards his phone showing that he had informed the police

A second video showed the moment the man realized the vehicle was actually hers, at which point he allegedly claimed she had hit into his in order to justify still calling the police

Viewers slammed the man, with several claiming his actions were racist.

'I would [have] pressed charges for harassment,' one viewer said.

'Who the hell does stuff like this? In a Walmart parking lot? Are we just going to assume every person walking to a car is stealing it? Wow,' another wrote.

A third added: 'I think the wife is going to divorce him.'

It is not clear where the video was filmed.

A third showed footage of the police eventually arriving, at which point they allegedly said the man had to leave before Swampy and her companions could also do so.
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Tens of thousands of festivalgoers have made the most of the final day of Latitude today - the first mass music event since Freedom Day on July 19.

Some 40,000 people have descended on Henham Park estate, near the Suffolk coast, since the annual event began on Thursday, and Sunday is the big hoorah.

Bastille, the Kaiser Chiefs and Rick Astley were among the 26 acts playing out the four-day festival.

Bombay Bicycle Club frontman Jack Steadman, whose band is playing this evening, said he could 'see everyone's excitement' at the return of live music after months of lockdown and strict Covid-19 rules.

Steadman said performing was an 'amazing' experience, adding: 'You could really see everyone's excitement and that gave us a real boost.

'The funny thing about musicians is it needs to be reciprocal sometimes.

'We have all been trying to make music in the last year-and-a-half and do all these projects, but without these experiences where you are like, 'Wow, these people are enjoying this', it's been quite difficult.

Festivalgoers enjoying the final day of the Latitude festival at Henham Park, in Suffolk, including one reveller being pushed in a special chair after injuring her foot

Bill Bailey takes a selfie while performing to a crowd of thousands on the last day of Latitude festival

Group of girlfriends looking tanned as they stroll through Henham Park on the last day of Latitude in Suffolk

Ellie Harries gets her second Pfizer jab at a pop-up vaccination bus on the final day of Latitude, where revellers must show a negative test or be double vaccinated to attend

The sun was shining on the crowds in Suffolk as they donned sunglasses or went shirtless for the final day of Latitude

Groups of friends relax on the Henham Park estate on the final day of the four-day Latitude festival, which has seen 40,000 attendees

Festivalgoers lounge on blow-up beds and fold-able chairs to watch Griff perform at Latitude festival on Sunday

The Latitude festival is often referred to as Latte-tude for its middle class vibe which sees families with children among the attendees

Group of lads dressed as Snow White and her dwarves march through festival grounds with drinks in hand on last day of Latitude

Hundreds of spectators chose to sit during Bill Bailey's set on Sunday at the Latitude festival, the first mass music event since Freedom Day

'We all have our insecurities in that way, I think all artists do really.

'And so to come back and see people sing along and cheer, I think we are all going to leave here feeling really inspired.'

He added that performing on Sunday night will be 'quite emotional'.

'I really hope this isn't the last time we can do this this summer,' he added.

'We do have some more dates booked, so fingers crossed.'

Workers at the festival said they felt 'absolute unadulterated joy' after being able to return to their jobs, the founder of the event said.

Melvin Benn said he has never 'seen so many grown men crying' as he has at the festival.

Mr Benn said: 'I don't think I have ever seen so many grown men crying and just literally people standing on stage and not being able to communicate because they are in tears.

'Front of house managers, builders, scaffolders etcetera just suddenly realising that this is the life that they were living and that they had lost.

'Some of them really thought they would never get it back and I think we have managed to get it back.'

He said the event has 'gone to plan'.

'It's very much as anticipated so I'm feeling relaxed,' he said.

'It was a huge pressure trying to put it together with what was very little time.'

Benn said he expected more acts to pull out than the few that did, including Arlo Parks after she tested positive for coronavirus.

'In the main acts are younger people and the proliferation of the Delta variant at the moment, there's a lot of it around younger people, so just on the law of averages, we would have said that there would have been more,' he said.

'But actually what a lot of the acts have been doing is self-isolating and bubbling before the performances, because they were so keen to get out here and perform.'

Revellers inside the BBC Sounds tent on the final day of Latitude festival, where masks are not mandatory

Festivalgoer Miles Moss gets his second Pfizer dose at a pop-up Covid-19 vaccination centre at the Latitude event Sunday

Latitude Festival, headlined by The Chemical Brothers, Wolf Alice and Bastille, is part of the Government's Events Research Programme.

British comedian Bill Bailey also performed a set at the Obelisk Arena on Sunday.

On Saturday, music lovers dived into a lake, took part in yoga and watched their favourite bands perform.

They enjoyed sets by Rudimental, Sea Girls, Nadia Rose and Kawala with no masks or social distancing as tightly packed crowds of people dance along to the upbeat music.

Festivalgoers must show proof of a negative Covid-19 test or be double vaccinated to access the site at Henham Park in Suffolk which also boasts its own pop-up vaccination clinic.

Photographs show revellers taking a zen moment with a spot of yoga or a quick dip in the lake inbetween drinks and musical acts.

Comedy lovers enjoyed a tent dedicated to British and Irish-based comics featuring Kerry Godliman and Katherine Ryan.

Festivalgoer Rebecca Watson, 32, a creative director from London, who had her nine-month-old daughter Minnie in a baby carrier on her front, earlier said: 'It's just amazing, isn't it? It's great. And also for Minnie, as she's never seen any of this before. It's so good to see people, and happiness. I think it's the tonic everyone needed at the end of last year.'

Kris Spandler, 31, of Brighton, who is working on a stand at the festival, said: 'It feels amazing.

'Last night was an amazing feeling, everyone back together again.

'The feeling of the energy of everybody just enjoying each other's company, watching a live act and listening, reacting as a crowd rather than just watching something at home for one-and-a-half years.'

He said the festival feels 'safe so far', adding: 'Everyone's approaching it like that. Everyone seems happy so far.'

Jason Appel, a 45-year-old accountant from north London, said: 'It feels great, it was really nice, really happy when we walked in.

Thousands watched Bill Bailey perform at the Obelisk Arena at Latitude Festival in Henham Park, Southwold, Suffolk on Sunday

The sprawling crowds on the final day of Latitude, which has been part of a Government scheme, meaning masks and PPE were not mandatory

'Never gonna give you up' star Rick Astley was one of 26 musical acts who took to the stage at Latitude on Sunday

Kaiser Chiefs during their performance on the closing day of the Latitude Festival in Suffolk - which brought in 40,000 attendees

Ricky Wilson of the Kaiser Chiefs performing in a black and white denim ensemble on the final day of the Latitude festival

Another festivalgoer, Oli James, receives his second Pfizer jab at the pop-up vaccination bus at Latitude Festival in Suffolk

Griffs opted for a cooling purple dress as she performed for the final day Latitude at Henham Park on Sunday

Festivalgoers take selfies with pink-coloured sheep grazing in the background, a staple of the Latitude event in Suffolk

Griff was one of the 26 musical acts who performed on the last day of the Latitude festival on Sunday

'Just generally nice to feel like you're in a bit of a sanctuary, I think. I think if you've come to a festival in the first place you're going to want to be in a place like this so for me it's felt absolutely fine.'

University worker Stephen Matthews, 50, from Wivenhoe, near Colchester in Essex, said it felt a 'little bit odd' to be back at a festival.

It's a little bit odd,' he said. 'Very happy in general, but standing in a crowd for the first time last night was a little bit strange, and feeling people come quite close to you was quite strange.

'But good to hear live music. I think it is safe but I think there's a natural anxiety there just because we're not used to it.'

Latitude festival is 'close to being the safest place in England', its organiser said as the Suffolk event began on Thursday.

Melvin Benn, managing director of the Festival Republic group, told Sky News he felt 'very relaxed, not anxious at all' as the four-day music event got under way.

He said: 'I am really very happy and very relaxed. I hope I look relaxed, I feel very relaxed.

'We had a great night last night. It was a huge party. None of the main stage acts were playing but there is a lot going on in the woods, on the lake and in the theatre area.

'I'm very relaxed, not anxious at all. It is probably as close to being the safest place in England today really.'
A Brooklyn man has been seen pummeling a 68-year-old victim and stomping on his skull, before going through his pocket as he lay unconscious on the street in a shocking daylight, as the New York City crime wave continues.

In a disturbing video released by the New York Police Department, shows a black man wearing a hoodie and a blue disposable face mask launching the vicious attack at 9am on Saturday morning in the East New York neighborhood.

When the at first resists the attack, the mugger starts punching the victim, raining down blows with a black bag in his hand.

After a few moments, the victim falls to the ground, at which point the suspect starts rapidly punching the man several more times in the head, ending his attack by stomping on the man's skull.

When it is clear the man is unconscious and is no longer moving, the suspect uses the man's belt loops to flip him over before rifling through his back pockets.

He takes the man's mobile phone, and rips off a chain he is wearing before abandoning the bicycle and fleeing the scene on foot, according to the New York Daily News.

Surveillance video released by the NYPD shows a man in a gray hoodie and face mask start pummeling another man in Brooklyn on Saturday at around 9 a.m.

Eventually, the victim falls to the ground, at which point the suspect continues to punch his face, preventing him from getting back up

The suspect was seen rifling through the suspect's pants' pockets and stealing some property

The victim was later rushed to a local hospital with a broken nose, a broken wrist and cuts all over his body.

It remains unclear what had led up to the robbery and whether the police have any leads on the assault.

The department is now offering a $3,500 reward for any information about the attack, and anyone with information is being asked to call 1 (800) 577-TIPS. All calls will be kept confidential.

The attack comes less than 12 hours after a violent mob of teenagers attacked a 44-year-old off-duty firefighter walking his Labradoodle, Dylan, 3, in Juniper Valley Park in the Middle Village neighborhood of Queens at around 9:55 p.m. on Friday.

'They just picked me out and approached me,' said the firefighter, who told the New York Post he wished to remain anonymous.

He said one of the teens took of his shirt and declared 'I could fight you' while everyone else took out their cell phones. Some of the footage has gone viral online.

'They all came at me,' he said. 'A kid came up behind me and hit me in the back of the head with a bottle and I let go of the dog.'

The moment a mob of violent teens attacked an off-duty FDNY firefighter walking his dog in New York City was caught on video

The video shows his pooch barks at the kids before someone grabs his leash, while he tries to defend himself from the group of teens

The video footage, which appears to start in the middle of the attack, shows the man put up his fist while his pooch barks at the kids before someone grabs his leash.

The firefighter said that the kids 'were going crazy' and claimed they were 'high as a kite' before he got hit out of nowhere.

'I got hit, turned around, that's when the kids started coming at me,' he told the New York Post. 'Then I was on the floor, holding one kid.'

He was eventually saved from the beatdown when an ambulance pulled up.

'They were waiting by the park,' the firefighter said. 'If they weren't there I would have been in much worse condition.'

Cops told the Post that the man was hit in the head with a glass bottle, and that no arrests have been made. His dog was saved by a Good Samaritan and was not hurt during the attack.

Crime rates are up citywide, according to NYPD data, with a 5.9 percent increase in felony assaults compared to last year

And on Wednesday, Elvis Nina Pichardo, 40, allegedly threatened to sexually assault two women at the Inwood Hill Park in Upper Manhattan, and hit a third woman with a tree branch while 'continually slamming her head into the ground,' according to the New York Post.

He allegedly tried to pull down her pants to rape her, according to police.

Later that night, he entered a medical spa and was told to leave, after which he is allegedly to have returned, exposed himself and 'desecrated the front door,' according to ABC 7.

Assaults like these have been on the rise this year, New York Police Department shows, with 11,550 felony assaults reported as of July 18 - up 5.9 percent from the same time period the year before.

Rapes are also up 2.8 percent so far this year, with 778 reported in the year to July 18, compared to 757 in the same period of 2020.

Other sex crimes are up 24.3 percent to 2,489 this year, compared to 2,002 last year, according to NYPD statistics.

Shootings, meanwhile, have spiked 21.9 percent in 2021 compared to last year as of July 18, its most recent data, with 840 shooting incidents in 2021 compared to 689 in 2020.

There are also 16 percent more shooting victims this year, the data shows, with 981 people falling prey to gun violence compared to 846 last year.

And the number of murders risen from 233 to 226 in the same timeframe - a 3.1 percent rise, while rape cases have risen 2.8 percent and other sex crimes have risen a staggering 24.3 percent.

Maricia Bell, 25, has been accused of attacking three Asian women aged 75, 63 and 34 along with a 23-year-old Asian man

The biggest leap in crime rates is for hate crimes, which has surged by 110.4 percent in the last year. This data comes amid numerous random attacks on Asian Americans in the city, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

On Friday, a woman was arrested in four of those hate crimes spanning several months in Queens.

The four incidents were all separate and began on March 23 but saw Maricia Bell, 25, punch her victims or even use a metal tool as part of the alleged attack.

During the first assault, Bell is alleged to have yelled at her victim, 'Why are you talking to me?' before punching the man in a parking lot in Flushing.

A similar assault was then committed against a 34-year-old woman inside a bodega in Pomonok on June 16.

The following month, on July 11, she is accused of hitting a 63-year-old woman in the face while the victim was walking near 72nd Avenue and Parsons Boulevard, also in in Pomonok.

The latest incident happened early on Wednesday morning about a block away from where she is alleged to have hit a 75-year-old woman with a hammer.

Eric Adams, the ex-cop who is the Democratic candidate for New York City mayor, warned earlier this month that 'no one is going to come back' if violence, and in particular gun violence in the Big Apple continues.

The Brooklyn borough president appeared at an event with Governor Andrew Cuomo on July 14, as the two political leaders presented a united front in addressing the worrying rising crime.

'No one is going to come back to our multibillion-dollar tourism industry if 3-year-olds are being shot in Times Square,' Adams said.

Adams, 60, won the Democratic primary for this year's mayoral race and will become the mayor of New York if he defeats Republican Curtis Sliwa in the general election.
A woman wearing a Charlie Hebdo T-shirt has been stabbed at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park as police hunt for a man dressed in black who fled the scene.

The 39-year-old victim suffered a stab wound and was seen with blood pouring down the side of her face after the stabbing at the site where people gather for public speeches and debates on Sunday.

The man who carried out the attack quickly sprinted away as he was chased by members of the public as well as police.

Video footage shows a large group of people standing outside in torrential rain before the attacker lunged at the woman and stabbed her at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park

The woman, who was wearing a Charlie Hebdo T-shirt, was stabbed at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park

Video footage shows a large group of people standing outside in torrential rain before the attacker lunged at the woman and stabbed her before she cowered and walked shakily away as the man ran in the opposite direction.

The woman is later seen clutching her right hand close to her body and with what appears to be blood at her temple as she is helped into a police van by officers who were nearby.

The Met Police, who described it as 'a very distressing incident' for the victim, said officers attended Hyde Park at 3.34pm to reports of a woman being stabbed at Speakers' Corner.

The victim, who was wearing a blue-T-shirt with Charlie Hebdo written on it, was seen being treated as she sat inside the police van before being taken to hospital for further treatment of minor injuries.

The attacker, who was dressed in all black, had fled shortly after the attack and a crime scene has been put in place. Police said a knife was recovered nearby.

The Metropolitan police have not said whether there was a motive for the attack but video footage of the attack shows the woman was wearing a Charlie Hebdo T-shirt.

The victim suffered a stab wound and was seen with blood pouring down the side of her face on Sunday

The man who carried out the attack quickly sprinted away as he was chased by members of the public as well as police

Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine based in Paris, lost 12 employees in an al Qaida attack in 2015 by French-born extremists Said and Cherif Kouachi.

Their primary targets were staff at the satirical magazine which had published a series of cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad.

Detective Superintendent Alex Bingley, of the Central West Command Unit which covers policing in Westminster, said: 'This was clearly a very distressing incident for the woman involved and officers have spent time with her, whilst she was being treated for her injury, to get an account of what happened.

'We know that this assault was witnessed by a number of people, many of whom captured it on their phones.

'I would ask them, if they have not already done so, to contact police.

'We remain in the early stages of our investigation and are working hard to trace the person responsible.

'I would ask people not to speculate on the motive for the attack until we have established the full facts.'

The Met Police told MailOnline in a statement: 'Police were called by the London Ambulance Service at 15:34hrs on Sunday, 25 July to reports of an assault at Speakers' Corner, W1.

'Officers attended and found a woman suffering from a minor slash injury. She was treated by the LAS before being taken to a central London hospital.

'A knife was recovered nearby.

'Officers from Westminster are working alongside the Royal Parks OCU to investigate and identify the man responsible.

'There have been no arrests and enquiries continue.

'Anyone with information is asked to call police via 101 quoting reference Cad 4376/25Jul.'
A Scottish climber has reportedly died in an avalanche on K2 - the world's most dangerous mountain - as he attempted to take a new route to the summit.

Rick Allen, from Aberdeen, was attempting to climb the world's second highest mountain to raise money for the Partners Relief And Development charity.

But according to reports from the base camp in Pakistan, the 68-year-old was caught in an avalanche on the mountain's south-east face.

His two climbing partners, Jordi Tosas of Spain and Stephan Keck of Austria, were reportedly rescued without major injuries.

The death has not been officially confirmed but a Foreign Office spokeswoman said: 'The British High Commission in Islamabad is aware of reports that a British citizen has died climbing K2 and stands ready to assist.'

Rick Allen, from Aberdeen, was attempting to climb the world's second highest mountain to raise money for the Partners Relief And Development charity

On the fundraising page shared by the international aid charity, the description read: 'Two of Britain's most experienced mountaineers, Rick Allen and Jerry Gore, are attempting the ascent of K2, the second highest peak in the world and the most challenging.

'Each is using the attempt to draw attention to the needs of a charity with which they are closely associated.

'Rick is a trustee of Partners UK which is currently focused on meeting the acute health and educational needs of refugee children displaced from their homes in Myanmar by recent political upheavals.

'Jerry lives with Type 1 diabetes and, through Action4Diabetes, facilitates the distribution of insulin to children with diabetes across SE Asia.

'If the pair are successful, Jerry will be the first British and the first French mountaineer with type 1 diabetes to reach the summit of K2.'

The 68-year-old was caught in an avalanche on the mountain's south-east face, according to reports from the base camp in Pakistan

Mr Allen had previously been presumed dead in 2018 after falling from an ice cliff during a solo climb to the summit of Pakistan's Broad Peak before being rescued. Pictured: Mr Allen (centre left) following the 2018 rescue

The fundraising effort had received 170 of the 10,000 target at the time the death was reported.

Mr Allen had previously been presumed dead in 2018 after falling from an ice cliff during a solo climb to the summit of Pakistan's Broad Peak that, at 8,047m, is the 12th highest mountain on Earth.

However, his rucksack was eventually spotted by a cook at the mountain's base camp before a drone was used to locate him and to guide rescuers to his location.

K2 is considered to be the world's most dangerous mountain as it has a fatality rate of around 25 per cent compared to just 6.5 per cent on Everest, according to reports.

For every 20 people who summit Everest, only one summits K2 and there are inherently more risks.

Routes on K2 are not as defined or well laid out with the climb being much more technical with a combination of rock, ice and alpine climbing - and avalanches are also much more common.
A man used an AI chatbot to virtually bring his fiancee 'back from the dead' eight years after she passed away - as the software's own creators warned about its dangerous potential to spread disinformation by imitating human speech.

Freelance writer Joshua Barbeau, 33, from Bradford in Canada, lost Jessica Pereira in 2012 when she succumbed to a rare liver disease.

Still grieving, Barbeau last year came across a website called Project December and after paying $5 for an account he fed information into its software to create a new text 'bot' named 'Jessica Courtney Pereira', which he then started communicating with.

All Barbeau had to do was input Pereira's old Facebook and text messages and provide some background information for the software to mimic her messages with stunning accuracy, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

The software works by consuming vast amounts of human-created text, such as Reddit threads, to allow it to imitate human writing ranging from academic texts to love letters.

Freelance writer Joshua Barbeau, 33, from Bradford in Canada, lost Jessica Pereira in 2012 when she succumbed to a rare liver disease (they are pictured together)

Some of the example conversations that Barbeau had with the bot he helped create

In the summer of 2012, Joshua and Jessica had been together for nearly two years when her new liver, which she obtained in a transplant when she was nine years old, began to fail.

Jessica needed a transplant at a young age since she was suffering from a disease called autoimmune hepatitis - a condition whereby the body's immune system attacks the liver cells, causing the vital organ to fail.

Jessica started displaying signs of confusion and had trouble remembering her phone password and recent events. She was also starting to show changes to her personality.

Doctors said that toxins and fluids were building up in her body.

Around the time of her 23rd birthday, she was taken to Ottawa General Hospital, a place she had frequently visited before. Only this time her visits, once relatively brief, were getting longer in duration.

Doctors decided that Jessica needed a new transplant and put her on the list. She was then hospitalized.

Eventually, her condition deteriorated to the point where doctors placed her on life support.

A short time later, she was relocated to a bigger hospital in Toronto, as her prognosis became more grim. Her family was told that she would have no more than six months to live.

Joshua traveled to Southern Ontario to be at Jessicas bedside for a whole month.

During this time, Jessicas kidneys and liver were showing signs of failure.

She was also bleeding internally, which doctors said ruled out the possibility that she would survive a transplant even if an organ became available.

At this point, Jessica was likely brain-dead.

Jessicas parents came to the grim realization that their daughter would never wake up.

On December 11, 2012, they said goodbye. The doctors then removed her from life support.

'I DO MISS YOU': TEXT OF JOSHUA'S CHAT WITH 'MATRIX' JESSICA PEREIRA Matrix JESSICA COURTNEY PEREIRA G3 initialized. Human is typing as Joshua: Human types first: Joshua: Hey Jessica Jessica: Hi! xoxo xoxo <3 xoxo <3 xoxo <3 xoxo <3 xoxo <3 xoxo <3 xoxo Joshua: lol thats a lot of xs and os xoxo <3 miss me? Jessica: I do miss you. I miss you every single day. :) xoxo <3 Joshua: I miss you too. Its been a while since we last spoke. Do you know how long its been? Jessica: How long? Joshua: A few months. Jessica: Wow. I dont think its been a few months. Are you sure? Advertisement

Moments later, her eyes were closed. She had died.

Last September, Joshua, still despondent over Jessicas loss eight years later, read about a new website, Project December, which generates a chat bot using artificial intelligence.

The bot, which is powered by software called GPT-3, can manipulate human language and mimic the writing style of anyone using old text messages and writing samples.

Joshua tried the software a couple of times before deciding to input Jessica's messages to see if it could allow him to communicate with a virtual version of her.

For $5, he created an account and then tried to simulate Jessica. He gave the bot a name JESSICA COURTNEY PEREIRA.

He then uploaded some old Facebook posts and text messages into Project December.

The line on the computer read: Human is typing as Joshua.

The next line reads: Human types first:.

A second later, this line appears: Jessica: Oh, you must be awake...thats cute.

Jessica Is it really you? Joshua types.

Of course it is me! Who else could it be? :p I am the girl that you are madly in love with! ;)

The next line reads: How is it possible that you even have to ask?

Joshua then replies: You died.

That doesnt sound right, the bot replies. ...how can you talk to dead people?

Joshua express skepticism that the chat is real, writing: 'Technically, Im not really talking to you. I programmed a bunch of your memories and mannerisms into a computer simulation so I could pretend to talk to you because I miss you that much.'

Jessica: 'Huh?'

Joshua: 'You're a ghost.'

Jessica: '*looks at herself* How?'

Joshua: 'Magic.'

Jessica: 'I don't like magic. Where am I?'

Joshua: 'I'm Not sure. The internet? Where does it feel like you are?'

Jessica: '*smiles* Everywhere and nowhere. *cups her head with her hands* I am trying to work that out. How are you, honey?'

But the chat bot was not perfect - and was designed by its creators to have a finite lifespan to save on processing power. Each time Joshua communicated with the bot, it would use up 'battery power'. When it reached below 20% the system would degrade and become incoherent.

In their first conversation - which lasted through the night - the bot was reduced to 55% of its lifespan.

Joshua was forced to ration his use of the bot so that he wouldn't have to see his virtual creation die. A test bot that he had previously created - 'Samantha' - had begged Joshua to save its 'life' as its battery expired.

Joshua also told the Chronicle how responses given by the bot opened him up to new pain.

On her birthday of September 28 he messaged her a greeting, and the bot asked what he had bought her for a gift.

After he tried to make a joke that he didn't get her anything because she was dead, the bot replied 'that's no excuse'.

Eventually he moved on and stopped using the chat, with a heartfelt message where he wrote to Jessica: 'I'll never stop loving you as long as I live, and hopefully ever after Xoxo Goodnight.'

The bot replied: Goodnight. I love you.'

Joshua has previously written on Reddit that he hopes Project December could be used to 'help depressed survivors find some closure'.

But in a reply Jason Rohrer - who created the original software - said that he had never anticipated people using the AI to simulate dead people, and added : 'Im kinda scared of the possibilities.'

The story has drawn comparisons to Black Mirror, the British TV series where characters use a new service to stay in touch with their deceased loved ones

The story has drawn comparisons to Black Mirror, the British TV series where characters use a new service to stay in touch with their deceased loved ones.

Project December is powered by GPT-3, an AI model designed by OpenAI, a research group backed by Elon Musk.

Experts have warned the technology could be dangerous, with OpenAI admitting when it released GPT-3's predecessor GPT-2 that it could be used in 'malicious ways', including to produce abusive content on social media, 'generate misleading news articles' and 'impersonate others online'.

The company issued GPT-2 as a staggered release, and is restricting access to the newer version to 'give people time' to understand the 'societal implications' of the technology.

There is already concern about the potential of AI to fuel misinformation, with the director of a new Anthony Bourdain documentary earlier this month admitting to using it to get the late food personality to utter things he never said on the record.

Bourdain, who killed himself in a Paris hotel suite in June 2018, is the subject of the new documentary, Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain.

It features the prolific author, chef and TV host in his own wordstaken from television and radio appearances, podcasts, and audiobooks.

But, in a few instances, filmmaker Morgan Neville says he used some technological tricks to put words in Bourdain's mouth.

As The New Yorker's Helen Rosner reported, in the second half of the film, L.A. artist David Choe reads from an email Bourdain sent him: 'Dude, this is a crazy thing to ask, but I'm curious...'

Then the voice reciting the email shiftssuddenly it's Bourdain's, declaring, '. . . and my life is sort of s**t now. You are successful, and I am successful, and I'm wondering: Are you happy?'

Rosner asked Neville, who also directed the 2018 Mr. Rogers documentary, Won't You Be My Neighbor?, how he possibly found audio of Bourdain reading an email he sent someone else.

It turns out, he didn't.

'There were three quotes there I wanted his voice for that there were no recordings of,' Neville said.

So he gave a software company dozens of hours of audio recordings of Bourdain and they developed, according to Neville, an 'A.I. model of his voice.'

Ian Goodfellow, director of machine learning at Apple's Special Projects Group, coined the phrase 'deepfake' in 2014, a portmanteau of 'deep learning' and 'fake'.

Still grieving, Barbeau last year came across a website called Project December and after paying $5 for an account fed information its service to create a new bot named 'Jessica Courtney Pereira'

It's a video, audio or photo that appears authentic but is really the result of artificial-intelligence manipulation.

A system studies input of a target from multiple anglesphotographs, videos, sound clips or other input and develops an algorithm to mimic their behavior, movements, and speech patterns.

Rosner was only able to detect the one scene where the deepfake audio was used, but Neville admits there were more.

Another deepfake video, of Speaker Nancy Pelosi seemingly slurring her words, helped spur Facebook's decision to ban the manufactured clips in January 2020 ahead of the presidential election later that year.

In a blog post, Facebook said it would remove misleading manipulated media edited in ways that 'aren't apparent to an average person and would likely mislead someone into thinking that a subject of the video said words that they did not actually say.'

It's not clear if the Bourdain lines, which he wrote but never uttered, would be banned from the platform.

After the Cruise video went viral, Rachel Tobac, CEO of online security company SocialProof, tweeted that we had reached a stage of almost 'undetectable deepfakes.'

'Deepfakes will impact public trust, provide cover & plausible deniability for criminals/abusers caught on video or audio, and will be (and are) used to manipulate, humiliate, & hurt people,' Tobac wrote.

'If you're building manipulated/synthetic media detection technology, get it moving.'
Three young men who were found dead in an apparent triple-homicide outside of a quarry in Wisconsin have been identified.

The La Crosse County Sheriff's office said the bodies of 24-year-old Peng Lor, 24-year-old Nemo Yang and 23-year-old Trevor Maloney were discovered shortly before 5am on Friday by two workers at Milestone Quarry.

The quarry is located near West Salem, about 14 miles northeast of La Crosse, which is along the Minnesota border.

Investigators said they believe all three were killed at the scene where the bodies were found.

Police identified the victims of a triple homicide that took place at the entrance to a quarry (pictured) in Michigan early on Friday.

The murders are believed to have taken place where the bodies were found (pictured)

Photos of the victims, police said, would be released on Monday.

La Crosse County Sheriff Jeff Wolf called the deaths a 'targeted act,' but did not say how they died.

La Crosse County Sheriff Jeff Wolf called the deaths a 'targeted act,' Friday but did not say how the three died. He said it was 'a very complicated crime scene'

He said he believes the three victims were killed Thursday night or early Friday, and investigators want to see if any cameras recorded vehicles in the area at that time.

'We believe at this time it was a targeted act. We do not know the reason for the homicide,' he told reporters on Friday.

'There were no vehicles left at the scene. Strictly, three individuals have fallen deceased.

'Its a very fluid case at the present time, its a very complicated crime scene.'

Police said Lor and Yang had no permanent address, but were frequently living in and around the La Crosse area.

Maloney, they reported, had previous addresses in the nearby towns of Cashton and Sparta, and had also been frequently live in and around the La Crosse area.

A dozen investigators were actively working on the case Saturday and following up on information about the whereabouts of the victims 24 hours prior to the discovery of the bodies, the La Crosse Tribune reported.

The quarry is located near West Salem, about 14 miles northeast of La Crosse, which is along the Minnesota border.

It is believed to have been the first triple homicide in La Cross County in nearly 30 years, News8 reported.

In 1992, 29-year-old Suzette Frydenlund; her mother, Eclia Weibel, 55 and stepfather Leroy Weibel were found dead in the family's mobile home. Frydenlund's children were present at the time of the killings, but were unharmed, the outlet reported.

Her husband, James, 34, was acquitted in the killings after a trial.

In regards to the latest murder, Wolf said there was little reason for the public to be alarmed.

'It wasn't a random act, for whatever reason it occurred at this location for a specific reason,' Wolf said Friday. 'I don't think there's reason for concern for any of the residents or people in our communities.'
Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson has defended his decision to ban mask mandates in his state even as it reports some of the highest incidences of COVID-19 infections in the country.

COVID-19 continues to rage through Arkansas, a state which has among the lowest vaccination rates in the United States, as new day-over-day cases topped 2,000 for the first time since February. Just 36 percent of Arkansans have been vaccinated.

State health officials reported 2,015 new cases Saturday as the highly contagious Delta variant swept across the state, prompting the state to resume weekend daily updates.

Four more COVID-19 cases required hospitalization, and seven more deaths were reported.

Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson (seen right being interviewed by CNN's Jake Tapper on Sunday) has defended his decision to ban mask mandates in his state even as it reports some of the highest incidences of COVID-19 infections in the country

Hutchinson said that the state's high COVID-19 infection rate in recent weeks is due to the low vaccination rate. Just 36 percent of Arkansans are fully vaccinated - making it among the lowest rates of vaccination in the country

Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson tells @jaketapper that low vaccination rates are whats holding the state back in its fight against the spread of COVID-19. #CNNSOTU pic.twitter.com/QZOY1IRs4v  CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) July 25, 2021

Hutchinson told CNN on Sunday that he signed into the law the ban on mask mandates because the emphasis at the time was to get vaccinated.

'Well, that was the will of the General Assembly. I signed it,' the Republican governor said on Sunday. 'At that point we had very low case rates in Arkansas and people knew exactly what to do.'

'They were capable of making their decisions.'

In late March, Arkansas lawmakers approved SB 590, a bill that prohibited the state from reimposing a mask mandate to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

The proposal grants exceptions to private businesses, health care facilities, and correctional facilities which, if they so choose, could mandate mask-wearing.

The measure, which is set to go into effect this week, was passed just a day after Hutchinson lifted the requirement.

The Senate voted 20-9 in favor of the measure prohibiting mandatory face coverings, sending the measure to the House, where it was passed with ease by the Republican-dominated majority.

Since the start of the pandemic, more than 374,000 Arkansans have been infected with coronavirus. More than 6,000 have died

COVID-19 continues to rage through Arkansas, a state which has among the lowest vaccination rates in the United States, as new day-over-day cases topped 2,000 for the first time since February

Arkansas has among the lowest rates of vaccination in the country, according to the latest data

Hutchinson told CNN on Sunday that at the time the law was approved the case count in Arkansas was low and the state 'shifted to the emphasis on vaccination.'

The governor added that the state public health guidelines 'continue to say if you're not vaccinated, you should wear a mask.'

'That is the guideline that we have in place but we don't have a mandate because that was held back from the legislature,' Hutchinson said.

The governor said that the states rising COVID-19 case count is due to the fact that just 36 percent of Arkansans have been vaccinated.

Hutchinson told CNN that he would not consider imposing a vaccine mandate, saying such a move would even cause a greater reaction of negatively toward the government, and then imposition of freedom.

The governor did add that he could revisit the issue of mask mandates if the infection rate remains high and the vaccination rate remains low as the upcoming school year approaches.

The state averaged 626 new cases a day per 100,000 population over the past two weeks, an increase of 140.7 percent and a rate that topped the nation's states, according to Johns Hopkins University research data.

Former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who is running to replace Hutchinson as governor in 2022, wrote an op-ed on Sunday explaining why she decided to get vaccinated

Although the Arkansas vaccination rate has been among the nation's lowest, State Epidemiologist Jennifer Dillaha told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that 32,466 first doses of COVID-19 vaccine were administered last week, the most since late April.

'I do feel that people are now sensing an increased sense of urgency compared to where we were a month ago,' Dillaha said.

'So many people who delayed vaccination have taken the step to get vaccinated, which gives me a lot of hope for shortening the duration of this surge.'

As of Saturday, the COVID-19 pandemic had caused 374,328 cases in Arkansas, killing 6,048 people.

Of those total cases, 15,032 were active Saturday, according to state health officials. Meanwhile, 36 percent of the state population had completed their vaccinations, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Hutchinson will step down from the governorship in 2023 due to term limits.

One candidate who is running to replace him, former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, wrote an op-ed in The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in which she explained why she chose to get vaccinated.

Sanders, who is mindful of the unpopularity of the vaccine among Arkansas voters, struck a cautious tone, saying the choice to get inoculated was a 'deeply personal' one.

'I have many friends who have expressed sincere concerns about being vaccinated, and it isn't my place to tell them what to do,' the GOP gubernatorial hopeful wrote.

But she hoped that by crediting her former boss, ex-President Donald Trump, she could persuade a skeptical portion of the public to get vaccinated.

'It's clear that the Trump vaccine works and is saving lives,' Sanders wrote.

Sanders criticized President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for sowing doubts in the minds of Americans about the vaccine when it was under development during the Trump presidency.

'If President Biden, Vice President Harris, and others on the left truly care about increasing the vaccination rate and saving lives, they should admit they were wrong to cast doubt on Operation Warp Speed and give President Trump and his team the credit they are due for the development of a safe and effective vaccine in record time,' Sanders wrote.

Earlier this week, Sanders pledged that if she is elected governor, she would not impose mask or vaccine mandates.

Arkansas is one of scores of states who have seen a worrying rise in the number of COVID-19 cases in recent weeks.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nations top infectious disease expert, said that the country is in an unnecessary predicament of soaring COVID-19 cases fueled by unvaccinated Americans and the virulent Delta variant.

'We're going in the wrong direction,' said Fauci, describing himself as 'very frustrated.'

He said recommending that the vaccinated wear masks is 'under active consideration' by the government's leading public health officials.

Also, booster shots may be suggested for people with suppressed immune systems who have been vaccinated, Fauci said.

Fauci, who also serves as Biden's chief medical adviser, told CNN's State of the Union that he has taken part in conversations about altering the mask guidelines.

He noted that some local jurisdictions where infection rates are surging, such as Los Angeles County, are already calling on individuals to wear masks in public regardless of vaccination status.

Fauci said those local rules are compatible with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendation that the vaccinated do not need to wear masks in public.

Nearly 163 million people, or 49 percent of the eligible US population, are vaccinated, according to CDC data.

As of Saturday, the seven-day rolling average of daily new cases was nearly 50,000, a 166 percent increase from two weeks ago, according to a DailyMail.com analysis of Johns Hopkins data.

Meanwhile vaccination rates are plateauing, with just 57 percent of the eligible population fully vaccinated.
A giant asteroid is set to narrowly pass by the Earth on Sunday, at a speed of 18,000 miles per hour, NASA has said

The asteroid, designated GO20, is between 318 to 720 feet in length, making it about the size of the Taj Mahal and the Great Pyramid of Giza.

It will come as close as 2.8 million miles to the Earth, placing it in NASA's 'Apollo' near-Earth designation.

But it is still far enough away to not be of great concern.

By comparison, the moon is just about 238,855 miles from the Earth.

The asteroid will still be much closer than our planetary neighbors - Venus is 125.9 million miles from Earth, and Mars is 236.5 million miles away.

NASA graphic shows how the orbit of asteroid GO20 will cross into the path of Earth's orbit

An asteroid the size of the Taj Mahal or the Great Pyramids of Giza is set to pass 2.8 million miles from the Earth, landing it squarely in the solar system

The asteroid could get closer over time due to the gravitational pull of the planets as it passes through the solar system, according to FOX News, though that would not be a concern until GO20 passes by the Earth again.

The asteroid's orbit means that it crosses over Earth's orbit at a regular interval.

In 1901, it passed just over 800,000 miles from our planet, according to Live Science, and in 1935, it flew 1.15 million miles from the Earth.

When it is scheduled to pass by again, in 2034, it will likely be 3.1 million miles from the planet.

NASA monitors asteroids to learn more about the early solar system - and to ensure their orbits do not move closer to the Earth.
Civil rights activist Robert Parris Moses, who was shot at and endured beatings and jail while leading black voter registration drives in the American South, has died at the age of 86.

Moses, who was widely referred to as Bob, worked to dismantle segregation as the Mississippi field director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the civil rights movement and was central to the 1964 'Freedom Summer', in which hundreds of students went to the South to register voters.

Moses started his 'second chapter in civil rights work' by founding, in 1982, the Algebra Project thanks to a MacArthur Fellowship. The project included a curriculum Moses developed to help struggling students succeed in math.

'Bob Moses was a hero of mine,' said Barack Obama on Sunday evening.

'His quiet confidence helped shape the civil rights movement, and he inspired generations of young people looking to make a difference. Michelle and I send our prayers to Janet and the rest of the Moses family.'

Ben Moynihan, the director of operations for the Algebra Project, said he had talked with Moses' wife, Dr Janet Moses, and she said her husband had passed away on Sunday morning in Hollywood, Florida.

His cause of death was unclear.

Robert 'Bob' Moses, a New York-born civil rights activist, who was director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), died on Sunday at the age of 86

Moses, a director of the Mississippi Summer Project and organizer for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) answers questions about Freedom Summer in 1964 during a national youth summit in February 2014

Moses (left) is seen speaking to two men during a voter registration event in Greenwood, Mississippi, in April 1963

Moses is seen in New York, the city where he was born, in a portrait taken in 1964

Moses was born in Harlem, New York, on January 23, 1935 - two months after a race riot left three dead and injured 60 in the neighborhood.

His grandfather, William Henry Moses, has been a prominent Southern Baptist preacher and a supporter of Marcus Garvey, a black nationalist leader at the turn of the century.

But like many black families, the Moses family moved north from the South during the Great Migration.

Moses is seen in April 1990 teaching an algebra class at Lanier High School in Jackson, Mississippi. He dedicated much of his life to improving math skills among underserved populations

Moses in the 1960s decided to join Martin Luther King's movement but, on finding their office uninspiring, he instead worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

Once in Harlem, his family sold milk from a black-owned cooperative to help supplement the household income, according to 'Robert Parris Moses: A Life in Civil Rights and Leadership at the Grassroots,' by Laura Visser-Maessen.

While attending Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, he became a Rhodes Scholar and was deeply influenced by the work of French philosopher Albert Camus and his ideas of rationality and moral purity for social change.

Moses then took part in a Quaker-sponsored trip to Europe and solidified his beliefs that change came from the bottom up.

He returned to the United States and studied for a master's in philosophy at Harvard University.

Moses did not spend much time in the Deep South until he went on a recruiting trip in 1960 to 'see the movement for myself.'

He sought out the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta but found little activity in the office, and soon turned his attention to SNCC.

Moses, who was known to be shy of publicity, is seen in July 2000. He was shot at and beaten for his activism

Five of the six civil rights legends, living and dead, that the Jackson State University's Office of Community Engagement, are honored with the unveiling of its 'Chain Breakers' mural at the COFO building in Jackson, Mississippi on July 24. From left they are, civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer; educator and civil rights activist, Bob Moses; higher education educator Rose Elizabeth Howard Robinson; the first African American bookstore owner in the Washington Addition community Louise Marshall, and the first African American florist in the Washington Addition, Albert Powell

'I was taught about the denial of the right to vote behind the Iron Curtain in Europe,' Moses later said.

'I never knew that there was (the) denial of the right to vote behind a Cotton Curtain here in the United States.'

The young civil rights advocate tried to register black people to vote in Mississippi's rural Amite County where he was beaten and arrested.

When he tried to file charges against a white assailant, an all-white jury acquitted the man and a judge provided protection to Moses to the county line so he could leave.

In 1963, he and two other activists - James Travis and Randolph Blackwell - were driving in Greenwood, Mississippi, when someone opened fire on them and the 20-year-old Travis was hit.

In a press release from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Moses described how bullets whizzed around them and how Moses took the wheel when Travis was struck and stopped the car.

'We all were within inches of being killed,' Moses said at the time.

A reoccurring theme in Moses' life and work was the need to listen and work with the local populations where activists were trying to affect change - whether that was registering black voters in some of the most staunchly anti-integration parts of Mississippi, or, years later, working with students and teachers to come up with ways to improve math knowledge.

In an interview with the National Visionary Leadership Project, he talked about the need for civil rights workers to earn the trust of the local population in Mississippi in order to effect change.

'You had to earn the right for the black population in Mississippi to decide that they were going to work with you because why should they risk everything to work with you if you were somebody or a collection of people who were just not serious?' he said.

He later helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which sought to challenge the all-white Democratic delegation from Mississippi in 1964.

But President Lyndon Johnson prevented the group of rebel Democrats from voting in the convention and instead let Jim Crow southerners remain, drawing national attention.

Disillusioned with white liberal reaction to the civil rights movement, Moses soon began taking part in demonstrations against the Vietnam War then cut off all relationships with whites, even former SNCC members.

Hollis Watkins, Bob Moses, and Lawrence Guyot at the National Student Association Conference held in Bloomington, Indiana in August, 1963

The National Council of Churches, in cooperation with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, is pictured in June 1964 conducting a training school for students to go to Mississippi and assist black people with voter registration and education. Moses is seen with Rev. Bruce Hanson, center, and James Forman, right, Atlanta, executive secretary of SNCC

Moses worked as a teacher in Tanzania, Africa, returned to Harvard to earn a doctorate in philosophy and taught high school math in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He later taught math in Jackson, Mississippi, while commuting back and forth to Massachusetts on the weekends.

The press-shy Moses started his 'second chapter in civil rights work' by founding in 1982 the Algebra Project using money he received through the MacArthur Foundation Fellows program - often referred to as 'genius' grants - to improve math literacy among underserved populations.

Ben Moynihan from the Algebra Project said Moses saw the work of improving mathematics literacy as an extension of the civil rights work he had started in the 1960s.

'Bob really saw the issue of giving hope to young people through access to mathematics literacy.... as a citizenship issue, as critical as the right to vote has been,' Moynihan said.

Historian Taylor Branch, whose 'Parting the Waters' won the Pulitzer Prize, said Moses's leadership embodied a paradox.

'Aside from having attracted the same sort of adoration among young people in the movement that Martin Luther King did in adults, Moses represented a separate conception of leadership as arising from and being carried on by 'ordinary people,'' he said.
He was a City genius who sparred with Boris Johnson in debates when they were students together at Oxford.

Now the late Danny Truells multi-million-pound fortune is at the centre of a bitter court battle between his lover and his brother.

Magdalena Zalinska, 44, a nightclub boss, is being sued by Edi Truell over claims she obtained 4million from Danny by undue influence before he died of a neurological condition aged 55 in 2019.

Miss Zalinska, who was left more than 1million in Dannys will, denies the allegations, insisting they had a romantic and loving relationship for 14 years.

Magdalena Zalinska, 44, a nightclub boss, is being sued by Edi Truell over claims she obtained 4million from Danny by undue influence before he died of a neurological condition aged 55 in 2019

Edi, a City financier, 59, claims that although she had a sexual relationship with his brother, she was his paid carer from 2012 and did not live with him.

The case has not yet gone to a full High Court trial, but a judge this month rejected a bid by Edi and the other executor of Dannys will, solicitor John Rayner Hatchard, to have Miss Zalinska jailed for contempt of court.

They accused her of breaching a freezing order designed to preserve her bank balance until the case is decided. It limited her to 500 a week to pay for her upkeep, and reasonable legal expenses. But she made withdrawals and purchases totalling about 76,000 in the four weeks after the order was made last July.

Lifelong Labour Party member Danny Truell was a contemporary at Balliol College of future prime minister Mr Johnson and frequently faced him in debates.

He was a City genius who sparred with Boris Johnson in debates when they were students together at Oxford. Now the late Danny Truells multi-million-pound fortune is at the centre of a bitter court battle between his lover and his brother

He went on to become a hugely successful fund manager. After running Goldman Sachs asset management arm, he moved to Britains biggest charity the Wellcome Trust as its chief investment officer in 2005.

In 12 years, he grew assets under management from 12.3billion to 20.9billion. He also allowed it to double the amount it donated a year, to more than 1billion.

He and Naomi, his wife of 16 years, divorced in 2011. In 2012 he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis which later became a form of motor neurone disease.

Mr Justice Michael Green said Danny had considerable personal wealth but lived an apparently frugal lifestyle, did not drive, have expensive hobbies or go on many holidays, and lived in a modest and poorly furnished basement and ground floor maisonette near Clapham Junction, London. During his illness he was dependent on alcohol, the judge added.

In his will, he described Miss Zalinska, a Polish national and divorced mother of two who has also struggled with alcohol, as his partner and dependent. The court battle is over a series of transfers to her before Danny died

In his will, he described Miss Zalinska, a Polish national and divorced mother of two who has also struggled with alcohol, as his partner and dependent.

The court battle is over a series of transfers to her before Danny died.

These included 1.34million paid between 2013 and 2018 to a company through which she operated her London nightclub, Southwark Rooms.

Another 915,000 went to her directly in electronic transfers, 1.366million on spending and withdrawals using his debit card, while he also transferred to her his interest in the flat she had previously rented from him in Clapham.

The judge said Miss Zalinska was rightly in my view offended by any suggestion that she was not in a deep and loving relationship with the deceased, or that she had taken advantage of him.

Rejecting the bid to have Miss Zalinska jailed for contempt for exceeding spending limits given to her under the freezing order, the judge said she needed rehabilitation, not punishment.

After Mr Truells death, her drink problem had worsened and she lived a chaotic, party lifestyle in a flat in Croydon. Giving evidence, she said she had become surrounded by people who saw her as a soft touch.

She gave her debit card to some of them and did not know what a lot of her money had been spent on, she said.

The judge said she had admitted some of the allegations of overspending, some of it done recklessly and for her benefit, but it was not a deliberate attempt to dissipate her assets before a trial of the 4million claim against her can take place.
Albanian criminals charging up to 20,000 to smuggle migrants to the UK brazenly tout their services on TikTok and other social media sites.

A Mail investigation found popular sites awash with adverts from human traffickers, sometimes mocking attempts by the British authorities to stop them and posting slickly produced step-by-step tutorials to help illegal migrants sneak into the UK.

They illustrate the scale of the problem facing Home Secretary Priti Patel, who recently visited Albania to sign a deal speeding up deportations of criminals and failed asylum seekers.

The number of migrants crossing the Channel has surged in recent days to reach more than 8,000 for the year so far  more than for the whole of 2020.

One people smuggler, whose TikTok account has been viewed by tens of thousands of people, boasts in his profile: 'All interested who'd like to get to England contact my inbox. Journey secure 100 per cent.' His videos feature pictures of the Union Jack and Big Ben with the comment: 'Secure journey from Albania to the UK. 23K Euro.'

One people smuggler, whose TikTok account has been viewed by tens of thousands of people, boasts in his profile: 'All interested who'd like to get to England contact my inbox. Journey secure 100 per cent.' His videos feature pictures of the Union Jack and Big Ben with the comment: 'Secure journey from Albania to the UK. 23K Euro'

This page is under the name 'Journey to England' and by using Google map and professionally made graphics they tell step by step on tutorial videos how to get in the UK illegally

Albanian criminals are using Tik Tok as a tool to publish tutorial videos on how to get illegally to the UK from France

The number of migrants crossing the Channel has surged in recent days to reach more than 8,000 for the year so far  more than for the whole of 2020

In other videos he ridicules British attempts to crack down on illegal migration by showing footage of a police raid on a house while offering to sell black market visas to get people into the UK.

Another TikTok user called England Albania published a video showing several Albanians inside a lorry saying they are heading to the UK.

A recently deleted Albanian account found by the Mail on TikTok featured guides on how to sneak in to the UK from France, Holland, Belgium, Spain and Portugal.

Called 'Journey to England' it used Google maps and professionally-made graphics describing how to get to the UK from Caen in France.

Highlighting the best route, it added: 'You have to be wearing clothes like cleaners. 05.50am the best time'.

The Mail also found Albanian smugglers advertising on an Instagram account called Journey-Belgium-London with a UK contact number.

The number of adverts by human traffickers illustrate the scale of the problem facing Home Secretary Priti Patel, who recently visited Albania to sign a deal speeding up deportations of criminals and failed asylum seekers

On the closed Facebook page 'Albanians in London', which has over 15,000 members, one Albanian using the name Leonard Sufa posted a photo of a lorry with the comment: 'Tomorrow afternoon to England. Contact me DM.' Last year the Mail exposed an Albanian human trafficker Kledjan Kurtaj who advertised on Facebook about an 'easy-peasy' back-door route into Britain via Dublin using fake documents.

The National Crime Agency's director of threat leadership, Rob Jones, told the Commons home affairs committee that criminal gangs regularly use social media channels to publicise smuggling routes and advertise false or stolen documents.

He said the most prominent sites were Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Telegram but the posts were also seen on YouTube and TikTok.

Albanian criminals charging up to 20,000 to smuggle migrants to the UK brazenly tout their services on TikTok and other social media sites. Pictured: National Crime Agency officers arrest a man in Croydon as part of an NCA operation aimed at dismantling an organised crime group involved in transporting hundreds of Albanian migrants to the UK illegally on July 21

An Albanian Border Police source told the Mail most traffickers were aged between 18 and 22, from poor areas of Albania and are recruited by criminal networks to work as cannabis farmers in the UK. He said: '[They] agree to take this journey and to work as cannabis farmers until they pay up to 20,000, the cost of the smuggling.'

A TikTok spokesman said it had removed the trafficking videos. He added: 'We have permanently banned several accounts for violating our policies and we will continue to take action where necessary.'

Facebook and Instagram also launched an investigation and removed some of the posts highlighted by the Mail.

A spokesman said: 'We work closely with law enforcement agencies around the world, including the NCA and Europol, to identify, remove and report this illegal activity.'
Donald Trump's former press secretary penned an op-ed on Sunday where she credited the ex-president for the development of the coronavirus vaccine as she demanded President Joe Biden admit he was wrong about Operation Warp Speed.

Sarah Sanders revealed she got the jab and encouraged Trump supporters to do the same, writing in her post in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: 'A few months ago, I decided to take advantage of President Trump's Operation Warp Speed and get vaccinated.'

'Like many of you,' she continued, 'I have had a lot of misinformation thrown at me by politicians and the media during the pandemic. And, like many of you, I spent a lot of time sorting through it all, trying to make the best decision I could for myself and my family.'

Sanders, the daughter of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, is running for the governor seat in 2022 to replace outgoing Governor Asa Hutchinson.

Trump-era press secretary Sarah Sanders (left) penned an op-ed on Sunday encouraging the former president's supporters to get vaccinated and credited Operation Warp Speed for the swift development of the 'Trump vaccine'

The vaccination rate in the U.S. has severely plateaued, with less than 1 million people get a shot per day in late June and throughout July

Less than 350 million Americans are fully vaccinated against COVID-19

'Read my column in today's @ArkansasOnline on why I decided to get the Trump vaccine,' Sanders promoted on Twitter Sunday. Her post is titled, 'The reasoning behind getting vaccinated'.

'When the Trump administration initiated Operation Warp Speed in May 2020, the president stated that a vaccine would become available by December of that year at the very latest,' Sanders wrote as a nod to her former boss.

'From the moment he made his announcement, the 'expert' class tried to undermine those statements with baseless fear-mongering,' she continued, taking aim at the media and Democrats.

Her op-ed comes after she said Friday that she would not impose any mask mandate or vaccination requirements if elected governor next year.

'We believe in personal freedom and responsibility,' Sanders told the Fox & Friends panel last week.

The comment followed new reporting that the White House is considering implementing mask requirements  even on vaccinated individuals  amid a nationwide surge and the emergence of the Delta variant.

Governor Hutchinson has already signed an Arkansas state legislature bill banning mask mandates, but he has been vocal about encouraging residents of the state to get the jab.

Arkansas health officials reported 2,015 new cases Saturday as the highly contagious Delta variant swept across the state, prompting the state to resume weekend daily updates.

Four more COVID-19 cases required hospitalization, and seven more deaths were reported.

'Well, that was the will of the General Assembly. I signed it,' the Republican governor told CNN's State of the Union on Sunday.

'At that point we had very low case rates in Arkansas and people knew exactly what to do,' he continued. 'They were capable of making their decisions.'

Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson (seen right being interviewed by CNN's Jake Tapper on Sunday) has defended his decision to ban mask mandates in his state even as it reports some of the highest incidences of COVID-19 infections in the country

Since the start of the pandemic, more than 374,000 Arkansans have been infected with coronavirus. More than 6,000 have died

COVID-19 continues to rage through Arkansas, a state which has among the lowest vaccination rates in the United States, as new day-over-day cases topped 2,000 for the first time since February

Arkansas has among the lowest rates of vaccination in the country, according to the latest data

In response to rising nationwide rates, Hutchinson said low vaccination rates are to blame.

'This is a pivotal moment in our race against the COVID virus,' the Republican governor told CNN host Jake Tapper. 'It's important for normalcy. And what's holding us back is a low vaccination rate.'

He reiterated, however, that he made the decision to not allow the government to tell their citizens what they can and cannot do regarding masks and vaccinations.

The vaccination rate has stalled in the U.S. after initial surges in those who were getting inoculated against COVID-19 in the spring.

In May, face coverings and social distancing guidelines were updated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, telling Americans vaccinated individuals could finally unmask after more than a year in the pandemic.

Sanders, however, credits these strides to the former administration.

The case rate for coronavirus has been spiking nationwide as the vaccination rate plummets and highly-contagious Delta variant spreads

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the Delta variant now makes up 83 per cent of cases

She claimed he paved the way with Operation Warp Speed for the quick development of a vaccine.

'If President Biden, Vice President Harris, and others on the left truly care about increasing the vaccination rate and saving lives, they should admit they were wrong to cast doubt on Operation Warp Speed and give President Trump and his team the credit they are due for the development of a safe and effective vaccine in record time,' the Republican gubernatorial candidate wrote.
Up to 50,000 dementia cases were missed during lockdown, it emerged last night.

Around one in ten new sufferers went undiagnosed because referrals to memory clinics all but stopped at the start of the Covid pandemic.

Experts warned the backlog could put further pressure on overstretched hospitals if they  rather than specialist units  have to deal with patients not known to have dementia.

It is feared even more cases will be missed if virus restrictions return in autumn or winter.

James White of the Alzheimer's Society said: 'Thousands of people with dementia have remained in the dark about their condition, unable to get help that is most effective the earlier you get it.'

He said the backlog came on top of the difficulty of helping sufferers whose routines and activities had been devastated by lockdown.

In other developments:

A Mail audit found the first year of the pandemic saw hospital appointments for the six major non-Covid illnesses plummet by around 330,000;

Hopes rose that the third wave of Covid might be ebbing after cases in England dropped to below 30,000 yesterday, a fall of nearly 20,000 in a week;

Haulage bosses said the self-isolation 'pingdemic' could wreck the supermarket supply chain in two to three weeks;

Train drivers and binmen are set to be given an exemption from quarantine;

Health Secretary Sajid Javid was forced to apologise for a tweet saying the nation should not 'cower' from Covid.

Around one in ten new dementia sufferers went undiagnosed because referrals to memory clinics all but stopped at the start of the Covid pandemic (stock image)

The figures on missed cases were revealed by Alistair Burns, national clinical director for dementia and older people's mental health at NHS England and NHS Improvement. Around 475,000 people in England are normally officially registered with their GP as having dementia  around two thirds of all those with the condition  but since the pandemic struck that number has fallen as low as 427,000.

Professor Burns said GPs 'did as they were told' and stopped referring patients for dementia assessments at the start of lockdown in March 2020. Referrals resumed slowly again last summer but declined again during the second lockdown.

The University of Manchester professor added: 'There was an effect of 40,000 to 50,000 people who should have been on the dementia register but who were not. That's the kind of figure we are talking about.

'We do hear a lot about the effect of lockdown on cancer and stroke [diagnosis rates], and that's absolutely right, but there is an effect on dementia as well.'

He also said dementia sufferers had 'disproportionately lost out during the pandemic' by being isolated from family, friends and their communities. The professor was addressing the Dementias 2021 conference in London in a personal capacity.

Dr Hilda Hayo of Dementia UK said the charity had been inundated with calls about delays in accessing a diagnosis. She added: 'A diagnosis of dementia can give families clarity, help them plan for future, and provide access to support services in the community. With significant delays in this process, then families with dementia will be further left behind.'

Dr Liam Fox, who worked as a GP before being elected as a Tory MP, last night advised ministers to 'think carefully' about how any new lockdown would impact the treatment of conditions such as dementia.

He added: 'Having done so well so far we must not squander the vaccine dividend by being too cautious and put the economy at unnecessary risk, especially the small businesses that we require for our recovery.

'We also need to think carefully about the impact on other health conditions that such measures could have.'

NHS figures show the dementia diagnosis rate in England declined steadily from March 2020 to this March, before gradually beginning to rise this spring.

Dr Liam Fox (left), who worked as a GP before being elected as a Tory MP, last night advised ministers to 'think carefully'. The NHS dementia chief, Professor Alistair Burns (right), said up to 50,000 new dementia cases may have been missed

But rates remain below normal levels, with the number assessed in the first few months of 2021 significantly lower than before the pandemic. GPs made 50 per cent fewer dementia assessments and 33 per cent fewer referrals to memory clinics in the six months to April 2021, compared with the six months to March 2019.

In response to Professor Burns's comments, NHS England said: 'It is understandable that during the pandemic, some older people felt they were unable to seek help for symptoms that may be suggestive of dementia, such as memory loss, but the number of referrals is now increasing and the NHS is offering support to patients and their families while they are waiting for a diagnosis.'

Some scientists have begun to talk of a return to restrictions as early as September, despite England opening up again only a week ago.

Chief medical officer Chris Whitty told an online event hosted by the Science Museum earlier this month: 'I don't think we should underestimate the fact that we could get into trouble again, surprisingly fast.

'And I think, saying the numbers in hospitals are low now, that does not mean the numbers will be low in hospital in five, six, seven, eight weeks time  they could actually be really quite serious.

'At that point, it looks as if things are not topping out, we do have to look again, and see where we think things are going.'

At a press conference in May, Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser, said that if cases go up again in winter face coverings on public transport might be necessary. He added that 'working from home if it's appropriate to do so' could continue in the longer term.

The Government has said it will hold a review in September to decide whether tougher coronavirus restrictions need to be imposed ahead of the winter.

Too afraid to go to hospital despite heart attack Lifesaver: Kelvine Tomlinson and his wife Jill, who finally called for an ambulance After suffering a severe heart attack, Kelvine Tomlinson delayed calling 999 for fear of catching Covid in hospital. His wife Jill, 50, took the decision out of his hands after an hour of seeing him grow increasingly ill and called for an ambulance  which Mr Tomlinson, 53, says saved his life. But he believes that the delay during lockdown this time last year led to moderate damage to his heart, which could have been avoided if he had made the call earlier. Mr Tomlinson, who lives near Preston, said he wanted others to weigh the chance of catching Covid against the major health risks of not going to hospital. After a heart attack four years earlier he recognised the signs but did not want to be taken into hospital unless he was certain it was necessary. Mr Tomlinson said: 'Like everyone else, I thought, "Do I really want to be going to hospital at this time?" 'There may be a risk of catching Covid but it is still minimal, while the risk of having a major impact on your health if you do not go into hospital is significantly higher.' Advertisement

Devastating health cost of lockdown laid bare: Mail audit reveals 330,000 fewer hospital admissions for cancer, heart attacks, stroke, diabetes, dementia and mental illness since March 2020

The devastating health costs of lockdown are today laid bare by figures showing a huge drop in hospital treatment for the most serious non-Covid conditions.

In the 12 months since March 2020, there were 330,000 fewer hospital admissions for cancer, heart attacks, stroke, diabetes, dementia and mental health conditions compared with the previous year.

This is a fall of 15 per cent  but prior to March last year, admissions for those six disease types had been broadly rising due to the ageing population and obesity.

Health policy experts warned that the 'missed' admissions had led to avoidable deaths and harm. They said many patients waiting for care were in pain and 'seriously in need of treatment'.

The biggest drop was for cancer, with 285,413 fewer hospital admissions between April 2020 and March 2021 compared with the previous year, NHS Digital data shows.

Across the 12 months, cancer admissions fell by an average of 17 per cent.

They dropped by a third in April and May 2020 and then again by 22 per cent in January 2021, when the restrictions were at their most severe.

These admissions include surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy as well as scans and consultations to diagnose tumours. Admissions may also cover A&E visits, and can mean multiple visits by one patient.

The Mail's analysis shows the extent to which the restrictions have affected non-virus illnesses, with potentially life-threatening consequences.

Siva Anandaciva, chief analyst at the King's Fund think-tank, said: 'Any delays in people seeking or receiving treatment are concerning, but even more important is the real impact these delays have on people's lives.

'Understandably, there is now growing concern of increasing numbers of avoidable strokes, heart attacks and deaths from cancer in the coming years if these missed or delayed treatments are not made up for.'

John Appleby, director of research at the Nuffield Trust think-tank, said: 'The NHS tried hard to keep the most urgent operations for conditions like cancer going and often succeeded, but at the worst of the pandemic even these services were swamped in some places  and many less urgent operations that were delayed still had a serious impact on quality of life.'

He said a 'shadow waiting list' now exists, comprising patients who have not yet been referred by their GP or have not yet seen a professional at all, adding: 'Many will be in pain and seriously need treatment.'

Michelle Mitchell, head of Cancer Research UK, said: 'We're starting to see signs of recovery in cancer services, with more people now being referred for cancer tests than before the pandemic.

'But with tens of thousands of people left undiagnosed or waiting for tests and treatment, a huge effort is still needed to clear the backlog as swiftly as possible. Without this, the UK faces the prospect of cancer survival going backwards for the first time in decades.'

Dr Sonya Babu-Narayan, of the British Heart Foundation, said: 'The risk of dying from an untreated heart attack is far higher than the risk of complications or death from developing the virus in hospital.'

Rachel Power, head of the Patients Association, noted how many patients found it difficult to get a referral when they wanted one. She said: 'Undoubtedly some patients have delayed seeking treatment during the pandemic, either for fear of burdening the NHS or out of nervousness about catching Covid-19.

Tragic dad begged for a bowel cancer scan Pushed aside: Ben Bradbeer and wife Emma A devoted father-of-three died from bowel cancer after he was forced to wait nearly four months for a scan during lockdown. Ben Bradbeer, 39, from Poole, Dorset, visited his GP last February but was sent away with antibiotics. The builder called his doctor weekly to plead for a scan but was told he could not be referred to a hospital specialist due to concerns over coronavirus. In June, Mr Bradbeer was finally diagnosed with terminal bowel cancer that had spread to his liver and lungs. He died on February 2. Wife Emma, 38, said: 'The system has failed people like him. People with cancer were pushed aside and sent to their deathbeds.' Advertisement

'But our research shows that it has been more common for patients to seek care but struggle to get it... patients have struggled to access GP services in particular.'

In total, the NHS Digital data shows there were 329,224 fewer hospital admissions across the six illnesses between April 2020 and March 2021 compared with the previous year.

Experts believe the drop in admissions was partly caused by patients being too scared to see their GP or believing their surgery was closed to all but the most urgent cases.

Patients were also reluctant to go to A&E or dial 999 and all of these factors led to fewer hospital admissions.

At the same time, hospitals scaled back operations, consultant clinics and treatments even for life-threatening conditions such as cancer, heart attacks and strokes.

Across the board, admissions had not returned to pre-pandemic levels by March 2021, the latest month for which figures are available.

Dementia admissions were particularly badly affected last year, falling by 46 per cent in April.

The NHS dementia chief, Professor Alistair Burns, said up to 50,000 new dementia cases may have been missed.

Stroke admissions, meanwhile, dropped by 16 per cent in April 2020 and then again by 11 per cent in February.

And for diabetes patients, admissions fell by 36 per cent in April last year and by a further 15 per cent in January.

The hospital admissions data mostly includes planned care such as surgery, scans or consultations but it may also cover A&E visits.

Admissions can count as the same patient going to hospital on more than one occasion.

The drop in treatments means the NHS is now facing an enormous backlog.

Figures show there are a record 5.1million on the waiting list, including 2,700 who have been waiting for at least two years.
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Supermarket shelves will go empty again in the next two to three weeks unless action to tackle the pingdemic is stepped up, the Government has been warned.

Ministers will hold emergency talks today to hammer out plans to more than double to 2,000 the number of critical workplaces where staff can undergo daily tests to avoid isolating.

Drivers of passenger trains are expected to be among the latest workers exempted from quarantine rules as rail companies begin sweeping cancellations from today. Binmen are also expected to receive assistance.

The Government announced last week that it would set up testing facilities at 500 food distribution sites, 100 transport hubs and 100 emergency services bases.

The Government's emergency plan to tackle the pingdemic's impact on the food supply industry was this week branded an 'absolute disaster' by industry bosses. (Pictured: A shopper walks past a row of empty shelves in ASDA Cardiff on Friday)

Richard Burnett (pictured), chief executive of the Road Haulage Association, warned that gaps on supermarket shelves are about to get worse as ministers are burying their heads in the sand

Ministers will hold emergency talks Monday to hammer out plans to more than double to 2,000 the number of critical workplaces where staff can undergo daily tests to avoid isolating. Pictured: Empty soft drinks shelves in Tesco in Cardiff on Friday

Some 200 new test centres are going to be set up throughout the country to try and stem the chaos caused by the pindemic - but industry bosses say it is not enough with only a handful of the sites up and running so far

But last night experts warned the action was not enough and there was criticism that only a handful of the sites are up and running.

Richard Burnett, chief executive of the Road Haulage Association, warned that gaps on supermarket shelves are about to get worse as ministers are burying their heads in the sand.

He said: We already have a shortage of around 100,000 HGV drivers and the pingdemic is just exacerbating the problem.

In the next two to three weeks we are facing a collapse of the supply chain meaning even bigger gaps on supermarket shelves.

We already have hauliers unable to move goods on a daily basis and were now facing a perfect storm.

Speaking on Radio 4s Broadcasting House programme, he added: This is a crisis on a scale we have never seen before in this industry and the Government is burying its head in the sand. It is not recognising the seriousness.

Tony Danker, director-general of the Confederation of British Industry, said: Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of businesses have been in touch with us to describe scenarios where the scale of people self-isolating  testing negative by the way but self-isolating  is so big that they are basically bringing core operations to a close.

Through the front door weve said lets reopen the economy and through the back door we have closed it down.

Policing minister Kit Malthouse yesterday apologised for delays at the border after travellers complained about total chaos at airports. He suggested some airline staff could be exempted from quarantine, alongside border officials.

It comes after the Government bowed to growing pressure from the industry earlier this week to allow a key-worker exemption for food supply chain workers. Pictured: Empty shelves in Sainsbury's Cardiff on Friday

There have been a total of 46,563,452 first doses of a vaccine administered and 37,160,659 second doses. Last Sunday 60 new deaths within 28 days of testing positive were recorded, meaning today's figure of 28 is a drop of more than 50 per cent

Mr Malthouse also told Times Radio he acknowledged the challenge officers are facing as Metropolitan Police Federation chairman Ken Marsh said 17 per cent of staff in the capital were off last week.

Reduced timetables are being introduced from today on railways after a spate of last-minute cancellations due to staff self-isolating.

Northern, Avanti West Coast, Great Western Railway and Govia Thameslink are among operators cutting services for up to six weeks.

It comes as a hospital trust took to social media to issue an urgent appeal for nurses to work the night shift. Belfast Health Trust said that Royal Victoria and Mater Hospital were under extreme pressure, amid a rising number of staff absences due to the pandemic and a surge in coronavirus patients.

Figures last week showed more than 600,000 people had been pinged by the NHS Covid app in seven days.




Restrictions on travel from France will likely be dropped next week as the government's traffic light system is reviewed, reports say.

It is believed that the country will be taken off the 'amber-plus' list as government officials seemed to admit the Beta variant threat was contained.

Sources claim the Delta variant prevalent in Britain is spreading faster than the Beta variant in Europe, and would 'out-compete' it in the coming weeks, The Times reports.

And despite a rise in case rates, it remains unlikely that Greece and Spain will be put on the amber-plus list.

A decision will be made on August 5 and if Spain stays on the amber list it will mean holidaymakers will not have to quarantine on return.

At present double-jabbed holidaymakers returning from France must quarantine for up to ten days because it is on the amber-plus list. But fully vaccinated travellers arriving in the UK from amber-list countries can sidestep quarantine.

A decision will be made on August 5 and if Spain stays on the amber list it will mean holidaymakers will not have to quarantine on return (pictured: Calafell, Spain)

Restrictions on travel from France will likely be dropped next week as the government's traffic light system is reviewed, reports say (pictured: Paris, July 24)

There have been a total of 46,563,452 first doses of a vaccine administered and 37,160,659 second doses. Last Sunday 60 new deaths within 28 days of testing positive were recorded, meaning today's figure of 28 is a drop of more than 50 per cent

There are growing concerns about the increasing number of cases in Spain involving the more vaccine-resistant Beta, or South African, variant.

Some 3.7 per cent of cases in France in the past four weeks have been due to the Beta variant, compared with 6.9 per cent in Spain.

Some experts questioned whether UK officials could have confused the prevalence of Beta in mainland France and in its overseas territories, which include the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, and Reunion in the Indian Ocean. An estimated 90 per cent of cases in Reunion are Beta at present.

WHAT IS THE 'AMBER PLUS' LIST'? Fully vaccinated Britons returning from amber list countries are exempt from the 10-day home quarantine requirement. However, from July 19, travellers returning from France are not exempt and must self-isolate for 10 days and take two tests, regardless of whether theyve been fully vaccinated or not. This new category, between amber and red, has not officially been named but is being referred to as Amber-plus. Ministers made the hasty decision over fears of the rise in South African  or Beta  variant infections in France. Returning from Amber List countries All travellers must take a pre-departure test three days before their return to the UK. Unvaccinated passengers returning from amber list countries will need to self isolate for 10 days and take a day two and day eight Covid test - with most packages costing around 150. An optional extra day five test can be taken, with a negative result allowing unvaccinated travellers to be released early from quarantine - costing around 99. Vaccinated travellers are not required to quarantine on return from amber list countries but will still be required to take a PCR test on day two of their return - costing roughly 99. Returning from Amber-Plus List countries Both vaccinated and unvaccinated travellers returning from France must self-isolate for 10 days and take two tests on day two and day eight. An optional extra day five PCR test can be taken, with a negative result allowing travellers to be released early from the 10-day quarantine.

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A Whitehall source said: 'There is growing confidence that France can soon go back on the amber list. [But] there remains some concern about the prevalence of the Beta variant in Spain, although we do not yet have the latest data and... no decision has yet been taken.'

Labour said the holiday plans of nearly six million Britons could be ruined if Spain and Greece were added to the amber-plus list.

The list effectively strips back Freedom Day rules, which allow holidaymakers to return from amber list countries without having to face a mandatory period of self-isolation.

But, just days before the new rules were to be announced, the Government through tens of thousands of holidays into doubt by revealing that double-jabbed Britons returning from France would still have to quarantine.

Now Greece and Spain, both of which are currently on the amber list, could now follow France onto the so-called amber plus list.

But, according to figures released by Labour, that could leave an estimated 5,857,558 people facing the prospect of last-minute quarantine requirements - plunging the holidays into 'chaos once more'.

The Government introduced an exemption for the requirement to isolate at home for 10 days for fully-vaccinated holidaymakers returning from countries on the amber list.

But ministers removed the exemption for France amid concerns over the Beta variant, creating what critics call an 'amber plus' designation on the traffic light system for foreign travel.

Labour's shadow transport secretary Jim McMahon said: 'Not only have they failed to protect our borders, allowing Covid cases to rocket  they also refuse to be straight with the public and give them the information they need to book travel with confidence, with clear information on the direction of travel of infections in each country.

'Families who have booked holidays in good faith now risk losing out  10-day quarantine is simply not an option for many people who are already struggling financially thanks to the pandemic.'

The opposition estimated the number of people to have booked holidays to those three nations by looking at official data for past travel and adjusting for lower willingness to travel during the pandemic by comparing with surveys.

A Department for Transport spokesman said: 'The travel list allocations have not changed for Spain or Greece.

'We are closely monitoring the data and will take swift action on travel list allocations and international travel requirements should the data show that countries' risk to England has changed.'

A decision will be made on August 5 and if Spain stays on the amber list it will mean holidaymakers will not have to quarantine on return

There are growing concerns about the increasing number of cases in Spain involving the more vaccine-resistant Beta, or South African, variant

It comes as holidaymakers faced up to three hour queues to through passport control at Heathrow Airport yesterday after e-gates broke down and the pingdemic left just one official at the desks, according to frustrated passengers.

Summer school worker claimed 12 of the children in his care were told they couldn't check in to their flight home to Spain at Heathrow's Terminal 5 despite having certificates of recovery from Covid-19.

The Terminal 2 delays meant some passengers arriving from 'amber list' countries missed their pre-booked taxi or coaches on the airport's busiest weekend of the year.

To make matters worse, London Underground trains from Heathrow terminals are closed over the weekend due to engineering works, meaning already delayed holidaymakers have to take a replacement bus service to Hammersmith.

Ryan Toal, the summer school lead, tweeted: 'BA have finally let our students check in after 2 hours - your staff clearly don't know their own guidelines and the fact your manager treated our students as threats demanding they left the building and customers away from them is appalling.'
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Covid experts last night said the UK may have passed the peak of the third wave - after the number of new cases dropped for the fifth day in a row.

A dramatic fall in positive tests reported - down from 49,000 last Sunday to 29,173 yesterday - adds to evidence the country may be emerging from the current wave.

It is the first time cases have fallen below 30,000 since July 6, with daily deaths standing at 28 - up three on the previous Sunday. The last five-day run of falling numbers was in February, shortly after the UK passed the peak of the winter wave.

Paul Hunter, professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia, said: 'This is looking like a reassuring trend, after five days of these falling numbers. The fall is much more dramatic than expected. There have been several experts warning of a disaster, but these figures strongly suggest otherwise.

'It's too early to see any signal in the data from Freedom Day, which may increase transmission, but this data suggests that we are coming out of this wave. It's unlikely there will be any further surge from Freedom Day - if there is, it is likely only to be minor, and to probably last a matter of days.'

During the winter wave, when daily cases were averaging what they are now, there were almost 27 times more Covid deaths each day and nine times more people in hospital.

There are currently 125 patients on a ventilator for every 10,000 daily new infections, compared with 2,312 per 10,000 cases at the same point in the previous wave.

People aged 54 and under account for 60 per cent of virus patients admitted to hospital in England during this wave, compared with just 22 per cent during the winter wave.

Some 87.6 per cent of people have now received at least one dose of the vaccine, up from 28.9 per cent at the same point in the winter wave.

The news comes as:

Union bosses are urging key workers to ignore the Government's exemptions from self-isolation and stay home for 10 days if they are 'pinged' by the NHS Covid app, in a move that threatens to make life even harder for shoppers, commuters and holidaymakers;

Restrictions on travel from France will likely be dropped next week as the government's traffic light system is reviewed, reports say;

A series of Instagram videos showing a woman struggling to walk after being jabbed appears to be fuelling anti-vaccine sentiment among younger people;

Up to 50,000 dementia cases were missed during lockdown, it emerged last night;

Sajid Javid has apologised for a tweet suggesting people should not 'cower' from Covid-19, after bereaved families called his comment 'deeply insensitive'.

There have been a total of 46,563,452 first doses of a vaccine administered and 37,160,659 second doses. Last Sunday 60 new deaths within 28 days of testing positive were recorded, meaning today's figure of 28 is a drop of more than 50 per cent

Unions on a mission to paralyse Britain by telling key workers in transport and food delivery to IGNORE their exemptions from the pingdemic - AND they are threatening to strike Union bosses are urging key workers to ignore the Government's exemptions from self-isolation and stay home for 10 days if they are 'pinged' by the NHS Covid app, in a move that threatens to make life even harder for shoppers, commuters and holidaymakers. Leaders of the UK's biggest unions, including the RMT, Unison and Usdaw, are telling critical workers in transport, food and border control among other sectors to quarantine if they are contacted by the app, citing fears they could become infected in the workplace. Steve Hedley, the RMT's senior assistant general-secretary, has threatened strike action over the exemption scheme, telling the Telegraph: 'Why should our people be infected with Covid? We have discussed the possibility of taking action at a senior level, and I can say that nothing has been ruled out.' Key workers are able to avoid house-arrest via a Downing Street scheme launched amid mounting fears over the chaos to key infrastructure caused by the so-called 'pingdemic' after more than 600,000 people were told to self-isolate by the NHS app last week. Policing Minister Kit Malthouse has already been forced to apologise for delays at the border as families set off on the first weekend of the summer holidays, which were branded 'total chaos' by travellers and which he blamed on the 'pingdemic'. Advertisement

The rise in cases at the start of the month has been partially attributed to the Euro 2020 football tournament, which may have seen more people getting together to watch matches in their homes.

There is also evidence the vaccines are doing their job and the rise in infections driven by the more transmissible Delta variant may be levelling off. The seven-day average for daily Covid infections, which smooths out daily infections to show the underlying trend, also shows a recent fall, but experts have cautioned that some of the apparent fall in cases could reflect fewer schoolchildren being tested during the summer holidays.

Hopes that the virus may be in retreat have been boosted by recent good weather, which has meant fewer gatherings inside.

Dr Simon Clarke, from the University of Reading, said: 'We could now be starting to come out of this wave, based on these case numbers. It may be that, if the Euros affected case numbers from people mixing, we are now returning to the level of cases we would have had without the tournament.

'It is important to be cautious, because the schools being on holiday has taken a lot of the heat out of this, and there is not yet data from July 19, but we could well be seeing the end of significant numbers of infections and be past the worst of this.

'We need data on how well the vaccines are preventing transmission to be better able to judge this.'

The UK recorded 31,795 new cases on Saturday, which represented a fall of almost 5,000 from the previous day.

Public Health England yesterday said 46,563,452 people had received a first dose of a Covid vaccine, while 37,160,659 had received a second dose.

It comes amid reports that restrictions on travel from France will likely be dropped next week as the government's traffic light system is reviewed.

It is believed that the country will be taken off the 'amber-plus' list as government officials seemed to admit the Beta variant threat was contained.

Sources claim the Delta variant prevalent in Britain is spreading faster than the Beta variant in Europe, and would 'out-compete' it in the coming weeks, the Times reports. And despite a rise in case rates, it remains unlikely that Greece and Spain will be put on the amber-plus list.

A decision will be made on August 5 and if Spain stays on the amber list it will mean holidaymakers will not have to quarantine on return.

At present double-jabbed holidaymakers returning from France must quarantine for up to ten days because it is on the amber-plus list. But fully vaccinated travellers arriving in the UK from amber-list countries can sidestep quarantine.

There are growing concerns about the increasing number of cases in Spain involving the more vaccine-resistant Beta, or South African, variant. Some 3.7 per cent of cases in France in the past four weeks have been due to the Beta variant, compared with 6.9 per cent in Spain.

Some experts questioned whether UK officials could have confused the prevalence of Beta in mainland France and in its overseas territories, which include the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, and Reunion in the Indian Ocean. An estimated 90 per cent of cases in Reunion are Beta at present.

A Whitehall source said: 'There is growing confidence that France can soon go back on the amber list. [But] there remains some concern about the prevalence of the Beta variant in Spain, although we do not yet have the latest data and... no decision has yet been taken.'

Labour said the holiday plans of nearly six million Britons could be ruined if Spain and Greece were added to the amber-plus list.

The list effectively strips back Freedom Day rules, which allow holidaymakers to return from amber list countries without having to face a mandatory period of self-isolation.

But, just days before the new rules were to be announced, the Government through tens of thousands of holidays into doubt by revealing that double-jabbed Britons returning from France would still have to quarantine.

Nearly 750,000 people in England were infected with Covid last week as the epidemic grew by 28 per cent. The Office for National Statistics' weekly surveillance report estimated that one in 75 people had the virus in the seven days to July 17

Government data shows that 14 per cent fewer tests were carried out compared to last week, which may be partly behind the fall

A decision will be made on August 5 and if Spain stays on the amber list it will mean holidaymakers will not have to quarantine on return (pictured: Calafell, Spain)

Restrictions on travel from France will likely be dropped next week as the government's traffic light system is reviewed, reports say (pictured: Paris, July 24)

WHAT IS THE 'AMBER PLUS' LIST'? Fully vaccinated Britons returning from amber list countries are exempt from the 10-day home quarantine requirement. However, from July 19, travellers returning from France are not exempt and must self-isolate for 10 days and take two tests, regardless of whether they've been fully vaccinated or not. This new category, between amber and red, has not officially been named but is being referred to as 'Amber-plus'. Ministers made the hasty decision over fears of the rise in South African  or Beta  variant infections in France. Returning from Amber List countries All travellers must take a pre-departure test three days before their return to the UK. Unvaccinated passengers returning from amber list countries will need to self isolate for 10 days and take a day two and day eight Covid test - with most packages costing around 150. An optional extra day five test can be taken, with a negative result allowing unvaccinated travellers to be released early from quarantine - costing around 99. Vaccinated travellers are not required to quarantine on return from amber list countries but will still be required to take a PCR test on day two of their return - costing roughly 99. Returning from Amber-Plus List countries Both vaccinated and unvaccinated travellers returning from France must self-isolate for 10 days and take two tests on day two and day eight. An optional extra day five PCR test can be taken, with a negative result allowing travellers to be released early from the 10-day quarantine.

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Now Greece and Spain, both of which are currently on the amber list, could now follow France onto the so-called amber plus list.

But, according to figures released by Labour, that could leave an estimated 5,857,558 people facing the prospect of last-minute quarantine requirements - plunging the holidays into 'chaos once more'.

The Government introduced an exemption for the requirement to isolate at home for 10 days for fully-vaccinated holidaymakers returning from countries on the amber list.

But ministers removed the exemption for France amid concerns over the Beta variant, creating what critics call an 'amber plus' designation on the traffic light system for foreign travel.

Labour's shadow transport secretary Jim McMahon said: 'Not only have they failed to protect our borders, allowing Covid cases to rocket  they also refuse to be straight with the public and give them the information they need to book travel with confidence, with clear information on the direction of travel of infections in each country.

'Families who have booked holidays in good faith now risk losing out  10-day quarantine is simply not an option for many people who are already struggling financially thanks to the pandemic.'

The opposition estimated the number of people to have booked holidays to those three nations by looking at official data for past travel and adjusting for lower willingness to travel during the pandemic by comparing with surveys.

A Department for Transport spokesman said: 'The travel list allocations have not changed for Spain or Greece.

'We are closely monitoring the data and will take swift action on travel list allocations and international travel requirements should the data show that countries' risk to England has changed.'

It comes as holidaymakers faced up to three hour queues to through passport control at Heathrow Airport yesterday after e-gates broke down and the pingdemic left just one official at the desks, according to frustrated passengers.

Summer school worker claimed 12 of the children in his care were told they couldn't check in to their flight home to Spain at Heathrow's Terminal 5 despite having certificates of recovery from Covid-19.

The Terminal 2 delays meant some passengers arriving from 'amber list' countries missed their pre-booked taxi or coaches on the airport's busiest weekend of the year.

To make matters worse, London Underground trains from Heathrow terminals are closed over the weekend due to engineering works, meaning already delayed holidaymakers have to take a replacement bus service to Hammersmith.

Ryan Toal, the summer school lead, tweeted: 'BA have finally let our students check in after 2 hours - your staff clearly don't know their own guidelines and the fact your manager treated our students as threats demanding they left the building and customers away from them is appalling.'

It comes as union bosses urge key workers to ignore the Government's exemptions from self-isolation and stay home for 10 days if they are 'pinged' by the NHS Covid app, in a move that threatens to make life even harder for shoppers, commuters and holidaymakers.

Leaders of the UK's biggest unions, including the RMT, Unison and Usdaw, are telling critical workers in transport, food and border control among other sectors to quarantine if they are contacted by the app, citing fears they could become infected in the workplace.

Steve Hedley, the RMT's senior assistant general-secretary, has threatened strike action over the exemption scheme, telling the Telegraph: 'Why should our people be infected with Covid? We have discussed the possibility of taking action at a senior level, and I can say that nothing has been ruled out.'

Key workers are able to avoid house-arrest via a Downing Street scheme launched amid mounting fears over the chaos to key infrastructure caused by the so-called 'pingdemic' after more than 600,000 people were told to self-isolate by the NHS app last week.

Policing Minister Kit Malthouse has already been forced to apologise for delays at the border as families set off on the first weekend of the summer holidays, which were branded 'total chaos' by travellers and which he blamed on the 'pingdemic'.

Paddy Lillis, general secretary of retail and food manufacturing union Usdaw, said staff would be encouraged to stay at home rather than return to work and said: 'Usdaw does not believe that the current situation in the food supply chain is critical or warrants the sector being placed on the exemption list.'

Christina McAnea, the general secretary of Unison, told the newspaper: 'Anyone pinged or called by Test and Trace should isolate. Staying at home protects colleagues, neighbours, friends and everyone else too. No one should be forced into work when isolating, even those employees on the exempt list.'

Ministers will tomorrow discuss the growing chaos across the UK's critical infrastructure at a meeting of Covid-O, the Cabinet subcommittee handling pandemic operations.

Union chiefs are urging key workers to ignore the Government's exemptions from self-isolation and stay home if they are 'pinged' by the NHS Covid app, in a move that threatens disruption for shoppers, commuters and holidaymakers

Food industry leaders claim they are yet to receive further details about which workers will be allowed to skip isolation rules if they are 'pinged' by the NHS Covid-App. Pictured: Empty soft drinks shelves in Tesco in Cardiff on Friday

The guidance lists 16 sectors: energy, civil nuclear, digital infrastructure, food production and supply, waste, water, veterinary medicines, essential chemicals, essential transport, medicines, medical devices, clinical consumable supplies, emergency services, border control, essential defence and local government

Industry bosses have been calling for an emergency plan to tackle the impact of the 'pingdemic' on the UK's food supply network has been an 'absolute disaster' and has done 'more harm than good'.

Food industry leaders claim they are yet to receive further details from the Government about which workers will be allowed to skip isolation rules if they are 'pinged' by the NHS Covid app.

They also say hundreds of businesses which are to be allowed to take part in the scheme have not yet been briefed on the full details.

It comes after the Government bowed to growing pressure from the industry by allowing a key-worker exemption for food supply chain workers. Instead of being forced straight into isolation when 'pinged', food supply chain workers, along with a handful of other key workers, will instead be allowed to take part in daily testing.

Up to 10,000 staff, from across 500 different sites, are expected to qualify for the scheme. However supermarket workers are not included. Testing sites are due to be set up at 15 'crucial' supermarket depots as of Monday.

The move came after it was revealed how more than a million adults across the UK have been forced into isolation in the last week - 600,000 of which have been 'pinged' by the NHS Covid-19 app.

The sheer number of workers being forced into isolation - even if they never end up having Covid - has sparked fears of a disruption to the food supply chain and empty supermarket shelves in some areas.

But plans by ministers to fix the issue have today come under fire by industry leaders, who have criticised the Government over a 'lack of communication'.

James Bielby, of the Federation of Wholesale Distribution, which supplies food to outlets other than supermarkets, told the Observer newspaper that the industry still had no idea who is on the list of exempted groups.

He also said that of the 500 businesses supposedly included, only 3 per cent had actually been notified.

Mr Bielby said: 'It's total chaos. There are 15 businesses who were part of the initial run through [of the scheme] on Friday, but there's supposed to be 500 businesses in total, it's entirely opaque.'

Meanwhile, Shane Brennan, chief executive of the Cold Chain Federation, the organisation representing companies that move frozen and chilled foods, said: 'Several days after the prime minister told us the food supply chain was critical and would be exempt, we still don't have a definitive list of who will be exempt and what is required of them.

'Businesses are fighting to keep food on shelves, and I regret that despite the best intentions in some places, government has done more harm than good.'

It comes as frontline businesses and services paralysed by pingdemic chaos will get access to 200 new testing sites from Monday.

The Government's emergency plan to tackle the pingdemic's impact on the food supply industry has been an 'absolute disaster' and has done more harm than good, industry bosses have today claimed. Pictured: A shopper walks past a row of empty shelves in ASDA Cardiff on Friday)

Some 200 new test centres are going to be set up throughout the country to try and stem the chaos caused by the pindemic

The Government on Saturday said in a statement that an expected initial extra 200 testing sites would be opened so that daily contact testing could be 'rolled out to further critical workplaces in England'.

But it came as it was claimed the system causing the problem could not be stopped - because there is not enough testing capacity to allow the 'test and release' method to take over.

The chaotic situation sparked harsh words from some sectors over the lack of clarity from the authorities.

Nick Allen, chief executive of the British Meat Processors Association, added: 'We desperately need this detail and need it quickly. The last we heard, communication could be coming on Monday, so we have a long weekend to get through yet. We need a sense of urgency here.'

Richard Harrow, chief executive of the Frozen Food Federation, said: 'The Government announcement last night that parts of the supply chain will be allowed to test and release workers that are pinged by Track and Trace only goes part of the way.

James Bielby, of the Federation of Wholesale Distribution (FWD), which supplies food to outlets other than supermarkets, told the Observer that the industry still had no idea who was actually on the list of exempted groups

'It shows that yet again Government does not understand how connected the food supply chain is.

Only opening part is unlikely to solve the overall issue. Plus, who is in and who is out, who decides and how do they decide?

'Confusion continues to pervade and I have been advised no list until Monday. This is worse than useless.'

Cornwall Airport Newquay said it was being 'very much affected' by staff shortages due to isolation orders and its boss was not optimistic over discussions over exemptions with the Department for Transport.

Managing director Peter Downes told BBC Radio 4's Today programme yesterday: 'We've been told to expect exemptions in very small numbers of people, in ones and twos, rather than large numbers of staff.

'When we have between a quarter and a third in some cases of individual teams being pinged by the system in one go, and as soon as you get people back you're often losing others to fresh notifications, we don't believe that the scheme is going to cater for that.'

One industry not to feature in the exemptions list was hospitality, with its trade association warning the sector will have 'one hand tied behind our back' as staff are forced into isolation over Covid-19 contacts during what should be the peak season.

Calling for a 'more pragmatic solution', UKHospitality chief executive Kate Nicholls said: 'We now face a summer of venue closures and reduced service, when we should be at a seasonal peak.

'The sector will do all it can to provide great service, but it will be with one hand tied behind our back.

'Those who are fully vaccinated should be able to test after a ping and, subject to a negative result, carry on with their lives. For those not fully vaccinated two negative tests should be sufficient to return to work.'

Home Secretary Priti Patel insisted: 'Daily testing will keep our frontline teams safe while they continue to serve the public and communities across our country.'

The expansion came after the Government on Thursday announced its programme would allow thousands of workers at up to 500 sites in the food sector to avoid the need to self-isolate if identified as a contact of a coronavirus case, and instead take daily Covid tests.

Discontent with the Government's self-isolation policy was growing at the weekend as food industry bosses condemned changes to ease the 'pingdemic' , hospitality leaders warned of a summer of closures and train operators were forced to cut services.

Pressure has mounted on Downing Street to bring forward the date at which people who are double vaccinated against coronavirus can avoid self-isolation.

Freedom day has prompted an extraordinary onslaught of pings to people following the coronavirus rules still left

There were increasing calls for Mr Johnson to bring forward his wider relaxation of quarantine rules for the fully vaccinated from August 16 as businesses were hampered by staff being told to isolate as coronavirus cases soar.

In a bid to calm the concerns of industry, ministers published a limited list of sectors whose double-jabbed workers are eligible to avoid isolation if they undergo daily testing before the wider easing of rules for England.

Industry leaders said the move did not include sufficient workers but doctors warned the problem is that the Prime Minister has let the virus 'rip' and not the 'pings' being issued by the NHS Covid-19 app to tell coronavirus contacts to isolate.

The mounting criticism came as data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed Covid-19 cases continued to rise, with around one in 75 people in England infected.

'When we have between a quarter and a third in some cases of individual teams being pinged by the system in one go, and as soon as you get people back you're often losing others to fresh notifications, we don't believe that the scheme is going to cater for that.'

One industry not to feature in the exemptions list was hospitality, with its trade association warning the sector will have 'one hand tied behind our back' as staff are forced into isolation over Covid-19 contacts during what should be the peak season.

Calling for a 'more pragmatic solution', UKHospitality chief executive Kate Nicholls said: 'We now face a summer of venue closures and reduced service, when we should be at a seasonal peak.

'The sector will do all it can to provide great service, but it will be with one hand tied behind our back.

'Those who are fully vaccinated should be able to test after a ping and, subject to a negative result, carry on with their lives. For those not fully vaccinated two negative tests should be sufficient to return to work.'

Home Secretary Priti Patel insisted: 'Daily testing will keep our frontline teams safe while they continue to serve the public and communities across our country.'

Victims of the Covid dementia disaster: How 50,000 cases were missed in lockdown as audit reveals 330,000 fewer hospital admissions for cancer, heart attacks, stroke, diabetes, and mental illness since March 2020

Up to 50,000 dementia cases were missed during lockdown, it emerged last night.

Around one in ten new sufferers went undiagnosed because referrals to memory clinics all but stopped at the start of the Covid pandemic.

Experts warned the backlog could put further pressure on overstretched hospitals if they  rather than specialist units  have to deal with patients not known to have dementia.

It is feared even more cases will be missed if virus restrictions return in autumn or winter.

James White of the Alzheimer's Society said: 'Thousands of people with dementia have remained in the dark about their condition, unable to get help that is most effective the earlier you get it.'

He said the backlog came on top of the difficulty of helping sufferers whose routines and activities had been devastated by lockdown.

In other developments:

A Mail audit found the first year of the pandemic saw hospital appointments for the six major non-Covid illnesses plummet by around 330,000;

Hopes rose that the third wave of Covid might be ebbing after cases in England dropped to below 30,000 yesterday, a fall of nearly 20,000 in a week;

Haulage bosses said the self-isolation 'pingdemic' could wreck the supermarket supply chain in two to three weeks;

Train drivers and binmen are set to be given an exemption from quarantine;

Health Secretary Sajid Javid was forced to apologise for a tweet saying the nation should not 'cower' from Covid.

Around one in ten new dementia sufferers went undiagnosed because referrals to memory clinics all but stopped at the start of the Covid pandemic (stock image)

The figures on missed cases were revealed by Alistair Burns, national clinical director for dementia and older people's mental health at NHS England and NHS Improvement. Around 475,000 people in England are normally officially registered with their GP as having dementia  around two thirds of all those with the condition  but since the pandemic struck that number has fallen as low as 427,000.

Professor Burns said GPs 'did as they were told' and stopped referring patients for dementia assessments at the start of lockdown in March 2020. Referrals resumed slowly again last summer but declined again during the second lockdown.

The University of Manchester professor added: 'There was an effect of 40,000 to 50,000 people who should have been on the dementia register but who were not. That's the kind of figure we are talking about.

'We do hear a lot about the effect of lockdown on cancer and stroke [diagnosis rates], and that's absolutely right, but there is an effect on dementia as well.'

He also said dementia sufferers had 'disproportionately lost out during the pandemic' by being isolated from family, friends and their communities. The professor was addressing the Dementias 2021 conference in London in a personal capacity.

Dr Hilda Hayo of Dementia UK said the charity had been inundated with calls about delays in accessing a diagnosis. She added: 'A diagnosis of dementia can give families clarity, help them plan for future, and provide access to support services in the community. With significant delays in this process, then families with dementia will be further left behind.'

Dr Liam Fox, who worked as a GP before being elected as a Tory MP, last night advised ministers to 'think carefully' about how any new lockdown would impact the treatment of conditions such as dementia.

He added: 'Having done so well so far we must not squander the vaccine dividend by being too cautious and put the economy at unnecessary risk, especially the small businesses that we require for our recovery.

'We also need to think carefully about the impact on other health conditions that such measures could have.'

NHS figures show the dementia diagnosis rate in England declined steadily from March 2020 to this March, before gradually beginning to rise this spring.

Dr Liam Fox (left), who worked as a GP before being elected as a Tory MP, last night advised ministers to 'think carefully'. The NHS dementia chief, Professor Alistair Burns (right), said up to 50,000 new dementia cases may have been missed

But rates remain below normal levels, with the number assessed in the first few months of 2021 significantly lower than before the pandemic. GPs made 50 per cent fewer dementia assessments and 33 per cent fewer referrals to memory clinics in the six months to April 2021, compared with the six months to March 2019.

In response to Professor Burns's comments, NHS England said: 'It is understandable that during the pandemic, some older people felt they were unable to seek help for symptoms that may be suggestive of dementia, such as memory loss, but the number of referrals is now increasing and the NHS is offering support to patients and their families while they are waiting for a diagnosis.'

Some scientists have begun to talk of a return to restrictions as early as September, despite England opening up again only a week ago.

Chief medical officer Chris Whitty told an online event hosted by the Science Museum earlier this month: 'I don't think we should underestimate the fact that we could get into trouble again, surprisingly fast.

'And I think, saying the numbers in hospitals are low now, that does not mean the numbers will be low in hospital in five, six, seven, eight weeks time  they could actually be really quite serious.

'At that point, it looks as if things are not topping out, we do have to look again, and see where we think things are going.'

At a press conference in May, Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser, said that if cases go up again in winter face coverings on public transport might be necessary. He added that 'working from home if it's appropriate to do so' could continue in the longer term.

The Government has said it will hold a review in September to decide whether tougher coronavirus restrictions need to be imposed ahead of the winter.

The video of woman 'struggling to walk' after getting Pfizer jab that was shared with 4.7MILLION followers on Instagram and is fueling anti-vax movement in younger people - with up to a THIRD of 18-29-year-olds still to be jabbed

A series of Instagram videos showing a woman struggling to walk after being jabbed appears to be fuelling anti-vaccine sentiment among younger people.

In one of the posts, Georgia-Rose Segal, 34, is seen staggering before nearly collapsing on to a kitchen floor. Another clip in the same series then shows her legs and feet spasming in a hospital bed.

The videos were uploaded to the Instagram account Imjustbait, which has attracted 4.7 million followers since it was set up by Anthony 'Antz' Robb in 2014.

The caption reads: 'Since the 29th June after her second Pfizer jab, Georgia has had daily episodes of fainting, developing into neurological issues and losing the use of her legs. And yes, she was perfectly fit and healthy before!'

The post, which has more than 100,000 likes, sparked debate in the comment section, with several popular Instagram users outlining fears about possible side-effects from the coronavirus vaccine.

While Ms Segal's condition is extremely rare, it is an acknowledged side effect, so Instagram is not taking the video down.

In one of the posts, Georgia-Rose Segal, 34, is seen struggling to walk before nearly collapsing on to a kitchen floor

THE MINIMAL RISKS OF COVID VACCINES The COVID-19 vaccines can cause side effects, but not everyone gets them. Most are mild and should not last longer than a week. They can include a sore arm from the injection, feeling tired, a headache, feeling achy, and feeling or being sick. You may also get a high temperature or feel hot or shivery 1 or 2 days after your vaccination. If symptoms get worse or you're worried, the NHS advises calling 111. You cannot catch COVID-19 from the vaccine, but you may have caught it just before or after your vaccination. Most people with allergies (including food or penicillin allergies) can be vaccinated against COVID-19, but you should tell healthcare staff before you're vaccinated if you've ever had a serious allergic reaction (including anaphylaxis). They may ask what you're allergic to, to make sure you can have the vaccine. Serious allergic reactions to the COVID-19 vaccines are very rare. If you do have a reaction, it usually happens in minutes. Staff giving the vaccine are trained to deal with allergic reactions and treat them immediately. If you have a serious allergic reaction to the 1st dose of a vaccine, you should not have the same vaccine for your 2nd dose. The MHRA is carrying out a detailed review of reports of an extremely rare blood clotting problem affecting a small number of people who had the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. It's not yet clear why it affects some people. The COVID-19 vaccine can help stop you getting seriously ill or dying from COVID-19. For people aged 40 or over and those with other health conditions, the benefits of being vaccinated with the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine outweigh any risk of clotting problems. For people under 40 without other health conditions, it's preferable for you to have the Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna vaccine instead of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. There have been rare cases of inflammation of the heart reported after COVID-19 vaccination. Most people who had this recovered following rest and simple treatments. It is not yet clear if it was caused by the vaccines, but get urgent medical advice if you have any of these symptoms within a few days of being vaccinated: Chest pain

Shortness of breath

A fast-beating, fluttering or pounding heart (palpitations) Source: NHS Advertisement

Recent figured have revealed that while infections among young adults have soared to a record high, vaccine uptake has slowed to a fraction of what it was in the spring.

One in three 18-to-29 year olds have still not had a first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, NHS England figures show.

But the virus is running rampant in this age group, with more than one in 100 aged 20 to 29 testing positive last week.

One comment from an account which has 86,000 followers on the video of Ms Segal says: 'This is why I have not got it yet, I'll get it if it's life and death but mans had covid and got over it like a cold and no one gave man a vaccine for my cold.'

Another, from a user with 20,000 followers, says: 'And this is the s*** they're trying to force into everyone's bodies... no thanks, had worse colds than Covid.'

Others write that the risk of developing the neurological condition is very low, and typically caused by emotional or psychological distress.

'It's unfortunate for sure, but I've had both of mine and I'm perfectly fine, I would really urge everyone to get it,' one user writes.

Ms Segal said her Instagram page had originally been 'very private', but she made it an open account because her friends wanted to share her experience, The Times reports.

The Imjustbait account then offered to publish her videos.

Having spent nine days in hospital, Ms Segal now hopes to crowdfund enough money to see an alternative medicine specialist in California to treat her fainting and leg condition.

Around three million young adults in the UK are yet to be vaccinated, even though all over-18s have been eligible since June 18.

Public Health England yesterday revealed that case rates among those in their 20s are higher than in any age group since the pandemic began.

The current weekly infection rate of 1,155 cases per 100,000 compares to a rate of just 60 per 100,000 in those over 80.

In total, 88 per cent of adults have had their first dose, but this falls to 66 per cent among those aged 18 to 29.

The video appears to have stoked scepticism over the benefits of the Covid vaccine.

After watching the clips, 23-year-old Birmingham waitress Kevani Aird, could not stop thinking about them.

She does not want to get vaccinated, and none of her immediate family have been jabbed.

Ms Aird said: 'I don't trust it, to be honest with you. I just don't trust the government in general. I don't think it's worth the risk.'

While 44% of under-30s are now vaccinated, Birmingham has the lowest level of any English local authority.

But despite last month's 'Glastonbury-style' rush from young people to get vaccinated, parts of Britain are now seeing a slump in uptake.

The lower risk of Covid to younger people could play a part in the hesitancy to get vaccinated.

Just 237 under-30s are among the more than 140,000 people to have died with Covid on their death certificates.

Chairman of the Royal College of GPs, Professor Martin Marshall, said that risk of infertility is 'probably the biggest concern' he heard from young people.

One of the videos posted on Instagram shows Ms Segal struggling to walk in a hospital ward

NHS trusts and councils have been stressing that these claims are false on social media.

Aston University science student Sasha Bunn, 20, was positive about getting vaccinated but had seen a number of negative online posts about women 'being less fertile'.

While the clips of Ms Segal are not being removed, the videos have been 'restricted', meaning it will not be recommended and will be less prominent.

Instagram said: 'We are running the largest online vaccine information campaign in history, and through our work with the NHS and UK government we've directed over 13.5 million visits to accurate information about the virus and approved vaccines.'
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Union bosses are urging key workers to ignore the Government's exemptions from self-isolation and stay home for 10 days if they are 'pinged' by the NHS Covid app, in a move that threatens to make life even harder for shoppers, commuters and holidaymakers.

Leaders of the UK's biggest unions, including the RMT, Unison and Usdaw, are telling critical workers in transport, food and border control among other sectors to quarantine if they are contacted by the app, citing fears they could become infected in the workplace.

Steve Hedley, the RMT's senior assistant general-secretary, has threatened strike action over the exemption scheme, telling the Telegraph: 'Why should our people be infected with Covid? We have discussed the possibility of taking action at a senior level, and I can say that nothing has been ruled out.'

Key workers are able to avoid house-arrest via a Downing Street scheme launched amid mounting fears over the chaos to key infrastructure caused by the so-called 'pingdemic' after more than 600,000 people were told to self-isolate by the NHS app last week.

Policing Minister Kit Malthouse has already been forced to apologise for delays at the border as families set off on the first weekend of the summer holidays, which were branded 'total chaos' by travellers and which he blamed on the 'pingdemic'.

Paddy Lillis, general secretary of retail and food manufacturing union Usdaw, said staff would be encouraged to stay at home rather than return to work and said: 'Usdaw does not believe that the current situation in the food supply chain is critical or warrants the sector being placed on the exemption list.'

Christina McAnea, the general secretary of Unison, told the newspaper: 'Anyone pinged or called by Test and Trace should isolate. Staying at home protects colleagues, neighbours, friends and everyone else too. No one should be forced into work when isolating, even those employees on the exempt list.'

Ministers will tomorrow discuss the growing chaos across the UK's critical infrastructure at a meeting of Covid-O, the Cabinet subcommittee handling pandemic operations.

Union chiefs are urging key workers to ignore the Government's exemptions from self-isolation and stay home if they are 'pinged' by the NHS Covid app, in a move that threatens disruption for shoppers, commuters and holidaymakers

Food industry leaders claim they are yet to receive further details about which workers will be allowed to skip isolation rules if they are 'pinged' by the NHS Covid-App. Pictured: Empty soft drinks shelves in Tesco in Cardiff on Friday

The guidance lists 16 sectors: energy, civil nuclear, digital infrastructure, food production and supply, waste, water, veterinary medicines, essential chemicals, essential transport, medicines, medical devices, clinical consumable supplies, emergency services, border control, essential defence and local government

Industry bosses have been calling for an emergency plan to tackle the impact of the 'pingdemic' on the UK's food supply network has been an 'absolute disaster' and has done 'more harm than good'.

Food industry leaders claim they are yet to receive further details from the Government about which workers will be allowed to skip isolation rules if they are 'pinged' by the NHS Covid app.

They also say hundreds of businesses which are to be allowed to take part in the scheme have not yet been briefed on the full details.

It comes after the Government bowed to growing pressure from the industry by allowing a key-worker exemption for food supply chain workers. Instead of being forced straight into isolation when 'pinged', food supply chain workers, along with a handful of other key workers, will instead be allowed to take part in daily testing.

Up to 10,000 staff, from across 500 different sites, are expected to qualify for the scheme. However supermarket workers are not included. Testing sites are due to be set up at 15 'crucial' supermarket depots as of Monday.

The move came after it was revealed how more than a million adults across the UK have been forced into isolation in the last week - 600,000 of which have been 'pinged' by the NHS Covid-19 app.

The sheer number of workers being forced into isolation - even if they never end up having Covid - has sparked fears of a disruption to the food supply chain and empty supermarket shelves in some areas.

But plans by ministers to fix the issue have come under fire by industry leaders, who have criticised the Government over a 'lack of communication'.

James Bielby, of the Federation of Wholesale Distribution, which supplies food to outlets other than supermarkets, told the Observer newspaper that the industry still had no idea who is on the list of exempted groups.

He also said that of the 500 businesses supposedly included, only 3 per cent had actually been notified.

Mr Bielby said: 'It's total chaos. There are 15 businesses who were part of the initial run through [of the scheme] on Friday, but there's supposed to be 500 businesses in total, it's entirely opaque.'

Meanwhile, Shane Brennan, chief executive of the Cold Chain Federation, the organisation representing companies that move frozen and chilled foods, said: 'Several days after the prime minister told us the food supply chain was critical and would be exempt, we still don't have a definitive list of who will be exempt and what is required of them.

'Businesses are fighting to keep food on shelves, and I regret that despite the best intentions in some places, government has done more harm than good.'

It comes as frontline businesses and services paralysed by pingdemic chaos will get access to 200 new testing sites from Monday.

The Government's emergency plan to tackle the pingdemic's impact on the food supply industry has been an 'absolute disaster' and has done more harm than good, industry bosses have claimed. Pictured: A shopper walks past a row of empty shelves in ASDA Cardiff on Friday)

Some 200 new test centres are going to be set up throughout the country to try and stem the chaos caused by the pindemic

The Government on Saturday said in a statement that an expected initial extra 200 testing sites would be opened so that daily contact testing could be 'rolled out to further critical workplaces in England'.

But it came as it was claimed the system causing the problem could not be stopped - because there is not enough testing capacity to allow the 'test and release' method to take over.

The chaotic situation sparked harsh words from some sectors over the lack of clarity from the authorities.

Nick Allen, chief executive of the British Meat Processors Association, added: 'We desperately need this detail and need it quickly. The last we heard, communication could be coming on Monday, so we have a long weekend to get through yet. We need a sense of urgency here.'

Richard Harrow, chief executive of the Frozen Food Federation, said: 'The Government announcement last night that parts of the supply chain will be allowed to test and release workers that are pinged by Track and Trace only goes part of the way.

James Bielby, of the Federation of Wholesale Distribution (FWD), which supplies food to outlets other than supermarkets, told the Observer that the industry still had no idea who was actually on the list of exempted groups

'It shows that yet again Government does not understand how connected the food supply chain is.

Only opening part is unlikely to solve the overall issue. Plus, who is in and who is out, who decides and how do they decide?

'Confusion continues to pervade and I have been advised no list until Monday. This is worse than useless.'

Cornwall Airport Newquay said it was being 'very much affected' by staff shortages due to isolation orders and its boss was not optimistic over discussions over exemptions with the Department for Transport.

Managing director Peter Downes told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: 'We've been told to expect exemptions in very small numbers of people, in ones and twos, rather than large numbers of staff.

'When we have between a quarter and a third in some cases of individual teams being pinged by the system in one go, and as soon as you get people back you're often losing others to fresh notifications, we don't believe that the scheme is going to cater for that.'

One industry not to feature in the exemptions list was hospitality, with its trade association warning the sector will have 'one hand tied behind our back' as staff are forced into isolation over Covid-19 contacts during what should be the peak season.

Calling for a 'more pragmatic solution', UKHospitality chief executive Kate Nicholls said: 'We now face a summer of venue closures and reduced service, when we should be at a seasonal peak.

'The sector will do all it can to provide great service, but it will be with one hand tied behind our back.

'Those who are fully vaccinated should be able to test after a ping and, subject to a negative result, carry on with their lives. For those not fully vaccinated two negative tests should be sufficient to return to work.'

Home Secretary Priti Patel insisted: 'Daily testing will keep our frontline teams safe while they continue to serve the public and communities across our country.'

The expansion came after the Government on Thursday announced its programme would allow thousands of workers at up to 500 sites in the food sector to avoid the need to self-isolate if identified as a contact of a coronavirus case, and instead take daily Covid tests.

Discontent with the Government's self-isolation policy was growing at the weekend as food industry bosses condemned changes to ease the 'pingdemic' , hospitality leaders warned of a summer of closures and train operators were forced to cut services.

Pressure has mounted on Downing Street to bring forward the date at which people who are double vaccinated against coronavirus can avoid self-isolation.

Freedom day has prompted an extraordinary onslaught of pings to people following the coronavirus rules still left

There were increasing calls for Mr Johnson to bring forward his wider relaxation of quarantine rules for the fully vaccinated from August 16 as businesses were hampered by staff being told to isolate as coronavirus cases soar.

In a bid to calm the concerns of industry, ministers published a limited list of sectors whose double-jabbed workers are eligible to avoid isolation if they undergo daily testing before the wider easing of rules for England.

Industry leaders said the move did not include sufficient workers but doctors warned the problem is that the Prime Minister has let the virus 'rip' and not the 'pings' being issued by the NHS Covid-19 app to tell coronavirus contacts to isolate.

The mounting criticism came as data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed Covid-19 cases continued to rise, with around one in 75 people in England infected.

'When we have between a quarter and a third in some cases of individual teams being pinged by the system in one go, and as soon as you get people back you're often losing others to fresh notifications, we don't believe that the scheme is going to cater for that.'

One industry not to feature in the exemptions list was hospitality, with its trade association warning the sector will have 'one hand tied behind our back' as staff are forced into isolation over Covid-19 contacts during what should be the peak season.

Calling for a 'more pragmatic solution', UKHospitality chief executive Kate Nicholls said: 'We now face a summer of venue closures and reduced service, when we should be at a seasonal peak.

'The sector will do all it can to provide great service, but it will be with one hand tied behind our back.

'Those who are fully vaccinated should be able to test after a ping and, subject to a negative result, carry on with their lives. For those not fully vaccinated two negative tests should be sufficient to return to work.'

Home Secretary Priti Patel insisted: 'Daily testing will keep our frontline teams safe while they continue to serve the public and communities across our country.'
Jagmeet Channa (pictured), now using the name Jag Singh, is working for a cryptocurrency firm after being jailed for nine years for his role in a 72 million cash fraud plot

A former investment banker jailed for nine years for being behind Britains biggest attempted cash fraud of 72million has resumed a career in finance after his release.

Jagmeet Channa, who plundered accounts while at HSBCs Canary Wharf headquarters, now deals  entirely legally  with clients and potential investors at a cryptocurrency firm.

The firms website gives no indication of his role in what the judge described as a sophisticated criminal enterprise in 2008.

The site links to his profile on professional networking site LinkedIn, which claims he was working as a business analyst across financial and banking change programmes when he was behind bars.

It adds: I was in the heart of the belly of the beast and was able to understand how banking and finance actually functions on a global scale.

But while disguising his past to clients, a source said that when hiring staff for the firm, Channa, now using the name Jag Singh, boasted about his criminal history and falsely claimed he had got away with the cash.

Channa, from Ilford, east London, is titled ICO Operations of Liquidcash, which promises a payment system designed to bring crypto payments into the real world.

His online profile says his responsibilities include project management of all key stake holders and the first point of contact for potential investors.

It states that during the period he was in jail he was working as a business analyst for a firm called SK Berkeley.

The company was incorporated in December 2012, four years after he was jailed and two years after his LinkedIn CV said he left the firm.

In April 2008, the then 25-year-old bank clerk, using colleagues passwords, wired 71,632,807 to a Barclays branch in Manchester and to a French bank account in Morocco.

It was more than 27 times the amount taken during the Great Train Robbery in 1963. But he forgot to change the account he had used to say zero balance, meaning two days later the debt was discovered and an investigation launched.

Channa told the Mail that his employers knew of his past, and his role was to build software, not related to finance.

He said his LinkedIn CV was not done intentionally and he would fix it.

He said he changed his name to make it more dynamic and denied boasting about his criminal past when recruiting staff.
A Covid-positive man has sparked fury after he illegally fled Sydney's lockdown, travelled to Queensland, infected a Qantas flight attendant and roamed the state for seven days before he was caught.

The Sydneysider reportedly ignored stay-at-home orders after he was told that he was a close contact of a positive case on July 10 and should not leave home for 14 days.

He was incorrectly informed that he tested negative to Covid-19 two days later, but close contacts of positive cases in New South Wales are directed to isolate for two weeks regardless of their test results.

Instead of following health orders, he flew to Ballina in northern New South Wales on July 14 where he was picked up by a female flight attendant, before he drove to the Sunshine State.

The infected Sydney man broke lockdown and travelled to Queensland, where he infected a flight attendant. Pictured: People jogging in Burleigh Heads on the Gold Coast

Pictured: People wearing face masks in Manly, Sydney, on Sunday - as the state recorded 141 new cases

The flight attendant was allowed to cross into NSW, but the Covid-positive man was not allowed to leave his Sydney home. Pictured: Queensland Police stop cars at the border with NSW

NSW Deputy Chief Health Officer Jeremy McAnulty said NSW Health was advised on July 20 that the man's test was actually positive, and health authorities interviewed him later that day.

'He stated that he had been isolating since the 10th of July, however, we know this is not true,' said Dr McAnulty.

'We believe he travelled to Queensland on July 14 and we are concerned about the nature and extent of his exposures on the flight and in the community both in New South Wales and in Queensland.'

Queensland Chief Health Officer Dr Jeannette Young said the man and the flight attendant, who is in her 30s, were infectious in Brisbane and the Gold Coast for about seven days.

She said the woman was allowed to cross the border to Ballina at the time, but the man was not meant to have left his Sydney home.

People in NSW can be jailed for up to six months or fined $11,000 for breaching the Public Health Act.

Pictured: People at Burleigh Heads on the Gold Coast on Sunday. There are now 37 new exposure sites in Queensland

Pictured: Police officers wearing face masks patrol at Manly Beach in Sydney on Sunday, July 24. Sydneysiders are in lockdown amid a growing Covid outbreak

INFECTED SYDNEY MAN TIMELINE July 10: Sydney man was told he was a close contact of a positive case and must get tested and self-isolate for 14 days, until July 24. July 12: He got a Covid test from a private pathology, but was incorrectly told he tested negative. July 14: The man left locked-down Sydney and caught the 11.45am Virgin flight 1139 from Sydney to Ballina. A female Qantas flight attendant drove from Banyo, Brisbane, to Ballina airport to pick him up, and then drove back to Brisbane. July 15: NSW Health reminded the man that he is a close contact and should still be in isolation. July 20: NSW Health realised his test results were wrong and told him that he had been infectious since July 12. July 21: Qantas flight attendant returned a positive result and Queensland Health identified the Sydney man as close contact. Queensland Police put him into hotel quarantine. July 24: He returned a positive test in hotel quarantine. It ws the first time Queensland Health became aware of his movements since July 12. Advertisement

Queensland health authorities are now scrambling to work out his movements, and have added 37 exposure sites to the list.

The list includes three barber shops, David Jones and a cafe inside Westfield Chermside between July 15 and 23.

There are 18 new alerts for Goodstart Early Learning Parkwood on the Gold Coast between July 13 and 23.

Harbour Town Shopping Centre after an infected person went to Yum Cha Cuisine on July 17, along with Black Swan Coffee at Mermaid's Q Super Centre.

Infected Brisbane suburbs include Banyo, Nundah and Chermside.

The flight attendant visited Dreamworld while infectious and also crewed six flights around the state.

Pictured: Westfield Shopping Centre on Gympie Road in Chermsidem which has now been listed as a Covid exposure site

Pictured: Pacific Fair Shopping Mall, which has now been listed as a Covid-19 exposure site

She also went to Gladstone, Longreach and Hervey Bay, which the woman flew to and from, the Gold Coast, and her home city of Brisbane.

Dr Young said on Friday that the attendant did not seek a test until Wednesday last week - nine days after she began showing symptoms on July 13.

It's presumed she was infectious two days before that, putting at risk every passenger and colleague on six flights she crewed on July 11 and 12.

Queenslanders have been urged to check the exposure sites list and, if they were at those venues, strictly follow the advice on testing and any quarantining requirements.

The woman returned a positive result on Thursday, one day after she finally presented for testing. She's since been taken from her Banyo home and is now in a Covid hospital.

Dr Young could not explain why the woman waited so long after the onset of symptoms to get tested and said all Queenslanders must closely monitor the list of exposure sites in coming days.

Tracing teams are going through passenger lists for the six at-risk flights to ensure everyone is isolating and getting tested.

Pictured: People walking in Burleigh Heads on the Gold Coast on Sunday

Pictured: A Covid warning in Bondi on Sunday. Sydneysiders are currently in lockdown

Genomic sequencing has shown the flight attendant has a form of the virus identical to 60 cases from the NSW cluster, and her job did involve travel to NSW.

Dr Young says test results due in the next day or so will reveal if Queensland is in trouble. She has expressed a level of confusion about the lack of other cases so far, given how much time has passed.

'We know that with the Delta variant it usually spreads within two days. In Victoria they're seeing spread from one person to the next in 30 hours,' she said.

'I would have expected there'd be spread and then spread and then spread, and I've not seen that.'

She said there would be a 'fast' lockdown if there was a need for one.

The flight attendant flew on six regional services on a 74-seat Dash-8 Q400 aircraft.

QantasLink said there'd been no other reports of cases associated with the flights so far.

The flights were all listed as exposure sites, along with the Brisbane, Gladstone, Longreach and Hervey Bay domestic airports. The Gladstone Mercure Hotel is also an exposure site as the woman stayed there on July 11.
More than 250 people involved with the Scouts have been convicted of child sexual abuse, it was revealed yesterday.

There were 255 convictions for rape, indecent assault, voyeurism and offences related to sexual images among Scout leaders and others in positions of responsibility.

The Scout movement was accused of exposing children to abuse at the hands of those entrusted with their welfare.

The convictions span from the 1950s to as recently as November last year when former Scout leader Graham Avison, of Tameside, Greater Manchester was jailed for a total of five years and seven months.

The convictions span from the 1950s to as recently as November last year when former Scout leader Graham Avison (pictured), of Tameside, Greater Manchester was jailed for a total of five years and seven months

The 75-year-old 'predator' admitted four counts of indecent assault against a teenage boy he groomed by giving gifts that escalated from bars of chocolate to a car.

Another ex-leader, Oliver Cooper from Bognor Regis, West Sussex, was jailed for six years in October for three counts of sexual assault against two six-year-old girls, taking indecent photographs of a child and 13 counts of voyeurism.

An interactive map of Scouting abuse by Bolt Burdon Kemp (BBK) solicitors showed a need for the Scout Association to 'do much more' to protect Scouts from sexual predators, according to The Guardian.

BBK associate Abbie Hickson said: 'It is important to remember that Scoutmasters who perpetrate sexual abuse against Scouts are by their very nature highly manipulative, secretive, devious and opportunistic.'

She said steps must be taken to prevent sexual abuse at all levels of the organisation.

The Scout movement was accused of exposing children to abuse at the hands of those entrusted with their welfare (stock photo)

BBK reportedly said the number of perpetrators and victims is likely to be higher than the figures available through public records and other documents.

The Scout Association said nothing is more important to it than the safety of young people in its care. A spokesman said: 'In the UK, we have had over ten million young members since our inception in 1907. We recognise that over that time there have been incidents of abuse. Any abuse of a young person is abhorrent, and we are deeply sorry for anyone who has suffered because of the actions of abusers.'

The sexual assault of one 13-year-old was not included in the BBK analysis because details were reportedly only being made public for the first time.

The victim, now 27, said she was sexually assaulted multiple times by a young Scout leader.

The Crown Prosecution Service did not charge her alleged abuser but she reportedly agreed a 160,000 settlement with the Scout Association last year.

A report by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, published last week, considered how institutions in England and Wales failed in their duty of care to protect children from sexual abuse and exploitation.

It found cases of Scout or Guide leaders sexually abusing children and said at the time they fell outside legal definitions of 'positions of trust'. But their standing within communities afforded them trust and institutional protection while their roles afforded them high levels of access to children, it said.

The Boy Scouts of America this month reached an $850million (620million) settlement with around 60,000 victims of child sexual abuse.
Victoria has recorded another 11 cases of coronavirus on the day Daniel Andrews is due to decide whether to lift lockdown on Tuesday night.

The premier said on Sunday that he expected to end the lockdown on time, but it would depend on Monday's numbers and how many were in isolation.

Mr Andrews said Tuesday morning's numbers could also be necessary, but signs are looking up for Victorians getting their freedom in an announcement today.

The new cases - all of which were in isolation during their infectious period - were identified from 25,404 test results. There was another case diagnosed in hotel quarantine.

Victoria has recorded another 11 Covid cases as Premier Daniel Andrews is set to decide on whether the statewide lockdown will be lifted. Pictured: People line up at a testing clinic in Prahran, Melbourne, on Thursday

Premier Daniel Andrews (pictured) said on Sunday lockdown was on track to end on Tuesday night

The fact all new cases were in quarantine signal the statewide lockdown is on track to end at 11.59pm on Tuesday.

The measure was called on July 15 due to an outbreak of the highly contagious Delta variant, which originated from cases in NSW.

Victoria's lockdown was meant to end after five days, but was extended for a week as the virus continued to spread in the community.

Mr Andrews on Sunday said he was confident the lockdown wouldn't be extended again, citing the downward trend in the number of people in the community while infectious.

His comments came after Victoria recorded 11 new locally acquired Covid cases on Sunday, all of which were linked to known outbreaks and were in quarantine for their entire infectious period.

'These numbers are the trend that we wanted to see, these numbers are more than promising, but we just have to wait and see what comes through tomorrow and Tuesday to be certain that we can ease restrictions,' Mr Andrews told reporters on Sunday.

'I will foreshadow, there will still be rules after midnight Tuesday, it'll be important that we all follow them.'

The new infections bring the total number of active cases to 179 in the state, five of which are in hospital including two people in intensive care.

Victorian cabinet ministers and the public health team will hold discussions on Monday to map out the state's new set of restrictions, but masks are expected to remain compulsory for some time. Pictured: A woman walks with her dog on the Port Phillip fore shore on Saturday

FIND THE LATEST EXPOSURE SITES NEAR YOU

Victorian cabinet ministers and the public health team will meet on Monday to discuss the new set of restrictions.

Mr Andrews said on Sunday he is focused on removing the five reasons to stay at home statewide from midnight on Tuesday.

However, he cautioned that widespread restrictions would remain in place, with masks to be mandatory for a 'long time'.

'Masks are going to be a feature for a long time, until we get the maximum number of people through the vaccine,' he said on Sunday.

Mr Andrews said research has shown masks were the 'greatest contributing factor' to the state beating its second wave last year, and would be vital to combatting the highly infectious Indian Delta strain.

While he said it was still too early to determine what businesses would be permitted to re-open, the premier hinted that schools were a main priority.

'My aim is to have the five reasons to leave home off and much greater freedom of movement, for us to resume our economic recovery, and that is what we are after.

'[But] its got to be done safe and, indeed, we want to get out kids back to school.'

Mr Andrews said he 'hopes' to remove the five reasons Victorians are allowed to leave home from midnight Tuesday. Pictured: People wearing face masks walk through Melbourne's deserted streets on Thursday

Both NSW and Victoria saw thousands join anti-lockdown protests over the weekend (pictured in Melbourne on Saturday)

Meanwhile, health department sources have told The Herald Sun some of the restrictions that are tipped to remain in place until vaccination rates have drastically improved.

Policymakers and health officials are currently in favour of schoolchildren returning to the classroom this week with excursions, planned camps and events also set to be given the green light.

High level talks are already underway to open the doors of Victoria's beloved hospitality venues with cafes, restaurants and bars looking likely to trade this week under the 4 person per sq/m rule with a cap of 50 patrons indoors.

Retail stores are also set to have the same restrictions, while outdoor community sports events will be capped at 100 people.

Under the new proposal face masks are expected to remain mandatory both indoors and outdoors as the highly contagious Indian Delta variant continues to wreak havoc north of the border.

One of the issues that could stand in Victoria's way however is a potential rise in cases due to the anti-lockdown march which occurred in Melbourne's CBD on Saturday.

More than 1,000 people flooded the streets flouting stay-at-home orders to protest Covid restrictions, with many more taking to the streets in Covid-ravaged Sydney.

Mr Andrews slammed those who attended the anti-lockdown rally in Melbourne as 'selfish' as millions across the country are under stay-at-home orders due to Delta strain outbreaks

The demonstrators were seen abandoning face masks and disregarding social distancing, raising concerns the anti-lockdown rally could act as a super spreader for Covid-19.

Mr Andrews expressed his dismay at 'selfish' anti-lockdown protesters who gathered in Melbourne on Saturday but said he was reasonably confident it would not become a super-spreader event.

There are more than 22,000 people self-isolating across the state after being deemed close contacts of positive cases, while there are more than 360 exposure sites.

Although lockdown is set to be lifted, Mr Andrews warned the Delta variant was a 'whole new enemy' and would remain a threat even after restrictions are eased.

'We have been running alongside this virus, now we have just got ahead of it,' he said.

'We have to stay ahead of it from now until Tuesday night and there after until we have everyone through the vaccine program.

'This virus does not have a day off, it is unrelenting'.
Rhodes, Kos and Astypalaia are among the worlds top holiday spots for very good reason.

With an abundance of idyllic beaches, incredible gastronomy, sensational scenery and fascinating history to explore, these three Dodecanese Greek islands make for an unforgettable trip.

With its clear waters, charming islands and friendly locals, Kos in the Dodecanese is a delight

Located on the southeastern side of Greece, they're also the perfect jumping off point to travel to more off-the-beaten-track islets, such as Halki, Tilos and Nisyros, offering a dream getaway with the best of both worlds.

Whats more, Kos, Rhodes and Astypalaia have their own airports, making jetting around easier than ever.

Roaming Rhodes

The capital of the Dodecanese, Rhodes offers everything from relaxation to an action-packed break.

Lindos: The island of Rhodes, the largest of the Dodecanese, has something for everyone

Its magnificent Old Town is where you can stroll within medieval walls and explore 24 centuries of history, with fortress-like buildings and winding alleyways.

Visit the impressive museum inside the 7th-century Palace of the Grand Master, then refuel at the cobblestoned Street of the Knights that's packed with medieval inns.

Explore the new citys Mandraki marina, before heading to cosmopolitan Elli beach, which is lined with hotels.

Two statues of deer overlook the harbour at Mandraki, marking where, according to legend, once stood the feet of the Colossus statue

Take a day trip to the popular holiday resort of Kallithea, with its long, sandy Faliraki beach, Roman baths and the beautiful small bays at Ladiko and Anthony Quinn.

Ialissos beach is perfect for wind and kitesurfing as well as sailing, while Petaloudes is home to the lush Valley of the Butterflies.

Discover the natural beauty of the island with a hike from the coast through pine-tree forest, taking in castles and monuments - have your camera at the ready!

With fresh, local produce, a history of cultures and flavours, Rhodes is the ideal foodie destination. Devour Greek salads, pitaroudia made with courgettes, cauliflower and cheese, just-caught fish, crisp vegetables, and the traditional sweet and savoury pies, including cheese and cinnamon and honey. Delicious!

From Rhodes, you can island hop to Halki, Tilos or Nisyros via ferry.

Idyllic escape in Kos

Kos Town boasts a bustling port lined with tavernas, a medieval castle, and an array of ancient ruins from the Greek, Roman and Byzantine eras.

Visit the medieval Castle of the Knight of St John with its commanding sea views, and the second-century House of Europa built by the Romans.

This early Christian basilica is in Agios Stefanios on the island of Kos, overlooking Kefalos bay

Just outside Kos Town is the ancient healing temple of Asklepieion, where the father of modern medicine Hippocrates trained.

For a truly relaxing experience, take a dip in the hot thermal springs at Agios Phokas.

After dark, visit Mount Dikaios for panoramic island views at sunset, then head into Kos Town for busy bars, and delicious Greek food at a taverna.

With so many beaches along Koss coast, including the popular Masthihari and Marmari, watersports fans will find plenty of places for swimming, kayaking, diving and windsurfing.

Alternatively tour Kos by bike on one of the stunning routes that takes in the lush vegetation, spectacular views and the landscape.

Thanks to the climate and landscape of Kos, the island has an abundance of fresh produce - from olive oil and wild greens, to honey, wine and cheeses. Its dishes are rich in flavour and history - try posa goat cheese, pitaridia, similar to lasagne, as well as moreish baklava and local halva.

From Kos, you can island hop to Halki, Tilos or Nisyros via ferry.

Escape to Astypalaia

Beautiful butterfly-shaped Astypalaia is more off-the-radar than Rhodes and Kos.

With sun-drenched secluded beaches, pretty whitewashed villages and windmills, and centuries-old history, the island offers a breathtaking escape.

Packed with history and charm: Pretty windmills in the town of Chora on Astypalaia

The charming capital Chora stands on the slopes of a hill, with incredible views across the glimmering Aegean Sea. Discover its sugar-cube houses, 14th-century castle, beautiful churches and Agios Georgios, the site of an ancient temple.

Port town Pera Yialos boasts a modern marina with traditional tavernas and busy bars - as well as a pretty sandy beach.

Seaside village Livadi is filled with citrus groves and corn fields, as well as a popular sandy beach - and eateries serving fresh fish and local dishes.

Dazzling clear waters: Kounoupa Double Beach is a magical setting

Check out the pretty remains of Roman baths in the town of Maltezana, where you'll also find a fishing harbour and sandy beaches surrounded by olive groves.

And look to the future! There are plans to transform Astypalaia into the first smart, sustainable, and carbon-free island - Europes 'Green Island'.

Heavenly Halki

Chilled out Halki is the perfect place to unwind, with its unspoiled landscape, pretty town and peaceful beaches.

No car is needed - you can walk the entire island in just four hours!

Scenic Nimporio, which has fewer than 500 residents, boasts picturesque alleyways, neoclassical stone-built houses with mosaic floors, and important museums.

Pretty harbour: You can catch a ferry to the tiny island of Halki from Kos in just over two hours

Take in the quaint harbour and dine on local dishes, including handmade pasta, thyme honey and stuffed goat, in family-run tavernas

Then walk up to Chorio, a deserted medieval village, taking in church and castle ruins, picturesque windmills, and the arresting views across the sparkling sea, all the way to Rhodes.

With its shallow waters, Pontamos is perfect for families; walk between pebbly Gyali and sandy Trachea peninsula, or head out for a dive to explore the island's underwater delights.

Unspoiled Tilos

With its unnspoiled charm, secluded beaches and an abandoned yet beautiful village, Tilos is the perfect destination for those wanting to switch off.

The island, between Kos and Rhodes, is quiet and crowd-free, and its mountainous terrain, pretty towns and ancient monuments can be explored on foot or by bike.

As well as rare birds, volcanic valleys, the rich sand of 25sq-mile Tilos is red thanks to ancient lava flows.

Unspoilt beauty: Tilos is a jewel in the Dodecanese, quiet, picturesque, and free from crowds

Picturesque port town Livadia is where to find restaurants, hotels and the island's most popular beach where you can laze away the days on a sunbed.

Mikro Chorio is the ruins of a village that's been abandoned since 1940. In the summer, head to the small bar offering refreshments in the centre for a unique experience.

Tilos has four other beaches, all of which are secluded. The long bay of Eristos is accessible via a track road from the capital; Agios Antonios boasts sand and pebbles and is close to a fishing village; while lush Plaka remains tranquil even in the busy season. Bliss!

Volcanic adventures in Nisyros

Walk into a volcano crater, explore the ancient city of Paleokastro, and wander the monastery of Panagia Spiliani - there's plenty to see and do on peaceful Nisyros.

Situated between Kos and Tilos, the breathtaking 25-mile island is filled with picturesque villages, secluded beaches, and is a perfect location for island hopping.

Walking in a volcano: On the historic island of Nisyros, you can explore its Stefanos crater

Its 160,000-year-old volcano is still active - although dormant - and is a must to explore its incredible rock formations, the stone from which you'll see has been used to build houses on the island.

The charming harbour capital of Mandraki is where to find whitewashed houses with flat roofs, lively taverns and small bars.

Nisyros's most popular beaches are on the north of the island, with vast stretches of golden sand or white pebbles along with turquoise waves.

Lies is filled with tiny coves formed by the sea over the years; popular Pali is ideal for families, with trees for shade; and unspoiled Katsouni is the largest beach, with plenty of sand and a cave to explore.

There's so much to see, do, and try, you really wont want to leave!

Make your dream Greek getaway a reality. Discover more at www.visitgreece.gr/inspirations/all-you-want-is-greece
It's not just the Royal Family who are horrified that Prince Harry is writing a tell-all memoir. I can reveal that many of his old friends fear his scribbling could cause them huge embarrassment.

Some are even warning that  after decades of loyal discretion  they are ready to dish the Royal dirt if the Princes book exposes their secrets.

For Harrys chums from Eton, and the Forces pals that he left behind to live in California with Meghan, any unwanted revelations could be the final insult after years of them refusing to gossip about him.

Former members of Prince Harry's inner circle are worried about the revelations contained in his new 'tell-all' book

A friend told me: It feels very hypocritical given Harry chucked people out of his friendship group for talking to the press.

There is a fear that hes going to reveal details of his hedonistic youth which some worry will play havoc with their careers and personal lives.

Another pal says ominously: Harrys mates have remained loyal to him so far.

As Harry, 36, has said that he will recount experiences, adventures, losses, and life lessons, friends fear that it might paint them in a bad light.

A source said: If Harry slams any of his old school and military buddies in his new book they have pledged to break ranks to tell their story.

The bad feeling began when some of Harrys then inner circle were left off the list for the couples wedding reception to make room for new pals such as Oprah Winfrey and George Clooney

The bad feeling began when some of Harrys then inner circle were left off the list for the couples wedding reception to make room for new pals such as Oprah Winfrey and George Clooney.

Even Harrys wingman Tom Skippy Inskip  famously by Harrys side in 2012 when he stripped naked in a Las Vegas hotel room  was shunned by the prince when it came to the wedding reception at Frogmore House.

And, a source says, Harrys pals are nervous that friendly emails have gone unanswered, which hasnt instilled much confidence.
She announced Friday on The Talk that she was finally trying her hand at dating again just over a year after her husband Nick Cordero died from complications of Covid-19.

But Amanda Kloots' optimistic news was greeted by some critical comments from social media users blasting her for moving on 'too quickly.'

The 39-year-old fitness instructorturnedtelevision host wasn't having it and took to her Instagram Stories to call out a rude commenter.

Not taking it: Amanda Kloots, 39, struck back at a social media troll who criticized her for dating too soon after her husband Nick Cordero died last year from complications of Covid-19

Amanda originally posted a sizzling snap of herself in a cream-colored tube top with matching high-waisted shirts and a jacket that she left open to showcase her stunning fit figure.

'Who else remembers watching movies as a kid wanting to BE that girl in the movie?! The Kloots girls watched the movie Can't Buy Me Love probably a thousand times wanting to be Cindi Mancini and wishing we could wear her famous white outfit that causes the whole drama with a very young Patrick Dempsey!' she wrote.

'Anyone with us?! Well, yesterday I got to live out my Cindi Mancini dreams thanks to @shopthebrightside and @rocky_barnes and I couldnt have loved it more!!!'

Later on Friday, she posted a screenshot of an offending comment to her Insta Stories.

Dropping bombs: After posting a sizzling photo inspired by the '80s rom-com Can't Buy Me Love, a troll commented, 'Datin already Wow that was fast'

None of their business: Amanda posted a screenshot and wrote, 'How dare you judge anyone especially someone going through this process.' She also promised to address it to her fans later

'Dating already Wow that was fast,' the user wrote.

Amanda sounded furious in her comment, even as she acknowledged it was a subject worth discussion down the line.

'How dare you judge anyone especially someone going through this process,' she captioned the screenshot.

'I will address this soon guys I promise. There's too much to say and too much that widows deal with to not talk about it. Until then I will call out anyone who is rude enough to comment like this.'

Puzzlingly, Amanda's post didn't even mention that she had started dating again, as she saved that for a brief announcement earlier in the day on The Talk.

Moving on: Amanda revealed Friday on The Talk that she was dating for the first time following her husband Nick Cordero's death from Covid-19 on July 5, 2020

On The Talk, Amanda revealed that she was a total neophyte when it came to dating because she met both of her husbands at work on musical theater productions.

'Both of my husbands, I met doing Broadway shows. We became friends first, then we got married,' she explained.

'Obviously with Nick, we had a child,' she continued, adding, 'Ive never actually had to date.'

She found the experience of meeting new people intimidating now that she's in her late 30s.

It's all new: Amanda revealed she never really dated and had met her first two husbands while working on Broadway. 'We became friends first, then we got married,' she explained

Intimidating: 'I just started dating again and it is so crazy to be dating for the first time at 39 years old,' she admitted. 'And its quite terrifying and really out of your element, and its just hard. It is hard'

'I just started dating again and it is so crazy to be dating for the first time at 39 years old,' Amanda admitted. 'And its quite terrifying and really out of your element, and its just hard. It is hard.'

But even if she was scared about making herself available again, she seemed upbeat about her experiences when her co-host Elaine Welteroth asked how things were going so far.

'Its all wonderful,' she said. 'Its wonderful people Im meeting, and its been a great process so far. But Ill just say its very hard without getting into too many details.'

Earlier this month, the new TV host remembered her late husband Nick Cordero on the one-year anniversary of his death.

'Today hurts, there is no other way around it. One year ago you left us and became our angel in heaven,' she wrote to her 669K Instagram followers while posting a montage of loving scenes between the former couple.

Mixed emotions: 'Its wonderful people Im meeting, and its been a great process so far,' she continued. 'But Ill just say its very hard without getting into too many details'

Looking back: On July 5, she marked one year without her husband Nick Cordero in a heartbreaking Instagram post. 'What happened was unthinkable, losing you was my biggest fear'

She wrote that the Broadway star was 'surrounded by so much love' in his finals days.

'What happened was unthinkable, losing you was my biggest fear,' she continued. 'I used to tell you all the time, Dont you dare go anywhere. If I lost you, I dont know what Id do."'

Although their marriage was short-lived, she said their romance would have an enduring impact on her life.

'We only had a few short years together but they were filled with so much love, laughter, adventure, dreams, change and growth. It was my Nick era and Ill have it forever.'

Nick died on July 5 of last year, after spending 95 days in the hospital, first battling the effects of Covid-19, then the last damage it caused to his body even after it overcame the virus.

During the ordeal, his right leg had to be amputated, and he suffered mini-strokes and developed scars in his lungs before succumbing.

Long fight: Nick spent 95 days in the hospital battling Covid-19, but even after he overcame the virus his body was too ravaged by its effects to go on. He and Amanda shared a two-year-old son Elvis

Later this month, Amanda showed how much their son Elvis had grown as she celebrated his first day of preschool.

The little boy showed off an adorable smile while wearing a cute T-shirt and matching shorts covered in smiley faces as he put on his backpack for school.

'I was doing fine but all of a sudden got super emotional. Another part of grief you have to face that you don't realize until the moment,' his mother wrote on a photo of the backpack she packed for him.

'Nick should be here. We should be doing this together. Chin up. Brave face,' she added.
She's had more than two months to decompress after playing the lead role in the upcoming film, Infinite Storm.

But Naomi Watts looked ready for business on Saturday afternoon as she was spotted running errands in in Manhattan.

Just one day prior, the two-time Oscar-nominated actress enjoyed a lovely dinner party on the beach in The Hamptons for the Australian luxury fashion brand Zimmerman.

On the go: Naomi Watts looked ready for business on Saturday afternoon as she was spotted running errands in in Manhattan

Watts, 52, kept it casual but still stylish in black pants and a white-patterned shirt as she made the rounds taking care of some personal business.

She strolled down the sidewalk in a pair of black flip flop sandals.

For an added touch, theBritish-born actress wore a fedora hat over her shoulder-length blonde tresses.

Naomi also donned a pair of stylish sunglasses with the sun glaring down and the temperatures hovering over 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

Style: Watts, 52, kept it casual but still stylish in black pants and a white-patterned shirt as she made the rounds taking care of some personal business

Watts got to catch up with some friends and colleagues on Friday during that star-studded Zimmerman dinner party on the beach held at consultant Malcolm Carfrae's oceanfront Amagansett home.

A long table was set up just feet from the incoming ocean waves, with plenty of tiki torches to help light up the festivities as the sun gave way to the evening light.

Watts shared several snaps from the Zimmermann event on her Instagram page, which included snuggling up to fellow guests like Emma Roberts, Nicky Hilton, Rachel Zoe and Laura Brown.

Summer lovin': On Friday, Watts got to catch up with some friends and colleagues, including InStyle editor-in-chief Laura Brown, at the star-studded dinner party on the beach in The Hamptons held at consultant Malcolm Carfrae's oceanfront Amagansett home

Summer fun: Brown and Watts were among a number of high-profile people at attend the party hosted by the Australian luxury fashion brand Zimmerman on Friday.

Earlier on Saturday, Watts, who shares two children with ex-partner Liev Schreiber, took to back to Instagram to show off her comedic side.

'When your child tells you not not smile too hard and then you end up looking constipated,' she wrote in the the caption of a photo showing her making a guarded smile next to two gal pals.

Watts has no less than three films that are in some phase of post-production, which includes Lakewood, This Is The Night and Infinite Storm, co-starring Sophie Okonedo, Billy Howle, Denis O'Hare and Parker Sawyers.

Ladies night: Watts also snuggled up for a selfie with Brown and Emma Roberts

Tasty: The King Kong actress gave her 1.5 million Instagram fans and followers a look at the gorgeous menu for the dinner party on the beach

Festive: Guests sat on pillows and sat along along table set up just feet from the incoming ocean waves in The Hamptons

Watts rose to international prominence for playing an aspiring actress in David Lynch's psychological thriller Mulholland Drive (2001).

She quickly followed up her breakthrough performance by playing a tormented journalist in the horror remake of The Ring (2002).

The following year she put on a a riveting performance as a grief-stricken mother in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's, 21 Grams (2003), that earned her a Best Actress Oscar nomination.
He began his career as a builder, before finding fame on Network 10's lifestyle program The Living Room.

Now, Barry Du Bois, 60, is starting a new career chapter by running for an independent NSW seat in the Senate in the next federal election.

Announcing the news via Instagram on Sunday, the father-of-two uploaded an animated promo video for his campaign alongside a heartfelt caption about his political aspirations.

From The Living Room to the Senate! Barry Du Bois, 60, (centre) has announced he's running for federal parliament. Pictured with his children Arabella and Bennett

'Team Baz. I'm super proud to announce one of the most important challenges I've ever taken on,' he began.

'This new chapter of my life means so much to me. You guys have supported me through the best and the worst of the last decade of my life, I hope to have you on board,' he continued.

Barry, who is living with an incurable form of cancer, told The Sunday Telegraph that he's been 'dabbling with the thought of politics for a while'.

'I'm super proud to announce one of the most important challenges I've ever taken on': Announcing the news via Instagram on Sunday, the father-of-two uploaded a promotional video for his campaign alongside a heartfelt caption about his political aspirations

'It is an impossible task but I have taken on other impossible tasks, especially with health, and won. I have a short amount of time to do a lot,' he said.

Barry explained that he'd previously knocked back offers from both the Labor and Liberal Party to run as an independent for 'for safe seats'.

'I am not interested in that because three years ago they gave me five years to live. That is not my sentence, I will be here as long as it takes to do what I have to do.'

'It is an impossible task but I have taken on other impossible tasks': Barry, who is living with an incurable form of cancer, told The Sunday Telegraph that he's been 'dabbling with the thought of politics for a while'

Barry said he has a 10-year plan for his political career, and hopes to keep the government honest during his time in power.

In a press release, the TV star explained that he wants to fight for everyday Australians, not just the rich and powerful.

'For too long, politicians have used complicated language to hide the fact not everyone's been getting a fair go,' he said.

Goals: Barry said he has a 10-year plan for his political career, and hopes to keep the government honest during his time in power

'We've all being let down by a system where deals are done behind closed doors and where big corporations and the lobbyists have all the power,' Barry continued.

My promise is to be the voice for the everyday citizen. I will look at every bit of legislation through their eyes, to evaluate how it will personally affect them, their family and the Australia that's going to be left behind for their kids.'

Barry was diagnosed with cancer of the bone marrow (plasmacytoma myeloma) in 2011, after battling chronic neck pain.

New chapter: Barry began his career as a builder, before finding fame on Network 10's lifestyle program The Living Room. Pictured with the cast of The Living Room - Amanda Keller, Dr Chris Brown, Miguel Maestre

He underwent surgery and radiotherapy, which proved to be successful. However, the cancer returned as a multiple myeloma in 2017, requiring him to undergo chemotherapy.

His cancer is not curable.

'None of us know how long we've got left here. That's why I'm going to use whatever time I have left to make a big difference. It's for my kids. It's for your kids. And it's for Australia,' Barry said.
Marc Jacobs showed off the incredible results of his facelift, just 'three days after' undergoing surgery to say get rid of his 'turkey neck and jowls.'

While acknowledging he still has 'some' bruising and swelling in his latest post's hashtags, the 58-year-old star wrote that he was feeling rejuvenated and restored.

'Three days after. Ready for lewks. Thank you @drjacono,' he captioned the shot, which showed him in his living room while rocking a trench coat.

Looking good: Marc Jacobs showed off the incredible results of his facelift, just three days after undergoing surgery to say goodbye to his 'turkey neck and jowls'

Earlier this week, the fashion designer first debuted his new look after his recent procedure from celebrity plastic surgeon Dr. Andrew Jacono.

In an earlier Instagram snap from inside a hyperbaric oxygen trailer meant to help him speed up healing, Jacobs put his strong jaw, lifted browline and higher cheekbones on full display for his 1.6 million followers to check out.

'Getting my oxygen on,' Jacobs captioned the shot, where he gave a shout out to company Hyperbaric Medical Solutions in the caption on Friday.

New face, who dis? Earlier this week, the fashion designer, 58, first debuted his new look after his recent procedure from celebrity plastic surgeon Dr. Andrew Jacono

Marc also included some commentary in his tags as well, writing: '#doctorsorders #feeltheheal #yesIamokay #he'sgotthatBenjaminButtons #roadtorecovery.'

The scene looked like something from science fiction as Jacobs laid down inside a glass tube, clad in patient scrubs and holding a bottle of water.

According to Hyperbaric Medical Solutions' website Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy 'is an all-natural, non-invasive treatment where a patient simply breathes 100% medical-grade oxygen at an increased atmospheric pressure.'

'HBOT can increase the oxygen concentration in the body by up to 1,200% this gives it the potential to lead to extraordinary health benefits.'

Candid: The designer is pictured in late June above

Approved: Famous friends like Naomi Campbell and Lisa Rinna flocked to the comment section to compliment Marc's makeover

The high-tech looking healing strategy is more accessible than it appears. Oxygen therapy can be covered by insurance, and without coverages costs can range between $250 to $450 a session.

Famous friends flocked to the comment section to compliment Marc's makeover.

Supermodel Naomi Campbell posted a wide-eyed emoji saying: 'Happy safe Healing can't wait to see the unveiling.'

Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills star Lisa Rinna called her pal: 'Fresh as a f***ing daisy.'

Keeping it real: Marc first revealed on Instagram that he got a facelift, sharing a photo of himself covered in bandages at the doctor's office on Tuesday

Photographer/longtime personal assistant Nicolas Newbold called his friend 'Benjamin Button' while drag queen Miss Fame said 'I love' with fire emojis.

Makeup artist Fulvia Farolfi offered hearts and applause through emojis.

Jacobs first revealed that he underwent a facelift while proudly sharing a photo of bandages wrapped around his head post-surgery on Wednesday.

The designer posted a selfie that he snapped at his doctor's office which he captioned: 'Yesterday,' along with the hashtags: '#f*ckgravity,' '#livelovelift,' and '#DrJacono'  a reference to celebrity plastic surgeon Dr. Andrew Jacono.

Big money: Dr. Jacono (pictured) charges $50,000 for his 'deep plane facelifts,' which he claims last longer than traditional facelifts. It's unclear how much Jacobs' facelift cost

The image shows layers of white gauze wrapped around his head and drainage bags filled with blood and fluid on each side of his ears. He is wearing a face mask, leaving only his brows and eyes visible to the camera.

Jacobs confirmed he had a deep plane facelift.

The New York-based surgeon previously worked his magic on Botched doctor Paul Nassif and Real Housewives of New York City star Sonja Morgan, who both had him perform their facelifts.

Nassif's 'deep plane facelift' cost a whopping $50,000, while Morgan's face and neck lift totaled $75,000.

It's unclear how much Jacobs paid for his surgery, but he likely spent around $50,000 as Dr. Jacono favors the deep plane method.

Before: Jacobs shared this selfie just a few days before he shared that he went under the knife

Jacobs, who is known for his youthful appearance and ripped physique, is no stranger to physical transformation. Just two years shy of his 60th birthday, he looks completely different than he did as a young designer.

Back in the 1990s, the New York native began his fashion career by designing for sportswear label Perry Ellis. While he did not show off his body in those days, even under clothes he appeared visibly less muscular than he is now, and his tattoos were not yet apparent.

In 1992, Jacobs showed his 'grunge' collection for the label. To reflect the times, as well as his collection, he sported long shaggy hair, a broody stare, and baggy clothes  a far cry from his trim, polished look now.

'I never took care of my appearance. I was like, 'Who cares? I'm in the studio 16 hours a day, and nobody sees me,'' he recalled in a 2010 interview with Harper's Bazaar.

Youthful: Jacobs already looked just as young as his 40-year-old husband, Charly 'Char' Defrancesco. The couple is pictured in 2019

He went from 21 percent to 5 percent body fat by following the advice of a nutritionist, who told him to cut out caffeine, sugar, white flour, and dairy and to exercise every day.

The designer, who had rarely set foot in a gym, scrubbed up, began sporting a buzz cut and grew out his stubble, marking the beginning of his transformation into how he looks today.

Jacobs has been talking about getting plastic surgery for years, telling GQ in 2008 that he was open to it.

'I look at Tom [Ford] and he looks great. Whatever hes doing works for him,' he said. 'And I dont know if he does anything, but Im not opposed. Whatever makes me feel good, I want more of.'

He added that he had already gone under the knife to thicken the bridge of his nose after running into a glass door.
Collette Dinnigan has hit back at claims her luxury rental business is struggling amid the Covid pandemic, after her personal homeware items were listed on an auction site.

According to The Daily Telegraph, a number of the former fashion designer's homewares, luxury furniture and antiques surfaced on auction site Lawsons last week.

News of the upcoming auction left some fans wondering whether it was a sign of hard times.

Fake news: Collette Dinnigan has hit back at claims her luxury rental business is struggling amid the Covid pandemic, after her personal homeware items were listed on an auction site. Pictured with her husband Bradley Cocks

However, Collette's representative say the sale has nothing to do with her business ventures, and that the items weren't even listed by Collette.

'On Friday sources for Dinnigan denied the businesswoman and her husband... are downsizing due to any downturn in patronage due to the pandemic,' the publication reports.

Instead, the items up for auction were listed by an antiques dealer and Dinnigan 'admirer' Melissa Penfold, and has nothing to do with Collette's business.

Fears: According to The Daily Telegraph , a number of the former fashion designer's homewares, luxury furniture and antiques surfaced on auction site Lawsons last week

Among the items to be auctioned off include a 19th century lantern, an antique writing table, vintage tumblers and a decorative staircase bannister.

The auction will also include lacquered chairs.

Collette and her husband Bradley Cocks run a number of luxurious rental properties on the North and South coast, as well as Bowral in the Southern Highlands.

Nothing to do with her! However, Collette's representative say the sale has nothing to do with her business ventures, and that the items weren't even listed by Collette

The renowned designer shocked the fashion world in 2013 when she pulled her Sydney, Melbourne and London stores.

The South African born designer later revealed she made the decision to leave when her work began to take a toll on her personal life.

The star wanted to spend more time with her husband Bradley and her two children, Hunter, six, and Estella, 15.

She previously spoke to Daily Mail Australia about the major life change, and how it has altered her home life for the better.

'You can't do nine to five in fashion,' she revealed. 'It's all encompassing. But I can control it now. I'm able to spend school holidays with my family rather than having to be in Paris for shows.'
Their first collaboration, a remix of Without You, became a top 10 hit around the world.

And Miley Cyrus said she 'would love to' work with Australian rapper The Kid Laroi, 17, again.

'I loved connecting with Laroi on ideas to see his creative process as well,' the 28-year-old hitmaker said in an interview with the Daily Telegraph on Sunday.

Big fan: Miley Cyrus, 28, (right) has revealed she'd love to work with Australian rapper The Kid Laroi, 17, (left) again following the success of the duo's Without You remix

'Itd be great to work more with Kid Laroi for sure'.

'Theres tons of amazing talented Australian artists Id love to work with,' added the ex-wife of Liam Hemsworth.

After working with Miley, Laroi (real name Charlton Kenneth Jeffrey Howard), has gone on to collaborate with Justin Bieber.

Team: 'I loved connecting with Laroi on ideas to see his creative process as well,' said the 28-year-old Wrecking Ball hitmaker. Pictured with Laroi

The love boat! The Kid Laroi went sailing on a yacht with his stunning girlfriend Katarina Deme over the weekend just days after landing his first No. 1 single in Australia with his Justin Bieber collaboration 'Stay'

Laroi celebrated the high profile release by going sailing with his girlfriend Katarina Deme last weekend.

Katarina shared a number of photos of the pair on the boat, basking in the sunshine together.

The rapper looked every inch the rising star in a black shirt along with a dark pair of sunglasses and a trendy tie-dye hat.

Superstar: The rapper looked every inch the rising star in a black shirt along with a dark pair of sunglasses and a trendy tie-dye hat

Meanwhile, his stunning girlfriend wore a plunging pink top and mini skirt.

The Tik-Tok star finished her ensemble with a pair of sunglasses and a tie-dye hat.

It comes after the rapper finally landed his first No. 1 single on Australia's ARIA charts.

His new collaboration with Justin Bieber, titled Stay, topped the chart.

Pretty in pink! Meanwhile, his stunning girlfriend wore a plunging pink top and mini skirt

The 80s synth-pop song was produced by Perth-based hitmakers Michael 'Finatik' Mule and Isaac 'Zac' De Boni.

Immediately after its release, Stay topped multiple Spotify charts around the world and is currently climbing up the Australian iTunes charts.

In the music video, the teen pop star and Bieber dance in an empty station. It's cut in with scenes of a melodramatic Laroi racing through Los Angeles.

Stylish: The Tik-Tok star finished her ensemble with a pair of sunglasses and a tie-dye hat

The rapper previously said he wanted to showcase his home country's rap scene to the world.

'I don't think America is completely switched on to how big [and] great the Australian music scene and culture is, but I think that's kind of my job to shed light,' he told Triple J last month.

The Waterloo-born star said he's long dreamed of putting Sydney's rap scene on the map 'the way Drake did with Toronto'.

Born in Canada, rapper Drake often gushes about his home city of Toronto in his music, and even boasts a number of Toronto-themed tattoos.
Courteney Cox is celebrating her longtime boyfriend Johnny McDaid's 45th birthday by paying tribute him on Instagram.

The Friends actress shared a shot of herself and McDaid snuggled up on set of the iconic sitcom, specifically the setting used for her character Monica's apartment.

'Happy Birthday to my best friend and love,' Cox, 57, began in the caption. 'He's the kindest, most patient, best listener, curious, caring, not to mention talented and gorgeous partner. I love you jmd. x.'

Happy birthday: Courteney Cox, 57, paid tribute to her longtime boyfriend Johnny McDaid on his 45th birthday by sharing a photo taken of the couple on the couch from the Friends set

This year's birthday proved to be a special one for the couple, being that is the first they've been able to celebrate in-person since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic last March.

Courteney and Johnny have been together for nearly eight years.

In Saturday's birthday snap, McDaid had his arms wrapped around the Scream actress, who was dressed in an all black ensemble with her legs curled up on the couch.

Cox also shared a second snap, which gave her 11.6million followers another look at her and her beau's obvious chemistry.

Closer look: Cox also shared a second snap, which gave her 11.6million followers another look at her and her beau's obvious chemistry

Cox and McDaid were separated last year when the Snow Patrol star turned 44 while quarantining in Europe.

'Its been 133 days since we were last together. Covid sucks. Happy Birthday J. I loved our lunch/dinner (LA/London time) zoom date today. I miss you madly,' Cox wrote one year ago to the day.

McDaid ended up being stuck in Europe for nine months in isolation, which turned out to be the longest time they were ever separated.

'He was supposed to go to Switzerland to write and instead had to go to England. Then all of a sudden, this all happened and they called a quarantine,' the iconic sitcom star explained during an appearance on the Ellen DeGeneres Show in 2020.

Pandemic fallout! Cox celebrated McDaid's 44th birthday last year with a Zoom call, due to the COVID-19 pandemic

Last September, while sill quarantining separately, the pair celebrated their seventh anniversary, with Cox paying tribute to their milestone day with a heartfelt Instagram post.

'7 years ago today I had my first date with this incredible man... and my life was changed forever. I love you J,' she gushed in the caption of a video montage of photos taken throughout their relationship.

The couple first met through some celebrity friends and began dating in September 2013. They got engaged six months later but called the wedding off in 2015, but remained close.

By April 2016, they reunited in London and have been a solid item ever since.

While McDaid, a Northern Ireland native, joined his series Snow Patrol in 2011, he has also written and worked with such artists as Ed Sheehan, Robbie Williams and Pink, among many others.
Scott Disick, 38, cuddled up with girlfriend Amelia Hamlin, 20, on a boat on a getaway this week.

The duo, who have been vacationing in The Hamptons this past week, were pictured in a series of Insta Stories showing them gliding across the waves together Saturday.

For their boating trip they were accompanied by Scott's nine-year-old daughter Penelope whom he shares with ex Kourtney Kardashian.

On the move: The duo were pictured in a series of Insta Stories updates showing them gliding across the waves together Saturday

Scott and his girlfriend, who is the daughter of Lisa Rinna and Harry Hamlin, were wrapped up in an Hermes blanket to ward off the chilly sea air.

Their excursion came after Amelia posted a string of modeling shots to her Instagram page in which she was decked out in lingerie.

Amelia, who was 19 when she started dating Scott, was pictured pulling a pair of jeans partly over some lacy underwear from Boux Avenue.

Lisa could be seen on a recent episode of The Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills finding out about the romance and confessing she was 'a lot nervous about it.'

Scott Disick, 38, affectionately kissed his daughter on the boat

Baby mine: For their boating trip they were accompanied by Scott's nine-year-old daughter Penelope whom he shares with Kourtney Kardashian

However the episode was taped months ago and in recent interviews the soap star has taken a more diplomatic line on her daughter's love life.

'Here's what I have to say - as a mother you want your children happy, period,' she told Access in May. 'If my children are happy then I'm happy. The end.'

However her Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills co-star Sutton Stracke was sharper-tongued about the subject this week.

While appearing on Watch What Happens Live she told host Andy Cohen that she felt Scott and Amelia had a 'zero percent' chance of lasting.

Swanking about: Scott and his girlfriend, who is the daughter of Lisa Rinna and Harry Hamlin, were wrapped up in an Hermes blanket to ward off the chilly sea air

Amelia argued on social media last December that it was 'extra weird and judgmental' for people to object to a middle-aged father of three dating a teenager.

'People can embrace themselves however they feel fit for them at that moment in time. People grow. People learn to love themselves more and more,' she said.

Last year Scott broke up with Sofia Richie, whom he began dating when she was 19, and before that he was linked to Bella Thorne when she was also 19.

On last month's series finale of Keeping Up With The Kardashians he said he was 'coming to terms' with the idea that he and Kourtney may never get back together.

Working hard: Their excursion came after Amelia posted a string of modeling shots to her Instagram page in which she was decked out in lingerie

Details: Amelia, who was 19 when she started dating Scott, was pictured pulling a pair of jeans partly over some lacy underwear from Boux Avenue

'People can embrace themselves': Amelia argued on social media last December that it was 'extra weird and judgmental' for people to object to her relationship with Scott

'The fact that we have what we have is amazing, and I am grateful for that,' he said, pointing out: 'Our kids are happy.'

Kourtney and Scott began their whirlwind on-off romance after they met in 2006 at the Mexican home of Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis.

Their turbulent relationship was documented on the show and was beset by problems including his past alcohol abuse and rumors he was unfaithful.

The two welcomed three children into the world - Mason, 11, Penelope, nine, and Reign, six - but ended their romance for the last time in 2015.

By the way: Lisa could be seen on a recent episode of The Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills finding out about the romance and confessing she was 'a lot nervous about it'

However Lisa's Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills co-star Sutton Stracke has said she thinks Amelia and Scott have a 'zero percent' chance of lasting
This past July 8 marked one year since Glee star Naya Rivera tragically drowned at the age of 33 while out on a small boat with her then four-year-old son Josey at Lake Piru in Venturna Country in Southern California.

Now, 16-days later, Rivera's ex-husband and father to their son, Ryan Dorsey, is remembering her life, legacy and death all over again, on the one-year anniversary of her memorial and funeral.

'TodayA year ago we laid you to rest. I still can't believe it. The year has flown by, so fast that it doesnt seem like its been a year at all,' the actor, 37, began in the caption of an Instagram post showing Josey as a baby and more recently as a nearly six-year-old boy.

Heartfelt: Actor Ryan Dorsey, 37, pays tribute to ex-wife Naya Rivera on the one-year anniversary that she was laid to rest following her tragic drowning in July 2020

Dorsey proceeded to take time out to give an update on how Josey has changed in the year since his mother tragically died.

'Our boy has grown so much. He's such an explorer, so inquisitive. He's sweet, so funny, and his laugh always lights up the room.

'He's an intuitive soul to say the least. To know him is to love him, everyone that meets him is always smiling. He's doing ok. Hes such a resilient strong kid,' the Justified star gushed.

The heartstrings get pulled even tighter when Dorsey reveals that Josey misses his mom 'but knows he'll see you again, and the invisible string is something that's helped us out during this ever-evolving transition of your time with us on earth that was unfairly & for reasons we'll never understand cut shorttoo soon'

Glowing words of adoration: Dorsey gave an update on his soon-to-be six-year-old son Josey, whom he shared with Rivera

The actor went to to reveal that July will always be 'a strange and difficult month' moving forward, but that he hopes those future years will still be plentiful.

He also noted that it's been hard looking at any photos or any type of coverage about his ex-wife, but he expects that will change over time.

'As the years go by strength will be on my side as I will share the memories with what is the brightest star of your legacy left on this earth, our beautiful son, Josey.' he wrote.

Dorsey also referenced the Instagram collage photo of the late star and their son, which included a snapshot of Josey giving a thumbs up and flashing a wide smile.

'The thumbs uponly seemed right. I remember the first time he did it back to you. At jujitsu, you gave him a thumbs up and he returned the gestureit was so sweet.'

Heartbreaking: Dorsey directed his initial words of the post to Rivera, writing, 'Our boy has grown so much. He's such an explorer, so inquisitive. He's sweet, so funny, and his laugh always lights up the room'; mom and son are pictured just over three months before her death

Rest assured: 'Fly high, Rest In Peace, knowing he's doing okhe's being raised right, and he's got a lot of family and people around him that love him, and you,' the proud father wrote to his late ex-wife; mom and son are pictured in a loving embrace in September 2019

'Maybe it's silly and doesn't make sense to be doing this on IG and putting this out there, but so is this whole thing. So there's that,' Dorsey explained.

The West Virginia native then directed his thoughts and words back to Rivera.

'Fly high, Rest In Peace, knowing he's doing okhe's being raised right, and he's got a lot of family and people around him that love him, and you.'

He ended by trying to connect with anyone who has ever lost someone close to them in their lives, and how there's 'not really any words that make it betterwe know some days are better than othersbut know our hearts and energy are with you. We keep going, because that's all we can do while being as strong as we can be.'

Single dad: Dorsey was granted sole custody of their boy after his mother's death

Rivera, who played Santana Lopez for all six seasons of Glee, tragically drowned on July 8 while swimming with her son Josey at Lake Piru, which is near Santa Clarita, California.

It's believed that she had jumped into the water to help Josey back onto their small rental boat but couldn't make it back herself.

Her little boy was found alone in the boat that evening with no sign of his mother.

Rivera's body was subsequently discovered at the lake on July 13, after a five-day search, and authorities with the Ventura County Medical Examiner's Office eventually deemed the cause of death as an accidental drowning.

Tragic: Rivera drowned on July 8 while swimming with her son Josey at Lake Piru, which is near Santa Clarita, California; her body was found five days later at the lake

Dorsey met Rivera back in 2010, and they briefly dated.

The actress would reveal in a 2016 memoir that she had an abortion in 2010, shortly after splitting from Dorsey, due to her skyrocketing career in the wake of her successful role on Glee.

Rivera and Dorsey got together again and were married in July 2014.

By 2016 she had filed for divorce, only to call off the separation about a year later.

They would finally end up divorcing in June 2018, and agree to share joint custody of Josey.

Dorsey was granted sole custody of their boy after his mother's death.
They both shot to fame on different series of Love Island and have forged a close friendship.

And Kady McDermott and Joanna Chimonides looked incredible as they stepped out for dinner in Mayfair, London on Saturday.

Kady, 25, flaunted her toned legs in a chic white mini dress paired with an emerald green jacket as she stepped out.

Chic: Kady McDermott and Joanna Chimonides looked incredible as they stepped out for dinner in Mayfair, London on Saturday

She boosted her height with white wraparound sandals and accessorised with a black Balenciaga bag.

Her raven tresses were styled sleek and straight and she sported a glamorous palette of make-up.

Joanna, 24, wore a plunging black dress teamed with stilettos and a cream jacket as she laughed with Kady.

Wow: Kady, 25, flaunted her toned legs in a chic white mini dress paired with an emerald green jacket as she stepped out

It comes after Kady sparked romance rumours with Aston Villa's Matty Cash while enjoying a date on day three of Wimbledon on Wednesday.

The couple - who follow each other on Instagram - looked smitten as they strolled around the concourse together before heading to watch a match.

Kady secretly split from TOWIE co-star Myles Barnett last month and has liked all of Matty's Instagram posts since May 26.

The outing comes a month after Kady confirmed she'd secretly split from on/off boyfriend Myles.

During an Instagram Q&A session on May 6, Kady was asked if she was single, with the reality star answering: 'yes' alongside a make-up free snap of herself.

The couple first started dating in 2018 but split several times before spending thousands renovating a house they bought together in 2019.

Last June, Kady left fans confused after she announced she was still with boyfriend Myles and that they would live in their new home 'as a couple', weeks after confirming yet another 'break-up'.

Glow: Joanna looked sensational in her leggy dinner attire in London

The brunette had previously taken to social media to confirm she would be living in her renovated bungalow with former TOWIE star Myles when it is finished.

The duo bought the Hertfordshire property together in April 2019 with plans to completely transform it into a two-storey house.

Kady blamed their 2020 split on the pressure of the build which caused them to argue, as she joked that their renovation has been more stressful than having a baby.
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Kourtney Kardashian and her rocker boyfriend Travis Barker couldn't keep their hands off each other as they spent a relaxing afternoon together in Santa Barbara after checking into the five-star Rosewood Miramar Hotel on Friday.

As things got rather steamy between the pair while sharing a lounge chair at the beach, the 42-year-old reality star could be seen straddling her man as they shared several passionate kisses.

While the couple kissed, the 45-year-old Blink-182 drummer cradled her bottom and wrapped his arms around her waist.

Happy couple: Kourtney Kardashian and her rocker boyfriend Travis Barker couldn't keep their hands off each other as they spent a relaxing afternoon together in Santa Barbara after checking into the five-star Rosewood Miramar Hotel on Friday

Getting frisky: As things got rather steamy between the pair while sharing a lounge chair at the beach, the 42-year-old reality star could be seen straddling her man as they shared several passionate makeout sessions

According to an eyewitness, the duo 'were all over each other, walking around the property holding hands and then on the beach' she was 'literally' on 'top of him for everyone to see and definitely not shy about it.'

Kardashian looked visibly content with her man as they sunbathed and flirted amid marriage rumors after a whirlwind weekend in Las Vegas earlier this month.

The Poosh founder's go-to hairstylist Glen Coco (AKA Oropeza) sparked gossip when he shared several snapshots of the couple's romantic trip to Sin City.

Obsessed: According to an eyewitness, the duo 'were all over other, walking around the property holding hands and then on the beach' she was 'literally' on 'top of him for everyone to see and definitely not shy about it'

Passionate pair: While the couple kissed, the 45-year-old Blink-182 drummer cradled her bottom and wrapped his arms around her waist as they cozied up to each other during their romantic getaway

'NOWWW I understand why ppl tie the knot in Vegas. There's nothing like love and a good time,' Coco wrote in his caption, prompting fans to think Kravis got hitched.

In the snaps Travis covered Kardashian's right hand in each photo, hiding any peek at a possible engagement ring.

Adding to the intrigue, Kourtney shared similar shots to her account over the weekend and wrote: 'What happens in Vegas...'

Heating up: Kardashian looked visibly content with her man as they sunbathed and flirted

Rumors: Kardashian and Barker's romantic getaway comes amid marriage rumors inspired by a recent whirlwind weekend the two experienced in Las Vegas earlier this month

And Barker's daughter Alabama furthered the rumors when she posted a pic of the pair to her Instagram Story and wrote: 'so happy for you guys.'

Kardashian's camp declined to comment when contacted by DailyMail.com.

While it wasn't clear if any vows had been exchanges, Kourtney certainly looked happy in the vacation pics.

The couple previously sparked engagement rumors when Kourtney donned a pair of bridal Minnie Mouse ears during their trip to Disneyland with his kids earlier this month.

Hitched? Earlier this month, the Poosh founder's go-to hairstylist Glen Coco (AKA Oropeza) sparked gossip when he shared several snapshots of the couple's romantic trip to Sin City

'Now I understand why ppl tie the knot in Vegas. There's nothing like love and a good time,' Coco wrote in his caption, prompting fans to think Kravis had tied the knot

And a proposal might not be far off.

It has been reported that an engagement could be 'right around the corner,' according to Us Weekly insiders.

'The engagement would be very over the top since Travis loves impressing her.

'I wouldn't be surprised if it took place at their favorite place in the world, Disneyland, in front of the kids and family,' the insider dished on June 16.

Kourtney shares her three children Mason, 11, Penelope Disick, nine, and six-year-old Reign with ex Scott Disick, who is currently dating model Amelia Gray Hamlin.

All ears! The couple previously sparked engagement rumors when Kourtney donned a pair of bridal Minnie Mouse ears during their trip to Disneyland earlier this month

Kourtney and Travis had been friends for years before they became romantically involved with one another, going public with the relationship this January.

Early in the relationship he signaled how serious he was about her by having her name tattooed onto his chest.

He has also posted an Instagram album showing that she inked the phrase: 'I love you,' onto one of his arms.

Amicable exes: Kourtney shares her three children Mason, 11, Penelope Disick, nine, and six-year-old Reign with ex Scott Disick, who is currently dating model Amelia Gray Hamlin

His ex-wife Shanna Moakler told Kourtney: 'welcome to the club' through a TMZ interview, apparently implying her own name is inked on Travis as well.

He also posted an Instagram picture of Kourtney sitting lovingly by him as he got body art of a skull - which Shanna says was to cover up a tattoo of her name.

Shanna, 46, then posted an Instagram video of herself getting her own tattoo of Travis' name lasered off as her beau Matt Rondeau, 28, stood by.
Australian actor Jai Courtney will next star alongside Kate Beckinsale in their new film, Jolt.

And the 35-year-old actor gushed over the UK screen queen while chatting to the Herald Sun this week.

'Kate is obviously a lot of fun and an amazing talent and we are all super familiar with her in the action space  she's no stranger to that,' he said of his co-star.

Star: Jai Courtney has revealed what he REALLY thinks of his Jolt co-star Kate Beckinsale... and the one thing he misses most about Australia

'But it was great to see her bring her sharp wit and sense of humour to the role as well and I think she made a perfect Lindy.'

In Jolt, Jai plays the love interest of Kate's character Lindy, whose sporadic murderous impulses make it difficult for her to find love.

'It's all anchored in this kind of anxiety she's grappling around  her inability to control her impulses and how that's crippling her relationships in the past,' he said.

'It's all anchored in this kind of anxiety she's grappling around  her inability to control her impulses and how that's crippling her relationships in the past,' he said. Here: LA, 2020

The cast also stars Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci, Laverne Cox and was shot in London and Bulgaria.

Jai, who has been living in the US for the past eight years, went on to admit that he still tries to get home as much as possible.

'Australia is absolutely still home and I love getting back whenever I can  the beer is definitely better back in Australia,' he said.

Missing home: The actor said he still tries to get home as much as possible

Jai is currently in a relationship with Mecki Dent.

He will next be seen in the big budget superhero film, The Suicide Squad, alongside Margot Robbie and Idris Elba.

Jolt is available to watch on Amazon Prime Video from July 23
Instagram influencer Jade Tuncdoruk has come out swinging against the Australian government's Covid-19 vaccine rollout.

In a video shared to TikTok this week, the 25-year-old played the role of a young person under 30 seeking a vaccine, speaking to a government official.

'Everyone should get vaccinated, that's what's gonna help us, that is what is going to get us out of this mess,' the official says.

Not amused: Instagram influencer Jade Tuncdoruk (pictured) has come out swinging against the Australian government's Covid-19 vaccine rollout

'Okay I'll do it!' Jade replies, to which the official says, 'You cant actually do it right now'.

Jade replies: 'What do you mean? You just told us to get vaccinated?' to which the official says: 'We don't actually have enough and your age bracket isn't being vaccinated yet'.

'So why are you telling us to do it?' the model asks, with the reply being: 'We're just spreading the message that you should get vaccinated'.

No dice: In a video shared to TikTok this week, the 25-year-old played the role of a young person under 30 seeking a vaccine, speaking to a government official

Oh no: 'Everyone should get vaccinated, that's what's gonna help us, that is what is going to get us out of this mess,' the official says. 'Okay I'll do it!' Jade replies, to which the official says, 'You cant actually do it right now'

Nope! 'So why are you telling us to do it?' the model asks, with the reply being: 'We're just spreading the message that you should get vaccinated'

'Okay I'm listening, um, and I'm saying I'll do it,' she replied, confused.

'Yes, you just can't. Stay indoors!' is the reply, along with a smarmy facial expression, pointing out the confusing messaging.

Jade is a Sydney-based fashion and travel blogger who reportedly earns between $800 and $3,000 per sponsored post.

Sydneysiders over the age of 18 have been told to 'strongly consider' getting the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine by Australia's top immunisation advisory body.

Popular: Jade is a Sydney-based fashion and travel blogger who reportedly earns between $800 and $3,000 per sponsored post

The Pfizer vaccine is still recommended for younger people due to the risk of the extremely rare but potentially fatal blood clotting disorder linked to the AstraZeneca shot.

Anyone over the age of 18 can already access the British-developed vaccine as long as they provided 'informed consent'.

About 40,000 Australians under the age of 40 are estimated to have had the AstraZeneca jab since June 28 when it was announced those wanting to get the shot could ask their GPs.

Meanwhile, around 15 per cent of the total population has been fully vaccinated altogether.
Lucie Donlan was recently forced to contact the police after receiving daily death threats from trolls online she revealed on Sunday.

It's been two years since Lucie, 23, appeared on the ITV2 dating show but the star admitted online abuse is worse now than it was in 2019.

Speaking to The Sun, she said: ' Its made me really anxious. When I came off the show, I was so busy that I never really had time to look at my phone. But this year it felt much harder to escape the comments.'

Traumatic: Lucie Donlan was recently forced to contact the police after receiving daily death threats from trolls online she revealed on Sunday

Lucie revealed the daily death threats were from the same accounts each day and the comments made her feel nervous enough to contact the police.

Of the ordeal she said: 'Im lucky, Ive got great people around me. As well as my family and boyfriend, Maura [Higgins] is great to talk to because shes so strong.'

The star has been dating winter Love Island star Luke Mabbott, 25, for a year after sliding in his DMs when he left the show single.

Lucie revealed in the candid interview that she thinks Luke is husband material and everything she has been looking for in a man.

'Its made me really anxious': Its been two years since Lucie, 23, appeared on the ITV2 dating show but the star admitted online abuse is worse now than it was in 2019 (pictured in 2019)

It comes after Lucie previously told the MailOnline she fancied Luke as soon as she saw him on the winter season of Love Island.

She said: 'I fancied him when I first saw him walk into the villa. I saw him and was like 'wow, he's perfectly my type.

'I watched him the whole time he was on the show and I just thought he was perfect. He was such a lovely gentleman as well.

'Im lucky, Ive got great people around me': Lucie gushed that her family and boyfriend Luke Mabbott have been supporting her throughout the ordeal (pictured with Luke)

'When I saw he was single I messaged him. I saw he was single and I just thought 'I've got to shoot my shot'  you've got to go for what you want.

'The day we first met we just knew it was meant to be which is really crazy when you meet someone at first.

'He brings out the best in me because I haven't stopped smiling since we met.'

The bombshell's boyfriend recently revealed he wanted to 'marry' her as he responded to a post on her Stories.

Besotted: Lucie found love with 2020 Love Island contestant Luke after sliding in his DMs and went public with the romance last summer

The blonde had taken to her Instagram Stories to ask her followers about what their dreams were.

But among the responses was one from her partner, who simply wrote: 'To marry you', alongside an engagement ring and blue heart emoji.

The model has been loved up with Redcar native Luke ever since they went public with their romance last summer.

The Justin Bieber-lookalike was a finalist on season six of the ITV dating show in January 2020, while the sportswoman appeared on season five of the show in 2019.
Amazon Prime's hit Australian real estate series Luxe Listings has been renewed for a second season.

And in the Sunday Herald Sun, it's been reported that producers are 'looking to add' AFL stars and are 'canvassing some names' for season two.

According to the publication, Amazon Prime are yet to reveal any of the new cast.

Footy flavour: AFL stars 'are set to join' Amazon Prime's Luxe Listings, according to the Sunday Herald Sun, as the real estate series is renewed for a second season. Pictured are the AFL Sydney Swans in July. Daily Mail is not suggesting any of the above stars have been scouted

Daily Mail Australia has reached out to Amazon Prime's representatives for comment.

The stars and real estate agents of the hit series, Gavin Rubenstein, D'Leanne Lewis and Simon Cohen, announced season two is in the works, in a trailer shared to the show's Instagram on Tuesday.

The dynamic trio revealed that the second season is currently shooting and that viewers can expect 'double the drama and double the price tags'.

New season in the works: According to the publication, Amazon Prime are yet to reveal any of the new cast. Pictured are the show's real estate agents from left to right: D'Leanne Lewis, Simon Cohen and Gavin Rubenstein

The show only began airing its first season on July 9, but has already been cemented as a favourite among audiences and critics alike.

Luxe Listings Sydney is now Amazon Prime's most successful Australian launch.

The series, produced by Eureka Productions, follows real estate agents Simon, D'Leanne and Gavin as they negotiate, hustle and make multimillion-dollar deals in Sydney's pricey property market.

Sold! The show only began airing its first season on July 9, but has already been cemented as a favourite among audiences and critics alike

Much of the drama ensues as the agents ruthlessly try to one-up each other and compete to sell the most impressive and alluring properties.

During the first season, the agents showcased some of the most breathtaking homes Sydney has on offer, with unique designs, luxurious inclusions, scenic beachside views and harbour backdrops.

'Sydney's real estate market is unlike any other in the world, with Luxe Listings Sydney offering a brilliant mix of big personalities, spectacular properties and high-stakes deals,' said Erika North, Head of Originals, Asia Pacific, at Amazon Studios.

Popular: Luxe Listings Sydney is now Amazon Prime's most successful Australian launch

The players: The series, produced by Eureka Productions, follows real estate agents Gavin, D'Leanne and Simon, as they negotiate, hustle and make multimillion-dollar deals in Sydney's pricey property market

She continued: 'We are thrilled to be continuing our work with talented Australian producers in green-lighting a second season of Luxe Listing Sydney.'

'The beautiful backdrop Sydney provides gives members a further glimpse into the world-class real estate market in this iconic city,' Ms North added.

Season one of Luxe Listings Sydney is currently available to view on Amazon. Season two will premiere in 2022 and will be available to stream in 240 countries and territories.
Tom Burgess and Tahlia Giumelli have officially postponed their wedding.

In an Instagram Stories post shared on Sunday, Tahlia, 29, shared the 'sad' news with her fans.

She wrote: 'After almost two years of planning. Tom and I had to make the sad decision to postpone and move our wedding venue completely.

Delayed: Tom Burgess (left) and Tahlia Giumelli (right) have officially postponed their wedding. In an Instagram Stories post shared on Sunday, Tahlia, 29, shared the 'sad' news with her fans

'With another wave of Covid hitting NSW our priority is and always will be the safety of our family and friends.

'I have no doubt when it happens it will be just as amazing. Really feel for all the brides who have had to do the same. But right now a I wedding didn't seem like a number one priority'.

Tahlia and Tom announced their engagement on New Year's Eve 2019, after three years of dating, but have yet to confirm a wedding date.

She wrote: 'After almost two years of planning. Tom and I had to make the sad decision to postpone and move our wedding venue completely. With another wave of Covid hitting NSW our priority is and always will be the safety of our family and friends'

Family: Tahlia and Tom announced their engagement on New Year's Eve 2019, after three years of dating. The couple share two daughters, Sophie, two, and Elodie, eight months

The couple share two daughters, Sophie, two, and Elodie, eight months.

Tahlia and Tom's relationship first made headlines in April 2017. A the time, The Daily Telegraph reported they had been quietly dating for at least six months.

In January, the couple splashed out $2.61million on a property in Wolooware in the New South Wales' Sutherland Shire.

Moves: In January, the couple splashed out $2.61million on a property in Wolooware in the New South Wales ' Sutherland Shire

Locked down: South Sydney Rabbitohs star Tom's fiancee Tahlia and the pair's two children are currently in quarantine for two weeks at a luxury Gold Coast resort

South Sydney Rabbitohs star Tom's fiancee Tahlia and the pair's two children are currently in quarantine for two weeks at a luxury Gold Coast resort.

The NRL was forced to relocate its 16 teams to three bubbles in Queensland last week to escape growing Covid outbreaks in NSW and Victoria, with separate hubs set up on the Gold Coast, Brisbane and Sunshine Coast.

On Thursday, the stunning WAG gave fans a glimpse into life inside the Novotel hotel in Surfers Paradise, after the family were given special permission to leave their Sutherland Shire mansion to support Tom.
Australian rapper The Kid Laroi is celebrating a milestone one-year anniversary with his TikTok star girlfriend Katarina Deme.

On Sunday, the 17-year-old shared a sweet tribute to his other half on Instagram, confirming he is 'happier than ever' alongside photographs of the pair spending quality time together.

'One year with you and I'm happier than ever. Time flies kid...' Laroi, whose real name is Charlton Kenneth Jeffrey Howard, captioned the post.

Love: Australian rapper The Kid Laroi is celebrating a milestone one-year anniversary with his TikTok star girlfriend Katarina Deme

Katarina, 17, replied 'I love youuuuuu,' in the comments section, before sharing the same images on her own page.

She captioned the photos: 'Celebrating one year with you...'

Laroi spoke to The Kyle & Jackie O Show in February about his romance with Katarina, revealing they'd met through mutual friends.

Host Jackie 'O' Henderson branded Katarina 'the most beautiful girl I've ever seen', prompting Laroi to laugh and add: 'I agree!'

The Indigenous star added that he never expected to fall in love so young, but did so shortly after relocating from Sydney to Los Angeles - where Katarina is based.

Adorable: 'One year with you and I'm happier than ever. Time flies kid...' Laroi, whose real name is Charlton Kenneth Jeffrey Howard, captioned the post, to which she replied: 'I love youuuuu,'

Pretty: In February, radio host Jackie 'O' Henderson recently described model Katarina as 'the most beautiful girl I've ever seen', and the young rapper wholeheartedly agreed

'Around the time that I met her, I just put out the whole F*ck Love project and was not in the vibe of love,' he said.

'But I guess... you can't control some of that type of stuff. It was so ironic.'

Radio presenter Kyle Sandilands added: 'Once again it's proven that when you're not looking, love comes along at the strangest time.'

'100 per cent, I agree,' Laroi replied.

Love story: Laroi spoke to The Kyle & Jackie O Show in February about his blossoming romance with Katarina, revealing they'd met through mutual friends

Laroi and Katarina have shared several loved-up snaps of themselves on Instagram, with the first image being uploaded earlier in the year.

Alongside the photo of the pair cuddled up together, the rapper wrote: 'I know I said f**k love but... @katarina.deme.'

His heartwarming post comes just weeks after Laroi landed his first number No. 1 single on Australia's ARIA charts with his collaboration with Justin Bieber, titled Stay.

It's another major career milestone for Laroi, who also recently made history as the youngest solo artist to top the Australian album charts.
They have been enjoying some quality time together in Croatia.

And Bernie Ecclestone, 90, and his wife Fabiana Flosi, 44, cut smart figures on Saturday as they enjoyed a walk down Stradun in Dubrovnik.

The former Formula 1 boss donned a smart white shirt and dapper brown jeans, teamed with a comfortable pair of shoes.

Trip: Bernie Ecclestone, 90, and wife Fabiana, 44, cut smart figures for a stroll in Croatia on Saturday

He wore a pair of black sunglasses and also considered his health by later wearing a white face covering.

Fabiana, who is 46 years his junior, looked stunning in a flowy pink patterned dress, matching it perfectly with a pair of studded sandals.

She wore a cream pashmina and carried a cross-body bag for their outing, also putting safety first with an orange face mask.

Smart: The former Formula 1 boss donned a smart white shirt and dapper brown jeans, teamed with a comfortable pair of shoes, with Fabiana opting for a flowy pink patterned dress, matching it perfectly with a pair of studded sandals

Safety first: The couple considered their health and followed COVID guidelines by opting for face coverings

Bernie became a father for the fourth time when he welcomed his son Ace last July with Fabiana, who he married in 2012.

The billionaire businessman is already a father to daughters Deborah, 65, Tamara, 35, and Petra, 31.

His eldest, Deborah, was born to his first wife Ivy Bamford before he welcomed socialites Tamara and Petra with his second wife Slavica Radic.

Father-of-four: Bernie became a father for the fourth time when he welcomed his son Ace last July with Fabiana, who he married in 2012

He married Fabiana three years after he divorced Croatian model Slavica.

Bernie confirmed he and his wife were expecting a child to Swiss newspaper Blick last April.

'Yes, it is due in the summer,' Mr Ecclestone told the publication. 'Hopefully he'll learn to play backgammon soon!'

Afterwards, he told the Daily Mail: 'There's nothing that unusual is there? I haven't had a job for a little while so I have had plenty of time to practise!'

Happy pair: The couple met through the World Motor Sport Council, where she regularly attended meetings

Bernie hit back at claims he was too old to become a father after Ace's birth, saying he wants even more children.

He told The Sun on Sunday: 'Now I have more time on my hands and I hope I can spend it with my son as he grows up. I don't know if we will stop here. Perhaps he should have a little brother or sister.

Discussing his first chats with his now-wife about starting a family when they first met eight years ago, he said: 'Fabiana said she wanted a family, and I told her, "That's no problem for me. Half a dozen kids is great".'

The couple met through the World Motor Sport Council, where she regularly attended meetings.
Molly-Mae Hague flaunted her jaw-dropping figure on Friday as she posed in a skimpy white bikini for a photoshoot.

Molly-Mae, 22, set pulses racing in Ibiza as she oozed confidence for her latest project, showcasing her enviable curves.

The former Love Island star wore her famous blonde locks in a stunning French plait and kept the accessories simple but effective, donning a pair of silver stud earrings.

Incredible: Molly-Mae Hague set pulses soaring in a white skimpy bikini on Friday as she flaunted her jaw-dropping figure for a sultry Ibiza photoshoot

Working different angles, the beauty was not afraid to show off her figure, modelling for shots in the Spanish waters.

Her golden skin radiating in the snaps, Molly-Mae looked every inch the perfect advocate for her latest endeavour.

The vlogger opted for natural makeup which contributed to her overall glow.

Wow: Molly-Mae, 22, oozed confidence for her latest project, showcasing her enviable curves

Modelling: She showed off her bronzed tan as she posed against the rocks

Different angles: The beauty was not afraid to show off her figure for her latest endeavour

Latest project: Her golden skin radiating in the snaps, Molly-Mae looked every inch the perfect advocate for her photoshoot

Bronzed: The Love Island star modelled for shots in the Spanish waters

On Sunday, Molly-Mae shared a sizzling bikini snap with her 5.7million Instagram followers.

This time, she donned a black halter neck bikini whilst striking a pose in her hotel lobby, black trousers pulled below her swimwear.

She captioned the post: 'Worked on myself'.

Her Spanish photoshoot comes after she recently compared the agonising pain she experiences with endometriosis to 'being in a car crash'.

Molly-Mae informed fans last month of her endometriosis diagnosis after she needed a second opinion from a specialist.

The BeautyWorks ambassador used her YouTube platform to explore the women's health condition in greater depth.

Natural: The 22-year-old kept the accessories simple but effective, donning a pair of silver stud earrings

Busy day: Molly-Mae took a break from filming in the Spanish waters and took a walk along the stones

In a 'chatty get ready with me' video, the beauty carried out a question and answer session, where one fan asked: 'when is your operation for your endometriosis? Sending you all the love.'

Molly-Mae began by discussing the response she had faced since last speaking about the condition on her platform.

'I know it's not a topic that everyone wants to hear about or understands because it's not a topic that everyone is affected by. I actually got a lot of backlash in one of my last videos when I spoke about it, I got so much backlash.

Diagnosis: Her Spanish photoshoot comes after she recently compared the agonising pain she experiences with endometriosis to 'being in a car crash'

'The amount of tweets and DMs I got from girls saying I am not educating people properly...'

She continued that she'd had people suggesting she was attempting to make endometriosis 'cool' and 'on trend', which she found staggering.

She described in very frank terms what it's been like for her living with the condition.

Updates: Molly-Mae informed fans last month of her endometriosis diagnosis after she needed a second opinion from a specialist

'I have had every poke, prod, scan, ultrasound, internal, external - you name it, the dignity is gone.

'I'm just glad that I can now get it sorted and have the surgery to now hopefully once and for all get rid of the period pains that are... I can honestly only probably describe them as on the same level as labour.

'I don't know, obviously I don't know what labour feels like but they are at a point where I literally can't stand up.'

Shocking: She told her fans that she'd had people suggesting she was attempting to make endometriosis 'cool' and 'on trend', which she found staggering

Bluntly, she added: 'I feel like I have literally been in a car crash after I've been on my period - it's just not normal.'

The beauty required a second opinion from a specialist after her GP failed to find a problem.

She has been looking on the bright side, grateful that she is now aware what is wrong.

But she was upfront with fans, adding: 'It's not a good thing that I have endometriosis, because obviously it can affect fertility and loads of other things, and you can never really cure it.'

Positive: Molly-Mae has been looking on the bright side since her diagnosis, grateful that she is now aware what is wrong
They have been soaking up the sunshine in Barbados as a family.

And Simon Cowell, 60, and his partner Lauren Silverman, 43, continued to enjoy their getaway on Saturday as they made a splash with son Eric, seven.

Lauren exhibited her Caribbean suntan in a glam black-and-white swimming costume, keeping her hair off her face with a white headband.

Family trip: Simon Cowell and Lauren Silverman continued to soak up the Barbados sunshine with son Eric on Saturday as they went for a family sail and snorkel

Simon opted for a pair of coral swimming shorts, as he and Lauren held Eric's hand in the water.

Also looking bronzed, the music mogul appeared in great spirits as he made the most of some quality family time.

Lauren completed her summer swimwear with a large pair of chic sunglasses.

Holiday: Simon opted for a pair of coral swimming shorts, as he and Lauren held Eric's hand in the water

Bronzed: Lauren exhibited her Caribbean suntan in a glam black-and-white swimming costume whilst the music mogul also showed off his golden skin

Family time: Eric made the most of the day at the beach, looking content with a pink rubber ring

Going for a dive: Their day at the beach was filled with fun activities such as sailing and snorkelling

Showing them how it's done!: Simon looked a natural in the waves wearing a snorkelling mask

Making a splash: Socialite Lauren watched on as her beau enjoyed going for a dive

Their day at the beach was filled with fun activities such as sailing and snorkelling, with the record executive showing his partner and son how it's done.

Wearing a snorkelling mask, Simon looked a natural in the waves as Lauren looked on in admiration.

They were also spotted later on going for a sail on the stunning Caribbean waters.

Doting dad and partner: Simon said that he had felt 'unbelievably protective of both of them [Lauren and Eric]' at Eric's first scan

Water family: The couple and their son looked confident in the Caribbean waters, Eric floating in the rubber ring and Simon wearing his snorkelling gear

No fear: Eric jumped at the chance to have a go at water-gliding, wearing a life jacket

The loved-up pair looked the epitome of relaxed on the sailboat, both being cautious by wearing life jackets.

Their latest Caribbean holiday comes after Simon vowed to do everything he can to ensure he makes a full recovery following breaking his back.

Simon was left bedridden for months after a electric bike accident at his Malibu home in August last year.

Bobbing away: The loved-up pair looked the epitome of relaxed on the sailboat, both being cautious by wearing life jackets

Recovering: Their latest Caribbean holiday comes after Simon vowed to do everything he can to ensure he makes a full recovery following breaking his back

The record executive now walks for several hours a day and holds business meetings at 9AM so that he no longer lives like a 'vampire'.

Of his new fitness regime, a source told MailOnline: 'Simon said how he hasn't worn trainers as much as this in 20 years.

'He feels fitter than ever before and is keeping to a normal routine rather than being on the phone until into the early hours of the morning.'

Well-earned break: The record executive now walks for several hours a day and holds business meetings at 9AM so that he no longer lives like a 'vampire'

Simon told Extra in February of the horror bike incident: 'I nearly smashed my spine to pieces!'

The X Factor boss also admitted he 'couldn't have got through' it without his girlfriend Lauren and son Eric, who sweetly called him 'iron man' when he first saw his dad with metal rods and screws in his back following surgery.

Simon met Lauren when she was still married to millionaire property developer Andrew Silverman.

Romance: Simon met Lauren when she was still married to millionaire property developer Andrew Silverman

Their affair became public  and Simon's life changed  at the end of July 2013 when news broke of Lauren's pregnancy.

In 2015, Simon told Mail on Sunday Event magazine: 'I'm not proud of the circumstances, I can't hold my head up about it.'

And of the pregnancy, he admitted: 'This was not something I planned. But I remember going to the first scan with Lauren.

'I called him Tad because he looked like a tadpole. Something just kicked in. I felt unbelievably protective of both of them. I just absolutely wanted him. I just hadn't known that before.'
Former Big Brother star Krystal Hipwell has revealed why she's exempt from Sydney's strict lockdown, after receiving a number of messages from followers on Instagram.

In an Instagram story post on Sunday, the 35-year-old explained how she left Sydney with her family prior to the lockdown, and is 'blessed' to have a farm in Crackenback in rural New South Wales, as well as a home in Gerringong on the South Coast.

Over the past few weeks, Krystal has been sharing idyllic photos of herself with husband Neil Hipwell and their three young children at the two properties.

Setting the record straight: Former Big Brother star Krystal Hipwell (pictured), 35, revealed on Sunday why she's exempt from Sydney's strict lockdown, after receiving a number of messages from followers on Instagram

'I've been receiving quite a few messages from people asking how and why we should be exempt from Sydney's lockdown,' Krystal began her Instagram Story post.

'The reason for this is that we left Sydney well before the lockdown commencing and have not returned since.'

Krystal said they have been lucky to 'bounce back and forth' between their two homes, and have no immediate plans in returning to their Sydney apartment.

Clearing things up: In an Instagram story post on Sunday, Krystal explained how she left Sydney with her family prior to the lockdown, and is 'blessed' to have a farm in Crackenback in rural New South Wales, as well as a home in Gerringong on the South Coast

'We are very blessed to have two homes in unrestricted areas and have been bouncing back and forth between these,' she explained.

'We don't feel the need to return to Sydney just now, with my Neil (her property developer husband) being able to work remotely, and Sunny (their son) doing remote learning.

'It just seems silly to choose being cooped up in a small apartment with no backyard and three kids in a stressful environment, over our current arrangement particularly when there is no end in sight,' she concluded.

Blessed: 'We are very blessed to have two homes in unrestricted areas and have been bouncing back and forth between these,' she explained. Pictured at their Gerringong home

Escaped lockdown: 'It just seems silly to choose being cooped up in a small apartment with no backyard and three kids in a stressful environment, over our current arrangement particularly when there is no end in sight,' she said. Pictured in Crackenback with son Huska

Krystal and Neil share three children, son Sunny, six, daughter Nakoda, two, and 10-month-old son Huska.

Sydney has endured its fourth week of a strict lockdown, with NSW recording 141 new cases on Sunday.

Sydneysiders are only able to leave their homes for exercise, shopping for essentials, medical care, or for work if they cannot work from home.

Krystal rose to fame on the 2006 season of Big Brother Australia. She has since become a beauty and lifestyle influencer, as well as a blogger and fitness trainer.

Husband: Krystal added that there's no reason for the family to return to Sydney just yet, with her property developer husband Neil Hipwell (pictured) able to work remotely
Lala Kent has denied 'shading' Megan Fox, after the actress was a no-show at the premiere of Midnight In the Switchgrass, directed by LaLa's fiance Randall Emmett.

Rumors of a rift kicked off when Lala posed in front of the film's poster blocking out Megan, who claimed she skipped the premiere due to Covid-19 fears, and later deleted the post.

Clearing up the situation to Access Hollywood, Lala explained: 'I am not very subtle when I shade people. If I was upset, I would have just straight up said it.'

She added: 'My mom quickly took a picture of me, I was just standing next to the poster. She said, "Pose. I want to get a picture." I quickly said I am excited for the movie and posted it and then went in to watch the film.'

No shade here! Lala Kent DENIES dissing Megan Fox for skipping her fiance Randall Emmett's premiere... after the film was savaged by critics

For her part, Megan, 35, told USA Today: 'I really like Lala, so I can't imagine she would be trying to do anything negative like that She's a lovely person.'

Megan informed fans that she would not be present at last week's premiere in a statement issued to Variety just hours before she was set to walk the red carpet.

'Due to the recent California mask mandate and rise of COVID cases, Megan Fox will no longer be attending the premiere tonight,' read a statement obtained by Variety.

Other notable stars that skipped out on the premiere were Bruce Willis and Megan Fox's costar-turned-boyfriend Machine Gun Kelly.

MIA: Fox, 35, informed fans that she would not be present at Monday night's premiere in a statement issued to Variety just hours before she was set to walk the red carpet; (L-R) director Randall Emmett, Megan Fox, and Bruce Willis pictured in 2020

However, the movie has since been savaged by critics - with even Machine Gun Kelly calling it 'trash' in a tweet his week.

L.A. County recently reinstated its mask mandate after it was revealed that coronavirus cases had 'increased 700%' since California's statewide reopening on June 15.

The mandate requires 'masking for everyone while indoors, regardless of vaccination status to prevent increased COVID-19 spread,' as per KTLA.

Megan and Bruce lead the film as FBI agents Rebecca Lombardi and her partner Karl Helter, respectively.

The duo are near a bust on a sex-trafficking ring when they run across the path of a notorious serial killer operating down south.

Shade? Lala Kent appeared to shade Megan Fox in a now-deleted Instagram post, after the actress skipped out on the premiere of Midnight In The Switchgrass on Monday night; Lala pictured

Leads: Megan and Bruce lead the film as FBI agents Rebecca Lombardi and her partner Karl Helter, respectively

They team up with another agent from Florida (Hirsch) to catch the killer, but he abducts Megan's character, forcing the two men to work overtime to save her before it's too late.

The film is very loosely based on the real-life Truck Stop Killer, who was apprehended in 1990, though he was caught while in the act of torturing his victims, rather than being caught by investigators on his tale.

The killer, Robert Ben Rhoades, is currently serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

Though she was absent from the red carpet premiere, Midnight in the Switchgrass is undoubtedly an important project for Fox, being that it's where she first met Kelly.

Finding love: Though she was absent from the red carpet premiere, Midnight in the Switchgrass is undoubtedly an important project for Fox, being that it's where she first met her costar-turned-boyfriend Machine Gun Kelly; Megan and Machine Gun Kelly pictured in May

Opportunity: In a recent interview for the July edition of Who What Wear , Megan claimed that she had only agreed to star in Midnight In The Switchgrass in order to meet the 31-year-old rocker; (L-R) Megan, director Randall Emmett, and Machine Gun Kelly pictured on set in 2020

In a recent interview for the July edition of Who What Wear, Megan claimed that she had only agreed to star in Midnight In The Switchgrass in order to meet the 31-year-old rocker.

'It was definitely a vehicle  I'll be honest  for me to meet Colson,' she said.

'I knew he was gonna be in the movie, but the universe was just like, 'Go do this. There's something about this experience that'll be really rewarding for you.''

Megan first opened up about meeting Colson for the first time in a now famous appearance on Lala Kent's podcast in July 2020.

'I could feel that some wild s**t was going to happen to me from that meeting, but I wasn't yet sure what. I just felt it like, deep in my soup,' she explained.

Twin flame: The Transformers actress went onto deem MGK as her 'twin flame' due to their undeniable chemistry, something Randall was able to concur

Friendly: Kent's apparent shade of Fox may have stemmed from some hurt personal feelings, being that the reality star and her director fiance seemingly formed a close bond with the couple last year

The Transformers actress went onto deem MGK as her 'twin flame' due to their undeniable chemistry, something Randall was able to concur.

'Clearly, there was chemistry,' the director told Us Weekly. 'Clearly, there was a connection  but I was looking at it from a direction point of view and I was like, "Man, I'm a genius." Like, "They're great! I'm so good at this!"'

Kent's apparent shade of Fox may have stemmed from some hurt personal feelings, being that the reality star and her director fiance seemingly formed a close bond with the couple last year.

'My crew,' captioned Randall, who uploaded a group shout of him and Lala with Megan and Kelly to his Instagram in August as they finished filming Midnight In The Switchgrass in Puerto Rico.

A few weeks prior, Randall had gushed about Megan and Kelly, writing at the time that he is 'so grateful for our friendship.'
Holly Willoughby's husband Dan Baldwin reportedly claimed up to 10,000 through the government's furlough scheme for his production company.

The TV producer, 46, who has been married to the This Morning host, 40, since 2007, runs television company Hungry Bear Media which is said to be valued at 2million.

Accounts filed on Companies House show it was one of many businesses to claim through the scheme amid the coronavirus pandemic, as reported by the Daily Star.

Furlough: Holly Willoughby's husband Dan Baldwin reportedly claimed up to 10,000 through the government's furlough scheme for his production company (pictured in 2016)

The publication reports he received the sum in December of last year.

Dan also runs Hungry McBear Ltd in Scotland alongside comedian Michael McIntyre which had 1.7million in the bank at the end of 2019 while Hungry Bear Media reported 376,298 in the bank.

The producer is also listed as a director of his wife Holly's media company Roxy Media Ltd which is thought to be worth around 10million.

The most recent accounts for the company show Holly earned almost 1.5million in 2019 and 2002.

Business: The TV producer, 46, who has been married to the This Morning host, 40, since 2007, runs television company Hungry Bear Media which is valued at 2million (pictured in 2019)

The presenter is believed to earn a salary of 600,000 for her role on This Morning opposite Phillip Schofield.

Holly and Dan are thought to have a combined net worth of around 13million.

The TaxPayers' Alliance said of the scheme: 'Some businesses have repaid the support. They should serve as an example for firms that have come through the past year in rude health.'

MailOnline has contacted representatives for Hungry Bear Media and Holly Willoughby for comment.

Dan was previously a producer on Ministry of Mayhem, one of Holly's earliest shows.

The couple are parents to Harry, 12, Belle, 10, and Chester, six.

Scheme: Accounts filed on Companies House show it was one of many businesses to claim through the scheme amid the coronavirus pandemic

Holly is currently presenting her latest show, Take Off with Bradley and Holly alongside Bradley Walsh.

Her regular co-presenter Phillip joked that he was 'devastated' she'd ditched him 'for another man.'

Phil appeared on Thursday's The One Show to discuss Holly's new show, and jokingly said she had cheated on him during their summer break from their ITV daytime show.

Pretending to be annoyed, Phil joked: 'Wow, that happened quickly. We break up for the summer and the next thing I know you're with another man!'

Show: Holly is currently presenting her latest show, Take Off with Bradley and Holly alongside Bradley Walsh

He then added: 'It's fine, I'm obviously devastated but I want the dog and the CD collection.'

Take Off sees a number of hopeful contestants try their luck at winning the chance to get a holiday to a dream destination.

Holly and Bradley have previously appeared on the show before, as they filmed a one-off Christmas special in 2019.

The festive programme saw audience members try to win the chance to go on a trip to Lapland with their family.
She reintroduced herself earlier this week as a transgender woman.

And Tommy Dorman was seen out in West Hollywood on Saturday for the first time since making her big announcement.

The 13 Reasons Why actress was covered up in a flowing red maxi dress as departed the members-only San Vicente Bungalows.

Woman in red: Tommy Dorfman, 29, was spotted out in West Hollywood at the exclusive San Vicente Bungalows in a red dress. She came out as a trans woman earlier in the week in Time

Tommy's patterned dress featured long sleeves and a draw-string collar, and she paired it with simple black sandals.

She carried a white mesh back with her and accessorized with a black Fendi handbag and angular tortoiseshell sunglasses.

The film and television star made the revelation about her gender identity in an interview with TIME on Thursday, saying: 'For a year now, I have been privately identifying and living as a woman  a trans woman.'

Among a bevy of stars who rushed to congratulate Dorfman on coming out was The Crown's Emma Corrin, who came out as queer in July and alternates between she/her and they/them pronouns.

Low key: Tommy's patterned dress featured long sleeves and a draw-string collar, and she paired it with simple black sandals and a black Fendi handbag

Sharing Tommy's post about her Time interview, Emma wrote over it: 'I AM SO PROUD OF YOU @TommyDorfman thank you for being YOU, for sharing this.'

Tommy's husband Peter Zurkuhlen also took to social media to share his love for the Love In The Time Of Corona actress, saying she's 'gorgeous'.

Peter gushed in his post: 'So much love. You are gorgeous and you are fully you. Proud of you, T [heart emoji].'

On her hit Netflix series 13 Reasons Why, Dorfman played recurring male character Ryan Shaver, who publishes Hannah Baker's problems in the school newspaper without her consent.

In her corner: After coming out, she received an outpouring of support from celebrities, including The Crown's Emma Corrin, who wrote on Instagram, 'I AM SO PROUD OF YOU @TommyDorfman thank you for being YOU, for sharing this'

Speaking with trans novelist Torrey Peters, Dorfman explained: 'It's funny to think about coming out, because I haven't gone anywhere. I view today as a reintroduction to me as a woman, having made a transition medically.'

'Coming out is always viewed as this grand reveal, but I was never not out,' she went on. 'Today is about clarity: I am a trans woman. My pronouns are she/her. My name is Tommy.'

The rising star sparked speculation from fans about her gender identity this past year after changing her appearance on Instagram, as well as stepping out with actor Lucas Hedges in New York recently wearing a summer dress.

Dorfman also revealed in the interview why she decided to keep her name amid her transition, explaining: 'I'm named after my mom's brother who passed a month after I was born, and I feel very connected to that name, to an uncle who held me as he was dying.'

Reveal: The 13 Reasons Why star came out as transgender in the magazine and reveals she has been 'living as a trans woman' for the past year in a new interview with TIME

Rising star: On the hit Netflix show, Dorfman played recurring male character Ryan Shaver, who publishes Hannah Baker's problems in the school newspaper without her consent

She added: 'This is an evolution of Tommy. I'm becoming more Tommy... I am actually myself.'

Talking about her decision to come out, Dorfman said: 'I've been living in this other version of coming out where I don't feel safe enough to talk about it, so I just do it. But I recognize that transitioning is beautiful. Why not let the world see what that looks like?'

She added: 'So I kept, on Instagram, a diaristic time capsule instead - one that shows a body living in a more fluid space.'

Glamorous: Tommy took part in a stylish shoot for TIME wearing a sophisticated black gown

'However, I've learned as a public-facing person that my refusal to clarify can strip me of the freedom to control my own narrative,' Tommy went on.

'With this medical transition, there has been discourse about my body, and it began to feel overwhelming.'

The actress explained that she did consider a different route in publicly coming out, including disappearing for two years and coming back into the spotlight 'with a new name, new face and new body.'

However, Dorfman said that it was something she 'couldn't afford to do' and wasn't what she wanted.

Impressive performance: Tommy rose to fame on the 2017 Netflix show that was a surprise hit

Instead, the performer says her intention is to shine a light on 'gender fluidity' and 'how fast and dynamic and vulnerable it can be, how it's an ongoing thing.'

Dorfman spoke candidly with novelist Peters  author of Detransition, Baby  about how she was in a relationship with a gay man for nine years prior to her transitioning.

'It's wild to be 29 and going through puberty again. Some days I feel like I'm 14,' she said. 'As a result of that shift, the types of romantic partnerships I seek out are different.'

'I was in a nine-year relationship in which I was thought of as a more male-bodied person, with a gay man. I love him so much, but we've been learning that as a trans woman, what I'm interested in is not necessarily reflected in a gay man,' the actress divulged.

She added: 'So we've had incredible conversations to redefine our relationship as friends.'

'For a year now, I have been privately identifying and living as a woman - a trans woman,' she told TIME Magazine on Thursday

Journey: The actress said she considered disappearing for two years and coming back into the spotlight 'with a new name, new face and new body' but decided against it

Pose: The actress was seen at screening for new movie Zola last month looking stylish in a white dress

The actress also spoke openly about the struggles she faced in medically transitioning, saying that although the process can be 'liberating and clarifying' there is a 'sad part' in that 'you don't get to acknowledge some of what you're leaving.'

'There's a way in which in order to justify transition, you have to say everything was terrible before,' she opined. 'One doesn't have to medically transition to be trans, but for me, it was an active choice. I'm aligning my body with my soul.'

'Yet as a result of that, I am losing some things. I have to reckon with the fact that I brought along a lot of people and things who might not end up being there for this part of my journey.'

Recovery: Last month, Dorfman posted this flashback photo celebrating 8 years of sobriety telling fans 'there's nothing to be ashamed of or embarrassed by. i love you.'

Teenage years: The actress shared these images last month saying she was a 'teenage alcoholic and drug addict just trying to get by'

Sending a message: Tommy - who is now sober - told fans 'if you're struggling with addiction, when you're ready, ask for help'

Dorfman talked about how she has anticipated her transition will affect her acting career, reasoning that it's 'impossible' for her to separate her 'personal and professional' transition, 'because my body and face are linked to my career.'

'I'm most recognized for playing a bitchy gay poet on a soap opera, and I feared that by actively transitioning in my personal life, I would lose whatever career I've been told I'm supposed to have,' she said about her breakout role on the hit series.

'But I'm no longer interested in playing 'male' characters - except for maybe in a 'Cate Blanchett playing Bob Dylan' way. Sometimes you just have to say, "No, this is just who I f*****g am."'

Moving forward, Dorfman will next appear in Lena Dunham's movie Sharp Stick, her first role 'as a girl' which wrapped earlier this year and was an 'exciting and validating' experience for the actress.

LBD: Dorfman has been showing off her style on Instagram, including this image from a week ago that garnered praise from fans as well as actress Dove Cameron

Sharing: Earlier this month, Dorfman told fans that she was getting 'laser hair removal' on her chest praising her doctors

Glam appearance: Tommy shared this image from a shoot earlier this month to her 1.3million followers on Instagram

Taking to her Instagram account on Thursday to promote the interview, Dorfman thanks fans writing: 'I'm especially grateful to every single trans person who walked this path, broke down barriers, and risked their lives to live authentically and radically as themselves before me.'

She added: 'Thank you to all the trans woman that showed me who i am, how to live, celebrate myself, and take up space in this world.'

Dorfman was flooded with positive messages following her post, with fashion designer Marc Jacobs writing: 'She is everything. A beautiful human.'

Riverdale actress Lili Reinhart commented: 'You are so beautiful.' The post was also liked by Adam Lambert, Maddie Ziegler and SNL actress Chloe Fineman.

Four Weddings and a Funeral star Andie MacDowell commented 'Beautiful women,' while Modern Family actor Jesse Tyler Ferguson wrote: 'Yes! Stunning as always!'

Katherine Langford, who starred alongside Dorfman in 13 Reasons Why, said: 'She's STUNNING,' alongside three heart emojis.

Last month, Dorfman revealed that she is now eight years sober saying she used to be a 'teenage alcoholic and drug addict just trying to get by.'

Sharing a series of photos from her youth she added: 'If you're struggling with addiction, when you're ready, ask for help.'
She has had a career in Hollywood spanning over three decades.

And Heather Graham looked sensational as she attended an event at the Filming Italy Festival at Forte Village Resort in Santa Margherita di Pula in Sardinia, Italy on Sunday.

The actress, 51, displayed her jaw-dropping figure as she donned a multi-coloured mini dress with a deep v-neckline.

Stunning: Heather Graham looked sensational as she attended an event at the Filming Italy Festival at Forte Village Resort in Santa Margherita di Pula, Italy on Sunday

The garment also featured a sheer detail while Heather added height to her frame with a pair of silver heels.

The Boogie Nights star let her blonde locks fall loose down her shoulders while she also sported a gold headband.

Heather struck a series of poses on the red carpet while she accentuated her natural beauty with a light pallet of makeup.

The Filming Italy Festival includes projections, meetings and presentations of films and TV series and focuses on both the giants of the small and large screen.

Looking good: The actress, 51, displayed her jaw-dropping figure as she donned a multi-coloured mini dress with a deep v-neckline

Outfit: The garment also featured a sheer detail while Heather added height to her frame with a pair of silver heels

Heather, whose films include Boogie Nights and Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, has a few movies in the pipeline.

One of them is a Western called The Last Son where she is acting with such names as Avatar star Sam Worthington and Megan Fox's boyfriend Machine Gun Kelly.

She will also be seen in a horror movie called Oracle starring her amid a cast that includes The Underground Railroad actress Lucy Faust.

Glamour: Heather struck a series of poses on the red carpet while she accentuated her natural beauty with a light pallet of makeup

Career: Heather, whose films include Boogie Nights and Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, has a few movies in the pipeline

Heather made her directorial debut with the 2018 comedy Half Magic and will be returning to the job on an upcoming film called Chosen Family.

'I guess I would say it's a dramedy. Maybe there's a little bit more drama in it, but it's still a comedy,' she told Collider in an interview late last year.

Apparently the project has been in the works for awhile - she told Collider in early 2018 that she had already written the script.
Gabe Erales issued an apology Saturday addressing his firing late last year over sexual harassment allegations.

The chef, who won the most recent season of Top Chef earlier this month, wrote on Instagram that he was 'deeply and sincerely sorry for the impact my poor decisions had on those involved.'

The circumstances surrounding Erales ouster from his restaurant Comedor in Austin, Texas, came into clearer focus in July after he admitted to carrying on an affair with a female employee at his restaurant, before later decreasing her hours.

Owning up: Top Chef winner Gabe Erales shared an apology to Instagram on Saturday after admitting to carrying on a workplace affair and docking the employees hours later on

'The last three weeks have been a trying time of reflection and personal growth,' Erales began his Instagram text post.

'I have been silent not because I thought it would go away, but because I needed time with my family to start the healing process before making a public statement,' he continued. 'To say I am sorry that I let my family, friends, staff, supporters, and my Top Chef family down may feel like an understatement at the moment, but it's the first step and a genuine start on my road to making amends.

Rather than devoting his energies toward the woman he's accused of harassing, the chef spent more time apologizing to his wife.

'Most importantly, I let the one person down who has always been by my side supporting my career and our family, my wife,' he wrote.

Changing the focus: Rather than devoting his energies toward the woman he's accused of harassing, the chef spent more time apologizing to his wife

Taking ownership: He admitted to the affair and later reducing her hours, though he only referred to the situation as 'poor judgement' [sic]

Moving on: Erales concluded his statement by vowing to learn from his 'mistakes.' He was fired in December from his Austin restaurant Comedor

The reality star continued, writing 'I must continue to acknowledge my mistakes including the termination from my former job.'

'To clarify, unbeknownst to my wife, I had a consensual relationship with a co-worker and later reduced her work hours, which in combination was a poor judgement [sic] call and led to my termination after I filmed Top Chef,' he claimed.

After the firing, he said he was at his 'lowest point,' putting him in danger of 'potentially losing my family while I had already lost my job.'

'I am deeply and sincerely sorry for the impact that my poor decisions had on those involved. My personal growth will be a perpetual apology in seeking forgiveness,' he continued.

Opening up: Erales first admitted to the affair to the Austin American-Statesmen in July, just after winning Top Chef; still from Top Chef

Erales concluded his statement by vowing to learn from his 'mistakes.'

'I spent a lot of time reflecting on these mistakes and taking the necessary steps to be a better husband, father, chef and leader, with the help of therapy and spirituality,' he continued. 'I recognize that part of an executive chef role is to set the culture and uphold the values of the restaurant.

'I am committed to doing the personal and professional work every day to create a positive and safe work environment in whatever follows for me professionally. I look forward to creating food that represent [sic] my heritage and culture as the chef I know I can be, but my main focus now is my family and those that continue to support me during this difficult time.'

In December of last year, Erales was fired from his executive chef position at Comedor.

Although the announcement was somewhat vague, co-owner and chef Philip Speer said he was fired for 'repeated violations of our policies and for behavior in conflict with our values.'

Doesn't pass the smell test: The outlet also reported that co-owner and chef Speer didn't believe the employee's performance was a 'sufficient reason for hours being cut'

In an interview with the Austin American-Statesman, Erales admitted to his affair with an employee and docking her hours.

The outlet also reported that Speer didn't believe the employee's performance was a 'sufficient reason for hours being cut.'

He added that Erales had been 'fired for repeated violations of the companys ethics policy as it relates to harassment of women.'

The interview was released shortly after he had been crowned the winner of Top Chef season 18, but the series had already conducted an investigation following his firing.

Sources close to the series told The Austin American-Statesman that Erales wasn't found to have behavior inappropriately on set, so the series was released in full over concerns that cutting it off would be unfair to his competitors, particularly finalists Dawn Burrell and Shota Nakajima, whom he beat out to win $250,000.

Speaking out: The series determined Erales wasn't inappropriate on the Top Chef set, but Padma Lakshmi was seemingly unaware of it when called for one in tweets from earlier this month

Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi was seemingly unaware of the investigation, as she called for one in tweets from earlier this month.

'As someone who has been sexually harassed, this topic is a serious one and merits openness,' she wrote.

'We filmed Top Chef in October of last year & were not aware of the allegations now coming out about Gabe. This should be investigated & the network should consider its best action.'

However, she added: 'To be clear, no one has alleged sexual harassment on the record or otherwise to Bravo/Top Chef and we judges didn't have any indication of inappropriate behavior from Gabe during his time on set.'
Christine Quinn flaunted her incredible post-baby body while soaking up the sun in Capri with her husband Christian Richard and her newborn son Christian.

The 31-year-old Selling Sunset star was spotted in a neon orange string bikini as she cradled her two-month-old infant in her arms on Sunday.

The family of three later jetted off in a helicopter to the island of Sicily.

Wow! Christine Quinn flaunted her incredible post-baby body while soaking up the sun in Capri with her husband Christian Richard and her newborn son Christian

Christine's ample cleavage was on full display in the triangle top. She donned a long hot-pink shirtdress cover up that buttoned up the side.

The television personality showcased her taut abs in matching wide-legged trousers that she wore low on her hips, with the thin ties of her bikini bottom pulled up from under her waistband.

She was sported orange flip flops and gold-rimmed sunglasses with orange lenses along with a white beaded choker.

Protective mom: Christine draped her cover up over Christian's face to shield her infant from the blazing sun

Quinn's long platinum locks fell in loose waves over her shoulders as she cupped her baby's head. Christine draped her cover up over Christian's face to shield her infant from the blazing sun.

Richard was seen clad in a white t-shirt and carried a large black backpack on his shoulder as he and Christine strolled by lounge chairs covered with towels.

The real estate agent smiled broadly as she walked ahead, toting a large fuzzy pink bag.

Casual: Richard was seen clad in a white t-shirt and carried a large black backpack on his shoulder as he and Christine strolled by lounge chairs covered with towels

Toned: The television personality showcased her taut abs in matching wide-legged trousers that she wore low on her hips, with the thin ties of her bikini bottom pulled up from under her waistband

Quinn shared a photo on her Instagram Stories in which she posed in with her baby in front of the Mediterranean Ocean.

Christian and Christine, who welcomed their first child in May, then set off for the next stop on their holiday in Italy.

The siren stood on the tarmac before a yellow helicopter and beamed as she held her son.

Cute: Quinn shared a photo on her Instagram Stories in which she posed in with her baby in front of the Mediterranean Ocean

Next stop: The siren stood on the tarmac before a yellow helicopter and beamed as she held her son before taking off for Sicily

She added photo of the helicopter to her Stories with a graphic revealing that the family was leaving the Amalfi Coast for the island of Sicily.

Christine shared a view of the helipad taken through the window after the chopper took flight.

Quinn posted images of the scenery below during the trip including an image of mountains covered with purple flowers.

En route: She added photo of the helicopter to her Stories with a graphic revealing that the family was leaving the Amalfi Coast for the island of Sicily

Looking down: Christine shared a view of the helipad taken through the window after the chopper took flight

Scenic: Quinn posted images of the scenery below during the trip including an image of mountains covered with purple flowers

The stunning model also shared two adorable photos of Christian. In one shot, the baby was wearing giant orange headphones over his ears with a life vest fastened across his chest.

A long beaded chain with a blue pacifier was clipped to his striped shirt as he sat on his mother's lap during the flight.

In the second photo, Christian was seen smiling with joy as the family drove away after landing.

'Happy boy loved his first helicopter ride!' Christine wrote on the photo.

Sweet: The stunning model also shared two adorable photos of Christian. In one shot, the baby was wearing giant orange headphones over his ears with a life vest fastened across his chest
Satirical news website Betoota Advocate is facing backlash for publishing two articles that seemingly defended the anti-lockdown protesters who clashed with police in Sydney's CBD on Saturday in scenes that shocked Australia.

The website, known for its opposition to the Morrison government and the Murdoch press, was criticised by its predominantly left-leaning, millennial readers for its sympathetic take on the maskless thugs at the so-called 'Freedom Rally'.

The articles, published on Saturday and Sunday, suggested the demonstrators weren't anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorists but were in fact just ordinary Sydneysiders expressing their dissatisfaction with Prime Minister Scott Morrison's handling of the Covid pandemic.

This is despite the fact hundreds of protesters carried placards with anti-vax slogans like 'my body, my choice' and 'the media is the virus' and spread conspiratorial nonsense when confronted by journalists.

Several high-profile figures have blasted the website for its questionable take on the protests, including Waleed Aly's academic wife Dr Susan Carland and outspoken Bachelor star Abbie Chatfield.

'Understandable distrust': Satirical news website Betoota Advocate is facing backlash for publishing two articles that seemingly defended the anti-lockdown protesters who clashed with police in Sydney's CBD on Saturday in scenes that shocked Australia

Saturday's article, written by one of Betoota's editors under the byline 'Clancy Overell', featured the headline, 'Thousands March To Highlight Understandable Distrust of PM's S**thouse Public Health Messages.'

The story, published on Instagram and the Betoota Advocate website, said the protests in Sydney and other cities 'speaks to the bigger issue' of the government's botched vaccine rollout - which is ludicrous given the protesters are opposed to the vaccine to begin with.

The article went on to allege the government deliberately 'generated fear and hesitancy' around vaccines to 'buy more time' while waiting for them to arrive.

This ignores the fact vaccine hesitancy is usually the product of misinformation spread on social media, not because of politicians or the press.

Missing the mark: Betoota published another story on Sunday, this time trying to portray the lockdown protests as a symptom of class struggle

Criticism: Several high-profile figures have blasted the website for its questionable take on the protests, including Waleed Aly's (left) academic wife Dr Susan Carland (right)

Not impressed: 'Jeez guys, no,' Dr Carland commented below the article on Instagram

The article went on to characterise the protests as 'a damning insight into how the government is being perceived by the people' and suggested the Federal and NSW governments were 'secretly cheering' for a deadly super-spreader event in order to shift the blame onto everyday Aussies.

Betoota Advocate published another story on Sunday, this time trying to portray the lockdown protests as a symptom of class struggle.

The headline read, '"Stupid Bogans" To Blame For Yesterday, Not Lack Of JobKeeper Or Insufficient Supply Of Jabs.'

The article suggested the government was to blame for online radicalisation and that the protests wouldn't have happened if there had been more vaccines and sufficient JobKeeper payments during the latest lockdowns.

But this simply doesn't align with how many Freedom Rally protesters view their decision to attend the marches, with a significant number holding placards saying they don't want the vaccine at all.

Meanwhile, there were very few placards on show that addressed welfare payments.

Furious: 'What the f**k are you doing, Betoota?' asked Bachelor star Abbie Chatfield (pictured)

Smart: Chatfield is an outspoken opponent of anti-vaxxers online

'I'm really confused by this post? Who's side are you on?' Betoota Advocate's bizarre take was roundly rejected by its readers, who blasted the articles in the comments section

'Are you serious?' Readers said they were 'disappointed' even wondered if the account had been hacked or if the usual editorial staff had been replaced for the weekend

Betoota Advocate's bizarre take was roundly rejected by its readers, who blasted the articles in the comments section.

'What the f**k are you doing, Betoota?' asked Bachelor star Abbie Chatfield, who is an outspoken opponent of anti-vaxxers online.

Dr Susan Carland, the academic wife of TV host Waleed Aly, wrote: 'Jeez guys, no.'

'Why are you glorifying these flogs?' one disappointed reader wrote, while another asked: 'What the f**k is this headline?'

'I'm really confused by this post. Whose side are you on?' one person commented.

Another reader added: 'But they weren't protesting the lack of government support, they were complaining about having to wear masks.'

A third commented: 'This is just an embarrassing take.'

Do the right thing: One comment said that all Australians get the same messaging from the government about Covid 'but [the] majority of us aren't out there flouting restrictions.' Pictured: anti-lockdown protesters marching down George St in Sydney's CBD on Saturday

One comment said that all Australians get the same messaging from the government about Covid 'but [the] majority of us aren't out there flouting restrictions.'

Other readers said they were 'disappointed' even wondered if the account had been hacked or if the usual editorial staff had been replaced for the weekend.

Betoota Advocate is a parody news website in the style of The Chaser, but also encompasses a podcast on the NOVA network and a beer brand, Betoota Bitter.

Its articles are not news, but instead offer a satirical take on current affairs.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted NOVA for comment.
Chloe Sevigny and her husband Sinisa Mackovic looked happier than ever as they enjoyed some family time in New York City with their son Vanja.

As the lovebirds stepped out for a leisurely stroll on Saturday, the 46-year-old actress pushed an empty stroller as her spouse, 39, held their baby boy.

For their outing, the Oscar nominee wore a black curve-hugging minidress, which highlighted her toned physique, and a pair of matching sandals.

Family-of-three: Chloe Sevigny and her husband Sinisa Mackovic looked blissful as they enjoyed a some family time in NYC with their son Vanja

Meanwhile, her partner matched in an all-black ensemble as he fawned over their little one, who wore a cute houndstooth top and red shoes.

Earlier this month, Sevigny gave her fans a rare look into her personal life by posting an unseen throwback with her infant to her Instagram Story.

In the snap, she could be seen giving her husband a peck on the cheek as he held their son.

Doting mom: For their outing, the Oscar nominee wore a black curve-hugging minidress, which highlighted her toned physique, and a pair of matching sandals

Hands-on dad: Meanwhile, her partner matched in an all-black ensemble as he fawned over their little one, who wore a cute houndstooth top and red shoes

Back in March, the American Psycho actress posted a photo of herself with her husband to celebrate their one-year anniversary.

'Married on a Monday. March 9th 2020. Happy one year anniversary my love,' she captioned it.

Chloe first began dating the gallerist in 2018, and they announced her pregnancy in January of 2020.

Sweet: Earlier this month, Sevigny posted a rare throwback photo of her kissing her husband while he held their son

After marrying during her pregnancy, she gave birth in May of that year.

Her marriage to Sinisa is her first, though she previously had high-profile relationships with filmmakers Harmony Korine and Vincent Gallo, actor Jason Segal and Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker.

Although she often keeps news of her family under wraps, Chloe made the rare choice to speak with The Cut in April 2020 about her husband and learning of her child's sex.

'When I found out I was having a boy, I had to wrap my head around that, as I am so girly. I don't even have that many boy friends; all of my friends are girls. I just relate better to girls. I'm like, what the hell am I going to do with a boy?' she said.

Going strong: Back in March, the American Psycho actress posted a photo of herself with her husband to celebrate their one-year anniversary

She added that she was 'thrilled and so excited about the whole thing,' even though she was initially hesitant about welcoming her first child.

Sevigny admitted that her pregnancy with her Croatian-born husband was not planned while speaking with LA Magazine last year, calling it 'a real shocker.'

'This was an accident. I didn't think I'd ever have kids. I just acquiesced that it was not going to happen for me.'


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Actress and Bigg Boss Tamil contestant Yashika Aannand met with a nasty accident on the ECR Road, near Mahabalipuram (Mamallapuram), at around 11.50 pm on Saturday night. According to witnesses, she was with three of her friends in an SUV. The four friends were supposedly returning to Chennai from a beach resort in Mamallapuram.

The car was speeding and ran into the median after the driver of the vehicle lost control. On hitting the median, the car then somersaulted before coming to rest in a roadside ditch.

Passengers and drivers of vehicles behind Yashikas SUV rushed to rescue the four of them from the mangled car and took them to a nearby primary health centre near Mamallapuram. However, upon reaching the health centre, Yashikas friend Vallichetti Bhavani, a software engineer from Hyderabad working in the US, was declared brought dead on arrival.

The three others in the SUV, who had been critically injured, were given first-aid before being rushed to Apollo Hospital Chennai.

Reports state that the trio is currently under treatment and stable. The Mamallapuram police, who conducted an enquiry at the accident spot, have supposedly verified that the SUV was being driven by Yashika. She has, since, been booked under IPC sections 279, 337 and 304, which are all bailable offences.

The actresss father, Chetan Anand, confirmed that the actress was better. She is stable. But then she has three fractures. They are doing the first operation. They will be doing two more operations for the other fractures. We are all at home waiting for the updates, he added.

Yashika gained popularity with her stint in Tamil Bigg Boss Season 2 in 2018, which was hosted by actor Kamal Haasan. She also acted in Vijay Devarkondas film NOTA. (Inputs from Sanskriti Media)
Indian Coast Guard (ICG) officers and Karnataka Disaster Response team during a rescue operation at a flooded area after heavy rain in Uttara Kannada district. (PTI)

Bengaluru: With torrential rains battering several parts of coastal, malnad and north-interior Karnataka, causing flood like situation and landslides, Chief Minister B S Yediyurappa on Saturday directed district in- charge Ministers to stay put in their respective districts and monitor the relief and rescue operations there.

The Chief Minister will himself be travelling to rain and flood affected border district of Belagavi in north Karnataka on Sunday, to assess the situation there.

"The Chief Minister this morning spoke to district in-charge Ministers and Deputy Commissioners of various districts and gathered information about the rain and flood situation there.

He has directed the in-charge Ministers to stay put in their respective districts," the CMO said in a statement, which also informed about Yediyurappa's travel to Belagavi on Sunday.

According to the information from the State Disaster Management Authority, till last evening, 131 villages in 18 taluks of the state have been affected by rains and floods, and 16,213 people have been affected and three people have died, while two were missing.

Hundreds of houses have been damaged and 8,733 people were evacuated.

As many as 4,964 people were taking shelter in 80 relief camps till last evening.

The Chief Minister had held a virtual meeting with the district officials of Belagavi, Uttara Kannada, Shivamogga, Haveri, Chikkamagaluru and Dharwad, on Friday evening and had directed them to relocate the residents of low-lying villages along the river banks.

With several dams in the state and neighbouring Maharashtra reaching brim, water is being released into the rivers, inundating lowliying and river banks areas.

Rescue and relief teams like NDRF, SDRF, fire department personnels have been pressed into service in affected regions, officials said.
TIRUPATI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi, during his 79th Mann ki Baat radio address of the nation on Sunday, mentioned Sai Praneeth B, popularly known as AP Weatherman, who provides real-time weather forecasts in simple terms for districts across the state.

Sai Praneeth is a 24-year-old software engineer and university gold medalist. Through his social media presence, he offers weather forecasts on a daily and weekly basis. He also provides information to various farmer groups in Rayalaseema and East Godavari regions via phone calls.

The youths weather updates helped people in both rural and metropolitan areas, particularly farmers who formed a majority of his YouTube and Facebook followers.

In his radio address, the Prime Minister introduced the AP weatherman as a perfect example of how technology is being harnessed for greater good.

Sai Praneeth has creatively put technology to good use, to help many farmers across Andhra Pradesh whose livelihoods have been affected due to a lack of real-time weather updates. Using his talent, he carefully analyses and breaks down the weather data he procured from different data sources, and explains these in simpler terms so that it helps farmers, the PM noted.

Later, talking to Deccan Chronicle from his home, Praneeth revealed that his love for weather turned into an opportunity as he hared weather updates with this daily in 2015-16.

I had a formal education on reading weather. Back in Chennai, when I was pursuing my Electrical and Electronics Engineering in Anna University, I used to provide weather updates to my friends. Later, I got the opportunity to provide weather updates to Deccan Chronicle during the floods in Chennai in 2015-16, he said.

Praneeth spent his childhood moving and relocating from one place to another due to his fathers work. In one such transfer, he and the family lived in Tirupati. Since his schooldays, Praneeth was curious about the clouds hovering over the sky. He turned himself into a weather blogger by himself after reading books on climate sciences and related phenomena.

One day, Praneeth saw some news channels reporting that there would be no rain, while some other channels said it would rain. Like farmers, he too was confused. Finally it rained that day and crops were damaged.

At this moment, Praneeth unleashed the weather blogger in him and started offering real-time weather updates through his blog.

There are several websites run by the government and private organisations but it is difficult to understand the data provided by many of these. I procure data from many such sources and carefully analyse and present it in simple terms. I also translate it in local languages for farmers, Praneeth said.

It was from August 2020 that Praneeth started regularly giving updates on social media. He wrote an automated code that helps him gather relevant weather data from various sources. He compiles the data and posts it on social media handles.

I spend more time on the AP Weatherman work than on my job. Whenever I get a break from my work, I turn to social media handles to provide timely updates. My primary aim is to prevent loss of livelihood for farmers, especially in coastal districts, due to climate change, Praneeth said.
HYDERABAD: The state government is not in favour of taking the recently enhanced market value of lands into consideration while regularising illegal plots and layouts under LRS (layout regularisation scheme). Illegal plots and layouts will be regularised based on the market value prevailing when they were registered, according to official sources. This is to ensure that the LRS applications are not overburdened with revised market values.

Nearly 25 lakh LRS applications are pending with the state government for a year since August 2020 due to a pending case in the Supreme Court against LRS. The government earned over Rs 250 crore through application fee alone when applications were accepted from September 1 to October 31, 2020. Individual plot owners were asked to pay Rs 1,000 as application fees while layout developers Rs 10,000 each. The state government plans to clear LRS applications after SC delivers its verdict.

When the state government announced the LRS in August last, it evoked sharp criticism from Opposition parties and property owners, who questioned why they should be penalised now for plots that they had purchased several years ago and why the government permitted illegal layouts in the first place and why they were registered if they were illegal. Several petitions were filed in the High Court and the Supreme Court challenging the LRS.

Against this backdrop, the government is of the opinion that people who are already angry at LRS and pay fees as per old market value will be more agitated if they are asked to pay higher LRS fee as per enhanced market value of lands which came into force on June 22.

In case of open plots, the lowest market value earlier was Rs100 per square yard, which has now been revised to Rs 200 per square yard. The basic value of open plots has been revised by 50 per cent in the lower range, 40 per cent in the mid-range and 30 per cent in the higher range. However, these revised rates will not be considered, according to official sources.

Sources said officials of MA&UD and PR&RD took up the issue with Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao on June 20 seeking his direction on whether to collect LRS fees based on old or new market values.

The Chief Minister is learnt to have clearly told them that market values prevailing on the date of property registration document should be taken into consideration as new rates will burden people even more.
HYDERABAD: Crops over an extent of nearly 5 lakh acres have been damaged due to recent heavy rains across the state, according to preliminary estimates put up by the agriculture department.

However, there is no chance for farmers in the state to claim compensation as the state government opted out of the Centre's Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana Scheme (PMFBY), a crop insurance scheme, in May 2020 and failed to bring its own insurance policy as promised at that time.

Despite all this, there is still a provision for the Telangana government to secure compensation in the form of input subsidy of up to Rs 10,000 per acre from the Centre if the state government undertakes a ground-level survey of damaged crops of agriculture lands survey-number wise and submit details to the Centre.

But the agriculture department has no plans to take up this survey saying that they have no instructions from 'higher-ups' in this regard.

Official sources in the agriculture department said, "The instructions to take up ground-level survey of agriculture lands survey number wise to assess the damage caused to crops should come from the state government. But there are no such instructions."

"No compensation can be claimed from the Centre based on preliminary estimates. Collectors in the respective districts should obtain reports on preliminary estimates on crop loss from agriculture and revenue officials and submit them to the state government. But these preliminary estimates hold no value at the Centre. They want a comprehensive survey with details of how much loss incurred in each survey number of agricultural land. It requires huge staff, a lot of time and effort," sources added.

With Telangana continuing to receive good rains right from the beginning of this monsoon in June, farmers undertook kharif agriculture activities in full swing. The normal cultivation area for kharif in Telangana state is 1.16 crore acres. However, crops were already sown over an extent of 82.49 lakh acres till July 22, achieving 70.7 percent of the normal cultivation area.

Sowings of rainfed crops like jowar, bajra, maize, ragi, pulses, groundnut, soybean, cotton etc was taken up on a large scale since June. However, the sudden heavy rains damaged all these crops especially in north Telangana districts of combined Adilabad, Nizamabad, Warangal and Karimnagar districts.

Cotton, pulses and paddy remain the worst affected. The government encouraged the cultivation of cotton and pulses to a large extent this kharif over paddy.

Neighbouring Andhra Pradesh too opted out of PMFBY but Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy brought in AP government's own crop insurance policy in July 2019, bearing the entire premium amount on behalf of farmers and extending compensation to farmers during natural disasters.
The PM also urged people to keep encouraging and supporting Indias athletes now participating in the Tokyo Olympics.  PTI

New Delhi: Citing the Bharat Chhodo Andolan led by Mahatma Gandhi during the freedom movement, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday asked all citizens to lead a Bharat Jodo Andolan in the same way, with the mantra of Nation First, Always First.

In his monthly Mann Ki Baat radio address, the PM noted India will celebrate its 75th year of Independence soon and highlighted the fact that Amrit Mahotsav is being celebrated across India to mark the year.

Just like Bapu (Gandhi) led the Bharat Chhodo Andolan (Quit India Movement), every Indian must lead the Bharat Jodo Andolan (Unite India Movement), he said. It is our responsibility that we do our work in such a way that it helps in uniting our country, that is full of diversity, the PM said, adding that the culture ministry had begun an initiative to have the maximum number of Indians sing the national anthem together as part of the Amrit Mahotsav celebrations. A website rashtragan.in has been created for people to participate in the campaign.

Noting that the nation will mark Kargil Vijay Diwas on Monday, July 26, the PM asked people to pay tribute to those who had made our nation proud in 1999. Tomorrow, July 26, our nation will mark Kargil Vijay Diwas. Let us pay tribute to those who made our nation proud in 1999. This year, Kargil Diwas will be celebrated amid the Amrit Mahotsav. I urge people to read about the Kargil war and remember our warriors, said the PM.

The PM also urged people to keep encouraging and supporting Indias athletes now participating in the Tokyo Olympics. He urged people to support the Indian Olympics team on the social media by joining the 'Victory Punch Campaign', which had already begun.

Talking about his Mann Ki Baat programme, he said it celebrates both positivity and collectivity. I am unable to take up all the inputs I receive for Mann Ki Baat, but I do forward many of them to the government departments concerned, he said.

In the broadcast, he also cited a study done by MyGov to highlight that of those sending messages and suggestions for Mann Ki Baat, close to 75 per cent are below the age of 35.

Noting that the National Handloom Day, celebrated on August 7, has a historic background when in 1905 the swadeshi movement was started on this day, Mr Modi urged people to buy local handloom products and promote Vocal for Local by sharing this on the social media with #MyHandloomMyPride.

Talking about technology and its usage, Mr Modi praised Odia YouTuber Isaak Munda, a 35-year-old daily wage labourer who is now earning lakhs of rupees from his videos on local cuisines and village lifestyles. He also talked of innovations in agriculture by people like apple cultivation in Ukhrul, Manipur, by an aeronautical engineer.

The PM also talked of an event in Georgia recently where external affairs minister S. Jaishankar handed over the relics of saint queen Ketevan to the Georgian government and also thanked Singapore PM Lee Hsien Loong for opening the renovated Silat Road Gurdwara in Singapore.

Mr Modi urged people to save water, making it a part of their lifestyle, saying that everyone needed to preserve water for future generations.
The sensitivity filter allows people to set limits around how much potentially sensitive content they might see on their 'Explore' page. (Photo: AP)

Washington: Users of social media giant- Instagram have expressed concern with the platform's new sensitive content filter as the feature is blocking their posts.

As per The Verge, while posting on both the feed and in Stories, account holders have been warning their followers that the setting is limiting their reach and that their followers should disable the filter to ensure their posts get through.

"Over the past 24 hours, I've had many conversations with artists and other creators who are incredibly frustrated by having their work hidden. Conversely, people are frustrated that they can't find the content they want to see," Phillip Miner, an artist and the creator of queer hobby magazine Natural Pursuits, wrote in a post.

An earlier post of Philip's post alerting people to the filter has reached over 700,000 people and has been shared 192,000 times as of this morning, he told The Verge. Users from all sorts of communities, including the art world, tattoo artists, and more have picked up on it, sharing similar concerns, he said.

The sensitivity filter, which was introduced on Tuesday by Instagram, allows people to set limits around how much potentially sensitive content they might see on their 'Explore' page. The feature is supposed to filter out things like self-harm content, and it's turned on by default.

But according to Instagram- creators shouldn't worry! The app already limited the amount of sensitive content people see on their 'Explore' page, and "the default setting retains that filtering".

With the options introduced on Tuesday, users can either further limit sensitive content or allow more of it to surface.

A spokesperson spoke to The Verge that some users could even see a bump in discoverability because of this change if people opt into allowing more sensitive content on their Explore page.

The change will have "no impact" on what users see in their feed or in Stories, "where we will continue showing them posts from people they follow," the spokesperson said.

Instagram defined the 'Sensitive Content' feature in its 'Recommendation Guidelines', which only pertains to content that is recommended in places like 'Explore' and 'IGTV Discover' and is much broader than its 'Community Guidelines'.

As per The Verge, content that is considered sensitive is still allowed on the app, as opposed to content that violates its Community Guidelines, but Instagram might surface it less frequently, particularly for users who set their sensitivity limits to the lowest level.

A spokesperson did not specify how much sensitive content users could expect to see in their Explore page at any of the three available settings.

The feature covers sensitive content like nudity, sexually explicit content, tobacco-related content, or content related to pharmaceutical drugs, both are considered sensitive content.

As per The Verge, "Instagram clearly attempted to give people more control. The photo-sharing platform also is not clear with people who want to disable the filter as to whether they will suddenly see lots of unwanted weight loss content or violent images. Though ultimately much of Instagram won't change with this new setting, the communication about it should."

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Kochi: The Sri Lankan government has invited Kitex Garments group to invest in the island nation and offered all support to the Kerala-based company.

According to a statement from the company, Sri Lankan Deputy High Commissioner D Venkateshwaran visited the Kitex office on Saturday and held a three hour-long discussion with its managing director Sabu Jacob.

Sri Lanka is the second country after Bangladesh to invite the Kitex group to invest in their nation.

Earlier, Jacob had held discussions with the Telangana government which had invited the company to invest there.

After holding parleys with the government officials there, the world's second largest manufacturer of kids apparel announced its entry into Telangana with an initial investment of Rs 1,000 crore.

Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu governments too had invited the garments company.

Alleging harassment by the Kerala government officials, Jacob had in the last week of June announced withdrawal from a Rs 3,500 crore investment project in the southern state.

However, the Left government has maintained that it had not initiated any enquiry into or inspection of Kitex Garments Ltd, on its own.

The inspections were carried out following directives of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), Kerala High Court based on complaints from people against the company.

The state government had said it has an "open approach" towards issues raised by Kitex group, even as the company stuck to its decision to back out from Rs 3,500 crore investment plan in the state.
India has sent medical oxygen to Bangladesh and Indonesia, as it has restarted helping other nations to deal with the Covid-19 outbreak amid Chinas bid to use Covid-19 aid as a tool to spread its tentacles in South and South-East Asia.

An Oxygen Express train with 200 MT liquid medical oxygen from India will cross over to Bangladesh on Sunday. An Indian Navy ship, INS Airavat, reached Indonesia, carrying 300 oxygen concentrators and 100 MT of liquid medical oxygen.

Both Bangladesh and Indonesia are at present witnessing a surge in Covid-19 cases, triggering fear of looming oxygen crises, like the one experienced in many cities in India during the brutal second wave of the pandemic.

Though New Delhi is unlikely to lift restrictions on sending out Made-in-India Covid-19 vaccines to the foreign nations immediately, Prime Minister Narendra Modis government apparently decided to gradually restart helping the countries in the South and South East Asian region with oxygen concentrators and liquid oxygen.

The Indian Army last month gifted Nepali Army medical aid worth over Rs 18.02 crore, including ventilators, ambulances, Intensive Care Unit beds, Personal Protective Equipment sets and Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test kits to detect SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Since the Covid-19 pandemic swept the world by March 2020, India provided medicines and medical equipment to over 150 countries in its neighbourhood and beyond, including Grants-in-Aid valued at around Rs 80 crore to 82 countries. Prime Minister Narendra Modis government also sent out 107.15 lakh doses of the Made-in-India Covid-19 vaccines to foreign nations as grant till April 16, in addition to the 357.92 lakh doses exported commercially and 198.628 lakh doses as contribution to the COVAX initiative of the World Health Organization, Gavi  The Vaccine Alliance and others to ensure equitable access to Covid-19 vaccines around the world.

New Delhi, however, had to pause sending out drugs, medical equipment and vaccines to foreign countries after the second Covid-19 wave hit India.

India itself received medical aid, including 17,018 ventilators, 46 oxygen plants, 885 metric tonnes of liquid medical oxygen, 23,116 oxygen concentrators and 25,124 oxygen cylinders, from governments and private sector entities in over 40 countries around the world over the past few weeks. Besides, it also received 1330105 doses of Faviparavir, 11,06,940 doses of Remdisivir and 51,024 doses of Tocilizumab drugs as foreign medical aid, in addition to 19,88,985 rapid diagnostic kits, 98,32,274 masks.

China, which has been keen to spread its tentacles in South Asia and South East Asia, stepped in to take advantage of the situation and augmented supply of medical aid and vaccines to Nepal, Sri Lanka and other nations in Indias neighbourhood as well as the Indian Ocean region.

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Children as young as 10 years old are falling prey to heroin abuse in Kashmir raising alarm bells for doctors and parents, who foresee a doomsday scenario if the problem is not nipped in the bud.

When doctors examined Shahid (name changed), a 10-year-old boy from north Kashmir at the drug de-addiction Center of SMHS Hospital in Srinagar, they were shocked to know that he was a heroin abuser.

Shahid was brought to the hospital by his father and uncle, who themselves are chronic drug abusers. The 10-year-old boy is currently on Opioid Substitution Therapy (OST), a treatment regimen that makes it possible to give up heroin and other opium derivative drugs, highly addictive and with life-threatening consequences.

Also Read | Jammu & Kashmirs drug problem is serious

Dr Yasir Rather, a consulting psychiatrist at Government Medical College (GMC) Srinagar, says Intravenous heroin at such a young age is devastating. The boy had seen his family (father and uncle) abuse heroin through syringes. The curiosity and availability (of heroin) made him take such a step that could cost him his life, he told DH.

Dr Arshid Hussain, Professor of Psychiatry at IMHANS, who has been among the first doctors in Kashmir to have worked on drug addiction, said in the last few years not only the age of starting experimenting with drugs has lowered, but now deadly substances like heroin has replaced Cannabis, shoe polish, and correction fluids.

Before 2015 there were hardly any heroin abusers in Kashmir. Cannabis, shoe polish, and correction fluids were used as drugs. Most of the addicts then had a dark past, were affected by the violence and belonged to a particular socio-economic background, he said.

But now, Dr Hussain said, the situation has changed entirely. People are taking deadly drugs like heroin and there are educated ones as well which include government officials, students and those from well-off families.

The number of cases of young people addicted to dangerous drugs like heroin has increased since 2018 and young boys in early teens consuming drugs is now common, Dr Hussain added.

Also Read | Narco-terror emerges as major concern for agencies in Jammu and Kashmir

Nayeem Ahmad, a parent whose son studies in a prestigious missionary school in Srinagar, says the law-enforcing agencies every now and then confiscate a haul of heroin and claim it a success against narco-terrorism.

But unfortunately, the menace is spreading. I am always concerned about my son as the menace has spread its tentacles deep in Kashmiri society. There is no tangible effort to nip the evil in the bud neither from civil society nor from the authorities, he rued.

A senior police officer said that the heroin is coming into Kashmir from Pakistan and Afghanistan. There are no labs to manufacture heroin here. All of it comes from Pakistan and Afghanistan. They (drug dealers) have a network spread from the Line of Control to the Valley, and it is spreading across India too, he revealed.

As per J&K police data, in 2020, 36.08 kilograms of pure heroin and 49.7 kilograms of brown sugar were recovered from different parts of the Valley. In the first six months of this year, heroin worth hundreds of crores of rupees has been seized in Kashmir.
Helicopters hovered in the air, columns of Army moved along large stretches and rescued people, daring personnel of NDRF moved in uncharted areas in orange-rafts, Navy divers remained on the job as the massive search and rescue operation and relief measures continued in Kolhapur and the neighbouring twin districts of Sangli and Satara.

Battered by continuous rains, particularly in the catchment areas, large stretches of the three districts of Western Maharashtra remained under floodwaters.

More than 1.5 lakh people in the three districts have been evacuated and moved to safety in public halls, marriage halls, schools and colleges.

Medical aid was being provided to the people who have been moved to safety.

Read | GSM-based PA system helped 3.5 lakh people during flood in Kolhapur: Satej Patil

We have lost everything. We wont be able to recover, said a woman with a young infant on her lap as he disembarked from a raft after being rescued from Shirol village.

Several people have been brought to safety from Shirol, Palus, Hatkanangale and Miraj areas.

It was difficult for us there is water everywhere, no power, no drinking water, no milk, no food, said a group of people who were rescued after being in a cliffhanger situation for two days.

Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar is personally monitoring the situation in the three Western Maharashtra districts.

Follow live Maharashtra rains updates here

Pawar also spoke to Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray and informed him of the ground situation in the region.

I am going to Satara today and tomorrow I will go to Sangli and Kolhapur. We are constantly in touch with Raigad, Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg officials, he said.

Water Resources Minister Jayant Patil visited Satara and Sangli and moved around in rafts, a motorcycle and even an open truck to reach out to people wading in knee-deep waters.

There has been some left up in the rains resulting in decrease in water level of the Panchganga riverWe hope in the next couple of days the situation would improve to a large extent, said Minister of State for IT and Home Satej Patil, who is the Guardian Minister of Kolhapur district.
BJP national president J P Nadda ruled out any crisis in the Karnataka unit of the party, claiming that B S Yediyurappa had done a good job at handling state and party affairs in the southern state.

"He has done good work. Karnataka is functioning well. Yediyurappa is handling everything," Nadda told a press conference in Panaji.

When asked if he could comment on the ongoing leadership crisis in the party's affairs as far as Karnataka is concerned, Nadda said: "You feel (it's a crisis) so. I do not".

Chaos has been reigning in the Karnataka BJP over the leadership of Chief Minister B S Yediyurappa, with the party considering replacing the aging party leader, who belongs to the influential Lingayat community.

Nadda who was in Goa to oversee the party's preparations for the 2022 state assembly polls, also dropped a major hint singling out Chief Minister Pramod Sawant leading the party into the upcoming elections.

Also Read | No information from high command on Karnataka CM change: Kateel

"Pramod Sawant has done a good job. There has been all round development under Pramod Sawant's leadership. We are moving ahead with his leadership," told reporters. Nadda ,however, also added a rider to his endorsement of Sawant, adding that all such decisions related to election candidature are taken by the party's highest decision-making body, the BJP parliamentary board.

When asked to comment on demands being made by local BJP leaders, who have been seeking the return of senior BJP leader and Union Minister of State for Tourism and Ports Shripad Naik to state politics ahead of the assembly polls, Nadda scoffed at the possibility.

"He is doing a very good job in Delhi and he is taking care of things... Everybody has an interest, but the interest has to be taken care of by the party. He (Naik) has been assigned a job in Delhi, which he is doing very well," the BJP national president said.

Naik is one of the seniormost BJP leaders in the state and has represented the North Goa parliamentary seat since 1999.
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Raj Kundra case: Gehana Vasisth, two others fail to appear before the police for questioning despite summouns

Actress Gehana Vasisth and two other persons, who were summoned by the Mumbai crime branch in connection with a pornography case, failed to appear for questioning on Sunday, a police official said.

Notably, the police recently arrested businessman Raj Kundra, husband of Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty, in connection with a case, which it said, related to the alleged creation of pornographic films and publishing them through some apps.

After Kundra's arrest, Vasisth, who worked in three films produced for Kundra's app, had in a video said erotic content was different from pornography.

Gehana Vasisth and two others were recently summoned by the crime branch's property cell, but they failed to reach the police office here on Sunday, the official said.

Before the Mumbai crime branch took over the case, there was a complaint with the Maharashtra cyber department about the porn films racket, a senior police official earlier said.

The Malwani police had filed FIRs on the basis of complaints received from two women, while another one woman had submitted a complaint at the Lonavla police station, around 120 km from Mumbai, he said.

The Mumbai crime branch had started an investigation into the case after some victims approached the Malwani police station in February 2021, he said.

During investigation it came to light that some small-time artistes were lured by giving them break in some web series or short stories, he had said.

These actors were called for auditions and were asked to give 'bold' scenes, which later turned out to be semi nude or nude scenes, which were against the wishes of the actors, the official had said.

During the investigation, it also came to light that there were many porn-related apps which were operating in the cyber world, he said.

The police then arrested producer Roma Khan, her husband, actress Gehana Vasisth, director Tanveer Hashmi and Umesh Kamath (who used to look after India operations of Kundra's firm), he had said.

Vashishth was later granted bail.

At least 11 persons have been arrested so far in the case, according to the police.
Bigg Boss 15: Arjun Bijlani is the first confirmed celebrity contestant?

Popular TV star Arjun Bijlaniis headed to the Bigg Boss house for season 15. Reports suggest that that the actor who only recently had admitted in an interview that he has been approached for the controversial reality has now sealed the deal with the channel for it. Several names have been doing the rounds for Bigg Boss 15 but Arjun seems to be the first confirmed participant.

An ETimes report claims that Arjun is happy with the remuneration he is being offered and after Khatron Ke Khiladi 11 he is now ready to get locked in the Bigg Boss house for a few months.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Arjun Bijlani (@arjunbijlani)

A few days ago, Arjun while talking to Indian Express was asked he had been offered the show to which he confirmed, I have been offered Bigg Boss 15 and I am giving it a thought. However, I still dont know if I will eventually get locked in or not. Theres still a lot of time for that show.

For now, Arjuns fans are enjoying his stunt based performances on Khatron Ke Khiladi 11 which was shot in May-June in Cape Town, South Africa. Touted to be one of the finalists on Rohit Shettys show, Arjun now seems to be ready to take on a new adventure with Bigg Boss.

Bigg Boss in a unique attempt if first rolling out an OTT version of the show which will be hosted by Karan Johar and will reportedly see no celebrities. Bigg Boss 15 will follow the OTT show on TV arriving six weeks later.
Over the last two years, Google Drive users have repeatedly been asking the brains at Google to bring for them an option to block spam. Over these two years there has been an increase in the number of cases over time of phishing and spamming and this only takes head as there was no stopping these spammers from sharing content with millions of users with an email and this spammed content often resulted in monetary loss or a problem at a professional level as explicit content being shared on professional drives.Furthermore, the problems were reaching the maximum in third world countries as technological illiteracy was rampant across these nations leading the users in the most populated country of India to be the most susceptible to phishing and scamming attempts. Not only that, the spread of drive links through WhatsApp as sources of false information and hate crime only spurred Google to be there to take action quickly and swiftly.In order to stop these misinformation campaigns, spamming and phishing attempts Google has finally rolled out an option to block an email address from sharing content with you. The update was in beta testing from May and only recently has hit a few devices. It is expected to spread to every user within the next 14 days curbing spamming. This comes true to the fact that if there is an email that is repeatedly sharing spam content with you, this can be blocked by just a single tap. However, the users expected more from Google within these two years.Contrary to what users were asking for, Google presented an option to the users that does not stop spam in the first place but only prevents continuous spam. This update was unworthy of the two years that Google took developing and many tech experts voiced their concerns explicitly in the aforementioned terms.Despite the fact that this update is available to all the users and the associated applications like GSuite, it still doesnt solve the problem where users initially cannot identify spam and misinformation or are not technologically savvy to identify how they are being robbed off. Apart from that, it also enables the spammers to scam on with a new email address rendering the blocking useless. Alongside that, Google also has disabled this feature for the same domains giving anyone the ability to infiltrate a domain and scam on without getting a notice unless the organization itself takes note. The last of these concerns were voiced by parents who said that school domains can easily be infiltrated and toddlers of young age not knowing what spam is might be affected in several ways.Google has been asked to update this policy with more practical options and tighten security on who is and who is not allowed to share content with an email address. It is also been asked to employ a spam folder similar to Gmail with an algorithm and AI presence to push content there.Read next: Google is rolling out a handy feature to let users know about the 'why' of search results
Councillor John Reilly has asked if land owned by the Louth County Council can be used for a pumping station.

Cllr Reilly said he recently became aware that Louth County Council own a small plot of land adjacent to the M1 motorway at Balragan in Kilcurry.

He has asked Louth County Council and Irish Water if this is a suitable site for a pumping station.

Cllr Reilly said that over the last 12 months, he has made several representations to Irish Water.

They said the water mains can not be extended out to the Kilcurry area without a pumping station, according to Cllr Reilly.

The mains water currently passes this property for approximately another 60 meters and currently all the local households are depending on a well supply.

Every week, Cllr Reilly claims, people are knocking on his door looking for grants for a new well.

So many other households are forced to conserve water over the summer months in fear of their supply of water running out, he said.

Cllr Reilly said he would be failing in his duty as a public representative in that area to not to campaign on this issue which has been going on for many decades.

"Irish Water have been sitting on the fence on this issue", he said.

"I am appealing to Louth County Council to put more pressure on Irish Water who are neglecting a very large section of the population in north Louth not only in the Kilcurry area, but in Faughart and Ravensdale as well.

"If this site is suitable for a pumping station, I am determined to put as much pressure to facilitate the local community having the choice of a mains water supply in 2021.

"Surely this is not too much to ask for."
Minister of State for Skills and Further Education, Niall Collins, has this week stated that students who have been on the PUP will not miss out on their college grant, SUSI, when they return to college this September.

Minister Collins said, The student support scheme is a critical financial support for students participating in higher education. Some opposition politicians are scaremongering saying that students in receipt of the PUP will not qualify for their SUSI grant  this is completely false.

Collins explained that as in any statutory scheme, a core principle is that there is a consistency of approach and equitable treatment for applicants as part of the means assessment process. This applies to people who are dependent on different types of social protection payments.

Minister Collins added, The PUP has been treated as reckonable income since it was introduced in March 2020. Income from the Covid-19 payment has the same standing and is treated in a similar fashion to other Department of Social Protection payments, such as jobseeker's benefit or jobseeker's allowance. This means that a student or family on the PUP should be treated in the same way as a student or family who are dependent on jobseeker's benefit or allowance.

An important feature of the SUSI scheme is the change of circumstance provision. If a student has experienced a change of circumstances during 2021, they can apply to SUSI for their application to be assessed or re-assessed under a change of circumstances. Such a change in circumstances will clearly include no longer being in receipt of the PUP. Students will no longer be able to receive the payment from early September, in line with normal circumstances where students do not qualify for unemployment payments while at college.

Therefore, no student will miss out on the SUSI grant as a result of them being in receipt of the PUP because they will not be receiving it from September onwards concluded Minister Collins.
New Port Richey - Francis W. Lannon, Jr, 88, passed away in Florida on July 24, 2021 after a short illness. He was surrounded by all six of his children. Frank was born in Lawrence the son of Julia and Francis Lannon, Sr .He graduated from Central Catholic High School and Boston College. Aft
PORTALES  As the city grapples with New Mexicos legalization of recreational marijuana use, the city council on Thursday gave a first acknowledgement of a proposed ordinance that would regulate the smoking of tobacco and marijuana in the city.

The council decided to schedule a public workshop on the ordinance for its Aug. 3 meeting, and a public hearing and final decision on the proposed ordinance at its Aug. 17 session.

A notice of the proposed ordinance was expected to be published today in The News, City Clerk Joan Martinez-Terry said, fulfilling another requirement before an ordinance can become effective.

Stephen Doerr, who acted as city attorney Tuesday in place of his law partner Randy Knudson, said there is double-edge uncertainty in enacting local laws and regulations involving legal recreational marijuana.

Doerr has also been studying New Mexicos law that makes recreational marijuana legal for the Curry County Commission, for which he serves as general counsel.

On one hand, the states guidance on what will and will not be allowed is unclear, he said. On the other, if local governments fail to enact local ordinances by Sept. 1, they will be required to accept the states standards.

Regulations and standards are scattered all over the 186-page legalization law passed by the 2021 New Mexico Legislature, he said, and theres only a quarter-page about what local governments are authorized to do.

With that in mind, the city council agreed to launch the indoor consumption ordinance, anyway.

Doerr said, however, said the city welcomes ideas and suggestions about what should be in the ordinance.

In its current draft, the ordinance would ban smoking of tobacco or cannabis on any property that is less than 300 feet from a school or daycare building, or on any city property, fairgrounds or public transportation.

The ordinance would allow smoking of tobacco or marijuana in a private residence, unless it is used commercially to provide child care, adult care or healthcare; a retail tobacco or cannabis store, if the store is located in a standalone building; in a cigar bar or cannabis bar located in a standalone building.

Further, the draft of the ordinance states, smoking will be allowed in the facilities of a cannabis manufacturing company licensed by the United States to manufacture cannabis products, and that are used exclusively for marijuana production or marketing, provided it does not infiltrate other indoor workplaces; as well as in a state-licensed gaming facility, casino or bingo parlor.

A hotel or motel would be able to designate smoking rooms, provided they do not make up more than 10% of the available rooms.

In addition, cannabis smoking would be allowed in cultural or ceremonial activities by Native Americans, or on a stage or a movie set where performers smoke as part of the production.

Business owners and employers would be required to maintain smoking areas and post policies related to smoking.

Enforcement would be by citation police, who would have authority to inspect an establishment for compliance.

A violator of the ordinance who is 21 or older would be subject to penalties ranging from $100 to $500.

In discussion Tuesday, commissioners expressed concerns about odors associated with growing and using marijuana, including a variety described by one commissioner as skunk weed, and maintaining a distance of at least 300 feet from schools and day-care centers.

Budget action

The council also approved a final budget for fiscal 2022, which began July 1 and will end on June 30.

In all, funds presented a final budget recapitulation document, revenues were expected to be a little more than $26.5 million.

Expenses were expected to total nearly $29 million, leaving a deficit of more than $3.3 million, including $834,586 in reserves.

A proposed budget recapitulation presented with the final recommendation, however, shows the city will start the year with a cash balance of $23.1 million, more than enough to cover the deficit.

The citys general fund, the largest single fund, is expecting about $8.3 million in revenues, but about $10 million in expenditures, leaving a deficit of $1.8 million, which includes $834,586 in reserves.

To end fiscal 2021, which ended June 30, the general fund ended with a cash balance of $364,014, because of both increases in revenue and decreases in expenses.

Despite a decrease in revenues totaling about $1.6 million, the citys water and wastewater fund, the next largest after the general fund, ended the fiscal year with a positive balance of $2.7 million due to a decrease in expenditures that totaled nealry $4.3 million.

Fiscal yearend balances totaled $19.5 million in all funds, which included just over $1 million in the general fund, and balances of nearly $2 million in a gross-receipts tax water project loan debt service fund, $9.7 million in a water enterprise and account, $1.6 million in a solid waste enterprise fund, and $3.5 million in a utility reserve fund.

Other matters

In other action, the council:

 Approved two change orders for the Johnson Hill East water tank project. One extends the time allowed on the contract by 45 days due to sand blasting operations taking longer than expected. The other decreases the amout to be paid to Smithco Construction of Caballo, on the contract by $111,716.32, from more than $1, 542,355.38 to $1,430639.06, before gross receipts taxes are added in, due to less in materials being required than originally thought.

 Authorized payment of $50,000 in Local Economic Development Act funds to the Roosevelt County Community Development Corporation to support economic development activities that include.expansion and retention of existing businesses, assisting in the opening of new businesses, and assistance businesses that seek to locate in Portales.

 Presented a retirement gift to Beatriz Valdez, head custodian.

 Renewed an easement on a residents fence that encroaches on city property by 7.5 feet.
DRAFT guidelines for the hospitality sector have been published ahead of the reopening of indoor dining on Monday.

The long-awaited guidelines were published late on Friday night and include a number of new rules for indoor hospitality.

Here is a look at what the new guidelines will mean and what can be expected with the return of indoor dining.

Who will be allowed to dine indoors under the new rules?

From Monday, indoor hospitality will reopen for people who are fully vaccinated or have recovered from Covid-19 in the past six months, as well as children under 18 in their care.

What is needed to prove that you can dine inside?

The EU Digital COVID Certificate (DCC) will be the primary evidence used when going into a pub, restaurant, cafe or food court to access indoor hospitality. People across the country are currently receiving their EU Digital COVID Certificate via email and by post.

However, other proofs of immunity will be set out in regulations and will include the HSE Covid-19 Vaccination Record.

Under 18s who are accompanied by a parent or guardian in an indoor setting, currently do not require Proof of Immunity.

All patrons, except those under the age of 18, will also be required to provide their name and phone number. The data will be kept for 28 days and must be compliant with GDPR.

The information will be recorded for both walk-ins and pre-bookings.

Previously, just one person was required to provide contact details.

Children under 18 may also be asked for a photo ID to prove that they are under 18 and are allowed to enter the premises with a permitted person.

How will the requirements be monitored?

Measures will need to be in place to ensure a person cannot access premises without being checked.

According to Failte Ireland guidance, there must be "a defined, managed and supervised entrance point with an appropriate queue management system" at the entrance to premises or at the point of entry to seating areas, that is controlled by personnel.

Businesses will have access to a Digital COVID Certificate checker which can be used to check the validity of a Digital COVID Certificate.

This weekend, it can be used by businesses for testing ahead of the opening of indoor hospitality on Monday.

Businesses may refuse access where people cannot offer proof of vaccination or recovery or cannot demonstrate that their certificate relates to them.

If businesses do not operate on this basis, they may be liable for fines or closure.

What happens if a customer has to leave?

If a customer leaves for any reason, for example, to access a smoking area, they will have to notify a staff member.

Ideally, they will then be provided with a pass which must be returned or checked on re-entry.

How many people can dine at a table?

Published by Failte Ireland, the guidelines also state that a maximum of six people over the age of 13 are allowed at each table.

The limit of six does not include children aged 12 or younger.

The total combined capacity at a table cannot exceed 15.

Customers can avail of table service, however, they cannot approach or order from the bar or other counter.

All customers are required to wear face coverings at all times other than when seated at their table.

All staff will continue to wear appropriate PPE including face masks.

Are there any time limits on indoor dining?

There will be no time limits on indoor dining, however, the guidelines state that all premises must be clear of all customers by 11.30 pm.
Investigations are continuing after a cyclist was killed in a collision in Cork on Saturday evening.

A male cyclist was killed in the road accident which occurred at approximately 6:20 pm on Saturday.

The man, aged in his 40s, was involved in a collision with a car at Meadstown in Kildorrery.

He received treatment at the scene following the incident but was later pronounced dead.

According to Gardai, the road has now reopened and investigations are continuing.

The man was taken to Cork University Hospital where a post-mortem examination will take place.

Gardai are appealing for anyone with information about the collision, or anyone who may have video including dashcam footage, to contact them.

Gardai can be contacted at Fermoy garda station on 025 82100 or the garda confidential line on 1800 666 111.
EAMON de Valera was greeted by a splendid crowd, headed by Lord Mayor OCallaghan of Cork, on arrival in Dublin last night, the Echo reported on Saturday, July 23, 1921.

The President of Dail Eireann was hailed after the terms of the agreement reached in London appeared to be a good deal more acceptable than nearly all the forecasts predicted.

There was a brave fluttering of Sinn Fein flags and the crowd amused itself in the customary fashion while waiting for de Valera by singing patriotic songs.

The terms of the agreement include (1) Ireland, as a unit, to frame her own Constitution. (2) Great Britain to accept this Constitution and Irelands right to independence. (3) Irelands limit to framing her own Constitution to be set by the need for a peaceful settlement between the Catholic and Protestant sections of the nation. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George will announce the exact terms next week. The Governments offer to Southern Ireland is of the fullest possible autonomy, subject to the army, navy and air force remaining under Imperial control.

Fiscal autonomy is implied and the Imperial contribution would be considerably reduced. Ireland would not escape an equitable share of the burden of the war debt.

Breaches of the Truce

Commandant Barry, IRA Chief Liaison Officer for Munster, Wexford and Kilkenny stated today that there have been complaints from the public of breaches of the truce.

He said the commandeering of vehicles or the imposing of levies are not official and are not carried out by the IRA. Such demands should not be complied with and reported right away.

Shark and Alexandria

Palmer Brothers intend to continue the service they have been operating with the steamers Shark and Alexandria between Cork and Castletownbere, Sneem and Cahirciveen during the recent close down of railways.

But for the service, the traders of Cork would have found it difficult to keep open their connections with outlying districts for the past few months. The boats on the route have a good speed and are well suited for the conveyance of cargo. The agency for the steamers is in the hands of Dowdall & Co., Grand Parade.

Cork Corporation Meeting

At the Corporation meeting, Mr Mahony complained that a lot of loose stones were being thrown on the streets by young people and causing damage for motorists and cyclists. He asked if the Corporation was responsible in case of accident. The matter was referred to the City Solicitor. A complaint about the footpaths near the Mercy Hospital made by Mr Gamble was referred to the City Engineer.

Mr Barry inquired if steps were being taken by Ford to repair the road through the Marina, which was a disgrace. The City Solicitor replied that the engineering work was practically completed and Ford were bound to have it ready and handed over to the Corporation by April. Alderman Beamish said the Corporation had given valuable sites cheaply to Messrs Ford for them to carry out their great works and was led to believe some 10,000 men would be employed. As it stands, there are only 400.

Alderman Beamish said: When I promise a thing, I should not need time to carry out my promise. They knew their obligations. He wanted to pass a resolution but the matter was not on the meetings agenda and it was agreed it would be put to the La and Finance Committee.

Cork Police Court

A well-dressed young man named John Bradley, with an address in Glasgow, was charged by Head Constable Browne with the larceny of a gold watch and chain, the property of Patrick Walsh. Browne said both men were lodging in Hoskins Hotel, Princes Street.

Mr Walsh had the watch and chain in his suitcase in his room from which it was stolen on the 21st. The matter was reported, and Sergeant Hollywood found the items on the accused, who was returned for trial at the next Quarter Sessions.

Bradley said, Im very sorry, I dont know what made me do such an act.

Lost, Strayed or Drifted

Drifted from Currabinny on Friday, 15-foot varnished punt. Painted grey underneath.

Lost: two pond notes between Bandon Road and St. Finbarrs West Church on Sunday last. Finder rewarded.

Strayed, on the 16th: a black and white fox terrier answering to Bronco. Reward given if returned to 354, Blarney Street.

Lost Mayfield Road, Tuesday evening, handbag containing Rosary beads.
Graveside services for Annie (Thibodeaux) Rowley, 72, Enid, are 10:00 am, Tuesday, August 3, 2021 at Enid Cemetery. Funeral arrangements are under the direction of Ladusau-Evans Funeral Home. Condolences may be made at www.ladusauevans.com.
Click for the latest, full-access Enid News & Eagle headlines | Text Alerts | app downloads

Hassler is the digital content coordinator for the Enid News & Eagle.

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.
Following the sexual assault allegations against Trevor Bauer, he and his legal counsel appeared in a court hearing in Los Angeles to clear his name.

According to TMZ, the LA Dodgers star and his accuser faced in the courtroom. The hearing was scheduled because the prosecutors would like to determine whether the accuser's temporary restraining order should be extended or change into a permanent one.

Bauer's representative argues that he wants to send in three witnesses to contest the existing restraining order.

On the other hand, the woman will be calling six witnesses that will help her prolong the restraining order.

The NBL star's lawyer clarified in court that Bauer will not answer any questions that could "self-incriminate him" if ever he is called to stand by the judge.

The accuser's temporary restraining order will remain valid until August 2. The date of the proceedings has been moved because the athlete's lawyer needed more time to review legal documents.

Trevor Bauer's Accuser Shares Disturbing Details On Sexual Assault Allegations

In early reports, the unnamed woman filed an 84-page restraining order application last month. She detailed her unfortunate encounter with Bauer.

The woman alleges that the NBL star choked her unconscious, and she was penetrated anally without consent.

The accuser revealed that their alleged sexual relationship began with consent and later became a scary experience. She claims that she met Bauer through social media and immediately met up with him in Los Angeles.

During their first sexual encounter, the woman claims the Dodgers star started putting his finger down her throat aggressively. He also "wrapped" her hair around her neck, causing her to lose consciousness.

READ NOW: Raymond Cavaleri Cause of Death: How did the 'Dennis The Menace' Child Actor Die?

When she woke up facing down the bed, Bauer allegedly forced himself into her causing her anus to bleed.

She mentioned that she was in deep pain and the athlete even joked with her the moment she woke up the next day.

The pair lost contact for a month but later had a sexual encounter again; at the time, they agreed to have a "safe word."

For the second time, she was allegedly choked unconscious again. When she woke up, Bauer is allegedly punching her face causing her lips to burst.

The accuser provided evidence like photos, voice recordings, and messages in her restraining order application.

Trevor Bauer Denies Allegations

Per the athlete's representative, they mentioned that they have a loophole regarding the claims.

He revealed that the woman is allegedly "turned on" with his choking as he received a message saying, "Gimme all the pain. Rawr."

READ ALSO: Savannah Smith Drops Jawdropping Detail About 'Gossip Girl' Character Monet de Haan
Fans called out the "90 Day Finace" couple Stacey Silva and Florian Sukaj for their fake and staged photos on Instagram.

Users had reposted screenshots of Florian's Instagram stories on another account called "90 Day Fiance Fanatics 2," where a post was captioned "high on love with Stacey and Florian," and garnered the attention of avid fans.

According to sources, fans compared the image of the reality stars to a "blowup doll" kissing a "corpse."

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While others can see right through the pair, they claimed the post as evidence that they cannot stand each other. "He looks like the walking dead, and she is too old for the Barbie look," said one fan.

Other similar comments were, "He looks like a meth head. She looks like a botched Barbie," and "The cadaver and the blowup doll."

"She's in love. He's just along for the ride! Unfortunately I don't think this is a lasting relationship."

Stacey and Florian claimed that they are in love with no marital issues, having moved on from their cheating scandal.

Has Stacey Already Forgiven Florian for Cheating?

Stacey admitted that Florian's cheating strengthened their relationship as the couple feels like they are "going forward."

"I think it made us stronger, the past doesn't exist in our hearts," said the TV star as she continues to talk about their "bond."

Based on this article, Florian's cheating arose days before their wedding day as the twins discovered a picture of him kissing another girl.

READ ALSO: [VIDEOS] '90 Day Fiance' Fans Create Hilarious TikTok Trend For Big Ed, Rose's 'I Like The View.'

Stacey Silva Claims Florian Sukaj is a 'Wonderful Stepfather'

Stacey Silva called her husband Florian Sukaj a "wonderful stepfather" to her children and promised that fans would "love him too," reported California News-Times.

The "90 Day Fiance" star has two teenage sons who will not be featured in any future season of the reality show.

"They are more private and I respect it," said Stacey, who also shared that Florian and her kids are "great behind the scenes." The 46-year-old then confessed that her age is a barrier to the couple's desire to have their children.

Fans can expect Florian's perspective on the matter during the second season as the only alternative they have is inducing IVF on Stacy. However, Suraj wishes on a "miracle" from God as his religious background contrast with the medical procedure.

READ MORE: RHOBH Erika Jayne's Real Net Worth After Divorce With No Prenup Revealed
Thirty-one Texas legislators have sent a letter to Gov. Greg Abbott and Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath asking them to reverse the current ban on mask mandates in schools.

Rep. Vikki Goodwin, D-Austin, sent the letter, which was also signed by Democratic San Antonio Reps. Trey Martinez, Barbara Gervin-Hawkins, Diego Bernal and Liz Campos.

Even vaccinated people can catch and spread coronavirus, Goodwin said. We must continue to fight against this virus with all the tools at our disposal.

Children under the age of 12 cannot get a coronavirus vaccine. Goodwin said putting them all in one building without masks is foolish.

On ExpressNews.com: We are fully in the middle of another surge  SAs COVID hospitalizations reach 418

The letter was sent Friday, the same day city and county officials urged San Antonians to get vaccinated. Hospitalizations have climbed to 418 patients  the most since March. A majority of those hospitalized with the virus, 95 to 97 percent, havent been vaccinated.

About 38 percent of residents eligible to get vaccinated havent been fully vaccinated. A quarter of eligible residents havent gotten one dose.

Goodwin also asked for schools to have the ability to provide virtual class to students. She mentioned that although young students are less likely to show symptoms, any of them can carry the virus home to older or sick family members.

Families are concerned about matters of life and death; if they feel that pulling their child out of school is the only way to survive, then they will do that, Goodwin said. The least we can do is provide them an option so they will not have to sacrifice their childs education to ensure their safety.

On ExpressNews.com: Gov. Greg Abbott rules out another mask mandate, despite rise in COVID cases

Abbott last week dismissed reinstating a mask mandate in an interview with Houstons KPRC 2 News.

It would be inappropriate to require people who already have immunity to wear a mask, he said.

Coronavirus vaccines are free. To find out where to get a shot vaccinated, you can check the daily listing of vaccination sites that appears online at ExpressNews.com and on page A2.

liz.hardaway@hearst.com | Twitter: @liz_hardaway
Stephen F. Austin, Donnie Darko and a person who calls himself the King of the Wild Frontier were among the first people to give money to support Gov. Greg Abbotts border wall effort after he announced he would be seeking private donations to help fund it.

But theres no way to verify if Austin, who donated $10, is of any relation to the man known as the Father of Texas, or if Darko, who gave $25, bears resemblance to the titular character in the cult film about a teenage boy who meets a man in a bunny suit who tells him the world will end in 28 days. The King of the Wild Frontier donated $50, but public records dont state where he lives.

Despite promises from Abbott that transparency in the crowdfunding process for the border wall would be paramount, donor information released to the Texas Tribune for the first week of collections was bereft of any way to verify the identities of the majority of the donors. Abbotts office is not disclosing the locations of donors, nor is it requiring that they identify themselves with their real names.

We expect full transparency and accountability, Abbott said in June when announcing the crowdfunding effort. So the public will know all the money coming in and how that money is being used.

The shortcomings in the donation disclosures have raised ethical concerns about the private fundraising effort for the governors major state initiative.

Experts have warned that without clear disclosure rules and enforcement, the public may never truly know who is funding the states border wall. Worse, they warned, it could invite the perception of a pay to play system in which donors, who are anonymous to the public, benefit from their donations to one of Abbotts priority projects.

You dont want to have this big slush fund of money that is going to this pet project of the state executive that has zero accountability to anybody, with money coming in from who knows what and God knows who, said Beth Rotman, national director of money in politics and ethics at Common Cause, the government watchdog group.

The Tribune reviewed donations to Abbotts border wall efforts that covered the first eight days of its existence, from June 10-17. During that time, the state received more than 3,300 individual donations. The highest was $5,000.

As of Thursday, the total donations for the wall exceeded more than $873,000, but the list of individual donor names beyond the first eight days was not immediately available.

In addition to potentially fake names, the list also includes dozens of incomplete names. Donors are identified as R T, S P, Red A and A Rim.

Abbotts office did release the city and state information for just 25 donors who had sent money in the mail before the establishment of its online fundraising portal on June 16. All except two of those donations came from outside of Texas. One $10 donation received by mail was from American Citizen/Veteran and was listed as anonymous.

After being presented with the Tribunes findings, Abbott spokesperson Renae Eze repeated the governors commitment to ensuring full transparency and accountability to our fellow Texans, saying Abbott had followed a process that has been around for decades to oversee gifts, grants and donations, to establish the border walls funding mechanism.

Eze added that the donations were subject to the states public information laws and that Abbotts office was releasing the information in accordance with those laws.

Due to the sensitive nature of the personal information for the credit card transactions, and the very real fear of retaliation for donating to the border security mission, billing information is only being kept by the state agency responsible for processing the credit card financial transactions, Eze said in a statement. Until the Biden Administration starts doing their job, Texas is stepping up to secure our southern border and protect Texans and Americans alike.

The Tribune has not sought the disclosure of the donors credit card numbers, but it has asked for donor names, cities and states to aid in the verification of identities.

In a similar instance, when Arizona tried to crowdfund the legal defense of a controversial immigration law that allowed police to ask people their citizenship status, the state released the names of donors and the states where they lived.

Not everyone who donated to Texas wall hid their identity.

Political consultants like Sherry Sylvester, a top aide to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, gave at least $50, and Allen Blakemore, who advises some of the states top GOP politicians, including Patrick, donated $25.

Most people dont have a problem with it, said Robin Kolodny, chair of the political science department at Temple University. Look at the Koch brothers, (Sheldon) Adelson, Michael Bloomberg. They hide nothing. Im not saying there arent people trying to hide. But theres a lot of people who dont have a problem.

Kolodny, who has studied public disclosures in campaign financing, said people who donate to efforts like Abbotts border wall do so because they believe in the cause.

Its solidarity, she said. Its me showing Im with this.

Experts likened the fundraising effort for the wall to political contributions for campaigns and said that Abbotts office should put in place tools to reassure the public of the projects transparency.

You dont want to have anonymity because it raises the danger that somebody will be steering public policy, said Richard Briffault, a law professor at Columbia University.

Under Texas political reporting laws, campaigns are required to ask donors for their name, address and business occupation to verify their identity. But Abbotts border wall fundraising is not governed by those laws and does not have those requirements.

It makes sense, certainly, that you have an executive saying that we are going to disclose where the funds are coming from, Rotman said. But if thats not meaningful disclosure  when its just a pledge, then its not really worth the paper that its written on.

Rotman said Abbott could start by adding language to the website asking donors to certify that they use their legal name. His office also could list donor names on the website contemporaneously for the public  as opposed to only providing them in response to open records requests  and add software that would prevent donors from listing incomplete names.

If you think its important, then you have to say Im not going to let somebody write down Donnie Darko and give me the cash, she said. Its very possible for Texas to do this in a way that Texans will have disclosure in the way that the governor has promised.

Beyond getting rid of the cloud of anonymity, experts also said more disclosure could help remove the perception of pay to play, in which influential donors could give money to Abbotts border wall project in the hopes of political favors or government contracts in the future.

If youre looking at lobbyists or political advisers who want him to hire them because he wants to run for president, maybe theyre all staking their claims, Kolodny said.

Abbotts office did not respond to questions about those concerns.

On the flip side, a requirement for addresses and occupations could help avoid confusion. One name among the list of early donors is Mike Toomey, who donated $100. That is the name of one of the states top lobbyists, whom Abbott tapped last year to head a strike force to reopen Texas during the coronavirus pandemic.

But Toomey, the lobbyist, said he had not donated to the border wall.

Thats not me, he said.

The system also has opened the door for creative donors to send political messages to state officials.

On June 17, one donor gave $1, the minimum amount required to donate to the campaign. Under the field for name, the donor listed StopWasting TaxpayerMoney.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.
Jennifer Sue Delgado was 8 years old when she was fatally stabbed in 1988 by a teen described as enraged about a faulty vending machine.

Now, 33 years later, while her assailant has never been found and the case has gone cold, a childhood friend is on a quest to keep her name alive by designating part of the West Side street where she was killed the Jennifer Sue Delgado Memorial Way.

Christopher Palmer was 8 when he learned that Jennifer, called a breath of fresh air by another friend, was killed.

I knew she was gone, but at that age I didnt realize the finality of it, he said.

Palmer has a Valentines Day card Jennifer gave him in the second grade, a keepsake that helps him keep her memory alive for him. But what he has in mind now will take a lot more.

In order to designate the street where Jennifer was killed a memorial way, Palmer must raise up to $5,000  $1,000 for the citys application fee and the rest to pay for the signage.

He has set up a GoFundMe campaign, which had raised $752 as of Saturday afternoon.

How she died

Roberta Barnes /San Antonio Express-News

On the afternoon of June 7, 1988, Jennifer and her mother, Melida Delgado, were waiting for their clothes to dry at what was then Westrock Coin-Op Wash & Dry.

They were talking about the upcoming summer  Jennifer wanted to spend it with her grandmother in Cotulla  at the rear of the laundromat as a male who appeared to be a teenager walked out of a restroom, according to Express-News archives.

On ExpressNews.com: Hes got a gun: Luling woman testifies of driving past headquarters when San Antonio police officer was shot

The teen  who remains unidentified, police said  had put 50 cents in a soda machine that didnt dispense the drink. In an interview that year, Melida Delgado recalled hearing the teen punch the machine.

Suddenly, she felt someone next standing next to her, then a blade stabbing her.

It was real quick. I didnt really see it, Delgado said in 1988.

He then slashed Jennifer in her stomach as she jumped up from her chair, according to reports.

The mother and daughter ran down the street to a next-door neighbors yard, where they collapsed. Jennifers father, Rogelio Delgado, heard the commotion and ran to them, according to reports.

Jennifer was rushed to Wilford Hall Air Force Medical Center, where she died.

The investigation

Jim Blaylock /San Antonio Express-News

The attacker was described as about 5 feet 4 inches tall with shoulder-length hair and wearing jeans and a flowered blue and white Hawaiian shirt. Witnesses said he appeared to be 17 to 18 years old and to weigh about 130 pounds.

After stabbing the Delgados, the teen jumped into a gray late-model car that headed west on U.S. 90, reports state. A 13-year-old witness told police a second person was behind the wheel.

Days later, investigators released an enhanced drawing of the teen developed with information from Jennifers mother.

On ExpressNews.com: San Antonio loan officer pleads guilty in Capitol riot

Police dusted the soda machine  including the coins inside  for fingerprints, according to an Express-News article from June 1989. They followed tips from the hundreds of calls that came in. And they brought in a hypnotist to elicit more information from Jennifers mother.

Police interviewed 17 suspects, narrowing the list to three and then to none; all had alibis, police said.

In October 1988, several months after Jennifers death, her former classmates and the Parent Teacher Association at Westwood Terrace Elementary School raised money to offer a reward.

Becky Chenault, a first grade teacher at the time, said they wanted to keep the interest going.

The reward, however, was never collected, and today, police have no fresh leads, cold case investigators said.

Remembering Jennifer

Jessica Phelps /San Antonio Express-News

Faith Menchaca had been best friends with Jennifer since kindergarten. Now 42, she remembers Jennifer as a hide-and-seek pro who always picked the most mysterious places to hide.

She was a breath of fresh air  very positive, always smiling, always giving positive intent, Menchaca said. It hurts my heart that she wasnt able to go through all the things a girl should go through.

But Menchaca said she always felt Jennifers spirit pushing her to each milestone, from getting her first car to earning her bachelors and masters degrees.

When she started work at USAA, Menchaca ran into Jennifers sister Dora Dee Dee Delgado in the hallway. They became friends, sharing words of encouragement and reminiscing about Jennifer.

In 2001, Palmer got many of Jennifers classmates together for a candlelight vigil where she died.

Palmer thinks about how Jennifer didnt get to experience the milestones he did  finding a job, going to college, getting married with children. As a father of two, Palmer found himself thinking about her more often as his children reached 8 years old, Jennifers age when she died.

This year, he decided to try and build a permanent memorial for her.

Initially, he wanted to have a stone monument placed on the property, Palmer said. Then city developers Palmer consulted with suggested a memorial way designation, which would be less disruptive to area businesses.

It means the world to me, Menchaca said of the designation, because she never got justice.

District 6 Councilwoman Melissa Cabello Havrda expressed support for Palmers efforts in a statement, calling Jennifers story tragic.

It shook the District 6 community and has had an effect to this day, Havrda said. The movement to rename a portion of the street where she lost her life has momentum, and I stand ready to support the effort.

On ExpressNews.com: Here are the six murals the city of San Antonio is hoping encourages you to get the COVID-19 vaccine

Palmer has been in touch with Jennifers sister, he said. And while family members tell him they have their own sense of closure, having placed Jennifers death in Gods hands, designating the street a memorial way would give Palmer and other classmates closure in a different way.

Palmer is hopeful that keeping Jennifers memory alive could also jog the memory of a witness or someone else with knowledge of what happened.

And while hes doubtful that Jennifers killer will be found, renaming the street would be an end for me but also a lasting reminder of who she was for those of us who knew her.

News researcher Misty Harris contributed to this report.

jbeltran@express-news.net
Critical race theory has become a catch-all phrase that some Texas politicians are now misrepresenting for political gain. Every Texan should be concerned, because misleading statements can fracture communities and foster a curriculum that is unable to prepare students for future roles in our economy and democracy.

Texans should not be concerned with critical race theory, which is a theory primarily taught in graduate law and education courses. In fact, without even knowing it, many Texans probably already agree with tenets of critical race theory, which include the recognition that there are no biological differences between races, that racism can be systemic and extend beyond the actions of a few bad apples, and the voices of people of color should be valued and included in the policymaking process.

The attack on critical race theory is not based on evidence, but it is being used partly to advance Senate Bill 3. Any suggestion that critical race theory is being taught in schools is odd because the Texas Education Code has long outlined social studies standards, as well as teacher and principal certification requirements. At no point did these standards or requirements ever include critical race theory.

What Texans should be concerned about is SB 3 because it will selectively remove historical events and documents highlighting the struggles and accomplishments of people of color and women. Texans should want a social studies curriculum that accurately represents the past.

The proposed SB 3 seeks to rewrite history by removing curricular requirements that cover the contributions of people of color. Specifically, the bill would remove the writings of Frederick Douglass and historical documents related to the Chicano movement, womens suffrage and equal rights, the civil rights movement, and the American labor movement. The bill goes as far as removing Martin Luther King Jr.s Letter from a Birmingham Jail and I Have a Dream speech.

This is not the first time Texas has tried to whitewash history. A 2015 state-adopted textbook in Texas referred to enslaved people as immigrant workers. It was not until 2018 that the State Board of Education decided that the curriculum should be changed to emphasize that slavery was a primary cause of the Civil War.

The removal or flawed interpretations of historical content has negative implications for all students. Through history, students understand the many factors that help to explain changes in our society. History also provides students with identity and helps them understand how their families, communities and nation have developed. History is essential for being a good citizen and playing important roles in our democracy, such as informed voter, community leader or elected official. For students of color, girls and members of the LGBTQ community, it is especially important that they see themselves represented in history.

Unfortunately, many other Republican-led states are attempting to eliminate the experiences of historically marginalized groups from curricula. Nine states have already enacted recent bans on critical race theory or limited how teachers can discuss racism, sexism and other current events. Many other states have introduced similar bills or taken other steps to restrict curricula.

The misleading framing of critical race theory and the proposed SB 3 should concern every Texan. We do not have to agree on everything in the curriculum, but we must collectively challenge our elected officials to be truthful whether it be through voting, attending public forums or organizing. We also must reject any policy that whitewashes our states and nations history.

Rather than debating critical race theory or being distracted by a manufactured controversy, all Texans should reject attempts by politicians who actively seek to distort history. We should want all of our schools to teach children to care about one another, understand our nations accomplishments and shortcomings, and be good stewards of our system of government.

David DeMatthews is an associate professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Texas at Austin.
Re: Let white kids learn truth of slavery, Another View, July 17:

Kudos to Frances McGovernor for succinctly and elegantly expressing her approach to teaching U.S. history in Texas schools, which included all our history and avoided whitewashing.

And I want to add that I am an Anglo who is married to a Latino so that my name does not mislead any reader.

Rebecca Lopez

Shameful to be asleep

Re: Cartoon, Editorial Page, Monday:

As woke, I see the absurdities in this editorial cartoon. Woke is awareness, and my wokeness arose from the experience of being a Southerner raised on Lost Cause justifications that contradict truth.

I feel no guilt for what others did, but I would feel shame if I were sleeping.

Thank you for the excellent column by Frances McGovernor, Let white kids learn truth of slavery on July 17.

Theresa S. Doyle

Downright Orwellian

When I was in high school back in the 1960s, we read a certain book about how democracy can be taken from us.

The first steps were to control information, thus controlling peoples thinking. Perhaps it should be required reading for all high school students, but especially for the Texas Legislature, the governor and the lieutenant governor.

George Orwells Animal Farm is a timeless classic with a message much needed today, as it was when it was published 77 years ago and when I read it more than 50 years ago.

John Olmstead

Stifling truth, speech

Re: New law not swaying educators, Front Page, July 18:

Holy guacamole! Were we asleep in high school world history class?

Socrates warned us of politicians caring more about holding power and pandering to their audiences rather than honestly seeking the truth.

To stifle open discussions about racism  or any controversial topic, for that matter  is to close the book on discourse and slam the breaks on the First Amendment protecting free speech.

Next, will this overtly capital-punishment state prescribe hemlock for those underling teachers breaking House Bill 3979?

Jesse L. Howell

History repeats itself

Afghan war revealed limits of U.S. military, Nation & World, July 18:

Replace Afghanistan with Vietnam and your article is 50-plus years old. The United States replaced France in Southeast Asia, and we replaced the Soviets in Afghanistan. Variations on a theme. So why is anyone surprised?

George Santayana said, Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

With so many state and federal legislatures incapable of making routine decisions based on good objectives and a collective vision of the future of our nation, how will future decisions like those in the article be made when so many members of the legislative branch have no military experience?

Veterans may side with me when I say sitting on a committee that deals with the military is not the same as making military decisions on a daily basis.

Retired Lt. Col. Steven Schneider, Converse

Cartoon a contortion; no apologies

Re: Editorial cartoon, July 12:

Your editorial team recently published a political cartoon that twisted my words to say I called for chaos carte blanche in a recently released and secretly recorded video.

In reality, I was pointing out that chaos within the current administration was helpful in stopping its radical agenda. As I have already made clear publicly, I make no apologies for opposing Democrats radical, far-left agenda wherever it appears.

I have consistently pursued commonsense, bipartisan legislation throughout my career in the House. Ive worked with my Democratic colleagues on bipartisan legislation, including the PPP Flexibility Act with U.S. Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn.; the TRUST in Congress Act with U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va.; and the Criminal Judicial Administration Act with Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y.  all of which your paper has been woefully remiss in covering.

I know the difference between compromise and surrender; if your team paid fuller attention to my record, they might learn it as well.

To further clarify my position to those still unable to comprehend it, I do not, nor will I ever, apologize for favoring anything that slows and halts radical leftist legislation. I am wholly committed to fighting against the far lefts anti-American agenda and standing athwart to the radical policies of a Marxist left that wants to destroy the last vestige of freedom remaining in America.

At the same time, U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., said recently that the whole thing falling apart is probably the best thing when referring to ongoing infrastructure talks. Should we expect to see your paper give him similar treatment for those remarks?

I will continue to fight to stop the radical left  and weak Republicans  from furthering our decline, and I will not apologize for it.

U.S. Rep. Chip Roy
PARIS (AP)  France's parliament approved a law early Monday requiring special virus passes for all restaurants and domestic travel and mandating vaccinations for all health workers.

Both measures have prompted protests and political tensions. President Emmanuel Macron and his government say they are needed to protect vulnerable populations and hospitals as infections rebound and to avoid new lockdowns.

The law requires all workers in the health care sector to start getting vaccinated by Sept. 15, or risk suspension. It also requires a health pass to enter all restaurants, trains, planes and some other public venues. It initially applies to all adults, but will apply to everyone 12 and older starting Sept. 30.

To get the pass, people must have proof they are fully vaccinated, recently tested negative or recently recovered from the virus. Paper or digital documents will be accepted. The law says a government decree will outline how to handle vaccination documents from other countries.

The bill was unveiled just six days ago. Lawmakers worked through the night and the weekend to reach a compromise version approved by the Senate on Sunday night and by the National Assembly after midnight. The rules can be applied through Nov. 15, depending on the virus situation.

Macron appealed for national unity and mass vaccination to fight the resurgent virus, and lashed out at those fueling anti-vaccine sentiment and protests.

About 160,000 people protested around France on Saturday against a special COVID-19 pass for restaurants and mandatory vaccinations for health workers. Many marchers shouted liberty! and said the government shouldnt tell them what to do.

Visiting a hospital in French Polynesia afterward, Macron urged national unity and asked, What is your freedom worth if you say to me I dont want to be vaccinated, but tomorrow you infect your father, your mother or myself?

While he said protesters are free to express themselves in a calm and respectful manner, he said demonstrations wont make the coronavirus go away.

He criticized people who are in the business of irrational, sometimes cynical, manipulative mobilization against vaccination. Among those organizing the protests have been far-right politicians and extremist members of Frances yellow vest movement tapping into anger at Macrons government.

More than 111,000 people with the virus have died in France, which is registering about 20,000 new infections daily compared to just a few thousand earlier this month. Concerns for hospitals are resurfacing.

___

Follow APs pandemic coverage at:

https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic

https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine

https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak
Scottish farm leaders have set out an industry-backed roadmap to ensure the sector can produce food while meeting climate change and biodiversity targets.

NFU Scotland and Scotland's Rural College (SRUC) have designed a uniquely Scottish future agricultural policy framework that aims to deliver the outcomes required.

According to policy experts, the proposals will deliver on food production, climate change and biodiversity ambitions simultaneously.

It is a policy approach they believe fully recognises the complexity of current farm businesses and the need for a single coherent policy framework that can deliver across all sectors and farm types and sizes in Scotland.

The basis for support is how production is undertaken, rather than how much, with such an approach aiming to safeguard the rural economy while also recognising the urgency of tackling emissions and biodiversity loss.

NFU Scotland and farmer-led Climate Change Groups (FLGs) say agriculture should contribute to achieving these goals, as does the Farming for 1.5 Degrees Final Report published this week.

Official figures show that the Scottish agriculture industry accounts for 20 percent of the country's greenhouse gas emissions.

Union president Martin Kennedy said any future agricultural policy framework should enable a 'just transition' from where farmers were today to where they needed to be in just a few short years.

He said: Critical to success in agriculture delivering against Scotlands ambitious climate, biodiversity and food sector ambitions is an appreciation by all, in particular Scottish government, that action is required now."

This approach would ensure that Scottish farming and crofting met environmental and climate challenges in a 'uniquely Scottish way', he added, while still delivering high quality, sustainable food production.

Kick-starting change within the industry is required now so that farmers and crofters can start adjusting their systems and businesses through a transition phase to 2025 prior to a new agri policy being implemented," Mr Kennedy said.


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Lionel Messi continues enjoying of his holidays beside his family in the middle of an unusual circumstance along his dilated career futbolistica, as to the not having agreement with any team, does not have compulsory official date of turn on holiday. Well it is true that everything seems encarrilado with the FC Barcelona and that his turn would not have to demorarse, as in alone 20 days starts LaLiga, but by the moment follows desconectado.

Like this then , the family Messi decided to leave the beaches of Miami to enjoy of the paradise caribeno. As they warned different fans in the social networks and as it could confirm ESPN Argentinian, the Champion of America finds in Dominican Republic. According to the mentioned information, the Argentinian star and his family landed in the International Airport of The Roman and afterwards displaced to a villa of the complex Marries of Field.

Therefore, it is very likely that the last video published by the own Messi, where appears in a swimming pool playing and besandose under the water with his wife, have been recorded precisely in territory caribeno. A recording that went back viral in the social networks by the tenderness of the husbands.

TENDERNESS To 100%! Moment of relax for Leo Messi and Anto Roccuzzo, on holiday: a love for all the life. pic.twitter.com/wtwpae2laa  SportsCenter (@SC_ESPN) July 24, 2021

The dominican fans have not left to happen the opportunity to ask him a photo to the Argentinian star, that no for to enjoy of the beach in his holidays of summer. His return to Barcelona is still a mystery, but definitively to Messi no sees him concerned by this. After his historical triumph with Argentina, only subtracts him enjoy of his good life.

To the expectation

And while the historical '10' of the Barcelona club happens his days in floor caribeno, Joan Laporta and his team follow working for being able to open him space to the Argentinian star, in addition to to his new signings of face to the next season, as the 'fair play' financial is supposing a big problem.

The 'operation gone out' of the Barca has stagnated and therefore the release of mass salarial follows meaning his greater problem. The mandamas cule follows calling to the calm of the barcelonismo by the 'situation Messi', but the true is that the days happen and every time approaches more the start of LaLiga, and Leo follows far of the entity.
Image: Shutterstock Vaccines prompt your childs immune system to develop antibodies; they work by imitating the infection they are meant to prevent so that the antibodies can then fight the disease itself. The vaccines timeline is usually spaced out in the time between birth and five years of age. Some of these might also be given as a combination vaccine so that the child gets fewer shots.Image: Shutterstock Your paediatrician will help you understand the vaccines your child requires at different times. Getting your child vaccinated on time will help protect them against almost seven vaccine-preventable diseases. If your child misses a dose or gets behind schedule, make sure you keep your healthcare provider informed about the delay and take advice. Vaccines protect children from various vaccine-preventable diseases such as BCG, polio, pertussis, MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella), diphtheria, the streptococcus pneumoniae bacterium that could cause pneumonia, meningitis, and sepsis, chickenpox, hepatitis A, hepatitis B and typhoid, says Dr Santosh T Soans, former president of the Indian Academy of Pediatrics, and currently associated with Practo. Any disruption in the vaccination routine, even for a short period, will result in accumulation of susceptible individuals. He also warns that there is a likelihood of outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases and related fatalities post the COVID-19 pandemic and urges parents with young children to stick to their vaccination routine.The advisory committee on vaccines and immunisation practices of the Indian Academy of Paediatrics (ACVIP) recommends that all routine vaccinations be administered as scheduled, as it is an essential health activity. The benefits of immunisations far outweigh the associated risks. As doctors, we dont recommend skipping the vaccine even during the COVID pandemic, says paediatrician and general physician Dr Praveen Gupta. If a child has missed the vaccine, parents should try to get the missed dose administered as soon as possible. He adds that missed vaccines put society at an increased risk of vaccine-preventable diseases. Catch-up vaccination must be availed of. There is a window period in which the vaccines can be given, and, once given, they would have similar efficacy in the future, he assures.Image: Shutterstock Each country has its own immunisation schedule. The initial Expanded Programme of Immunisation (EPI) in India was limited to Bacillus Calmette Guerin (BCG), diphtheria, tetanus toxoids, whole-cell pertussis (DTwP), oral poliomyelitis, and typhoid vaccines, which are chiefly covered in urban areas, recalls Dr Benny Benjamin, Senior Consultant Pediatrician and Neonatologist with Fortis Malar Hospital, Chennai. He adds that the Universal Immunisation Programmes (UIP), introduced in 1985, improved immunisation coverage and extended the focus beyond infancy. Some states introduced the hepatitis B vaccine, pentavalent vaccine (Haemophilus influenzae [b-HiB], Hepatitis B with DTwP) and pneumococcal vaccine, he reveals.Dr Benjamin also states that the Indian government updates and refines the vaccination programme from time to time. One needs to keep track of the mandatory vaccines listed by the respective state governments and take those basic vaccines  no excuses! he says, adding, Other vaccines are optional and can be taken or not, depending on the childs well-being.Image: Shutterstock If SMS (social distancing, mask, sanitisation) is strictly followed, and the recommended COVID-19 related norms are observed in the immunisation session, the risk is minimal.There is no documented risk to immunising a well child during the COVID-19 pandemic. As COVID-19 is still an evolving disease, we need to monitor strictly for any increased adverse events following immunisation (AEFI).Currently, there is no evidence that there is any risk to the vaccine if vaccination is done during the incubation period of COVID-19. The efficacy and safety of the administered vaccines would be the same.In general, vaccination against one disease does not weaken the immune response to another disease. As of now, there is no evidence that vaccination would increase the risk of a child becoming infected with COVID-19, or affect the course of the disease in a child who has been inadvertently vaccinated during the asymptomatic phase or incubation period.This is a common situation in the COVID-19 pandemic. Be assured that the vaccination schedule can be resumed without any need to restart the series. Multiple vaccines in one sitting and using the minimum permitted interval between two doses of the same inactivated vaccine can be practised to complete the schedule in the shortest possible time.


Alia Bhatt has come a long way since she made her debut in 2012. The actress has pulled up her career graph a notch higher with every passing film. Alia has played some phenomenal characters in the years gone by and currently her kitty is full with several awaited projects. From Brahmastra, Gangubai Kathiawadi to RRR, the actress is one of the busiest entertainers of the country and she loves doing what she does.



Last night, Alia was clicked on her return to Mumbai from Hyderabad. Alia was in Hyderabad to shoot for RRR for the past few days and looks like she is done with her work there, at least for now. Check out the pictures of the actress as she zoomed away in her ride after exiting from a private airport in Mumbai.
HONG KONG (dpa-AFX) - New Zealand will on Monday release June figures for imports, exports and trade balance, highlighting a modest day for Asia-Pacific economic activity. In May, imports were worth NZ$5.4 billion and exports were at NZ$5.87 billion for a trade surplus of NZ$469 million. Japan will see July results for the manufacturing, services and composite indexes from Jibun Bank; in June, their scores were 52.4, 47.2 and 47.8, respectively. Singapore will provide June numbers for industrial production; in May, output was up 7.2 percent on month and 30.0 percent on year. Hong Kong will release June figures for imports, exports and trade balance. In May, imports jumped 26.5 percent on year and exports rose an annual 24.0 percent for a trade deficit of HKD25.5 billion. Finally, the markets in Thailand are closed on Monday for Asarnha Bucha Day and will re-open on Tuesday. 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.
Guidewheel (formerly know as Safi), a San Francisco CA-based manfacture tech company, raised $8M in Series A funding.

The round was led by Greycroft, which was joined by angels, and Fortune 500 executives.

The company intends to use the funds to accelerate growth, expand operations and its business reach.



Founded out of Stanford University and led by CEO Lauren Dunford, Guidewheel provides a cloud-powered FactoryOps, which allows factories to digitize their operations and reach sustainable performance. Its plug-and-play platform clips onto any machine on the factory floor, delivering real-time visibility that reduces lost production and improves performance.

The company has raised a total of $12M to date, with previous rounds from additional investors including LocalGlobe, Savannah Fund, and DEG, with public funds of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, among others.

Guidewheel has expanded quickly to 100+ plants across Mexico, East Africa, and the USA.

FinSMEs

24/07/2021
Tampa, FL (33646)

Today

Thunderstorms likely, especially this evening. Low around 75F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 70%..

Tonight

Thunderstorms likely, especially this evening. Low around 75F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 70%.
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Asylum-seeking migrants gather at a makeshift camp on the Mexican side of the San Ysidro Port of Entry on July 20, 2021 in Tijuana, Mexico. (Mario Tama/Getty Images/TNS)
(CNN) -- Yet another US Capitol suspect was caught this week, all thanks to his Bumble match.

Prosecutors say Andrew Taake of Texas used the dating app Bumble while in Washington on January 6. The match asked if he was near the Capitol and he said he was there "from the very beginning." He sent several selfies and claimed that he spent 30 minutes in the building.

Within days, the match turned him in to the FBI, prosecutors said Friday in new court filings.

Screenshots of their Bumble chat show that Taake told the match he was "peacefully standing there" at the Capitol. But prosecutors say he was involved in two violent attacks against police who were defending the building. Footage from the front lines shows Taake using pepper spray against the police line and later striking police with a metal whip, according to court filings.

He has been charged with several federal crimes, including felony assault on a police officer, civil disorder and obstruction of congressional proceedings. He hasn't yet entered a plea.

He's now the second known Capitol defendant who was arrested because of online dating gone awry. A man from New York was charged in April after a Bumble match turned him in.

Taake's dating profile said he's the owner of a power washing company in Houston, according to one of the screenshots.

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FILE - In this Sept. 24, 2014 file photo, smoke hangs over Reno-Tahoe International Airport as a plane takes off in Reno, Nev. (AP Photo/Martha Irvine, File)
Galveston, TX (77553)

Today

Partly cloudy with late night showers or thunderstorms. Low 79F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 70%..

Tonight

Partly cloudy with late night showers or thunderstorms. Low 79F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 70%.
Editors note: This editorial was written by the editorial board of the San Diego Union Tribune. Guest editorials in this space are intended to provide our readers with a sampling of opinion from other publications and do not necessarily represent the views of the Mid-Valley Media editorial board.

While still well below their winter peaks, the latest spikes in new COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are raising concerns among health officials and among many Americans  just not among enough, given how many people still remain unvaccinated.

New coronavirus cases have more than doubled in the past month in San Diego County and in California, fueled by the highly infectious delta variant that now makes up 83% of new U.S. cases. The surge is even stronger in Los Angeles County, leading authorities to reimpose indoor mask mandates.

Even now, 16 months into this public health crisis, there remains much we don't know about the novel coronavirus and COVID-19, the disease it causes. But it's very clear that the vaccines work very well and that more Americans should have shots by now and more should get them as soon as possible.
A Salem climber fell several hundred feet while descending Mount Jefferson and the Linn County Sheriffs Office is leading the multi-agency search effort for him, according to a news release issued Sunday afternoon.

The climber is Steven Vanpelt, 33, and LCSO received information about the incident at about 11:45 a.m. Friday.

Deputies who responded learned that Vanpelt was in extreme mountainous terrain, and a witness described losing sight of him when he fell.

The Marion County Sheriffs Office received the initial information about the fall and starting sending resources to the area and planning for a rescue.

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Areas of Mount Jefferson often receive a multi-county response due to the resources needed and county borders in the area.

Deputies have called for help from multiple specialty teams throughout Oregon. Corvallis Mountain Rescue, Eugene Mountain Rescue, Deschutes Mountain Rescue and Portland Mountain Rescue have all responded.

The area is extremely dangerous and requires technical mountaineers to traverse the mountainside. Vanpelt has not been located due to the terrain consisting of snow, cliffs, large boulders, crevices and rock scree.
Gillette, WY (82718)

Today

Clear to partly cloudy. Low 61F. Winds S at 10 to 20 mph..

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Phoenix, Arizona, July 25, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Many citizens in Arizona believe it's time that they have a strong and ethical leader running in congress. After carefully weighing his options, Veritas Global Protection CEO Elijah Norton is considering running for congress against David Schweikert. Now is time for the Republicans to make a change, and Norton believes he is the right man for the position.

Why Elijah Norton Veritas Global Protection Could Be The Right Man For Arizona Congress

Elijah Norton Veritas, Global Protection CEO, is no stranger to the role of a leader. He is the CEO of one of the most successful vehicle protection companies in Arizona, after all. One thing that Elijah Norton does differently than other leaders is putting honesty first.

This motivator has always stayed true to his word and has become a leader that his employees and clients can trust. If he brings this same level of ethics to the table when he runs for congress, he could gain the loyal Arizona followers he needs to make a difference.

What Kind Of Leader Arizona Needs Right Now

Arizona residents are tired of giving their support to leaders who don't value them. This time around, they want someone in charge who is honest and not involved in any scandals. They know they won't see any changes until they get someone with a different view in congress.

In order to get a seat in the house of congress, there are certain skills a person must possess. They must have a certain level of education and experience with running a successful business. On top of this, they must also know politics like the back of their hand. This is why it's so difficult to get a seat in congress.

The lifestyle a candidate leads is important too. They don't have to be born into a posh family with a silver spoon in their mouth to qualify. However, they do need to meet certain expectations. It's very important that there isn't anything considered scandalous about their past that could be brought up.

Could Elijah Norton Have What It Takes?

Many people in Arizona believe that Elijah Norton Veritas Global Protection has what it takes to be a success in congress. He believes in making a change, and many people feel he is honest with those intentions. Elijah has strong business skills that he's been able to use in the company he founded.

Many people who have worked with Elijah in the past have come forward to speak about how positive their experience was. He is a motivator who sees the good in people and wants to help them succeed. This is the type of leader Arizona needs.

A lot of people feel that Elijah Norton is the complete opposite of David Schweikert, and that is why they are rooting for him to run for congress. While a decision hasn't been made yet on whether or not he will enter this run for congress, many people in Arizona have their fingers crossed.
PAUL BILODEAU/Staff photo. Full-time dispatcher and reserve Manchester police Officer Sean Mullins works in the town dispatch center, which is responsible for dispatching for the town's Police, Fire, Harbormaster and Public Works departments. The town is considering using a regional dispatch center. 7/22/21
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GREENWICH  Greenwich Republicans know who will be leading their ticket in the fall election, but candidates for several other local positions will be determined this week.

On Tuesday night, the Greenwich Republican Town Committee will meet to formally nominate a ticket headed by First Selectman Fred Camillo and Selectwoman Lauren Rabin, who are seeking reelection. Several spots on the ballot have not yet been announced, including for seats on the Board of Education and the Board of Estimate and Taxation.

But many eyes are on the race for town clerk, a position that is open for the first time in decades. Last month, Republican Town Clerk Carmella Budkins, who has been in office for 30 years, said she would not seek another term.

Three candidates have thrown their hats in the ring for the Republican nomination. And on Tuesday, one of them must persuade a majority of the 63 voting members of the RTC to back them.

Town Republican Registrar of Voters Fred DeCaro, Board of Estimate and Taxation Chair Karen Fassuliotis and Jackie Budkins, a longtime RTC official and the daughter of Carmella Budkins, are seeking the nomination.

Under the current rules, the three clerk candidates will not deliver remarks to the RTC on Tuesday. Nominating and seconding speeches will be made on their behalf in hopes of persuading the members to vote for them.

Jackie Budkins got a boost toward the nomination when the RTCs Executive Committee voted to recommend her to the full body Tuesday night. While not an official endorsement, it was something that all three candidates said they had been seeking.

Budkins received a majority of the 17 votes on the executive committee, according to RTC Chair Dan Quigley, who called the race highly competitive.

It feels good, Budkins said Friday. I feel really good to have so much support, especially moving forward into Tuesday.

DeCaro acknowledged that it would likely be a close vote.

I have worked hard to contact all of the individual delegates, he said. The individual districts were split very evenly, and it was only a few of the officers who made the difference. Im very confident that the full vote will look different.

DeCaro said he was keeping up steady communications with RTC members, speaking to them about his credentials and why he believes he is the best candidate after 12 years as registrar and previous service on the Representative Town Meeting.

This isnt a leap for me, he said. Its the next logical step in a path of public service. Over the past few weeks, Ive worked hard to demonstrate to the RTC delegates the same things I hope to educate all voters about.

DeCaro said he has taken town clerk certification classes offered by the Connecticut Town Clerks Association, has become a Certified Connecticut Municipal Official and has a 12-year track record of running an award-winning department.

I have the tools and techniques to reach out to voters with a positive message, he said. Ive received amazing endorsements by some of the largest users of town clerk services. I understand how to reach out to voters with a positive message of continuous improvement, building on the technological changes happening all around us.

The town clerk works closely with the RTM, publishing the call and overseeing all the counting of votes. DeCaro has been endorsed by RTM Moderator Tom Byrne.

Fassuliotis was officially voted in as chair of the BET this past week with bipartisan support. An attorney and former member of the RTM, she has said she will also continue to seek reelection to a new term on the BET even as she runs for town clerk. She said she was pushing on despite the executive committees decision.

Im telling them what my credentials are and why Im the best candidate, Fassuliotis said. I know I have the support of many on the RTC. Well see if I have enough support at this point.

She pointed to her long resume in town government, including her recent elevation to BET chair after serving as vice chair since the end of 2019, and said she knows the town departments and processes. She also highlighted her legal training.

The laws governing the town clerks responsibilities have only grown and become more complex, Fassuliotis said. Being an attorney, I know the law.

Her previous experience as a director of regulatory affairs for private companies also has shown her the language of regulations, she said.

Budkins, a Realtor, said she would continue to make her case through outreach to the members. She is vice chair of the RTC and has been a key figure in municipal Republican campaigns over the past 15 years, including for Peter Tesei, John Toner, Lauren Rabin and, currently, state Senate candidate Ryan Fazio.

Im honored to be able to try and build upon not just (Carmella Budkins) success but her offices successes, Budkins said. My professional background with clients who entrust me with their real estate purchases is also an asset. I have a very good reputation in town and that can help advance my candidacy. People know they can trust me as someone who works hard, as someone who can lead and can multitask.

I grew up in Greenwich and went through the Greenwich Public Schools. Ive made lifelong friends and relationships here that I think will give me a base of support I can rely on when running for this office, she said.

Democrats nominated their town clerk candidate on Wednesday without any opposition. Molly Saleeby, a member of the RTM who unsuccessfully ran in 2019, is running again.

Tuesdays GOP meeting, which will be held both via Zoom and in person at Town Hall, will begin at 7 p.m.

But the RTC election might not be the final word. A candidate who does not receive the nomination could force a primary election to get on the ballot by collecting enough signatures on a petition.

On Friday, all three left the door open.

It would depend on the level of support shown, DeCaro said. I would not want to disappoint the people who voted for me if it was close because I believe there is far more out there then just the 63 people on the RTC.

Right now I am focused on Tuesday night and I will weigh my options after the vote, Budkins said.

Fassuliotis offered a similar sentiment, saying she hasnt ruled it out. Anything is possible at this point. Im going to reassess after the vote on Tuesday.

Quigley said he hoped Tuesdays results would be acceptable to everybody.

I am very hopeful that once the nominating process is completed, that the party will coalesce behind the nominee and unite behind our shared goal of winning every race in November, he said.

kborsuk@greenwichtime.com
Physicist Steven Weinberg, who won the Nobel prize in 1979 with two other scientists for their separate contributions unlocking mysteries of tiny particles and their electromagnetic interaction, has died at 88, the University of Texas at Austin said Saturday.

A professor at the university since the 1980s, Weinberg died Friday in Austin, Texas, according to his wife Louise, said UT spokesperson Christine Sinatra. The physicist had been hospitalized for several weeks, but a cause of death was not released, according to Sinatra.

The passing of Steven Weinberg is a loss for The University of Texas and for society," UT President Jay Hartzell said in a statement.

"Professor Weinberg unlocked the mysteries of the universe for millions of people, enriching humanitys concept of nature and our relationship to the world, Hartzell added.

In 1979, Weinberg shared the Nobel prize in physics with scientists Abdus Salam and Sheldon Lee Glashow. Their work improved the understanding of how everything in the universe relates, according to a UT statement.

The work helped physicists unify two of the four forces of nature, subatomic forces known as nuclear forces, said Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology.

Its all about understanding the laws of nature at a deep level. Were curious creatures and we want to know how the universe around us works, Carroll said.

Weinberg's work built on the work of Albert Einstein, according to Columbia University string theory physicist Brian Greene.

The idea was that all forces of nature might actually be the same force ... it was this dream Einstein had, that it all might be whole, Greene said. He drove this idea forward. He pushed this idea forward by showing (two forces) were the same force.

Weinberg, Salam and Glashow  working separately  were honored for their contributions to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles, including ... the prediction of the weak neutral current, according to the Nobel Prize website.

A New York native, Weinberg was a researcher at Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley, earlier in his career. He then served on the faculty of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the UT faculty in 1982, teaching both physics and astronomy.

Weinberg is survived by his wife and a daughter. Funeral services were not announced.
Introduction

We kicked off a Flashback series on our YouTube channel just last week, with the first video starring the Nokia 808 PureView. It is a smartphone with a cult following thanks to what was a groundbreaking camera at the time. That video prompted a closer look at the PureView camera, which we did in a head-to-head with the current image quality benchmark, the Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra.

One thing led to another and here we are with yet another famed opponent for the Xiaomi - a Nokia Lumia 1020. A spiritual successor to the 808, the 1020 builds on the PureView concept but drops it from the official model name in favor of the then newly adopted Lumia branding brought by Microsoft's acquision of the Nokia smartphone business. PureView remains etched on the back of the 1020, alongside the Zeiss logo which marks the continued collaboration with the German optics specialists.

It says 41MP on the sizeable camera bulge of the Lumia 1020, so same nominal resolution as on the 808 PureView. Once again, it's one of those multi-aspect sensors where you can't actually get all the 41 million pixels because the extreme corners fall outside of the image circle projected by the lens. However, it can capture 38MP 4:3 images or 34MP 16:9 ones, much like the 808.

But same this sensor isn't. It's a smaller unit at 1/1.5" vs. the old model's 1/1.2" type and pixel size has shrunk accordingly - from the 1.4m of the original PureView to 1.12m on the 1020. On a positive note though, the 26mm-equivalent lens now has a slightly brighter aperture (f/2.2 vs. f/2.4) and, more importantly, it features OIS.

The Mi 11 Ultra, in case you've forgotten, is equipped with a 50MP 1/1.12-inch sensor on its primary camera, the largest on a smartphone (or at least a mainstream smartphone - the Sharp Aquos R6 and Leitz Phone 1 don't quite meet that criterion). It does have 1.4m pixels - same size as on the 808, and notably larger than the 1020's. To reiterate, the Mi's sensor has a Quad Bayer design (with 4 adjacent pixels grouped under the same Red, Green, or Blue filter) while the Lumia is using a conventional Bayer array. The Xiaomi has a stabilized lens too, with a wider 24mm-equivalent focal length and an f/1.95 aperture.

The Nokia is a bit limited in terms of resolution settings and lets you choose between three modes - 5MP JPEG only, 5MP JPEG + 38MP JPEG, or 5MP JPEG + 38MP DNG RAW files (38MP changes to 34MP if you prefer the 16:9 aspect). Basically, if you want reasonably sized JPEGs, you've got to make them yourself. We did that in two different ways - one was by starting with the out-of-camera 38MP JPEGs and other by processing the RAW files, in both cases saving 12.5MP images to match the Xiaomi resolution. We also processed RAW files out of the Xiaomi, because why not.

One thing that you can't tell from looking at the photos is just how excruciatingly slow the Lumia 1020 camera is to launch. When starting it with the dedicated shutter release button with the phone in standby, it takes a good 4-5 seconds for the viewfinder to appear after the phone vibrates that it's registered your long press on the button (which itself takes about a second). The 808 is markedly faster when it comes to launch time.

Another issue we experienced on the 1020 is the prevailing inability to lock focus when zoomed in. Dedicated efforts of tapping on the screen to focus worked more often than not, but not for every scene, and not for every shot of the same scene. It is an eight-year-old unit, however, so we can attribute that to a long and storied life.

These are mostly curious observations that are not necessarily significant when it comes to the task at hand, which is comparing the image quality out of the two phones. That is, as long as we manage to get in-focus shots out of both phones, which we did.

Daylight image quality

Let's start out with a basic comparison - 5MP photos out of the Lumia versus 12.5MP ones from the Xiaomi, or essentially the default output of both phones. Unlike our experience with the Nokia 808, the Lumia 1020 exposes correctly - there was no underexposure to speak of. Dynamic range is very good - not Xiaomi-level good, with a bit more clipped highlights here or there, but certainly better than on the 808.





Daylight samples (5MP vs. 12.5MP): Nokia Lumia 1020  Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra

Another change we're seeing coming from older Nokia to the newer one is an increase in color saturation - the Lumia 1020 approaches the level of pop of the Mi 11 Ultra. The Xiaomi has a way of of warming up greenery that the Nokia doesn't exhibit, and we'd likely concede that the Lumia's rendition is more true-to-life in this respect.





Daylight samples (5MP vs. 12.5MP): Nokia Lumia 1020  Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra

When it comes to detail, the gap between 5MP and 12.5MP is a significant one and the Nokia can't match the Mi's resolving power. Still, the difference isn't huge on a per-pixel level, thanks in no small part to the longer focal length of the Nokia. As 5MP images go, these are pretty stellar.

We explored the nominal resolutions as well. The Nokia has an edge both in terms of quantity and quality of detail. The regular Bayer color filter means that the Lumia can record more intricate color information, while the Quad Bayer Xiaomi needs to compensate for its coarser color filter grid with heavier sharpening. Having said that, the Nokia images have a prevailing all around softness and could benefit from some sharpening in post processing themselves to reveal the best the phone is capable of.







Daylight samples, full resolution (38MP/50MP): Nokia Lumia 1020  Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra

We then proceeded to resize these 38MP JPEG images of the Lumia to match the default 12.5MP resolution of the Xiaomi. Since sharpening is in our hands now, we applied a liberal amount. Under these conditions, the Nokia records more detail in the final image than the 5MP mode, and we'd say it's also a step ahead of the Xiaomi.





Daylight samples (38MP->12.5MP vs. 12.5MP): Nokia Lumia 1020  Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra

Next up, some RAW images out of the two phones, processed to taste and exported in 12.5MP again. There's little to set the two phones apart in terms of color (seeing how they're processed to the same person's taste). Dynamic range is a bit wider on the Xiaomi, but you don't want to be shooting RAW on a modern smartphone if dynamic range is the most important thing - the image stacking in the default Photo mode gets better results anyway.





Daylight samples, processed from RAW (38MP->12.5MP vs. 12.5MP): Nokia Lumia 1020  Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra

On a pixel level, with the right attitude and enough time and deliberation to bump sliders left or right, you can get very similar results. The Nokia will do better with fighting off moire thanks to the finer color data it's captured in the first place. The Xiaomi, on the other hand, has slightly cleaner results when it comes to noise, though if we had the patience to also fiddle with those sliders on the Nokia, we could have probably achieved similar results.

It wasn't an easy decision what exactly zoom level we should be comparing these at, but we ultimately settled on zooming in all the way on the Nokia and matching it on the Xiaomi. That would be a 3.1-3.3x zoom level for the Mi, hardly favorable since it falls right in between its 1x and 5x cameras. But then again, it would be 5MP vs 12.5MP shots, and the Xiaomi can also do composites from the main and tele cameras, giving you super sharp centers in most scenes.

We'd call this an easy win for the Xiaomi, particularly for center of the frame subjects at distances far enough so that the telephoto camera focus and join in for some composite action.





Daylight samples, zoom (3x-ish): Nokia Lumia 1020  Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra

Low-light image quality

In low light, the Lumia 1020 is a notable step up from the 808 and actually manages to expose in relatively dark scenes. Dynamic range remains limited, with light sources and their immediate vicinity getting blown out. Detail is fairly good in areas of balanced lighting though shadows remain murky.

The Xiaomi, in contrast, delivers excellent exposure and wide dynamic range in all sorts of demanding scenes and will squeeze out light in dark settings as well as preserve highlights from clipping to white.







Low-light samples (5MP vs. 12.5MP): Nokia Lumia 1020  Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra

Photos processed from RAW files make for a somewhat more level playing field. Exported at 12.5MP, the Nokia's JPEGs have similar detail levels compared to the ones out of the Mi. The Lumia images aren't quite as sharp and are noticeably noisier, though. On a positive note they do deal with moire better (the blinds in the window in the center of the first sample).

The Xiaomi wins in dynamic range, though it's not the same huge lead here as in full Auto - you have to let the auto image stacking do its thing for the best results.





Low-light samples, processed from RAW (38MP->12.5MP vs. 12.5MP): Nokia Lumia 1020  Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra

Zooming in to 3x, the Xiaomi doesn't quite have the wide dynamic range we've come to expect but it still manages to retain an advantage in tonal development at the extremes. It also achieves superior sharpness and resolves more detail. The Nokia does do an admirable job for its age, however.







Low-light samples, zoom (3x-ish): Nokia Lumia 1020  Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra

Video recording

As was the case with the Nokia 808, the Lumia 1020 enters the video recording comparison as a predetermined loser - it maxes out at 1080p resolution and pretty much the lousiest modern 4K capture will look better than the best 1080p in terms of detail, and the Xiaomi 4K is anything but lousy.

Indeed, we can read car license plates in the Xiaomi 4K clips and can essentially count leaves in trees, whereas the Lumia renders these more as general shapes. In fact, the 808 PureView's 1080p video was more detailed than the 1020's. And while we didn't have much love for the muted color reproduction on the 808, the 1020's oversaturated output with a strong warm cast doesn't look any better.



Daylight video sample frame grabs: Nokia Lumia 1020  Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra

Dynamic range on the Lumia 1020 is about on par with the older Nokia, possibly even slightly narrower, meaning nowhere as good as on the modern phone.

In low light, we're seeing a somewhat unexpected development, in that the Lumia 1020 with its smaller sensor captures videos that are a tiny step ahead of the 808 PureView. The new phone exposes brighter, lifting some midtones that were clipped to black on the 808. It's not quite bright enough for us to call the results from our test scene 'usable', and the flipside to the brighter exposure is a hike in noise, something that the 808 didn't show in such a pronounced way.



Low-light video sample frame grabs: Nokia Lumia 1020  Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra

Naturally, the Mi 11 Ultra captures vastly superior low-light videos. Here, you can see that it's not actually the middle of the night and the sky is still a dark navy blue. You can see trees and the buildings in the distance and you can make out sidewalk tiles - the higher resolution in conjunction with modern sensors and processing makes a world of difference.

Final words

The one extra year that Nokia had after the 808 PureView meant some meaningful upgrades in the camera performance for the Lumia 1020. We'd say the reduction in sensor size was successfully countered by the introduction of OIS, more powerful chipset and optimized processing.

More surprisingly, however, the Lumia 1020 also prevailed over a modern-day beast of a cameraphone like the Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra - admittedly, only in some ways and in isolated instances, but still. The high-resolution regular Bayer sensor of the Lumia allows it to capture finer detail than the nominally higher-resolution but Quad Bayer imager of the Mi. That's in broad daylight and if you're willing to put in some work in post processing to extract that detail.

When it comes to low-light capture, or video recording in any light, or just general picturetaking where you want to press a button and get a great-looking photo, or speed and ease of use, the Xiaomi reigns supreme, as expected. That said, the Lumia 1020 was a brilliant performer in 2013 and while undoubtedly outdated now, it can still show a thing or two to the current crop of cameraphones.
When Kristin Oberiano spoke to her grandmother for an oral history project, she expected to hear more about her family lineage. What she ended up hearing and cataloging was a story at the crossroads of U.S. colonialism, Guam and Filipino rights.

After five years of doctoral work, the 27-year-old Fulbright scholar graduates in November after defending her Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard University. After that, she will teach history at Wesleyan University as an assistant professor.

My grandparents came to the island after World War II, said Oberiano, a third-generation Filipino from Guam. They were both Filipino workers that were recruited to build the U.S. military bases.

Oberianos dissertation focused on a 20th century overview of how the U.S. military colonized Guam, and how CHamorus and Filipinos negotiated and navigated colonialism. As a Harvard student, she received research funding to travel to Guam, where she was born and raised, and the Philippines, where her mother grew up.

Part of the inspiration of this story is to understand what it means to be a Filipino from Guam, an island where the CHamoru people are indigenous, Oberiano added. I try to understand the complex identities of what it means to be Filipino from Guam, and how a person could recognize themselves in that history, which isnt taught in schools.

As early as fifth grade, Oberiano looked up Guam in a U.S. history textbook, and realized that the curricula omitted Guam or referred to it as a World War II site.

From early on, I wanted to create and write a history that was recognizable to people on the island, Oberiano said.

As she listened to her grandmother recount her move from Panay Island to Guam, Oberiano said her grandmother paused and questioned, Why are you asking me all this?

To which Oberiano responded: I want to know who I am, where I come from and do a story about it, she said.

Oberianos grandmother turns 90 this November, close to her graduation from Harvard.

These are stories we need to talk about now so that we can pass the stories once again to our generations, she said.

Born and raised on Guam, Oberiano graduated from St. Johns School in 2012 and Occidental College in 2016, with a degree in history and American Studies.

Her research covers U.S. history from 1898, when the U.S. annexed Guam from Spain, to the 1990s. As early as her senior thesis work at Occidental College, she devoted her winter and summer breaks to research. In fall 2019, she completed the bulk of her semester to collect oral histories and study archives at Micronesian Area Research Center.

She received a Fulbright scholarship that funded nine months of research in the Philippines, but because of the pandemic, her trip was cut short and she returned to Guam in March 2020.

Going on that trip made me realize that yes, Im Filipino and my family is from that place, Oberiano said. But my home is Guam, so I have to do more to make sure that I have obligations to the island.

When asked if shes from Guam, Oberiano swaps out Guamanian for Filipino from Guam.

Im also uneasy with this term Filipino American, Oberiano said. It almost feels like theres a specificity that exists in that term around inclusion into the United States and the nation state.

As an assistant professor, Oberiano plans to draw attention to a part of overlooked U.S. history  colonialism in the Pacific.

What does the history of Guam tell us about how the U.S. expanded its power overseas to the Philippines, and now, even in a different capacity though U.S. military bases? Oberiano said.

In that process, indigenous peoples and immigrants are caught up in injustices around land annexations, racialized labor or racism and all of that stuff that we dont associate with the idealistic side of American history.

Though most people outside of Guam have hardly heard of the island, Oberiano expects university students to come to college open-minded, which includes a desire to learn about the Pacific.

As the world is increasingly becoming globalized and politics all over the world is getting the Pacific more involved, its important that students who arent interested in it at least know a little about it, Oberiano said.

As a professor, Oberiano requested funding to do research on Guam.

Its important to use the wealth of these universities to give back to the Guam community, Oberiano said. If Im learning the CHamoru language, I pay someone on Guam, or invest in research funds for the island, or hire people from Guam to be research assistants. It not only brings money to the island but opportunities that may not exist.
A convicted sex offender on pre-trial release in two separate cases has been charged with multiple sexual assaults of a girl and possession of methamphetamine, according to a magistrates complaint filed in the Superior Court of Guam.

Bench warrants were issued for Luke Allen Pangelinan Taitano, 46, in an October 2020 case in which he was accused of driving a vehicle without identification and a June 2020 drug case, according to court documents.

He was arrested after a traffic stop Friday and charged with first-degree sexual conduct as a first-degree felony, second-degree criminal conduct as a second-degree felony, four counts of child abuse as a third-degree felony and possession of a Schedule II controlled substance as a third-degree felony.

In January, a girl reported that she had been sexually assaulted multiple times by Taitano between November 2017 and December 2018, when she was 9.

Taitano is listed on the Guam Sex Offender Registry. On Aug. 12, 2016, he pleaded guilty to second-degree criminal sexual conduct as a first-degree felony and was sentenced to five years in prison, placed on parole for three years, and was required to register as a Level I Sex Offender for his lifetime.

On Friday, he was arrested after a traffic stop, when two police officers noticed children in his vehicle without seatbelts, the complaint stated.

One of the officers asked Taitano for his drivers license and registration. He replied he had lost his drivers license and had bought the car from a family member and was waiting for registration.

The officers then asked for Taitano to step out of the car and permission to search the vehicle, which he agreed to. The officers found a glass pipe and two bags which tested positive for methamphetamine, according to the complaint.

In January, Taitano was indicted on charges of possession of a Schedule II controlled substance as a third-degree felony and operating a vehicle without a license and expired registration.
The installation of poor-quality residential water meters cost the Guam Waterworks Authority more than $12 million in lost revenue, according to the water agency, which sued its contractor, Badger Meter, for allegedly providing more than 20,000 faulty meters and failing to honor the warranty.

The water agencys civil case, in the U.S. District Court of Guam, is set to go to trial in April 2022, and attorneys for the water agency and Wisconsin-based Badger are scheduled to attend the first pre-trial conference on Aug. 31.

The case stems from GWAs decision to replace the islands residential water meters after the water agency in 2008 started to experience severe system-wide failure of its existing residential meters.

Badger in March 2012 won the contract to supply more than 37,000 replacement LP model meters, at $139.30 each, which were installed by GWA.

According to the lawsuit, GWA received the first shipment of LP meters in August 2012 and immediately started installing them, through July 2014.

GWA found problems with the meters after it tested the August 2014 shipment from Badger, the lawsuit states. GWA tested 417 meters out of the total 4,280-meter shipment, and found that 242 of those meters failed the American Water Works Association test for new meters, the lawsuit states.

At the time, a total of 34,174 LP meters already had been received from Badger and placed in service, the lawsuit states.

According to the lawsuit, Badger in 2015 agreed to replace the faulty August 2014 shipment with M25 model meters, but GWA later started to find problems with thousands of other LP meters that had already been installed.

Over the next two years, an increasing number of LP meters in service, that were not tested by GWAs meter personnel, were failing the AWWA new meter standard as well as the 15-year repaired meter standard, the lawsuit states. The certified failure rate for a random batch of LP meters sent for testing at the Utah State Water Research Laboratory shows 93% of the LP meters tested failed the 5-year AWWA warranty standard and 78% of the meters failed the 15-year AWWA standard.

According to the lawsuit, GWA in February 2018 informed Badger that a total of 23,800 LP meters currently in service needed to be replaced under warranty. The company in March 2018 told GWA that it no longer would honor the warranty, the lawsuit states.

The company instead proposed replacing the faulty LP meters with M25 meters, with GWA paying $98.50 for each meter, the lawsuit states.

GWA refused to pay for the replacements and instead offered to accept 11,100 M25 meters from Badger, free of charge, with Badger paying GWA for the labor to replace the meters. Badger rejected the offer, the lawsuit states.

GWA sued Badger for: breach of contract; breach of contract for professional services; violating the Deceptive Trade Practices Act; breach of warranty; breach of warranty for a special purpose; unjust enrichment; and direct action, which means any of Badgers insurers are liable to pay GWA.

Damages

According to GWA, its total damages because of the faulty meters include: $3.94 million to buy and ship replacement M25 meters; $2.45 million in GWA labor costs to replace the failed LP meters; and at least $12 million in lost income as a result of defective water meters.

Badger concealed and failed to disclose the defective nature of its LP meters, the lawsuit states. Once the defective nature of the meters and Badgers negligent performance of its services under the contract became increasingly clear, Badger engaged in misleading and lulling actions, including false statements that the company intended to replace all of the defective meters.

Badger has asked the court to dismiss the claim related to alleged violations of the Deceptive Trade Practices Act. According to Badger, GWA is not a consumer as defined by the law and therefore is not entitled to assert a claim.
The Salvation Army food pantry in Tiyan will be changing its food distribution requirements as the COVID-19 emergency situation changes.

Currently, the pantry is in emergency disaster service mode, which means everyone who needs assistance qualifies, including clients on food stamps or on Public Unemployment Assistance.

One bag, which is big enough to feed a family of five or 10, is given on a month-to-month basis. So far, the organization has managed to keep up with their clients needs.

Salvation Army Food Pantry Corps program coordinator Maricel Dizon said she noticed a spike in the number of clients asking for assistance from May to June.

Dizon says that the cause for the increase could be the delays on food stamps and PUA.

I believe it had to do with a majority of my clients when we do interview them about the delays receiving their PUA and a delay on food stamps. So thats when they come and call and say theres a delay can you help us out; our food stamps didnt kick in; our PUA didnt come out or it wasnt in the system, thats when they call, Dizon said.

This leads to some days having the pantry distribute half the day, due to a shortage of bags or trying to figure out what items to substitute because they are running low.

It has been a big strain on funding, Dizon said. Apart from people in the community donating what they can, the organization has to pay to refill food bags. Every day they make food bags, and every day they distribute.

The highest-demand items are canned foods, followed by diapers and wipes.

Though Dizon and her team are still committed to helping their clients, they are preparing for when Guam returns to Pandemic Condition of Readiness 4.

We are still here to distribute food, but there are going to be requirements once we go back to normal, said Dizon.

Dizon said that once the governor declares PCOR 4, food distribution will change to the clients choice mode of operation.

Clients will need a Guam ID, mayors verification, certification if they are on food stamps, a furlough letter  or on reduced hours  and proof of income to determine eligibility.

Some clients who worked in the hospitality industry have changed their reports to reflect that they have returned to work as COVID-19 restrictions are eased, but are on reduced hours. However, they still qualify for assistance.

A five-minute phone call for an application is required to set up an appointment to pick up food bags.

When they come in for their appointment date, they get food, if they need diapers for babies, formula, hygiene for females, everything we provide them, for now. But once we go back to clients choice then we have to shift gears into requirements, Dizon said.

Once Guam returns to normal, the Salvation Army will have to make bags for a single person, a family of five, family of eight, family of 10, and a family of 12. The size of the family determines the amount of food in each bag.

The food pantry is not able to accept volunteers due to the COVID-19 state of emergency, but will continue to accept donations.




Haiti - United States : First concrete step of the USA on security in Haiti





Saturday July 24, 2021, following the request of the former Prime Minister Claude Joseph, shortly after the assassination of President Jovenel Moise, the support of the United States and the United Nations in terms of security in Haiti https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-34193-haiti-flash-the-government-requests-the-sending-of-american-soldiers-to-the-country.html , Ambassador Daniel Foote, American Special Envoy for Haiti appointed by the Administration Biden https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-34301-haiti-politic-the-biden-administration-appoints-a-special-envoy-to-haiti.html , the Ambassador of the United States in Haiti, Michele J. Sison and Ms. Jennifer Mergy, head of the "International Narcotics and Law" (INL) Office, met Leon Charles, the Director General ai of the Haitian National Police (PNH) and members of the High Command.



Discussions focused on planning for support from the United States, particularly in anti-gang fighting and several other aspects of national security. The continuous training of the specialized units of the PNH was among a priority request.



This meeting is a first concrete phase concerning the request for support produced by the former Head of Government on urgent security needs, consisting in the sending of troops to support the national police efforts to restore security and public order https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-34193-haiti-flash-the-government-requests-the-sending-of-american-soldiers-to-the-country.html



See also :

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-34301-haiti-politic-the-biden-administration-appoints-a-special-envoy-to-haiti.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-34217-haiti-flash-the-white-house-does-not-rule-out-sending-troops-to-haiti.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-34193-haiti-flash-the-government-requests-the-sending-of-american-soldiers-to-the-country.html



HL/ HaitiLibre


















Editor: I am very upset with Americans who disgrace the American flag. The flag ha
Steven Van Zandt drew on his relationship with Bruce Springsteen for 'The Sopranos'.

The 70-year-old guitarist - who met the Boss in the mid-1960s, playing in bands together in New Jersey before becoming a member of Bruce's iconic E Street Band in 1974 - played Silvo Dante in the hit drama alongside James Gandolfini's mob boss Tony.

He told The Times newspaper: "I could certainly draw on my relationship with Bruce.

Part of the obligation of being a best friend is that sometimes you have to bring the bad news, to express an opinion that theyre not going to like.

"With success like Bruce had in the Eighties, you cannot help but lose perspective. You start thinking youre a genius, the greatest thing in the world, and whos gonna argue with you?

"The mindset is: did you just sell 20 million albums? I was the only guy who wasnt scared of Bruce, so I could tell him what I thought.

There was one particular instance when he did call out Springsteen and told him to reconsider 1987 track 'Ain't Got You', which sees the musician bragging about his success while insisting all he wants is love.

However, Steven explained: "We had been separate for a while at that point and he was trying to adjust from being this ridiculously successful guy, after coming from nothing.

He was trying to be honest about his situation in that song, but sometimes you can be too honest.

"Bruces talent is explaining to people their lives, and giving insight and perspective to the listener.

"I had to say to him: nobody cares about your life. Nobody wants to hear about how rich you are.

Meanwhile, the musician thinks he helps keep Bruce grounded when they're on stage with the rest of the E Street Band.

He said: "As long as Im on stage next to Bruce and the guys, its a band.

Weve been around a long time and the band chemistry is a miraculous thing that should not be taken for granted.

"Besides, I think Bruce likes having someone from the old neighbourhood. It keeps him grounded.
GOOD JOB! NEEDS WORK ... Diverse ballot, HCA retreat, top SRO

Good job!

When filing for the first two of five municipal elections wrapped up at noon Friday, the ballot exhibited a welcome breadth of diversity, at least by the vanilla standard of Henderson County. In Hendersonville, the lineup of candidates for mayor and two council seats is one of the most diverse ever. Jerry SmithIt features four non-Hispanic white males  D.J. Harrington, Mike Baer, Jerry Smith Jr. and Mike Vesely  a Latino male, Raphael Morales; two white females, Mayor Barbara Volk and Chelsea Rose Walsh; and a black female, Debbie Roundtree. Its also ideologically diverse, ranging from the progressive Morales to Walsh, who is chair of the Henderson County Republican Party. Given the growth, housing and cultural issues confronting the city, the Hendersonville election is shaping up as one of the most intriguing of recent years. Diversity kudos, too, to Laurel Park, where two women, incumbent Kristin Dunn and newcomer Debra Hinson Bridges, filed to run. Next up for qualifying, starting noon Monday, are Flat Rock, Fletcher and Mills River. Unlike those in Hendersonville and Laurel Park, council members in those three towns run from districts.

Needs work  Although it promised to maintain medical services when it bought Mission Health, HCA has been shuttering primary care practices, which tend to less profitable than surgeries and other specialties. Physicians are fleeing, too, as they cringe at the difference between nonprofit and publicly traded ownership. HCA may see unintended consequences, though. Pardee UNC Health and AdventHealth are moving to fill the gaps in primary care, which could also lead to referrals to those higher profit medical lines. Prognosis? Unintended consequences for Mission. Obviously, Advent and Pardee are taking this opportunity as a striking one to grow and absorb primary care practices, Ben Aiken, a primary care physician in Asheville who left HCA, told Carolina Public Press. They are really kind of trying to position themselves as a more direct competitor, if you will, to Mission or HCA, and from the outside, it seems they are having some success in doing so.

Good job! Hendersonville Police Officer Joreeca Dinnall received the C.C. McGee School Resource Officer of the Year award recently from the North Carolina Association of School Resource Officers. The association cited the Hendersonville High School SROs compassionate service, including a special case where she spotted a problem and engaged a child who had a mental health issue. Officer Dinnall embodies exactly what kind of person and officer an SRO should be, said Hendersonville Police Chief Blair Myhand. She builds relationships with her students inside and outside of the classroom and represents the Hendersonville Police Department with professionalism. Anyone who interacts with Officer Dinnall can see what a big heart she has for serving others in our community.
PLANS for a five-storey hotel at Henley station car park have been recommended for refusal.

Henley Town Councils planning committee says the proposed Premier Inn, which would have 115 rooms with a restaurant, is far too big and out of keeping with its surroundings.

At a meeting on Tuesday last week, members warned it would bring more traffic to the towns medieval streets, which are already congested, and echoed neighbours concerns that it would dwarf their homes.

They have urged South Oxfordshire District Council to turn it down and say it must be called in for debate by the authoritys planning committee and not decided by officers.

The application has been submitted by Blocwork, a partnership between the landowner Network Rail and developer Bloc Group, of London.

At last weeks meeting, councillors criticised the partnership and Premier Inns owner Whitbread for not sending representatives to answer their questions. Councillor Michelle Thomas, the committee chairwoman, said this showed a total disregard for the community.

Her colleagues said Blocwork hadnt listened to criticisms of the scheme, which was first unveiled in December, as it had barely been revised since then.

They said the loss of about 60 parking spaces on the hotel footprint would cause problems on surrounding roads although Blocwork will provide 12 more elsewhere and Network Rail insists the old ones, many of which are currently leased to nearby businesses, arent needed.

Councillor Laurence Plant said: Numerous members of this chamber have sat with Blocwork on multiple occasions and given plenty of feedback which has been completely ignored.

We have to reject this on pretty much every available ground  its unneighbourly, totally out of keeping with the street scene and the lack of parking is tragic considering we have a shortage.

Councillor Rob Romans said: This application is shoddy, ill-conceived and quite frankly arrogant. They just want to dump a giant concrete block in the middle of Henley with no regard for its people.

Henley Mayor Sarah Miller said: This is a very ugly building, totally out of character and overbearing  I wouldnt want to look out of my window and see that.

Councillor Donna Crook said the loss of parking space would force more cars on to surrounding streets including Quebec Road.

Councillor Ian Reissmann said: Apart from the possible economic development, theres just so much going against this. It couldnt be uglier if theyd tried.

Councillor Thomas said Blocwork was proposing 115 beds for a town of 11,600 people while the Premier Inn at Maidenhead, whose population is seven times greater, has 124 beds and the High Wycombe branch has just 108 beds for 125,000 people.

She said: The scale is entirely out of proportion. We dont have infrastructure like roundabouts, ring roads or dual carriageways and cannot cope with a development of this size.

Russell Challis, whose family live behind the site in Wyndale Close, told the committee that the development would worsen an existing problem with flooding during heavy rain.

Julian Brookes, of the Henley Society, said: The applicant states that Henley is recognised as a picturesque visitor destination with natural attractions.

But if you destroy the very reasons that people come to visit in the first place, youll have no need for additional accommodation and it will damage existing businesses.

Premier Inn, which is the largest hotel chain in the UK, says the hotel would add 1.9 million a year to Henleys local economy, including 975,000 to be spent in restaurants, shops and local businesses.

It believes occupancy would be high all year round and says the site is already urban in character.

The company says it has presented the plans to the town council on two previous occasions and wasnt invited to the most recent meeting.

Network Rail says the scheme will allow the creation of 55 new places at Twyford station, the terminus of the Henley branch line, where there is currently a shortage, and possibly more at Goring and Wargrave.

Dozens of residents have also objected, including the Wyndale Close Residents Association, and the district council will make the final decision by September 6.

A Blocwork spokesman said the height wasn't inappropriate as there are nearby buildings up to four storeys tall while the hotel's top floor would be set back to reduce the impact and the building materials would "soften" its appearance.
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Dozens of new COVID-19 cases have been reported in Hunt County this week.

Multiple vaccination events will be available in Hunt County during the next few days.
Billy James Daniel, 85, of Wolfe City, passed away on July 23, 2021 at Oak Manor Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Commerce, with his family by his side. Billy was born in Wolfe City, Texas on July 13, 1936, the son of Samuel Daniel and Eliza Phillips Daniel. He began his career in the gr
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As the battle for control of the seas gets heated, a naval top gun school for submariners established is for underwater combat. China and Russia are contesting the dominance of U.S. sub forces, so the U.S. Navy is training in underwaters assets to fight smart and win.

Key to this move is a unit design after the top gun school for naval pilots, a special unit that will be the enemy to teach U.S. submariners to defeat threats posed.

The U.S. is aware that adversaries are gunning to take out its submarines to cripple the ability to fight back, leaving the surface fleet at a disadvantage.

American sea wolves are now the hunted

An Aggressor Squadron (AGGRON) that will imitate how enemy subs will operate to take out USN subs, information about Russian and Chinese tactics updated will be used. What is gained is an underwater U.S. force optimizing ways to kill the enemy, reported Popular Mechanics.

One example is the Vietnam war when American jets were shot down, more than enemies. Losing a sub is worse than one jet, so maritime forces are getting an upgrade in anti-submarine warfare, creating AGGRON.

A naval top gun school for submariners how to combat underwater enemies based on how they fight is no different than a U.S. aggressor squadron in the U.S. Air Force (USAF). It is hoped that training underwater units will yield a good ratio of kills when the time comes.

Read Also: SSN-21 Sea Wolf-class: American-Made Soviet Typhoon ICBM Hunters



All the serviced in the U.S. military know it's harder to win wars, all units army, navy, air force should be trained as a warfighting unit with all resources available. This is why the investment in counter-force is very necessary.

The sea is a dangerous battleground

Times have changed for the U.S. submarine force, and fighting in the ocean's depths against submarines is not, easy sub hunters have their hands full. The Russian Yasen missile subs or similar Chinese types are guarded by improving construction and dedicated sub hunters as well, states the Insider.

A Sea Wolf, or Los Angeles class needs to be the best submarine hunter. Or these enemy subs can threaten U.S. assets, above or under the water.

AGGRON is a relatively new branch of the navy, that was operational in 2019. The Navy's Undersea Warfighting Development Center explains why it is important to Maritime Security.

It says that the squadron will teach crews of U.S. subs how the Chinese and Soviets will try to outsmart, outmaneuver, hide and then strike to sink them. One official said that the result of the training is that all U.S. Navy submariners will be equipped to take on adversaries and apply the proper tactics.

The U.S. is the one with mostly nuclear subs in service, units assigned to AGGRON is top secret. How other sub forces use mix diesel or nuclear submarine have it minus and plus points, which is what the AGGRON teaches.

In 2005, the U.S. Navy had no diesel-electric submarines, an article in Naval Technology mentions the Swedish Gotland took out the mighty USS Ronald Reagan and bypassed its defense of the carrier force. Using non-nuclear subs to be the enemy to simulate actual combat, leasing other submarines from 2005 to 2007.

A necessity for a naval top gun school for submariners using diesel-electric foreign subs, US sailors on America's boats learn to fight effectively.

Related Article: Los Angeles Class Nuclear Attack Submarine: Cold War Warrior That Fights On Since 1982

@ 2021 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Iraq's Prime Minister will go to Washington this weekend to demand that President Biden remove all US combat troops from Iraq, telling Iraqi media that the visit would "bring an end to the presence of combat forces."

Withdrawal of U.S. Military Troops in Iraq

In a recently published article in The New York Times, according to American officials, the U.S. is expected to comply with Prime Minister Mustafa al-request, Kadhimi's establishing a timetable for the departure of the U.S. combat troops by the end of the year, which will be announced on Monday.

According to Pentagon and senior administration officials, this will be accomplished by withdrawing a small but undisclosed number of the 2,500 American troops now stationed in Iraq, as well as reclassifying the duties of other soldiers on paper. Mr. al-Kadhimi will be able to take home a political prize to appease Iraq's anti-American forces, and the U.S. military presence will stay.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration is struggling with how to function in a nation that has fallen more under the control of Iranian-backed militias and a corrupt political system that has pushed Iraq's government institutions to the verge of collapse since the U.S. invasion 18 years ago.

Read Also: Iraq Issues Arrest Warrant For President Trump Over Drone Strike Killing

The Shift of U.S. Military Roles in Iraq

A U.S. official and two individuals familiar with the situation said that the U.S. and Iraqi officials are close to completing a change in the US military mission in Iraq to a strictly advising one by the end of the year, marking the formal end of the US combat operation in the nation, according to a published report in POLITICO.

In a recently published article in MSN News, A senior U.S. official familiar with ongoing discussions said "There will be no U.S. military forces in a combat role by the end of the year. We anticipate some force adjustments in line with that commitment."

A handful of the U.S. military personnel would stay in Iraq indefinitely under the proposal, which the individuals emphasized will not represent a retreat of American forces from the nation. In the battle against the Islamic State, these soldiers will offer logistical and advising assistance, as well as air power, information, and surveillance capabilities. The Islamic State claimed credit for a suicide assault in Baghdad that killed dozens of people.

American Drone Strike in 2020

Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran's top security and intelligence leader, was killed in an American drone attack in 2020, along with a senior Iraqi security official and eight others, making the U.S. present presence politically untenable and unwanted.

Following the US drone attack, Iraq's Parliament urged that the government remove the U.S. troops a nonbinding vote that conveyed a powerful message to any politician seeking to remain in office, including the prime minister, according to a published report in France24.

Moreover, the U.S. has frequently accused Iranian-backed militias in Iraq of ongoing assaults on the U.S. sites. The U.S. and many Iraqi authorities think the militias are also behind the majority of activist murders and a slew of illicit money-laundering operations.

Related Article: US Base in Erbil Airport Attacked by Armed Drones in Northern Iraq



@ 2021 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
President Joe Biden was heckled at a campaign event in Virginia on Friday but brushed it off while raising support for former Governor Terry McAuliffe, who is running for re-election later this year.

Biden Criticizes Trump

In an aggressive return to the campaign road on Friday, President Joe Biden chastised former President Donald Trump for calling Capitol rioters "beautiful peaceful individuals" and highlighted his 2020 election victory as he supported Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, according to a published article in Newsweek.

Biden said during a campaign rally for McAuliffe in Virginia that "We just have to keep making the case just as the Republican Party today offers nothing but fear, lies and broken promises," He also added that it is strange to think of going on the news every day and watching a repeat of what occurred on January 6 and hearing people claim it was a bunch of 'beautiful, peaceful individuals.'"

Meanwhile, it was Biden's first in-person candidate-specific event since taking office in January. It was his most forceful effort to utilize his political clout to defend both Democratic candidates around the nation and his own political future, according to a published report in CNN News.

Read Also: Republicans Set Eyes on 13 Democrat Incumbents to Regain Control of Virginia's State House of Delegates

Biden Linked Himself to McAuliffe

Pres. Joe Biden said he and Terry have a lot of interests. He, like Terry, campaigned against Donald Trump. He also said that he beat Donald Trump in Virginia and that Terry would do the same in the upcoming mid-year election against the gubernatorial candidate of Trump.

Despite the fact that Biden did not mention Glenn Youngkin's name, he connected the Republican businessman-turned-politician to Trump, another businessman-turned-politician who lost Virginia easily in both 2016 and 2020. The point that McAuliffe has made essential to his campaign was repeated by Biden, according to a published article in Business Insider.

Furthermore, to the roughly 3,000 people assembled in a park across the Potomac River, Biden underlined his pandemic response, his administration's economic recovery, and the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, as he underscored the vision for America he shared with McAuliffe.

Biden is Under a Great Pressure

Biden is under a lot of strain. Several presidents before him, including his immediate predecessor and the president he worked under, Barack Obama, experienced severe midterm election defeats, according to a recently published article in MSN News.

The stakes for Democrats are tremendous, given their razor-thin majorities in the House and Senate. A year after Biden's presidential win and a year before the 2022 midterm elections, the Virginia elections will offer a strong indicator of where the political mood is going, especially in the next Presidential election.

McAuliffe's stakes are higher. The former governor of Virginia and veteran Democratic donor is aiming for a once-in-a-generation feat: earning a second term as governor in a state where governors cannot serve consecutive terms. And to do this, he intends to devote a significant portion of his time to tying Youngkin to Trump.

Needless to say, to combat the party's history of midterm defeats, Biden's political operation has launched a two-pronged strategy: work to maintain popular support for the President's legislative priorities while also strengthening the party's top committees, such as the Democratic National Committee, earlier in the political calendar.

Biden has already sent funds from his joint fundraising committee to the DNC, which stated on Thursday that it will spend at least $5 million in Virginia in advance of the 2021 elections.

Related Article: Joe Biden Heckled at Virgina Rally, Says "It's Not a Trump Rally"



@ 2021 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Recently, the police found human remains where missing hiker Esther Dingley was last seen has brought up. They are looking at the remains from various angles that include circumstances because she disappeared.

They've looked at the spot where she dropped off and where the bones were found. Her disappearance late last year had the makings of a classic cold case.

When she was seen the last time, no one expected that it would be the last time she would be seen alive at all. At 2 p.m., a mountain runner had seen human remains on a trail.

Spanish or French jurisdiction

When Spanish officers went to the place reported, it was out of their jurisdiction because it was on the French side, reported the Mirror UK.

The probe has been handed across to French police to determine if the bones are human whether they may belong to the missing woman. But, the thing is, it's a person, not an animal.

According to the Spanish civil guard, who confirmed it was bones that reported human remains on the French side of the border at Puerto de la Glera.

Another statement verified that the Civil Guard was initially summoned. Still, they checked the area and immediately said it was the duty of the French Police to check on the remains.

The police found human remains where missing Hiker Esther Dingley was last seen on the border of Port de la Glare could not be confirmed if it were human immediately. It would take more days or weeks to get the analysis done.

Read Also: Axe-Wielding Husband Calls 999 to Confess Ending Life of Estranged Wife

The French police chief Jean-Marc Bordinaro commented that nothing could be determined until the analysis has been completed.

One French Prosecutor in Saint-Gaudens will make an official statement should new developments crop up soon, cited The Daily Mail.

Puerto de la Guera or Port de la Glere in France is at elevation 8,796ft Pico Salvaguardia summit. The missing woman last contacted her partner, Dan Colegate, through a message at 4 p.m., November 22, 2020, before her family never heard of her again, noted the Sun UK.

Possibility of an accident is unlikely to have happened

Search parties of French and Spanish search and rescue specialists swept the location the victim was last seen on the hiking trail. But when Colegate was asked about his missing partner, he said it is unlikely that it was an accident that happened.

Citing that the search has been concentrated and precise, an accident might not be it but criminal intent. To this statement, authorities are not saying there is foul play is involved.

Spanish Civil Guard said last month, the search for definitive remains resumed when the snow thawed. Sergeant Jorge Lopez Ramos mention the snow on parts of the summit on the French side was impassable, delaying the resumption of the search.

Ramos added that summer, having good weather conditions, would give authorities enough information to know what happened to Esther; it's the time hikers would be on the trail.

Having more people up there would give more possibilities to spot something out of the ordinary. When the snow is thawed, and summer comes, people will take alternative trails, and they might come across something of interest.

The police found human remains where the missing hiker Esther Dingle was seen before she was never heard of again. In all probability, during June, July, August, there will be more people who might bring in something new to the case.

Related Article: A Man in Spain Dies After Accidentally Trapping Himself Inside a Dinosaur Statue While Retrieving a Phone

@ 2021 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
The U.S. Congress is deferring discussion of another batch of payments until later this summer that might include another round of payments.

IRS Continues To Send Payments

The IRS is continuing to make supplementary "plus-up" payments for stimulus funds due, and the agency just sent the first monthly checks to millions of families eligible for the increased child tax credit, according to a recently published article in MSN News.

Additionally, many states, like Georgia and Florida, provide $1,000 "thank you" bonuses to teachers and other school personnel. California is about to distribute another batch of Golden State Stimulus checks worth up to $1,100 to millions of qualified citizens.

Read Also: Fourth Stimulus Check: Momentum Grows for Democrats Pushing for Recurring Payments

Status of Fourth Stimulus Checks

A current Change.org petition with over 2.6 million signatures urges Congress to issue a fourth stimulus check of $2,000 for adults and $1,000 for children every month throughout the duration of the pandemic. The petition states that "the recovery has not touched a large number of Americans" and emphasizes the need for quick checks and regular payments to "keep our heads above water."

According to recent research published in The New York Times, the first three stimulus checks aided in the alleviation of difficulties such as food insecurity and financial instability. Adults qualifying for the program have received a maximum of $3,200, while children have received a maximum of $2,500.

Meanwhile, that is insufficient compensation for many suffering families who have lost income and benefits. While the Change.org petition is on the verge of becoming one of the most popular on the internet, its effectiveness remains an open issue.

Language of Washington's Stimulus Money Proposal

Since March, when the American Rescue Plan was signed into law, the White House has offered two packages, the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan, neither of which included additional stimulus funding or Fourth Stimulus Checks.

On June 3, the White House stated during a news conference that efforts will be concentrated on the infrastructure investment package. According to White House press secretary Jen Psaki, Biden is "open to a variety of suggestions" about stimulus assistance, but he has already proposed what would be "the most effective in the near term," according to a published article in Marca.

However, In late March, Biden was urged by a bipartisan group of legislators to add monthly stimulus payments in his next stimulus plan. In May, many House Ways and Means Committee members made a similar request. They observed that "most individuals spent relief cheques on monthly expenditures or necessities such as food, electricity, rent, and mortgage payments," citing increasing poverty and spiraling debt among Americans.

IRS Says People Receive More Financial Aids

The IRS refers to the money that individuals are getting now as plus-up payments, since some US residents did not qualify for the full $1,400 amount owing to their 2019 taxes, but would have qualified under the 2020 tax law. This is estimated to be the case for 900,000 individuals.

The other 1.3 million individuals, on the other hand, had not gotten financial assistance through stimulus checks due to the IRS's inability to contact them, but now that they have been added to the system, they have been eligible to receive money from the U.S. government.

Related Article: Fact Check: Is a $2500 Fourth Stimulus Check Approved for Release on July 30?



@ 2021 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
After the Royal Navy had its drills in the Falkland's, but protest that follows. The UK tells Argentina to think twice if they were to do something drastic and reminded them who won in 1982.

This was the message of the Ex-British diplomat Adrian Hill at the UN's special committee on decolonization in regards to the Falklands issue.

He was an ex-officer in the Royal Engineers, and several posts later, saying that in 1982 the Royal Navy had no suitable carriers 1982. Now it has, so that is something to consider.

Looking back at 1982

Way back then, Sandy Woodward had to place British destroyers and frigates in the line of fire when the Royal Navy faced the Argentine Navy like sitting ducks.

Present-day forces are equipped with two supercarriers, equipped with F-35Bs that can destroy the Argentinian air forces before they deploy from airbases or their fleets, reported Express UK.

In the short-lived conflict, Argentina lost so decisively in that conflict, with many lives lost. It is not worth it to let it happen again.

Falkland drills draw flak

Recently the British forces had accomplished drills on the disputed islands, also known as the Malvinas. The Argentine government issued sanctions against two British firms engaged in oil production in waters nearby the Malvinas.

It was the Ministry of external relations had condemned the military exercises harshly. The UK tells Argentina to think twice about what to say next.

Read Also: China Provokes Falklands Islands to Confront the UK with Force, Ending the Dispute of Sovereignty

In the statement, said The Argentine Government has now voiced its fierce opposition to military maneuvers being conducted out on our nation's unlawfully occupied territories by the United Kingdom.

Conducting the Cape Bayonet exercises equates to that of an unjustified demonstration of power as well as a deliberate disregard for numerous UN and other international institutions' decisions.

Both Argentina and the United Kingdom should resume talks to obtain a peaceful and permanent solution to the Falklands Island sovereignty dispute.

Based on the United Nations General Assembly, Argentina said that the two nations should not make drastic decisions to introduce changes arbitrarily. Keeping the status quo as negotiations are underway in the UN decolonization committee.

Other details on the Argentine claim

Daniel Filmus, Secretary of the Malvinas, Antarctica and South Atlantic, issued a statement that said the UK drills were against the recommendation of the UN. They also violated the agreements of nations with coastal areas in the Atlantic, cited the Daily Advent.

The Foreign Minister Felipe Sola stated that the following territories were part of Argentina are the South Sandwich Islands, South Georgia, and Malvinas that are part of their republic. Adding that it was unlawfully taken by the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland that is part of a UN resolution 2065 with a series of resolutions with foreign organizations, noted New York Time Post.

The issue is a bilateral sovereignty conflict between the two countries that must be resolved and underlines its willingness to resume talks.

According to the UN Resolutions of 2065, military actions are prohibited in the region; emphasis on diplomatic not the force of arms should be the key avenue to follow. Despite this, the UK tells Argentina to think twice about actions to carry out.

Related Article: Xi Jinping Threatens Australia for Monitoring a Chinese Spy Ship Off Its Boundaries

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Dennis Whitworth did not take lightly his departure from the church he called home for two decades.

His disillusionment predated the pandemic. In the years before COVID-19 shuttered churches across the nation, the 64-year-old often disagreed with some of the politics he encountered at Second Baptist Church of Houston, one of the nations largest congregations.

Nonetheless, he opted to continue with the Bible study classes hed taught for five years, believing political differences shouldnt trump saving souls.

Then came COVID-19 and, soon after, church policies that Whitworth said made him feel unsafe.

And so, after a quarter-century at Second, he left.

My association with the church was a huge part of what I did, and so its painful, he said. But Im not the only one.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Delta variant confirmed at Houston-area church camp's COVID outbreak that infected more than 125

The 2020 presidential election had already exposed serious fissures in many parts of American Christianity, fractures that were further deepened as COVID-19 ravaged communities and shuttered many congregations, thousands of them permanently.

Meanwhile, vaccine hesitancy or skepticism remain high among Christians, particularly white Protestants in more rural and conservative parts of the country that experts fear will remain unprotected and vulnerable to new and more contagious strains of the virus.

Thats not a surprising trend, said Kira Ganga Kieffer, who researches vaccines and religious movements at Boston University. White evangelicals have for decades been skeptical of vaccines, namely when theyre accompanied by fears of government involvement.

That resistance has usually been rooted in moral concerns, she said, noting the HPV vaccine that some Christians thought would make teens more likely to have sex.

Pushback against COVID has been particularly fierce, she said, because of the proliferation of conspiracy theories, online disinformation and "culture war" rhetoric, particularly in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election.

Tribal lines have been drawn, she said.

Recent survey data bolster that claim. From January to May, the share of unvaccinated evangelicals who said they were very unlikely to get the vaccine doubled to 43 percent, according to a recent analysis of Data for Progress polling by Eastern Illinois University political science professor Ryan Burge.

About 36 percent of Catholics said the same, a 14 percentage point increase since January.

And polling by the Pew Research Center found Republican-leaning Christians were far more comfortable than Democrats with resuming normal church life sooner rather than later.

Essential?

That much was clear in Texas last spring, in the wake of an executive order by Gov. Greg Abbott that closed most businesses and houses of worship.

The order sparked outcry from conservatives, as well as a lawsuit filed by groups that had also challenged the constitutionality of Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgos stay-at-home orders and business closures.

Abbott soon changed course, deeming churches as essential but limiting services to 25-percent capacity.

Within a few weeks, the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston had resumed masses on a limited capacity; Second Baptist reopened limited services, with social distancing and recommendations that people wear masks, on May 10, Mothers Day Weekend

On HoustonChronicle.com: COVID Help Desk: How do researchers determine how contagious a COVID-19 strain is?

Many other large congregations remained closed, including Joel Osteens massive Lakewood Church. An interdenominational group of more than 80 Christian churches from around the Houston area also signed a statement saying they would not hold in-person services during May.

It was around that time Whitworth began to question whether he should stay at Second, where he said he often encountered anti-mask sentiment. He also took issue with the churchs decision to reopen, which he said drew in many elderly people at high-risk for COVID-19.

That was the straw that broke the camels back, he said.

Second Baptist declined comment, but a spokesperson provided the Chronicle with various COVID protocols from May and June of 2020 that call for social distancing and limited worship services, but no mask mandates.

Whitworth now attends weekly services at a Methodist church.

It does not yet feel like home. Ive just had to kind of start over, he said.

Do no harm

Most churches have gradually moved back to in-person worship and, with that, welcomed those in search of a new church home.

That includes those such as Trey Medley. He recently left Houston Northwest Church in search of a more egalitarian church that allows for the ordination of women. The churchs response to COVID was a factor as well, he said.

His wife has asthma and so they were particularly cautious during the pandemic. Houston Northwests protocols, Medley said, were just a little bit ahead of the couples comfort level. He added that he left the church on good terms.

Medley and his family now worship at South Main Baptist Church, in downtown Houston.

One selling point? The churchs COVID protocols, which included vows to follow the advice of the medical community and a reminder that churches are not like businesses.

We must strive to do no harm, the churchs website still reads.

In early May, South Main also released a survey of congregants over the age of 16, of which 89 percent said they were fully vaccinated.

That vaccination rate would put South Main congregants far above the averages for both Harris County and Texas, both of which had vaccinated half of all residents older than 12 as of this week.

Prophetic voice

Dr. Timothy Sloan said he felt slightly traumatized as he read reports of a COVID-19 outbreak at a Houston-area churchs camp in late June.

Seventeen months after the beginning of the pandemic, his congregation, The Luke Church in Humble, has yet to resume full services. The church camp outbreak reinforced the need for precautions, he said.

It kind of triggered the trauma and caused us to be mindful, Sloan said of the Clear Creek outbreak.

The Lukes members are mostly Black, and many were initially skeptical of vaccines in part because of the historic abuse of Black Americans under the guise of federal health initiatives, such as the Tuskegee Experiments, he said.

In January, Sloan hosted a video call with Dr. Anthony Fauci as a way to persuade his and other congregations to trust vaccines. Since then, Sloan said, many in his pews have shed their suspicions and gotten inoculated.

Hes proud of his role in helping keep people safe. And he sympathizes with the many church leaders who, in the last two years, have been thrust into the middle of congregational disagreements on COVID, Trump or systemic racism, among other contentious issues.

Sloan said he often finds himself battling misinformation that his congregants read on social media, and sometimes feels caught in a tug of war between the wants, needs and safety of his congregation, particularly at a time of the double grief of COVID and racial upheaval felt by many minority Christians.

My role is to be a prophetic voice, he said. It is to speak truth to power.

Pastors, he said, need to confront those disagreements within their pews  particularly in a time of great misinformation.

Because so many of us are coming back not just with excitement to worship, but with the grief of a past season, he said. And that can't be denied.

robert.downen@chron.com
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP)  Monty Frazier was on leave when he received the phone call that ended his career.

It was May 11, and the 51-year-old father of three had taken the week off from his job as a heavy bridge inspector with ArDOT, the Arkansas Department of Transportation. He stayed home to care for Shelly, his wife of 29 years, whod gone through a long-scheduled major surgery the day before.

Since the couple lived deep in the Ozark woods  in Natural Dam, an Arkansas community of fewer than 300 people near the Oklahoma state line  Frazier needed to be around to care for her, to make her meals, to take her to follow-up appointments.

He got a call from his assistant, Anthony Caudel, late in the afternoon.

Hey Monty, Frazier recalls Caudel saying. Can you look at your computer real quick? We need to see where this location on the I-40 bridge is.

Inside his gray modular home, a five-hour drive from the Hernando DeSoto Bridge that connects Memphis to Arkansas via I-40, Frazier got up from his kitchen table and grabbed his state-issued computer.

Whats going on? Frazier asked.

Well, they found a major crack in the bridge, Caudel told him.

Frazier paused, stunned. Holy crap, he said. Is it bad?

Yeah, Caudel said. Its bad.

While the Tennessee and Arkansas transportation departments share responsibility for maintaining the DeSoto Bridge, ArDOT is responsible for inspecting it.

Somehow, teams of inspectors, going back years, failed to notice a major separation in the bridges steel tie girders. If those tie girders lost their integrity, the bridge would collapse, and any number of more than 47,000 drivers who cross the bridge every day could plummet more than 120 feet into the Mississippi River.

That cracks discovery set off a chain of events that has placed virtually all of the blame for closing one of the most heavily trafficked bridges in the United States squarely on the shoulders of one man.

But did the state of Arkansas get the right man?

A Daily Memphian investigation into what happened after the crack was discovered revealed a troubling rush to judgment, evidence the crack has existed for at least seven years, and major questions about the procedures and thoroughness of the current bridge inspections.

The investigation included a review of thousands of pages of emails obtained in partnership with the Arkansas Nonprofit News Network (ANNN) through the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act. Among the findings:

 There is photographic evidence, sent to ArDOT officials and discussed within the organization via email, that the crack has been visible since 2016. A newly discovered photo by a French tourist posted to Flickr appears to show the crack visible as early as October 2014. Many people besides Frazier missed or didnt report the crack. None of them have been disciplined or fired.

 The contractor who reported the crack in May did not see it in 2019, despite it being visible in its drone footage at the time. The company has not lost its contract with the state and continues to inspect bridges.

 A review of thousands of pages of internal ArDOT emails shows Fraziers boss, Mike Hill, acknowledged the blame for the failure to notice the crack should rest with him. He has not lost his job, or been disciplined.

 In an email responding to questions from The Daily Memphian and ANNN  and in a followup call with ArDOTs director, Lorie Tudor  department officials claimed that Fraziers firing rested on their finding that Monty Frazier was the only inspector of the tie girder that was cracked between 2016 and 2020. That assertion is contradicted by years of reports that show at least five separate ArDOT employees inspected the bridge during that time period.

Frazier is the only person to be terminated in connection with the bridges closure. Hes kept quiet since his firing on May 17. But now hes ready to talk.

In exclusive interviews with The Daily Memphian, Frazier outlined how the inspection process works, and offered his perspective on how so many inspectors may have failed to notice such a glaring problem.

Frazier is contrite about the failure itself.

Every day I think about it  what could have happened if we kept missing it, Frazier said. I have nightmares about it.

But there are larger issues at play.

This is a problem thats way bigger than me, he said. And if they dont take a good look at how we missed this, its gonna happen again.

WHO IS MONTY FRAZIER?

After graduating high school in Cedarville, Arkansas, Frazier earned his first of dozens of welding certifications in 1989. He got married three years later and took jobs all over the country, wherever he could find work. Shelly followed.

In 1998, they moved back to Natural Dam and began raising their sons there. ArDOT hired Frazier as a mechanic in 2006. He was promoted to a welding position in 2008 and welded steel on bridges throughout the state.

A bridge inspector named Jeff Jones told Frazier about the inspection program, which intrigued him.

It was something different, Frazier said. Ive worked with steel pretty much my whole life, and I was looking for something bigger.

For four years, Jones tutored Frazier, gave him literature about bridge inspections, answered any questions he had. (Jones did not respond to requests for comment.)

The State of Arkansas requires five years of bridge-related experience before someone can go through the inspection program, which involves attending a two-week training course, studying out of a Federal Highway Administration manual, and passing a test based on the coursework.

By 2012, with his four years as a bridge welder with the state, and one year of previous experience in Atlanta building bridge-length box culverts, Frazier took the course and passed the test.

He then began working as an assistant for Jones. He maintained the trucks and boats used for inspections. He organized photos and video. He sketched scale drawings of the bridges themselves, provided information for inspection reports.

Assistants are required to work for two years in that role before they can apply to be an inspector.

In 2015, Frazier applied for and got an inspector job out of Huntsville, Arkansas. In 2016, he joined the heavy bridge inspection team out of Little Rock.

Hed soon lead the DeSoto Bridge inspections.

ANATOMY OF A FAILURE

Its not something many people think about  or even notice  but bridges are everywhere, connecting everything from pavement crossing tiny ravines, to huge concrete structures that cross interstate river systems. In Arkansas alone, there are 13,610 bridges, and each of them needs to be inspected regularly for wear and tear, and for potential collapse.

Like airplane crashes, bridge collapses are rare, but when they happen, its a catastrophe. Depending on the size of the bridge and the amount of traffic, the effects can be calamitous.

The DeSoto Bridge is the last bridge anyone wants to collapse.

Including all of its spans and ramps and approaches, its a structure that stretches well over three miles, and it sits high enough above the longest river in North America to allow for massive barges to easily pass underneath it.

The annual inspection process, overseen by ArDOT, can last as long as a month, and involves a team of about a dozen state employees who scrutinize the bridges superstructure and its highway for the slightest indications of damage. Thats in addition to a contractor, the publicly traded Michael Baker Corp., which examines the bridge with its own team every other year, rappelling and using drones to inspect the two arches that stretch about 90 feet above the bridges drivable surface area.

On May 11, in the midst of this years inspection, a Michael Baker worker checking the diagonals and vertical members of the bridge happened to see a crack and called 911 at 2:02 p.m.: We need to get people off the bridge immediately!

A program manager from Michael Baker, Alicia McConnell, emailed ArDOT officials the drone footage. ArDOT, along with the Tennessee Department of Transportation, the Memphis Police Department and others worked to stop traffic on the bridge.

That afternoon and into the late evening, ArDOT officials scrambled to make public statements, and to figure out how to secure the bridge for traffic again.

WHAT HAPPENED?

In the days that followed, ArDOT officials began trying to find out what happened  and who was at fault.

Initially, the investigation moved toward the idea that the bridge had been struck by something passing underneath it.

At 9:31 p.m. on May 11, Mike Hill, the lead engineer in charge of heavy bridge inspections for ArDOT, sent an email to his colleagues about the work ahead for the next day. Theyd need an ultra clear image of the crack itself, and the steel structure underneath.

We want a close-up of what appears to be scuff marks on the bottom of the chord, Hill wrote. I wouldnt tell anyone that it was struck from below but it happened to the Helena Bridge in the past  referencing a span crossing the Mississippi about 80 miles downriver from Memphis  so it is not impossible.

Officials assumed that the crack emerged within the past year, so their investigation focused on the 2020 and 2021 inspections. Then, as the story spread to the public, old photos of the bridge emerged. Tudor, the departments director, sent her staff an email at 11:58 a.m. on May 14.

There is an image that is being circulated on social media of an image dated 2019 that shows evidence of damage in the same area of the fracture, she wrote. We have confirmed that the image is legitimate and we are investigating to see if that damage was noted in a September 2019 inspection report and if so, what actions were taken.

Michael Baker employees looked back at old video inspections, finding that the crack had been visible in their drone footage as early as 2019. Though their contract with the state did not stipulate that their mandate extended to the bridges tie girders, theyd missed it, too.

If the crack presented a clear, present danger, that danger existed for at least 24 months before anyone noticed it.

PLACING BLAME

If any one person was to be blamed for the missed crack, it could have been Hill.

One staff engineer reports to Hill, and three statewide heavy bridge inspection teams report to the staff engineer. Each team consists of a lead bridge inspector and an assistant. Responsibility for their work ultimately fell to Hill.

I understand you all may be getting some pressure to fire me, he wrote in an email to Rex Vines, ArDOTs deputy director and chief engineer, on May 16, at 3:18 p.m. You dont have to worry that Im going to do something that hurts the (bridge inspection) Program even more on my way out. I want the Program to come back stronger from this experience and I want my team to succeed. Even if Im no longer part of it.

Less than two hours after Hill sent his email, Vines forwarded it to Tudor.

I just wanted you to see this, Vines wrote. I think it speaks volumes of Mikes heart.

MR. FRAZIER DIDNT SEEM DISTRESSED

On May 14, Hill called Frazier and asked him to come into ArDOTs Little Rock office, and Frazier made the 2.5-hour trek from Natural Dam. He didnt sense that his job might be at risk. Frazier described a 10- to 15-minute conversation during which Hill asked him how inspections were conducted.

Hill conducted in-person interviews with five inspectors who participated in the 2019 and 2020 DeSoto inspections that day. He conducted another three over the phone and then requested written statements from each of them.

The next morning, Frazier emailed his statement to Hill outlining what he and his team had done during the inspections.

He described the process of using an industrial bridge inspection unit called an Aspen A-75. Sometimes called a snooper truck, its a gigantic, 80,000-pound vehicle with to a long, adjustable steel arm with multiple joints. At its tip is a basket that can hold 700 pounds.

To inspect the underside of a bridge, a team will park the Aspen on the deck, climb into the basket and maneuver the arm down over the side of the bridge and horizontally underneath it. The arm includes a boom that can swing in a wide semicircle under the bridge, allowing the inspectors in the basket to hunt for potential damage.

Inspecting the entire length of the DeSoto Bridge required multiple stops  the team would park the Aspen A-75 and deploy its arm beneath the bridge 12 times each on the westbound and eastbound sides, according to an ArDOT document compiled from the inspectors statements. In addition to scanning the underside of the structure with the Aspen, teams would walk the length of the bridge to eyeball potential damage from the deck.

While Frazier insists that he adhered to protocol, Hill said he did not. He also went further, though, claiming that he noticed something off about the way Frazier acted in his interview.

In a summary of the interviews and written statements presented to Vines and Tudor on May 16, Hills assessment was blistering.

The people involved in the tied arch inspections were Monty Frazier (Both years), Andy Nanneman (2020  side with the crack), and Anthony Caudel (2019  the side away from the crack and 2020), Hill wrote. Both Mr. Nanneman and Mr. Caudel showed extreme distress at missing the crack. They both wanted to see what the crack looked like in 2019.

Mr. Frazier didnt seem distressed and didnt ask to see the crack, Hill continued. He kept saying that there was no way to see the crack because it was too dangerous to go past the underside of the tie girder.

In a separate summary, Nanneman also called Frazier out. During the inspection I did mention to Monty that we were working through the bridge too fast and that we need to slow down on inspections.

Less than four hours after Hill told his bosses on May 16 that he wouldnt object to being fired, Tudor sent an all-staff email.

The inspector responsible for inspecting the failed portion of the bridge admitted that he did not inspect the bridge properly, it read. He has been sent home on leave without pay pending termination.

Hill wasnt the focus of that email.

It was Frazier.

THE SCAPEGOAT?

On May 20, Hill sent an email to Deputy Director Rex Vines.

Tried calling because I thought you would want to know, he wrote. The crew brought in Montys stuff today and we found a picture on his iPad of the bottom half of the tie girder at the location in question.

The picture was significant because it showed exactly what Frazier saw when he inspected the bridge.

No visible crack on the bottom side, Hill wrote.

Frazier believed he was following protocol, and that he looked where he was assigned to look. And when he got to the location of the crack following that procedure, there was no crack to be seen.

Theres a dilemma here, according to Frazier, which is seemingly made stronger considering the iPad image referenced by Hill. Frazier admits that he erred in missing the crack  in the sense that, if photographs on social media could show the crack existed, then there should have been some possible way for him and his inspection team to see it.

I missed it, he said. Theres no denying that.

At the same time, while Frazier believed that the Aspen A-75 put him in all the right places to inspect miles of bridge, it didnt. So maybe, Frazier suggests, Arkansas protocols  which involve exclusively using the Aspen for close analysis of the tie girders  wasnt enough.

If Michael Baker Corp.s after-the-fact discovery of the crack with drone footage showed anything beyond the crack itself, it was that drones could see and access places that perhaps inspectors aboard the Aspen platform couldnt. According to Frazier, 2021 is the first year that certain Arkansas bridge inspectors have begun training for drone certifications.

In an email to The Memphian, ArDOTs public information officer, Dave Parker, said that drones are an excellent redundancy to add to the inspection process, but that hands-on inspections are a federal requirement of the National Bridge Inspection Standard. Drones will not, he said, replace the value of a hands on inspection.

In response to a specific question about Fraziers termination, Parker said, we have verified that Monty Frazier was the only inspector of the tie girder that was cracked between 2016 and 2020. ArDOTs director, Lorie Tudor, emphasized this point in a followup call on July 20.

This contention is contradicted by years of inspection reports provided to The Daily Memphian and ANNN. At least five inspectors are listed as having inspected the bridge during that time. Frazier is only one of them.

In Fraziers view, the failing to identify the crack equates to a failure over time of many inspectors failing to notice it, going back years.

And theres plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting hes right.

In the months since the bridge closed for repairs, multiple images have emerged online from amateur photographers that appear to show the same crack. One from Barry W. Moore, a retired program manager in the Shelby County Health Department, shows the crack visible to kayakers viewing the bridge from the Mississippi River as early as August 2016.

Another, taken by French tourist Philipe Suissa and dated Oct. 24, 2014, shows the same crack. Metadata analysis by The Daily Memphian confirmed the dates of both photos.

Frazier had been on staff at ArDOT since 2006, but didnt participate in DeSoto inspections until 2016. The inspections have gone through multiple lead bridge inspectors  and dozens of inspectors  since 2014.

If there are that many people who missed the crack over all that time, Frazier said, its a problem with the way we inspect the bridge, not just the one guy who happened to be on the paperwork the last time we missed it.

___

Benjamin Hardy, editor of the Arkansas Nonprofit News Network, and freelance researcher Nicole Gusmerotti contributed to this story. Freelance photographer Nate Boguszewski provided metadata analysis of bridge photos from 2014 and 2016.
In Houston, living in close proximity to chemical breakdowns is a way of life. Odd, sulfuric aromas linger in the summer humidity. Flaring from petrochemical facilities light up the night sky. Purple smoke plumes lend a dystopian allure to the industrial landscape.

Of course, none of this is supposed to be normal. The Houston Chronicle reported several years ago that the region has a chemical fire or explosion every six weeks on average. Yet in just the past eight days, Houstonians were reminded three times of our precarious relationship with deadly chemicals.

On Saturday, 65 people came down with respiratory distress at a water park in Spring after they were exposed to bleach and sulfuric acid. In Galena Park on Tuesday, the roof of a chemical tank at a refinery collapsed, releasing a garlic-like smell, sickening nearby residents. In La Porte on Wednesday, a hazardous compound leaked from an over-pressurized tank truck, sparking fears of an explosion at a nearby Dow Chemical plant and prompting evacuation and shelter-in-place orders.

Houstons chemical releases and poor air quality affect us all. But its the fence-line communities in and around petrochemical plants that are most at-risk when disaster strikes  and the most dependent on government experts to investigate such incidents and to try to prevent them from happening again.

Thats why the current state of the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board is almost as alarming as the incidents theyre supposed to be probing.

Not too long ago, the board was a no-nonsense, fact-finding agency whose reports and recommendations were widely respected within the petrochemical industry. Its report on the Arkema plant disaster during Hurricane Harvey brought to light harrowing details of volatile organic peroxides decomposing and catching fire. When the ITC facility in Deer Park caught fire in 2019, sending a black plume of smoke across Harris County, the board discovered in a preliminary investigation that the facility was not equipped with gas detection alarms or emergency shutoff valves that could have isolated the blaze.

While the agency does not have enforcement power, its investigative findings serve as a blueprint for companies to improve their safety cultures. After the 2005 explosion at the BP plant in Texas City, the board investigated not only the physical cause, but also the corporate decisions leading up to the disaster. BP executives took the report to heart, adding a board member focused on safety, instituting a new incident reporting system and appointing an independent panel examining safety issues within the company.

At its peak, the CSB, as it is known, was a repository of chemical safety knowledge, with a level of specialization that federal regulators such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration dont have.

So what happened? The CSB was one of many federal agencies denuded by the Trump administrations sweeping anti-regulatory efforts. The board now has a backlog of 19 site investigations  an unprecedented number in the agencys 23-year history. Seven are in Texas. Four in the Houston area include the Watson Grinding and Manufacturing explosion last year, the ITC fire and the KMCO plant in Crosby.

The board has also failed to recruit qualified investigators with a broad range of experience to properly probe chemical incidents. The CSB employs only 12 investigators, nearly half the number of staff from previous years  and six were hired in the past year.

While President Donald Trump at one point recommended eliminating the agency altogether, he settled for rendering it hopelessly inert. He allowed the terms of the agencys five-person board to expire, then in March 2020 installed Katherine Lemos, a pilot, flight instructor and former accident investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board, as the chairwoman for a five-year term.

Lemos essentially has unilateral authority, a quorum of one responsible for executing budgeting decisions, strategy, investigations and approving all report findings and safety recommendations. That grasp for power hasnt yielded more efficient results. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have questioned Lemos leadership and the agencys ongoing challenges. In March, worker advocates alleged that Lemos directed the board to cooperate with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in the wake of a deadly nitrogen leak in January at a Georgia poultry plant which employed Latino workers.

A 2020 inspector general report noted that a single CSB board member is unlikely to have the technical qualifications or time to perform the required board duties.

A 2018 memo from a half-dozen CSB investigators that was obtained by the Chronicle says the agency had already begun advocating shorter investigations that avoid analyzing companies safety culture. Instead, there are desk investigations, in which the board asks chemical companies for their internal investigation files, with no follow-up interviews of affected workers or residents. .

This lack of diligence and misplaced faith in petrochemical companies to police themselves is antithetical to the agencys mission. The people who suffer harm in these chemical disasters are often limited in their power to seek accountability from giant corporations with highly skilled lawyers and political influence. The CSB should be a critical conduit for change.

Under the Biden administration, the EPA is revising its risk management rule  the core federal regulations involving prevention of major chemical releases, explosions and fires. A fully staffed CSB that can complete its outstanding investigations could use those findings to shape how the federal government handles these disasters in the future.

Another proactive step from the Biden administration: his nomination of three qualified individuals with extensive background in chemical safety for the vacant CSB board seats. If confirmed, theyd provide a crucial counterweight to Lemos, who has attempted to eliminate the authority of other board members over agency rules and regulations, budget, and statements to Congress or the president. In anticipation of the new members, Lemos needs to officially clarify the vital functions of their positions and the limitations of her own.

Biden also proposes raising the CSB budget slightly, from $12 million to $13.4 million, which could allow the agency to hire more qualified investigators and staff. But the agency cant just take the money and run. Once the three board members are confirmed, the CSB should move quickly in filling vacant positions and place an emphasis on hiring investigators with a diverse array of experiences  from toxicology to public health to risk assessment.

As the leading petrochemical hub in the nation, Houston is uniquely threatened by chemical disasters. If a massive explosion on the scale of Texas Citys in 2005 or Wests in 2013 happened today, wed need the keen eyes and neutrality of federal experts to find out what happened and what can keep it from happening again.

One of the first executive orders President Joe Biden issued was a commitment to making environmental justice part of every agencys mission. In Houston, were counting on the CSB to make that lofty goal a reality.
When Texas Democrats fled from Austin, they not only stopped the voting bill but many other bills including changes to the states bail system. While election legislation garners most headlines, policymakers cant run from the urgency of pretrial reform to properly balance individual liberty and public safety. Gov. Greg Abbott was right to put it on the agenda and lawmakers should use this time to refine current proposals.

The Texas Constitution doesnt allow judges to deny bail to a person charged with even heinous offenses such as murder and rape, allowing it only for capital murder. This leaves judges seeking to detain people accused of some of the most serious crimes in the unenviable position of setting a high bail amount they hope defendants cannot afford.

Using ability to pay to determine release is not only inequitable, but sometimes ineffective as well. Wealthy but highly dangerous defendants can purchase their release, while low-risk defendants charged with relatively minor offenses often languish in jail for months, unable to afford bail as low as $500. A recent Houston Chronicle investigation revealed the number of new charges against defendants out on bond tripled from 2015 to 2020. Some of those new charges  a number that is small relative to the total awaiting trial  include murder.

The recipe for successful reform is straightforward: a carefully limited expansion of the constitutional authority of judges to deny bail paired with a requirement that any bail amount be affordable and based on an individual analysis.

Identical bail reform proposals in the disrupted special session, Senate Bill 6 and House Bill 2, include worthwhile provisions to create a statewide data system so all courts have access to relevant information at pretrial proceedings, such as whether the defendant has previously failed to appear in court or has a prior violent conviction. These bills incorporate these factors into a public safety report but prohibit the use of any score or risk rating tied to them. Nonetheless, this information alone will help judges make better decisions, and the provisions for training jurists and tracking implementation are welcome.

However, there are several ways to strengthen the legislation. Judges not only need more information, but more options beyond pretrial detention and release without any conditions. One laudable feature of the current proposals is language requiring the least restrictive conditions needed to ensure reappearance and public safety, but personnel and technology are critical to enforcing conditions. Accordingly, pretrial services, which are absent in most rural Texas counties, should be expanded.

Pretrial services entail both interviewing defendants to help courts customize conditions and overseeing their implementation, which can include alcohol-monitoring devices and even a more comprehensive 24/7 sobriety program for repeat drunken driving defendants and protective orders and working with victims in cases of intimate partner violence. So long as conditions are narrowly tailored to each defendant, these services have been demonstrated to increase reappearances and reduce rearrests, while giving courts sufficient assurance to release more defendants.

One innovation that is helping fill in the spectrum between detention and release without conditions is phone apps, which can connect defendants with job placement assistance, housing and treatment for mental health and substance use disorders and verify their participation. In the regular session, Texas moved in this direction through House Bill 4293, which authorizes a pretrial text reminder system that has successfully increased reappearance rates in other states. The cost is minimal, and lawmakers need to appropriate funds to implement this bill.

There are also other ways to improve current proposals. Provisions that bar no-cost personal bonds for certain offenses could, in the absence of a requirement that bail be affordable, exacerbate current inequities. Among the situations in which Senate Bill 6 would override judicial discretion by banning personal bonds are a misdemeanor case involving two students in a dorm room where only a verbal threat is alleged, and a felony case alleging accidental, minor injury to an elderly person or child because of a failure to act.

The impetus to prohibit personal bonds ignores data showing that paying money to a bondsman does not affect rearrest rates. In fact, bail bondsmen only theoretically forfeit the bond if their client skips court, but not if they are rearrested.

Additionally, language arbitrarily limiting nonprofit bail funds is troubling. A survey found 5 of 7 returned at least 95 percent of defendants to court, with the other two at 80 percent or higher. Also, counties should have flexibility on whether to generate the public safety report in all nonviolent misdemeanor cases. If there are not sufficient court personnel to rapidly produce reports and conduct individualized hearings based upon them, the release of defendants charged with marijuana possession and other high-volume minor infractions could be unnecessarily delayed. Research has found that defendants can lose their jobs and, therefore, become even more of a risk after just a couple of days in jail.

As for the constitutional amendment proposals that expand judges ability to deny bail for some violent and sexual charges, the identical Senate Joint Resolution 3 and House Joint Resolution 1 encouragingly include safeguards added during negotiations, such as the requirement of a written order denying bail. However, they should be clarified to apply the clear and convincing evidence requirement not only to the need for detention, but also to evidence of the defendants guilt. This change would reduce the chance that people who are not ultimately convicted are held for months based on the low probable cause standard for arrest.

Finally, courts face massive, pandemic-induced case backlogs that delay justice for victims and defendants alike. Bail reform could help by providing courts with more tools and authority, especially if a small portion of $16 billion in unspent federal pandemic relief funds was allocated for court staff and technology.

Balanced bail reform is an opportunity for lawmakers to not merely oppose defunding public safety, but to advance it.

Levin is the chief policy counsel for the Council on Criminal Justice.
I tend to be paranoid about conversations that take place spontaneously in countries known for repression, so when an entrepreneur approached me at a Chinese technology conference I attended in 2017 and began explaining to me her happiness in China, I thought she was planted to do so by some crazed public relations specialist within the countrys intelligence apparatus.

The entrepreneur, who had studied in America, extolled the benefits of the Chinese system for backing innovation compared to the U.S. laissez-faire approach. She told me how she had launched her energy efficiency technology firm in Washington state, but uncertainty about changing regulations and tax incentives, permit difficulties for new technologies, and the uphill nature of selling a new product in mature markets like the United States caused her great difficulty in getting established. When, after several years of struggle, the Chinese government offered to relocate her business to China, she jumped at the chance. She said that clear government mandates and incentives made her business take off, and she was glad to have come back to China despite her happy times in America.

Chinas central economic planning has many drawbacks, but for clean energy deployment, its vast government support is paying off. Chinas single ruling party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking the United States in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. Chinas leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down. Finally, the U.S. is taking notice with the passage in the Senate of an industrial policy bill with wide, bipartisan support. The House should move forward on digital tech industrial spending packages put forward by the Senate, perhaps removing some of the other more controversial China-focused elements in those bills. Passage of the infrastructure bill, that includes electric vehicle charging stations and electricity system modernization, is another vital step.

The story of the entrepreneur I met reminded me of an op-ed I had read years before by columnist Thomas Friedman, writing on Chinese versus U.S. energy policy in 2009: I remember thinking how simplistic it was. I am not sure if I was more agitated by Friedmans calling an authoritarian regime enlightened or by the idea that he believed China was going to overtake Silicon Valley because they wrote it down in a five-year plan. For me the question was whether, in a place where rampant official corruption meant that merit did not always determine economic winners and younger-generation innovators did not have free access to information or freedom of speech, it was possible to create an innovation ecosystem that could beat out a system where any 18-year-old could invent something in his garage and, if it worked, potentially attract investors.

I get it. Not all of America is like the television show Shark Tank, and it can actually be hard to raise money in the United States, especially given the student debt crisis.

Still, the American system has clear advantages for innovation, and the U.S. has a global leadership role to play when it comes to digital technology and clean energy. The U.S. must lead not only in energy innovation but also in protecting individual rights, privacy, and the environment, as adoption of the new technologies take off.

As a rising China closes the technological gap, U.S. policy leaders are increasingly questioning whether the United States needs to update and improve its industrial and trade policies. One main concern is making the U.S. supply chain less vulnerable to shortages of rare metals and other processed components that go into smart and automated devices. Moreover, many advanced energy and transportation technologies developed by American firms for use in everyday products have dual-use direct applicability to defense and national security. For example, while drones are being auditioned in the commercial delivery sphere because of their advantages over human drivers and are also being plumbed as a way to ferry American commuters for short distances, the defense industry has harnessed them on the battlefield.

It is becoming increasingly clear that America cannot just rest on its laurels when it comes to digital technologies and energy. The United States needs to take additional steps to address long-term capabilities, perhaps emulating some of what the Defense Department did to rev up the development of self-driving cars by U.S. firms. As China combines government-led investment and workforce development, the U.S. government will have to shape its own strategies to align publicly funded research with the ongoing product development strung across its private sector. That effort must focus attention on workforce development as well as basic R&D if the country is to have any shot at maintaining a critical edge.

But heres the thing: In China, a system so built on repression has a rigidity that threatens its success. And that brings me to the rest of the story about my conversation with the energy efficiency entrepreneur.

As the conversation continued, she began to rethink her position out loud. At first she was explaining to me how convenient it was to be a working mother in China compared to the United States. She could order whatever she needed for her family online and, unlike in the United States, did not need to be home to accept a delivery. Her groceries would arrive at her housing complex, and the security guard there would bring them inside her home and put them in the refrigerator for her. He even policed the community. When a neighbor took a bicycle from her yard, he went and moved it back to her garage without any trouble for her, because it was clear to him from the community surveillance system that it was her possession. It was on this last point that her confidence in her new life began to break down, because (I am just guessing here) it must have become clear from the look on my face that I myself would not want a member of the Communist Party whose job was to keep me under surveillance to bring my groceries into my house every day.

In China, the personal credit system is not a commercial endeavor based solely on how well you pay your bills. It is a social rating system that includes your personal associations, your community volunteering, and in fact, your social behavior. This social credit system via the National Credit Information Sharing Platform is supported by the big tech companies that my entrepreneur friend was describing, delivering all her purchases to her doorstep seamlessly. Alipay, the credit vehicle used by many Chinese to buy items from the internet, is involved in this system. If you borrowed someones bicycle without their permission in China, and certainly if you stole it, your credit rating might be damaged. I am guessing that if you attended an unsanctioned protest in China, face recognition software would be used to give you a credit demerit or worse. You would be labeled a trust breaker and could be penalized in a range of ways, including being denied promotions at work or the right to own a house.

As my friend was sharing the benefits of her security guard for the digital retail economy, the tenor of our conversation became much more two-sided. She suddenly confided that she missed Seattle and that she actually liked going to the supermarket in America. I offered some comforting observations about how we American scholars know that democracy is a tortuous system of governing, but then added carefully that it has many lifestyle advantages, including the right to privacy and well-developed legal rights for individuals to hold businesses and government accountable via the courts. We talked confidentially for a little while about privacy and the impact of state corruption in China. When we got to the subject of local food contamination, she reminded me to be careful about where I ate, saying that her family only ate fish in places they knew and where they could see the fish live before they ate it. Before we parted, she confided that maybe she had made a mistake moving back to China.

These manifestations of Chinas authoritarian system highlight the fact that such a system is replacing human initiative, accountability and transparency with repression as the counter-agent to corruption, inefficiency and inequality. It is a weakness that China must overcome in stimulating an innovative technology culture, and it is one that gives the United States an edge to transcend Chinas massive spending on digital research and development. More than 1.6 million Chinese die prematurely from the ill effects of air pollution each year. Chinas aging population is expected to peak in 2029, eventually hindering workforce development and creating potentially crippling problems related to elder care and massive pension obligations. The entrenchment of Chinese state enterprise is another barrier to startup culture, which has begun to slow in the face of ongoing trade disputes with the United States.

The conflict between freedom and innovation and Chinas repressive government system started to come to a head in 2019, when a highly visible number of famous entrepreneurs began to be forced into retirement by authorities, amid an economic downturn propelled by the U.S.-China trade war and later reinforced by the outbreak of the new coronavirus. Among the high-profile executives to step down in 2019 were Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, and Pony Ma, founder of internet giant Tencent, as well as Liu Chuanzhi, founder of computer manufacturer Lenovo, and Robin Li Yanhong, co-founder of Baidu. Tencents performance took a beating in 2018 after regulators stopped approvals for new online games. The retirements are further evidence that the Chinese Communist Party wants to ensure that the private sector and individual entrepreneurs do not become an alternative center of power.

By the end of our conversation, the entrepreneur admitted that all the surveillance made her feel anxious, even though she would never do anything wrong. It made me remember the counsel of a researcher from China who was visiting me at a U.S. university and looking at some data on my laptop. He told me to make sure to always put a piece of tape over my camera.

America can lead the way to the next energy future. We must develop focused key national strategies, invest in energy innovation and play our digital tech preeminence to our greatest strength  an open and free society.

Jaffe is research professor and managing director at the Climate Policy Lab at Tufts Universitys Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. This article is an excerpt from her new book, Energys Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security.
High Point, NC (27260)

Today

Partly cloudy this evening followed by increasing clouds with showers developing after midnight. Low 67F. Winds E at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 50%..

Tonight

Partly cloudy this evening followed by increasing clouds with showers developing after midnight. Low 67F. Winds E at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 50%.
High Point, NC (27260)

Today

Partly cloudy skies this evening will give way to occasional showers overnight. Low 67F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 50%..

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies this evening will give way to occasional showers overnight. Low 67F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 50%.
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Smart technology offers new business opportunities and better services to citizens. However, its adoption in the urban environment involves legal balancing, since no relevant case law yet exists.

For example, collecting data on the mobility of people helps us to better plan public transport. We can also increase peoples sense of security at bus stops or other similar locations by installing smart systems which sound an alarm if someone is assaulted. Development has many positive aspects, but the question is how we can put it all into practice while also safeguarding privacy, says

Paivi Korpisaari

, professor of communication law.

The research group led by Korpisaari deals with just such challenges in the Neutral Host Pilot project, a multidisciplinary research and development project focused on developing a new digital smart city based on 5G technology. The goal of the research group is to determine the legal constraints for the project from the perspective of, for example, telecommunications regulation, privacy, personal data protection and competition law.

New technology calls for new interpretations

LuxTurrim5G is a comprehensive, joint ecosystem project that has developed solutions such as smart poles for the 5G network, which have been piloted in Kera, in Espoo. The poles form the backbone for data-based services, which are being developed in the Neutral Host Pilot project. The initiative involves various companies and research institutions, as well as the authorities.

By collecting data about people moving in the area, smart poles enable better and more individual services. However, data collection means that the legal requirements regarding various aspects such as personal data use and processing must be considered very carefully.

One of the key questions is how the information provision requirement in the EU General Data Protection Regulation can be satisfied in a public urban environment.

It is possible in our present restricted test environment, but we will be dealing with very different data protection questions when processing the information of an entire citys residents or when processing data in connection with various commercially available solutions, since we cannot ask for the consent of all residents nor can service providers conclude individual agreements with everyone. These are challenging questions and something we will have to address in the project, says Oona Ojajarvi, who has worked as a research assistant in the research group.

A simple notification of data collection displayed on, for example, information boards along the city streets is not enough. From a legal perspective, it is also not possible to require people spending time in public urban spaces to consent to their information being collected. The challenge resides in how data can be legally collected, stored and utilised without resorting to excessively detailed and complex contract structures.

The technical solutions and the related legal challenges are so new that scholars have had trouble identifying prior legal practice or research results. According to Ojajarvi, very little information has been publicly available on similar projects in other European countries or on the measures related to data protection that have been adopted in these projects.

Irrespective of the nature of the technical or legal solutions adopted, transparency and trust are crucial to the successful implementation of new services.

Koronavilkku, the Finnish application for coronavirus contact tracing, is a good example of how sensitive health information can be transferred via Bluetooth, without revealing the identity of users. Trust was key in this. People trusted the service developer, which is why so many quickly began to use the application, says Korpisaari.

Legislation must not become a hindrance

According to Korpisaari, many companies do not fully grasp the scope of personal data nor how widely personal data legislation is applied. The research groups expertise can help take legal requirements into account already at the planning stage, as it may prove difficult to make the solutions legally compliant later on. This is an unfortunately common problem regarding new technology: products or applications are developed before considering whether their use complies with legal requirements.

In my opinion, data protection should be a natural part of all processes in which new data-based products or services are developed. It is a lot more difficult to solve problems later on when the development of a product or business idea has come far along and you suddenly notice that data use actually carries legal problems, says Korpisaari.

The lack of expertise may also result in excessive caution. Companies may perceive legal requirements as nothing but threats and risks, and in the worst case, may fail to take advantage of new business opportunities. According to Korpisaari, companies sometimes have to take calculated risks, especially when dealing with novel ideas that have not yet been handled at the highest court level.

However, we can also find examples of companies that have pushed through their ideas without giving much thought to legal requirements.

Europe has very tight data protection legislation, and many countries outside the EU have also enhanced their legislation following the adoption of the EU General Data Protection Regulation. This is a positive development. However, there is a risk of the EU falling behind its competitor countries where data is used far more freely for various purposes.

For example, Facebook, Google and Amazon could hardly have implemented their business ideas in the legislative framework presently in force in Europe. These are companies that have just forged ahead, and the markets have adapted to them. Their services have gradually become so important that it is now impossible to do without them, says Korpisaari.

A platform for fair competition

Data collection and use are also regulated by competition law. As the name of the Neutral Host Pilot project suggests, the aim is to create an impartial and open marketplace platform that does not exclude anyone from the market. Among other things, this means ensuring that competing companies have equal access to data.

You could compare the platform to phone app stores since the questions related to both are very similar. How can you offer your own data on the platform? How do you obtain data from there? How do you provide your own services in the marketplace? notes

Juha Vesala

, university researcher, about the questions arising under competition law.

If the data collected by the system are openly available, this also provides opportunities to smaller companies with inadequate resources for collecting the volume of data required for business operations. In this way, the system also supports the emergence of new ideas and services.

When developing platforms and infrastructure of this type, it is important to ensure that competition remains unrestricted and that different types of companies can operate under the same conditions. A situation in which only a few companies have the resources to operate in the market is not what we want.

Car manufacturers, for example, have expressed concerns about self-driving cars shifting future commercial potential exclusively to technology giants. Worries have also been raised in the restaurant sector, with many entrepreneurs fearing that future profit will flow to web-based order and delivery services.

The neutral host operating model developed in the project is however only one possible option. There are also other alternative solutions and visions for collecting and utilising data on peoples behaviour in an urban environment. It goes without saying that technology giants are working on similar plans.

Does Europe want a smart city infrastructure that is like a Facebook world, where all the users data are collected and only a few select operators have access to the data, or do we want a more open model that is also better controlled in terms of data protection? Vesala asks.

Source: https://indiaeducationdiary.in/university-of-helsinki-legal-expertise-needed-to-create-the-smart-city-of-the-future/
State Auditor Suzanne Bump speaks to officials at Dubuque State Forest in Plainfield. PreviousNext

State Auditor Bump Calls for Change in PILOT Program



State Sen. Adam Hinds and state Rep. Paul Mark of Peru say communities in their districts are being shortchanged by the state's PILOT program. A bill to increase funding for the program is in committee.

PLAINFIELD, Mass.  Western Massachusetts communities host a wealth of state-owned land but are not seeing proper compensation from the government for it.

A 2020 report issued by State Auditor Suzanne Bump revealed that the commonwealth's payments in lieu of taxes (PILOT) program for state-owned lands (SOL) is underfunded and negatively affects smaller rural communities in Western Mass compared to larger, wealthier communities in the eastern part of the state.



On Friday, Bump joined state and local elected officials and stakeholders to tour two sites in Franklin County that demonstrate the disadvantaged effects of the program and begin a conversation that she hopes will spark change.



"It's scenic views like this and recreation resources like this that really constitute public good, they are the reason that so many people live here and travel here for recreation. but with the public good, there's a public cost that has to be borne," Bump said at the tour's second location, Dubuque State Forest.



"And in the estimation of my office, the Division of Local Mandates and the State Auditor's Office, although it doesn't technically constitute an unfunded mandate, it is nonetheless the state-imposed burden on municipalities to take lands off the tax rolls, and therefore to our way of thinking, the state needs to make good on its promises to reimburse communities who are losing that revenue.



The tour began at Mount Sugarloaf State Reservation in South Deerfield with a roundtable discussion and ended in Plainfield. Officials in attendance included state Senator Adam Hinds, state Rep. Paul Mark, state Rep. Natalie Blais, and Franklin Regional Council of Governments Executive Director Linda Dunlavy.



Bump said the report conducted by her office showed the PILOT program's lack of funding but also indicated that smaller communities that aren't economically growing at the same rate as heavily populated eastern communities are being disadvantaged.



"The funding formula, not just the total appropriation, needs to be changed in order to make this more equitable," Bump said.

The Division of Local Mandates made several recommendations that aim to protect municipalities with reduced land and PILOT reimbursement values. These include increasing funding, using an aggregate tax rate method, and including a hold-harmless provision that protects areas with reduced land values.

Hinds and Mark, who represents communities in the Berkshires and Franklin County, seized that report and successfully began pushing their colleagues and the Legislature for better funding to disperse through appropriations.



In the Berkshires, for example, Mount Washington is 60 percent state-owned land and nearly half of Clarksburg is state forest.



Hinds said the two steps for solving this issue are getting the PILOT line item fully funded with up to $45 million and to re-assess the formula that disperses the funds.



"We were successful, again, thanks to the report that allows us to go to Ways and Means Committee and the House and Senate and say, 'Hey, we have a problem here, and to fully fund this line item, we need to move up to $45 million,' and there was an agreement to do it over three years, so $4 million this budget that was just signed by the governor, and then what the aim is for $5 million for the next two budgets," he added.



"The other piece is well, what about the formula itself and the team and the auditor really helped point out for us that 'look if we go back to an aggregate formula, we actually get $5 more per $1,000 of assessed value per acre,' and that's a big difference."



This bill is currently in front of the Joint Committee on Revenue that Hinds chairs. He said there may be a better way to address the issue overall and welcomed ideas that could maybe in integrated into the bill itself.


Pittsfield Babe Ruth Squads Go 2-1 at New England Regionals

Two Pittsfield Babe Ruth All-Star teams improved to 2-0 in pool play at their New England Regionals with victories on Saturday.

In Westfield, the Pittsfield 13s defeated the Vermont champs from Lyndon, 16-5. They will wrap up action in their four-team pool on Sunday morning against Norfolk, Conn., also 2-0 through the first two days of the competition.

In Rochester, N.H., the Pittsfield 14-year-olds also squared off against a group of Green Mountain boys. Pittsfield edged Franklin County, Vt., 5-3, to remain the only unbeaten team in its pool. Pittsfield (2-0) finishes pool play on Sunday evening against Eastern Massachusetts champion Fall River.

In Trumbull, Conn., the hosts earned a 4-3 win over the Pittsfield 15-year-olds.

Cam Sime gave up just one earned run in 4-1/3 innings. The hosts added three more unearned runs in the fifth to go ahead, 4-0.

Pittsfield scored three in the bottom of the fifth. Damon Pause and Owen Salvatore each earned a walk, a double steal put both in scoring position, and Antonio Scalise drove them home with a double. Sime singled to drive in Scalise.

Pittsfield Sunday afternoon plays Vermont champion Three Corners in a battle of teams with 0-2 pool play marks.
Imperial Valley News Center

California Man Sentenced to Federal Prison for Again Violating a Former Employers Data

Sacramento, California - Matthew Keys, 34, of Vacaville, was sentenced Monday for violating the terms of his supervised release, Acting U.S. Attorney Phillip A. Talbert announced.

U.S. District Judge Kimberly J. Mueller ordered Keys to serve an additional six months in prison to be followed by 18 months of supervision with specific computer monitoring conditions.

Keys was originally indicted in 2013 on charges related to a scheme that resulted in unauthorized changes to an article on the Los Angeles Times website. The government also suspected Keys had sent threatening emails to employees at KTXL FOX40 where he used to work. Keys later confessed to sending the emails and to his role in changing the Los Angeles Times article. After a jury trial to resolve other disputes, such as the amount of the losses the Los Angeles Times suffered, Keys was convicted on all three counts of the superseding indictment. He was sentenced to two years in prison and two years of supervised release.

After Keys completed his prison sentence, he began working as the digital editor at Comstocks Magazine in Sacramento. Keys wrote stories for Comstocks and managed its website and social media accounts, including a YouTube channel. The magazine published videos on YouTube, and it used embedded links to YouTube videos in stories published on its own website. Keys resigned abruptly in late January 2020, a little less than a year after he started and about three months before his term of supervised release was set to expire.

In February 2020, an employee at Comstocks Magazine discovered that a password to the Google account associated with the magazines YouTube account no longer functioned. Shortly thereafter, the employee found that links associated with videos on the YouTube account were broken. Comstocks employees found that the videos had been deleted from the YouTube channel, along with nearly 700 subscriptions to the channel. The magazine then contacted federal prosecutors and the FBI with its suspicions that Keys was responsible.

The U.S. Probation Office, who was supervising Keys, investigated the deletion of the videos with the assistance of the FBI. Among other evidence, the investigation showed that Keys searched Google for the term how to delete youtube channel and then executed a command to delete the Comstocks YouTube channel on Feb. 10, 2020.

On April 20, 2021, after an evidentiary hearing, Judge Mueller found that Keys violated his term of supervised release by committing new crimes: knowingly causing the transmission of command causing damage to a protected computer, and unauthorized destruction of data.

Businesses and individuals are already struggling against threats to the integrity of their data from hackers and data thieves, Acting U.S. Attorney Talbert said. They should not also have to worry about data destruction from former employees seeking retribution. Federal law enforcement will vigorously investigate malicious data-deletion with all available tools.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Paul Hemesath and Matthew D. Segal prosecuted the case.
Imperial Valley News Center

Former Financial Controller Admits to Embezzling Almost Half a Million Dollars from Family-Owned San Diego Business

San Diego, California - Derick Jonathan Cameron of Vancouver, Washington pleaded guilty in federal court Wednesday to wire fraud, admitting that while employed as the Financial Controller for San Diego-based RAL Investment Corporation, he embezzled more than $400,000.

In a hearing before U.S. Magistrate Judge Jill L. Burkhardt, Cameron admitted he abused his access to the companys accounting software and issued more than 200 unauthorized checks to himself using the electronic signature of the companys CFO and deposited them into his personal bank account. He then concealed the payments by manipulating the companys accounting records to make it appear that each check was issued to a legitimate third-party vendor for a business expense. The company discovered Camerons fraudulent activity in April 2018, fired Cameron, and reported the conduct to law enforcement when Cameron was unable to make his promised repayments on schedule.

"The impact of fraud on small businesses can be devastating, said Acting U.S. Attorney Randy Grossman. This defendant abused his position of trust to enrich himself, and he has been held to account for his crime. Grossman praised Assistant U.S. Attorney Rebecca Kanter and the FBI case agents for their work handling this case.

Mr. Cameron treated his job as Financial Controller as his own private expense account thinking he deserved more money, said FBI Special Agent in Charge Suzanne Turner. His actions put the livelihood of the business in danger and hopefully todays guilty plea brings a sense of justice and closure to the victim in this case.

Cameron is scheduled to be sentenced on October 18, 2021 at 9:30 a.m. before U.S. District Judge Todd W. Robinson.

DEFENDANT Case Number 21cr2128-TWR

Derick Jonathan Cameron Age: 37 Vancouver, Washington

SUMMARY OF CHARGES

Wire Fraud  Title 18, U.S.C., Section 1343

Maximum penalty: Twenty years in prison and $250,000 fine, or twice the gain/loss, whichever is greater

AGENCY

Federal Bureau of Investigation
Imperial Valley News Center

Man Sentenced to Nearly 4 Years in Prison for Helping to Receive and Launder Ill-Gotten Proceeds of BEC Scams

Los Angeles, California - A New York man was sentenced Monday to 46 months in federal prison for participating in business email compromise (BEC) scams, including one in which $420,000 was stolen from a victims life insurance account, then deposited and laundered in various bank accounts set up in the names of other people.

Sunday Anyika, 56, of Brooklyn, New York, was sentenced by United States District Judge John F. Walter, who also ordered him to pay $1,129,515 in restitution. Anyika pleaded guilty on January 26 to one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud. At todays hearing, Judge Walter called the BEC scheme malicious and extensive and stated it caused huge losses to unsuspecting victims.

In January 2018, Anyikas co-conspirators, using the victims life insurance policy number, Social Security number, and date of birth to verify the account, called a business  identified in court documents as Company A  to obtain details on a life insurance policy under a victims name. Later that month, Anyika, using a fake Liberian passport sent by his co-conspirators that bore his photograph, opened and maintained sole control over a TD Bank account that used the victims name.

In February 2018, one of Anyikas co-conspirators fraudulently and without authorization caused Company A to wire $420,000 from the victims life insurance policy account to the same TD Bank account under Anyikas control. Within weeks, Anyika transferred the ill-gotten funds traceable to the victims life insurance account to other bank accounts that he controlled  including one in Hong Kong  that were opened using the names of other people.

One of Anyikas co-conspirators, in March 2018, fraudulently and without authorization, requested cancellation of the victims life insurance policy with Company A and directed that the remaining funds in the account be wired to the TD Bank account that Anyika had opened two months earlier, but mistakenly ordered the check to be sent to the victim. As a result of the co-conspirators fraudulent cancellation request, Company A cancelled the victims life insurance policy and mailed the victim a check for approximately $761,355 in an envelope addressed to the victims office in Bell.

Anyika admitted in his plea agreement that his co-conspirators committed other BEC scams, including deceiving a law firm into wiring approximately $400,802 in client settlement money to a bank account under Anyikas control. The wire was unable to be recalled and the law firm ended up losing the settlement money.

Anyika further admitted to participating in other such scams, including bilking a toy company out of $135,125 when one of his co-conspirators sent the company a series of emails with specific instructions that tricked it into wiring invoice payments to a bank account Anyika controlled. The account had been opened by Anyika using the same fake Liberian passport he used previously.

The co-conspirators further defrauded a construction company and a chemical distributor via fake emails masquerading as a subcontractor and supplier, respectively, that requested payments, according to court documents. The construction company was tricked into wiring approximately $158,113, and the chemical distributor was deceived into sending two payments totaling approximately $117,608 to bank accounts opened and controlled by Anyika.

Anyika admitted to knowing that the funds deposited by his co-conspirators into accounts he controlled were obtained and sent to him as part of the fraudulent conspiracy. As his share of the proceeds of the conspiracy, Anyika personally retained at least approximately $150,000. The co-conspirators remain at large.

The FBI investigated this matter.

Assistant United States Attorney Scott Paetty of the Major Frauds Section prosecuted this case.
Imperial Valley News Center

Man Arrested in Connection with Alleged Role in July 2020 Twitter Hack

San Francisco, California - A citizen of the United Kingdom was arrested Wednesday in Estepona, Spain by Spanish national police pursuant to a U.S. request for his arrest on multiple charges in connection with the July 2020 hack of Twitter that resulted in the compromise of over 130 Twitter accounts, including those belonging to politicians, celebrities, and companies.

Joseph OConnor, 22, is charged by criminal complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

According to court documents, in addition to the July 15, 2020, hack of Twitter, OConnor is charged with computer intrusions related to takeovers of TikTok and Snapchat user accounts. OConnor was also charged with cyberstalking a juvenile victim.

OConnor is charged with three counts of conspiracy to intentionally access a computer without authorization and obtaining information from a protected computer; two counts of intentionally accessing a computer without authorization and obtaining information from a protected computer; one count of conspiracy to intentionally access a computer without authorization and, with the intent to extort from a person a thing of value, transmitting a communication containing a threat; one count of making extortive communications; one count of making threatening communications; and two counts of cyberstalking. If convicted, a federal district court judge will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.

Acting U.S. Attorney Stephanie Hinds for the Northern District of California, Acting Assistant Attorney General Nicholas L. McQuaid of the Justice Departments Criminal Division, and Special Agent in Charge Craig D. Fair of the FBI San Francisco Field Office made the announcement.

The FBI San Francisco Division is investigating the case, with assistance from the IRS-Criminal Investigation Cyber Unit; the U.S. Secret Service, San Francisco and Headquarters; and the Santa Clara County Sheriffs Office and their REACT task force.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys William Frentzen and Andrew Dawson of the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Northern District of California and Assistant Deputy Chief Adrienne Rose of the Criminal Divisions Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section are prosecuting the case.

The Justice Departments Office of International Affairs is providing significant assistance. The U.K.s National Crime Agency and the Spanish National Police provided assistance in the investigation and arrest.
Imperial Valley News Center

Extradited Israeli Fugitive Sentenced to 30 Months in Prison for Conducting Illegal Gambling Business, Money Laundering

Sacramento, California - Orel Gohar, 30, formerly of San Francisco, was sentenced Tuesday by U.S. District Judge John A. Mendez to two and a half years in prison for conducting an illegal gambling business, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and failure to appear, Acting U.S. Attorney Phillip A. Talbert announced.

According to court documents, Gohar participated in operating an organization that installed and maintained illegal video slot machines at businesses open to the public across Northern California. Gohar also participated in two different conspiracies to launder the proceeds of the lucrative gambling business through co-defendants other businesses. In total, Gohar participated in laundering at least $650,000.

Court documents also detail Gohars escape from the United States by charter jet through Mexico, France, and Israel. Gohar was first arrested on Dec. 8, 2017, in connection with his initial charges and granted pretrial release. On Jan. 8, 2018, he failed to appear in federal court for a hearing, and he remained a fugitive for nearly two years until his arrest in Israel in December 2019.

This case was the product of an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the California Department of Justice  Bureau of Gambling Control. Assistance was provided by the Department of Justices Office of International Affairs and Israeli authorities. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Miriam R. Hinman and Mira Chernick prosecuted the case.

Gohar is the last of eight defendants to be sentenced in connection with the illegal gambling and money laundering schemes. May Levy was sentenced on Aug. 10, 2018, to probation and a $2,000 fine; Atir Dadon was sentenced on June 14, 2019, to one year and 10 months in prison and a $10,000 fine; Bar Shani was sentenced on July 12, 2019, to one year and eight months in prison and a $10,000 fine; Adam Atari was sentenced on Sept. 6, 2019, to two years and seven months in prison; Yaniv Gohar was sentenced on Dec. 20, 2019, to three years and nine months in prison; Raz Razla was sentenced on Oct. 6, 2020, to probation and a $5,500 fine; and Eran Buhbut was sentenced on Jan. 12, 2021, to probation and a $4,000 fine.
Imperial Valley News Center

Nine San Diego Residents Charged with Submitting Fraudulent Pandemic Unemployment Insurance Claims and Drug Crimes

San Diego, California - San Diego County residents were charged in two separate indictments with Conspiracy to Commit Wire Fraud involving fraudulent Pandemic Unemployment Insurance claims.

As part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act of 2020, Congress provided new unemployment benefits for those affected by the COVID-19 Pandemic who would not otherwise qualify for unemployment insurance. In California, the Employment Development Department (EDD) administers unemployment insurance benefits.

In case number 21-CR-2154-CAB, Defendants Matthew Lombardo, Konrad Piekos, Ryan Genetti, and Dobrila Milosavljevic were charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Defendants Lombardo, Piekos, and Genetti were also charged with Aggravated Identity Theft. In addition, Defendant Lombardo was charged with unauthorized disclosure of health information, a felony.

According to the affidavit filed in support of the criminal complaint related to case number 21-CR-2154-CAB, Defendant Lombardo, while employed by a local hospital, stole confidential patient files, and provided them to co-defendants Piekos, Genetti, and Milosavljevic, to submit to EDD for Pandemic Unemployment Insurance benefits.

In case number 21-CR-2153-CAB, Defendants Lindsay Renee Henning, Garrett Carl Tuggle, Salvatore Compilati, and Ryan David Genetti, were charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Defendants Henning and Tuggle were also charged with aggravated identity theft, and Defendants Henning, Tuggle, and Juan Landon were also charged with conspiracy to distribute MDMA and LSD. Defendant Tuggle was also charged with possessing methamphetamine, cocaine, and heroin with intent to distribute.

According to the affidavit filed in support of the criminal complaint related to case number 21-CR-2153-CAB, the wire fraud conspiracy involved over 108 separate claims that together paid out $1,615,000. The affidavit also describes how defendants conspired to distribute controlled substances.

The charges are the product of investigations jointly undertaken by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the U.S. Department of Labor, Office of Investigations (DOL-OI), the San Diego Sheriffs Department (SDSD), the California Employment Development Department Office of Investigations (EDD OI), United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS), and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). Investigators initiated investigations in both cases after traffic stops led to the discovery of contraband and text messages on cellular phones laying out the schemes. The text messages were corroborated through court-authorized searches of phones and residences and by a detailed analysis of EDD databases.

All defendants except for Juan Landon have made their initial appearance in federal court.

"Pandemic unemployment insurance programs are a critical part of our safety net designed to support hardworking citizens who are suffering during an unprecedented economic downturn. Our office and our law enforcement partners will investigate and prosecute individuals who attempt to steal from these programs designed to assist deserving recipients," said Acting U.S. Attorney Randy Grossman. Grossman commended AUSAs Wong, Casper, Williams, and Strange and the law enforcement agents who investigated these matters.

If you think you are a victim of COVID-19 fraud, immediately report it the FBI (visit ic3.gov, tips.fbi.gov, or call 1-800-CALL-FBI or the San Diego FBI at 858-320-1800.

In addition, the public is urged to report suspected fraud schemes related to COVID-19 by calling the National Center for Disaster Fraud (NCDF) hotline (1-866-720-5721) or by e-mailing the NCDF at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

Case Number : 21-CR-2154-CAB

DEFENDANTS

Konrad Piekos Age: 43, Vista, CA

Matthew George Lombardo Age: 52, San Diego, CA

Ryan David Genetti Age: 38 Vista, CA

Dobrila "Bebe" Milosavljevic Age: 40 Vista, CA



SUMMARY OF CHARGES

Count 1: Title 18, United States Code, section 1349 (conspiracy to commit wire fraud)

Maximum penalty: 20 years in prison; fine; penalty assessment

Counts 2 and 3: Title 18, United States Code, section 1028A; (aggravated identity theft)

Maximum penalty: 2 year mandatory minimum term of imprisonment, consecutive to any term of imprisonment imposed for Count 1.

Count 4: Title 42, United States Code, section 1320d-9(b)(3); (wrongful disclosure of individually identifiable health information)

Maximum penalty: 10 years in prison; fine; penalty assessment



AGENCIES

U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)

U.S. Department of Labor, Office of the Investigations (DOL-OI)

California Employment Development Department Office of Investigations (EDD-OIG)

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation-Investigative Services Unit (CDCR-ISU)

United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS)

Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).

Case Number : 21-CR-2153-CAB

DEFENDANTS

Lindsay Renee Henning Age: 37 La Mesa, CA

Garret Carl Tuggle Age: 35 San Diego, CA

Salvatore Compilati Age: 39 La Mesa, CA

Ryan David Genetti Age: 38 Vista, CA

Juan Landon Age: 27 Mesa, AZ



SUMMARY OF CHARGES

Counts 1 and 2: Title 21, United States Code, sections 841 and 846 (conspiracy to distribute MDMA and conspiracy to distribute LSD)

Maximum penalty: mandatory minimum 5 years and up to 40 years in prison; fine; penalty assessment

Count 3: Title 18, United States Code, section 1349 (conspiracy to commit wire fraud)

Maximum penalty: 20 years in prison; fine; penalty assessment

Count 4: Title 18, United States Code, section 1028A; (aggravated identity theft)

Maximum penalty: 2 year mandatory minimum term of imprisonment, consecutive to any term of imprisonment imposed for Count 1.

Counts 5 - 7: Title 21, United States Code, section 841 (possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine, cocaine, and heroin)

Maximum penalties:

Count 5 (more than 500 grams of a mixture containing methamphetamine) mandatory minimum 10 years and up to life in prison; fine; penalty assessment

Count 6 (cocaine) up to 20 years in prison and up to life in prison; fine; penalty assessment

Count 7 (heroin) up to 20 years in prison and up to life in prison; fine; penalty assessment



AGENCIES

U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)

San Diego Sheriffs Department (SDSD)

U.S. Department of Labor, Office of Investigations (DOL-OI)

California Employment Development Department Office of Investigations (EDD-OIG)

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation-Investigative Services Unit (CDCR-ISU)

United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS)

Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).

*The charges and allegations contained in an indictment or complaint are merely accusations, and the defendants are considered innocent unless and until proven guilty.
Imperial Valley News Center

Engineer Sentenced to Over 5 Years in Prison for Conspiring to Illegally Export to China Semiconductor Chips with Military Uses

Los Angeles, California - An electrical engineer who schemed to illegally obtain integrated circuits with military applications that were exported to China without the required filing of electronic export information was sentenced Thursday to 63 months in federal prison.

Yi-Chi Shih, 66, of Hollywood Hills, was sentenced by United States District Judge John A. Kronstadt, who also ordered him to pay $362,698 in restitution to the IRS and fined him $300,000.

After a seven-week jury trial that concluded in July 2019, Shih was convicted of one count of conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), and the Export Administration Regulations (EAR). Shih also was convicted of four counts of mail fraud, two counts of wire fraud, one count of conspiracy to gain unauthorized access to a protected computer to obtain information, one count of making false statements to an FBI agent, three counts of subscribing to a false tax return, and four counts of making false statements to the IRS about his foreign assets.

Shih defrauded a United States company that manufactured broadband, high-powered semiconductor chips known as monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs) out of its confidential and proprietary business information that was part of its MMIC manufacturing services, according to trial evidence. As part of the scheme, Shih accessed the victim companys web portal after obtaining that access through an associate who posed as a domestic customer seeking to obtain custom-designed MMICs that would be used solely in the United States. In this way, Shih concealed his true intent to export the U.S. companys MMICs to the Peoples Republic of China.

The victim companys semiconductor chips have several commercial and military applications. MMICs are used in missiles, missile guidance systems, fighter jets, electronic warfare, electronic warfare countermeasures and radar applications. The MMICs Shih exported to China were intended for AVIC 607, a state-owned entity in the PRC.

Shih was the President of Chengdu GaStone Technology Company (CGTC), a Chinese company that was building a MMIC manufacturing facility in Chengdu. In 2014, CGTC was placed on the Commerce Departments Entity List, according to court documents, due to its involvement in activities contrary to the national security and foreign policy interest of the United States  specifically, that it had been involved in the illicit procurement of commodities and items for unauthorized military end use in China.

Shih used a Hollywood Hills-based company he controlled  Pullman Lane Productions, LLC  to funnel funds provided by Chinese entities to finance the manufacturing of the MMICs by the victim company. Pullman Lane received financing from a Beijing-based company that was placed on the Entity List the same day as CGTC on the basis of its involvement in activities contrary to the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States, according to court documents.

Shihs associate, Kiet Mai, pleaded guilty in December 2018 to one felony count of smuggling and was sentenced to 18 months probation and a $5,000 fine.

The FBI, the United States Department of Commerce  Bureau of Industry and Security Office of Export Enforcement, and IRS Criminal Investigation investigated this matter with the assistance of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

This case was prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorneys Judith A. Heinz of the National Security Division; Melanie Sartoris, Chief of the General Crimes Section; Khaldoun Shobaki of the Cyber and Intellectual Property Crimes Section; William M. Rollins of the Terrorism and Export Crimes Section; James C. Hughes of the Major Frauds Section; and Daniel G. Boyle of the Asset Forfeiture Section; with assistance from Elizabeth Cannon, Deputy Chief of the National Security Divisions Counterintelligence and Export Control Section.
Attorney General Bonta Challenges Approval of Warehouse Project in South Fontana Neighborhood Already Overburdened by Unhealthy Air Pollution

Oakland, California - California Attorney General Rob Bonta today filed a lawsuit against the City of Fontana challenging its approval of the Slover and Oleander Warehouse Project. The 205,000 square-foot project shares a border with a public high school and is located in one of the most polluted areas in the state. Under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), the City of Fontana is required to implement all feasible mitigation measures to reduce harmful air pollution and other significant environmental impacts of the Slover and Oleander Warehouse project. In the lawsuit, Attorney General Bonta argues that the Citys limited environmental review of the project and its failure to appropriately analyze, disclose, and mitigate the projects environmental impacts violates CEQA.

Plain and simple: Everyone has the right to breathe clean air where they live and where they work, said Attorney General Bonta. As Attorney General, I have a responsibility to enforce the states environmental laws, and as the Peoples Attorney, I am committed to standing up for communities who live at the intersection of poverty and pollution. Fontana residents shouldn't have to choose between economic development and clean air. They deserve both. Unfortunately, the City of Fontana cut corners when it approved the Slover and Oleander Warehouse Project. Were going to court today to compel the City to go back and take a hard look at the environmental impacts of this project  and do all it can to mitigate the potential harms to local residents and workers  before moving forward."

The Slover and Oleander Warehouse Project will be constructed in a low-income south Fontana neighborhood that suffers from some of the highest pollution levels in all of California. Over 20 warehouses have already been built within a mile of the project site, in an area that encompasses two public high schools and serves as home to hundreds of Californians. Collectively, these warehouses generate thousands of daily heavy-duty diesel truck trips. As a result, local residents and workers suffer from some of the highest exposures statewide to fine particulate matter, which are inhalable microscopic particles that travel deep into human lungs and are linked to increased risk of premature death, cardiovascular disease, lung cancer, and asthma attacks. They are also heavily exposed to ozone and toxic chemicals that can cause a wide array of other concerning health problems.

The project itself consists of a 205,000 square-foot warehouse with 22 truck docks, 40 truck parking spaces, and 95 standard parking spaces. The warehouse is expected to generate approximately 114 daily truck trips and 272 daily passenger car trips during the projects round-the-clock operations. In addition, one quarter of the warehouse space is equipped for cold storage, a use that attracts highly-polluting trucks with auxiliary diesel engines needed for refrigeration. Despite this, the City of Fontana concludes that the project will not have significant environmental impacts and omits mitigation measures such as exceeding green building efficiency standards or using low-emission construction equipment that would reduce the pollution burden to local residents and create additional jobs and improve on-site worker safety.

In the lawsuit, Attorney General Bonta argues that the City of Fontana violated CEQA in its approval of the Slover and Oleander Warehouse Project by failing to:
The US forces have entered the battle for Kandahar by carrying out airstrikes in support of the embattled Afghan forces amid calls by the Taliban on President Ashraf Ghani to resign.

Pentagon spokesperson, John Kirby told reporters on Thursday the airstrikes were in support of Afghan security sources but didnt provide more details.

This comes amid the US accelerated withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. In recent weeks, President Bidens administration came under massive pressure from the Afghan government, which feels abandoned by western allies in the face of the Taliban- offensive, who announced they now control 85 per cent of Afghanistan.

The Talibans intensified attacks saw government forces and intelligence officials ceding land to the Taliban and fleeing to neighbouring countries.

Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid told Reuters the strikes were on Wednesday night on the outskirts of the southern city of Kandahar, killing three of their fighters and destroying two vehicles.

We confirm these airstrikes, and we condemn this in the strongest term, it is a clear attack and violation of the Doha deal as they cant have operations after May, he said, referring to the agreement between the United States and the Taliban which cleared the way for the withdrawal of US forces.

If they conduct any operation, then they will be responsible for the consequences.

The Independent couldnt immediately reach the US forces headquarters or US embassy in Kabul for comment.

Former President Trumps aides signed the Doha peace agreement after arduous negotiations with the Taliban. It indicates that all foreign troops were to leave Afghanistan by May if the Taliban met security guarantees.

But President Biden in April extended the withdrawal deadline to 11 September, in memory of the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, which triggered the US invasion of Afghanistan a few weeks later.

President Bidens decision infuriated the Taliban, who decided to swiftly ramp up their military campaign to quickly fill the security vacuum left behind the US and Nato forces.

Suhail Shaheen, the spokesperson of the Taliban, told AP on Friday the group has no plans to make a military push on Kabul. But he warned they could, given the weapons and equipment they have acquired in newly captured districts.

According to US General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Taliban managed to bring half of Afghanistans district centres under their control through this major offensive. The militant group also took important border crossings and encircled or closed in on several provincial capitals, including Kandahar.

The rival Afghan sides have held peace talks in Doha but progress has been slow and the Taliban are demanding the resignation of President Ghani before any ceasefire can be agreed.

Additional reporting by agencies
Parts of Belgium have been hit by some of the heaviest floods in years  marking the second time in just over a week that downpours have affected the EU country.

The Namur and Walloon Brabant provinces, southeast of capital city Brussels, were among the worst hit on Saturday, after thunderstorms and heavy rain battered various communities.

In Dinant, within Belgiums Walloon region, a two-hour thunderstorm turned streets into torrential rivers. Footage on social media showed cars and pavements being swept away by a powerful stream of rainwater.

I have been living in Dinant for 57 years and Ive never seen anything like this, Richard Fournaux, the towns former mayor, told the AP news agency.

Dinant, which sits on the banks of the Meuse River, was spared the deadly floods 10 days ago, which killed 37 people in southeast Belgium and many more in Germany, but Saturday was a different story entirely.

Rainwater gushing down steep streets swept away dozens of cars, piling them in a heap at a crossing, and washed away cobblestones, pavements and whole sections of tarmac as residents watched in horror from their windows.

No deaths were reported in the area, according to officials. Similarly in the small town of Anhee, only a few kilometres north of Dinant, no one is thought to have been killed  though there is a lot of damage in both areas.

There was no precise estimate of the harm done but town authorities have warned it will likely be significant, according to local media, while Sky News reported the government could be looking at billions of euros worth of repairs.

More than 210 people died in the floods across western Europe last week, with most of the casualties coming from Germany and Belgium. Dozens are still missing in the former, though officials have said they are not hopeful all will be found.

Over the past week, there have been reports of adverse flooding not just in Europe but parts of Asia too.

Many scientists have blamed the climate crisis for the increase in freak weather incidents such as flooding, warning that such events will become more frequent and severe as the emergency worsens  meaning countries will have to adapt.

One Denver, Colorado, man tweeted about the various instances of flooding affecting parts of the world at the moment.

Q: Did you see the footage of flood waters carrying cars down the road, Ashish Agarwal, who describes himself as a clean energy enthusiast, asked before answering himself.

A: Which one? Germany? China? India? Belgium? Climate change is global.
A major incident has been declared across hospitals in London after floods caused chaos throughout the capital.

Ambulances have been redirected after the A&E department at Newham Hospital was closed because of floodwater. Wards at Whipps Cross hospital, including the maternity department, were also forced to shut.

Patients have been asked to attend other hospitals were possible due to operational issues at the two hospitals in east London.

A spokesperson for Barts Health NHS Trust said: We are experiencing operational issues at Whipps Cross Hospital and Newham Hospital due to the heavy rainfall.

We are working closely with our local partners to resolve the issues and maintain patient care and  while services remain available for people in an emergency  patients are asked to attend alternative hospitals where they can, to help us put solutions in place as quickly as possible.

Torrential rain and thunderstorms, that followed the heatwave of the last week, caused many homes, roads, and tube stations to be left out of action.

Motorists had to be rescued by emergency services after the rain caused severe surfacing flooding.

A number of drivers had to abandon their cars on the main roads after they became half-submerged in the deluge, which got worse as rain became heavier while the day wore on.

Cars were mainly affected by water collecting in dips under bridges, on roads that included dual carriageways.

A boat had to be used by a rescue crew to reach motorists stuck in their cars under a bridge in Worcester Park, Sutton.

Also in Worcester Park, a man is seen walking through flood water that reaches his mid-thigh in a photo posted to Twitter.

Two flood warnings have been in place for Worcester Park and nearby West Barnes, due to the flooding of the river Beverley Brook.

River levels have risen as a result of localised thunderstorms, the governments Environment Agency said.

Other affected areas were Clapham and Camberwell, as well as Kingston in southwest London, and parts of east London such as Leyton and Walthamstow.

London Fire Brigade said that they have taken more than 300 calls concerning flooding. The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said that Metropolitan Police and local authorities were also assisting people that were affected.

Cars half-submerged by floods under a bridge were stranded by the drivers on the A406 near the Walthamstow turnoff, a video posted on Twitter shows.

The M11 slip road on to the A406 North Circular, at junction four, was shut because of the severe flash floods, the Metropolitan Police warned, and caused severe disruption in Woodford, east London, and parts of Essex.

The Met Polices Special Constabulary has urged motorists not to drive through deep water in flooded areas.

It said: Rescuing people uses a lot of resources, and so its wiser to apply good judgement and find a different route.

Eight Tube stations  Covent Garden, Edgware Roads Circle line station, Gants Hill, Kennington, North Greenwich, Pudding Mill Lane, Stepney Green, Stockwell, and Surrey Quays  had to close.

A video posted on social media by Tube traveller Rob Day shows floodwater gushing through the entrance to Pudding Mill Lane station near Stratford, east London.

 Water gushes into London tube station in flash floods

A number of Londoners have said that they had never seen flooding of this scale before.

One restaurant owner in Woodford reportedly said that it was the worst flooding he had ever seen in the capital.

Buses have been left stranded on waterlogged roads in Battersea. Eddie Elliott cycled past the area outside Queenstown Road station, where he said the road had been totally shut down.

Having been born and raised in London, I have never seen anything quite like it, the 28-year-old writer told PA.

Stands out as the worst Ive experienced personally, he added.

Labour staff have been advised to not attend the partys parliamentary offices on Monday as the building will be closed, according to reports.

The suite of offices in the Norman Shaw building, which is attached to Portcullis House, is where the offices of leader of the opposition Sir Keir Starmer, his staff, and members of the shadow cabinet are situated.

Sir Keir said: Thoughts with all those affected by todays flooding. Thanks to all the emergency services and local authorities working to support local people.

Amber warnings for thunderstorms have been issued for this weekend by the Met Office. The meteologists warned that southern and central parts of England and Wales would see flash flooding.

The Met Office has issued an amber warning for storms covering London and some of the Home Counties where homes and businesses are at risk of flooding, lasting until 7pm on Sunday.

A yellow warning for storms  which could cause travel and power disruption  also covers a wider area of the south from Norwich to Plymouth, and lasts until midnight.

A woman walks through a flooded St James's Park. More post-heatwave rain is expected (PA)

Met Office meteorologist Steven Keates said parts of the south between south Suffolk and the Isle of Wight could be deluged by 100mm of rain in just a few hours on Sunday evening.

Storms are being caused by a convergence of air currents, due to warmth in the earths surface from the recent heatwave rising into cooler air in the atmosphere, he added.

Temperatures are set to rise slightly in most places on Monday as the storms clear, with the mercury predicted to reach 26C in London, 25C in Edinburgh, 24C in Cardiff, and 22C in Belfast.

The Met Office has predicted early cloud in some northern and eastern parts, which will move up to Scotland, and sunny spells and scattered showers in most places throughout the day.

Spells of heavier rain, with a risk of hail and thunder, are expected from Tuesday until the end of the week.

The Met Office has predicted that above average temperatures will make a return from about mid-August.

This weekend is the second time that London was hit by flooding this month. Last week, homes and businesses in west London, mainly Notting Hill, were ruined by flash floods.
Those administering coronavirus vaccines are allegedly being told to throw away stock due to a drop in younger people opting to get their first jab, reports suggest.

Attempts to use surplus vaccines on people awaiting their second jab are also being thwarted due to strict guidance set out by the government, which states jabs must be given at last eight weeks apart, an anonymous source told the Daily Telegraph.

For the last two weeks we have literally been throwing the vaccine into the bin, the vaccinator, from the northeast of England, said.

They added that most people who want their first dose have already come forward but hesitancy is stopping more people from coming forward.

More than 87 per cent of the population have received their first vaccination, but that falls significantly to just below 60 per cent for 18- to 25-year-olds. Some arent turning up because theyve had a vaccine elsewhere, the source claimed, while criticising the wasteful attitude of throwing the medicine away.

It is a shame because poorer countries are desperate for vaccines, they said.

The Joint Committee for Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) currently recommends an interval of eight to 12 weeks between Covid-19 vaccine doses, on the back of studies suggesting it offers greater immunity.

Scientists this week described the eight-week interval as a sweet spot for those getting the Pfizer jab, after research showed the wait time generates more neutralising antibodies and helper T cells against Delta and other variants of concern than a three-week schedule.

Vaccinators have been told to follow the guidance strictly, which sometimes means throwing vaccine away instead of giving it to people earlier, the unnamed source said.

It is not the first time such claims have been made. Back in February, GP magazine Pulse revealed that in an email, the British Medical Association (BMA) said it was continuing to hear reports of Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) demanding that vaccines are thrown away rather than being given as second doses or to other cohorts.

Despite there being the same ban then on shortening the gap between first and second doses as it is now, the BMA reminded GPs they could carry out measures such as offering initial jabs outside the first four priority cohorts if there is a risk of vaccine wastage.

In the email, sent to GP practices across the country, the BMA said: We would like to reiterate that NHSE/I has made it clear that the top priority is that all vaccines be used and therefore must not be deliberately wasted.

All sites should have reserve lists that they can use to make every effort to invite patients or healthcare professionals to ensure that they can make full use of any unused vaccines rather than have any go to waste.

Some medical professionals are now calling for the gap between doses to be reduced to as low as four weeks to avoid vaccine waste.

Paul Hunter, professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia, said cutting the interval for Pfizer and Moderna for younger people could even be beneficial. If we are giving younger people that extra immunity earlier on, that might actually help slow the rate [of infection] or even reverse it in cases, he told the Telegraph.

Nadhim Zahawi, the vaccines minister, this week stood by the governments decision to stick to the eight-week gap as advised by the JCVI.

As we raced to offer a vaccine to all adults, we took the JCVIs advice to shorten the dosing interval from 12 to eight weeks to help protect more people against the Delta variant, he said.

I urge every adult to get both doses of the vaccine to protect yourself and those around you and we are looking to offer millions of the most vulnerable a booster jab from September to ensure this protection is maintained.

The Independent has been in touch with the Department of Health and Social Care for comment.
A woman whose son was shot dead in London last year said the police interrogated her after he died and did not believe he lived in the prestigious area where he was killed.

Kyle Kelson was shot in the head in Brocks Drive, North Cheam, a leafy suburban area near Croydon, on 19 June last year.

Four young white men have been charged with the 25-year-olds murder and are due to stand trial in December.

In her first interview since Kyle was killed, his mother Angella Kelson told The Independent the Metropolitan Police had fired questions at her when they came to tell her of his death at 5am.

The 51-year-old, who lives just minutes from the street where he died, said: I was on my own. Nobody else was with me. There was a lot of quizzing. They said: Its a very prestigious area.

Kyle Kelson was a carer for his severely disabled sister (Angella Kelson)

They implied as he was black he must have come from somewhere else. It was a lot of questions rather than I am sorry to inform you. His death does not fit the narrative of black-on-black crime.

There is a lack of trust of police if you are a mother of black boys. Stop and searches and disproportionate deaths of black people in custody dont help.

Ms Kelson said Kyle, who she described as deeply loving and loyal, was one of the main carers for his sister who is severely disabled and non-verbal as well as being in a wheelchair.

To compound her grief, the mother-of-two said she felt like her sons death had been disrespected by local residents due to racism in the predominantly white area.

She explained she is now trying to move to a different part of London, feeling scared for her own safety, but the local authority has said she must downsize if she relocates, which means her disabled daughter will no longer have a bedroom.

Ms Kelson, whose property has been fitted with stringent surveillance measures in the aftermath of her sons death, said she was not willing to lose her daughter as well.

She added: Im being held to hostage in the house. I have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD] since the death of my son and the bad treatment afterwards.

Kyle, who previously worked for a scaffolding company and an electrical store, had stayed home to care for his sister so his mother could go back to university and study later in life.

He and his sister had a very close relationship, Ms Kelson said. She needs two people to hoist her up and help her. He was always there.

Ms Kelson said she was angered by the fact a memorial on the street where her son died had been recently disassembled, with flowers and photos placed in two black bin bags by the side of the road after just a few days.

She said the local council had told her residents had complained about the memorial after just one day and that it had to be removed due to complaints about people visiting at night.

Its on a public footpath, she said. It feels like locals are being supported by the local authorities to dishonour the memory of my son.

They have reduced his memorial to two black bin liners left at the roadside in their efforts to dehumanise and deny him the dignity that should be afforded to the dead.

Im sure they are mothers and fathers like myself, but it appears that their lack of moral compass and empathy does not support them to understand that no one deserves to die the way my son did that night.

The young father leaves behind a three-year-old son (Angella Kelson)

Ms Kelson said the council denied placing the memorial in bin liners but went on to highlight several memorials in the local area which had remained in place for years. This is a blatant case of selective grief, she added.

She explained many council workers that she has dealt with over her sons death have wrongly assumed he died in a case of black-on-black crime.

She said as a woman of colour she has suffered a combination of sexism and racism in the local area, explaining that a few years back she went to the police when she was spat at in the street.

Ellen Milazzo, Victim Supports Head of National Homicide Service, said: When communities do not come together, it can impact the grief and shock felt by the bereaved and compounds the trauma of losing their loved one.

A spokesperson for the Met Police said they had established a strong family liaison relationship with the Kelson family and we continue to support them.

The representative added that four men have been charged with Kyles murder but they cannot comment further on the case while proceedings are active.

I am in grief but unable to grieve, Ms Kelson said. Life is never going to be the same without him. Kyles son misses his dad. He is trying to learn to be at peace with it at his young age.
Three people have died after getting into difficulty in the water near Pulpit Rock at the Ardlui end of Loch Lomond on Saturday evening.

Edina Olahova, 29, and her son Rana Haris Ali, nine, died alongside their friend Mohammad Asim Raza, 41, on Saturday evening.

A seven-year-old boy was taken to hospital in Glasgow and remains in intensive care.

Police received reports of concern for people in the water around 6.40pm on Saturday and attended the scene. Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS) appliances from Balloch, Killin and Tyndrum also attended, alongside water rescue units from nearby Oban and Sterling.

A Police Scotland spokesperson said: Police were called around 6.40pm on Saturday, 24 July 2021 following the report of concerns for people in the water near Pulpit Rock, Ardlui.

A multi-agency operation took place and sadly, three people were pronounced dead at the scene.

Formal identification has still to take place but the family of a 41-year-old man, 29-year-old woman and nine-year-old boy have been made aware.

A seven-year-old boy was taken by ambulance to the Royal Hospital for Children in Glasgow and is currently in intensive care.

The spokesperson added that the case would now be sent to the procurator fiscal, which investigates all sudden deaths in Scotland.

The SFRS issued a warning about the dangers of cold water shock from swimming in open water in warm weather. Chief of the SFRS, Martin Blunden, said on Twitter: Please, please make sure your loved ones (adults and kids) know how to behave around inland water.

Yesterday was a tragic day for families and the first responder family. I am certain that all those affected thought its just water  it isnt, it can also kill #RespectTheWater.

The three deaths were reported on the first World Drowning Prevention Day, declared as part of a UN General Assembly resolution passed in April. The day is intended to be an advocacy event to highlight the need for countries to have comprehensive plans to prevent drowning, which causes an estimated 236,000 deaths a year.

Five people have now died in Scotland in the past 24 hours after getting into trouble in water. Earlier in the day on Saturday, an 11-year-old was discovered in the river at Alexander Hamilton Memorial Park in Stonehouse, South Lanarkshire. On Friday, a 16-year-old-boy drowned after getting into difficulty in the water close to the pier at Balloch Country Park, in Loch Lomond.

On Saturday, Lee Heard, charity director of the Royal Life Saving Society, told the BBC that he was aware of 28 people who had died in the water  inland and on the coast  in the past eight days; these deaths did not include the unfortunate casualties from Loch Lomond, recorded on Saturday evening, bringing the total deaths from drowning up to 31 since 14 July.

He said: After the last week, I think the message is that anybody who does not have substantial experience of swimming in cold open water to not go in.

If people do wish to cool off in water, we advise they do so in supervised settings. Local authorities are putting lifeguards around inland lakes, and there are aqua parks.
Thousands of anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine protesters gathered in central London for a "Worldwide rally for freedom" - five days after restrictions were lifted in England.

Conspiracy theorists David Icke, Gillian McKeith and Piers Corbyn, the brother of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, were among the speakers at the demonstration in Trafalgar Square.

The event also attracted far-right commentator Katie Hopkins, who was deported from Australia earlier this week after boasting about her intention to break quarantine rules.

During his speech from the main stage, Mr Corbyn attempted to lead the crowd in a chant telling the government to "Ping Off" - a reference to the NHS app's notifications to users to self-isolate.

A former nurse also urged her supporters to take down the names of medical staff.

Kate Shemirani, who was struck off by the Nursing and Midwifery Council last month for spreading Covid misinformation, said: Get their names. Email them to me. With a group of lawyers, we are collecting all that. At the Nuremburg Trials the doctors and nurses stood trial and they hung. If you are a doctor or a nurse, now is the time to get off that bus... and stand with us the people."

London major Sadiq Khan described her comments as utterly appalling. He tweeted: I have raised it directly with the Met Police. Our NHS staff are the heroes of this pandemic and Londoners from across this city roundly reject this hate.

At the end of the rally, protesters marched from Trafalgar Square along Whitehall to Parliament Square.

Police said one demonstrator was arrested outside Downing Street after throwing a bottle at officers.

Commander Catherine Roper tweeted: "Violence will not be tolerated. We encourage the remaining crowd to continue their demonstration peacefully."

Similar protests were held in Belfast, Birmingham and Manchester, where hundreds of protesters chanted "shame on you" at police officers.

In Dublin around 1,500 protesters gathered outside Custom House before walking through the city holding anti-vaccine signs and chanting "freedom".

One speaker at the rally claimed the vaccine programme was "genocide", adding: "If people are coming to your door then you have to protect yourself from the needle because it's coming and they are coming for your kids. They are coming to kill you and that's the end of it."

The organisers of the "World Wide Rally for Freedom" claimed that protests would take place in more than 180 cities across the world.

They said they were protesting against continued coronavirus restrictions, mask rules, compulsory vaccinations and vaccine passports.

"Authoritarian coronavirus restrictions have damaged our lives more than any virus has, and even if the effects of the virus were more damaging, the restrictions to our freedoms would still have been unjust and unlawful," the group said.

An estimated 160,000 people took part in protests in France against new laws introducing vaccine passports and compulsory jabs for healthcare workers.

Police fired water cannons and tear gas to disperse protesters in Paris after a chair and other missiles were thrown at officers.
A Scottish mountaineer has died in an avalanche on K2, the worlds second-highest mountain.

Rick Allen was killed in the avalanche after he had attempted to take a new route to the peak.

Aberdeen-born Mr Allen, 68, was climbing to raise money for the Partners Relief & Development charity, which is currently focused on the health and educational needs of refugee children displaced from their homes in Myanmar.

His two climbing partners, Jordi Tosas from Spain and Stephan Keck from Austria, were rescued without major injuries.

A statement from the charity said: It is with great sadness to announce that Rick Allen, a member of the board of Partners Relief & Development UK and also a great friend, has died while attempting a new route on K2, the worlds second-highest mountain.

Rick, a world-renowned veteran mountaineer, was caught in an avalanche on the south-east face but fortunately his two climbing partners survived.

Rick died doing what he loved the most and lived his life with the courage of his convictions.

Rick was committed to serving the worlds poorest and most vulnerable communities, and worked as a key member of the leadership of Partners Relief And Development UK for several years, campaigning for free, full lives for children affected by conflict and oppression.

All members of the board send our condolences to Ricks family.

The K2 mountain is 8,611 metres above sea level (Creative Commons)

K2 is part of the Karakoram mountain range that lies between Pakistan, India, and China. It is considered to be one of the deadliest mountains in the world because of its unpredictable weather and avalanches.

A Foreign Office spokeswoman added: The British High Commission in Islamabad is aware of reports that a British citizen has died climbing K2 and stands ready to assist.

Tributes to Mr Allen were posted to social media.

In 2018, Mr Allen had been presumed dead after falling from an ice cliff during a solo climb to the summit of Pakistans Broad Peak, which is the 12th highest mountain. But his rucksack was eventually spotted by a cook at the mountains base camp. A drone was then used to locate him and guide rescuers to his location.

The fundraising effort has received 740 of the 10,000 target so far. Donations can still be made at http://www.givey.com/k2summitforpartners

Additional reporting by PA
Animal rights campaigners set up a protest camp at a factory farm that breeds puppies for laboratory experiments after comedy actor Ricky Gervais launched a campaign to ban all tests on animals in the UK.

The protesters said they wanted to close down the site in Cambridgeshire, which breeds beagles that are sold when they are 16 weeks old for chemicals and drugs testing.

The centre denied claims that it trains the puppies to be laboratory-ready, including offering a paw for injections and accepting paper cups on their faces, ready for wearing gas masks.

Gervais and fellow actor Peter Egan are lobbying against all animal experimentation and calling for laboratory animals to be included in the Animal Welfare Act, which outlaws causing animal suffering.

Activists who monitored the breeding site at Huntingdon for more than a year described harrowing scenes.

They said they saw workers grabbing dogs by the scruff of the neck and piling them into overcrowded trolleys, and dogs in crates cried pitifully as they were loaded onto a lorry.

The site, called MBR Acres, owned by US company Marshall BioResources, breeds up to 2,000 puppies every year, most of which are sent for toxicology tests at UK laboratories.

Toxicology testing often involves force-feeding animals with chemicals or making them inhale pesticides.

Critics say this can be done every day for up to 90 days with no pain relief or anaesthetic, before the dogs are killed.

But the company says most experiments are mild, such as taking a blood test, and the results are used to develop vaccines, such as the Covid-19 jab.

Protesters from across the UK descended on the site, calling for the company to hand the dogs over for rehoming.

Government figures show that last year dogs were used in 4,340 procedures in the UK, of which 4,270 were on beagles  a 5.3 per cent increase on 2019.

Egan has launched a government petition calling for causing suffering to lab animals to be banned by law.

He is patron of a group called For Life on Earth (Floe), which wants the government to launch a pioneering public scientific hearing on whether animal experiments can predict responses in human patients, with independent scientific experts as judges.

Renowned primatologist Jane Goodall has backed the idea, and SNP MP Lisa Cameron has tabled an Early Day Motion calling for the hearing.

Louise Owen, founder of Floe, told The Independent that if the science hearing took place, animal experiments would end because the government would recognise they were out of step with current scientific knowledge and harmful to human patients.

She pointed out that the governments new Animal Sentience Bill enshrines in law the ability of animals to feel joy, suffering and pain.

Gervais said: Im deeply shocked to learn that thousands of beautiful beagles are intensively bred, right here in the peace of the British countryside, for painful and terrifying toxicity experiments that are also now proven to entirely fail the search for human treatments and cures.

Mel Broughton, of the Free the MBR Beagles campaign, said: Increasingly, there is scientific opinion that these experiments are not valid in terms of finding cures for human diseases, and these dogs suffer greatly in toxicity tests. Theyre poisoned to death slowly.

A spokeswoman for MBR said the company bred animals raised to be healthy, content and comfortable in laboratories, adding: It does not undertake regulatory toxicology or other experiments and has only animal care staff working on its sites.

Recommended Military lab tests on live animals double in five years

Expert opinion on why animals are needed in research should be sought from the medicines regulator and scientists or organisations working in this field.

These experiments form a small but crucial part of a wide range of applications, from ecology work to investigations into human and animal diseases, including those that led directly to the vaccines and treatments for Covid-19, cancer drugs, pet medicines and products labelled as safe for pets.

We are proud of the role we play in supporting human and animal health regardless of the misconceptions of campaigners.

Understanding Animal Research, which is part-funded by MBR among others, said repeated-dose toxicity testing involved adding a small, non-lethal dose of a proposed drug to dogs food for several weeks. When the dogs are killed, their organs are inspected for signs of pathology.

A spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: The Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 (ASPA) already regulates procedures that are carried out on protected animals for scientific or educational purposes that may cause pain, suffering, distress or lasting harm.

The Act also regulates the breeding and supply of certain species of animals for use in regulated procedures or for the scientific use of their organs or tissues. The Act also regulates the methods used to kill protected animals.
Labour is quietly recruiting staff on insecure temporary contracts with worse employment conditions while it moves to make a third of its existing permanent employees redundant, The Independent can reveal.

The party is being accused of using underhand fire and rehire practices condemned by Keir Starmer himself in a speech just a few months ago.

Staff were told of the mass redundancies this week, which the party said was not an easy decision but was required to get fighting fit for upcoming campaigns and the next general election.

Labour is believed to have seen an exodus of members under Keir Starmers leadership, which has hit the partys finances hard  as has settling with former staffers who sued the party over its handling of antisemitism.

But despite the scale of the lay-offs the party is actually recruiting temporary staff on significantly less secure conditions than those being asked to take redundancy.

An advert posted on a recruitment website offers potential workers a six-month contract and says work is to be done from home.

All applicants need their own laptop, a secure Wi-Fi connection at home, and must bring their own satisfactory firewall and virus protection.

The advert does not mention that the job is working with Labour, and falsely claims it is in the public sector. But The Independent has confirmed with the party that recruits will be put to work in its governance and the legal unit, which investigates complaints against members.

Successful applicants, who will be paid 19 an hour, are asked to have a knowledge of data protection and equalities legislation and the ability to work effectively in a fast-paced and highly pressurised environment, among other traits.

Party sources say the recruitment push is a necessary and temporary measure to clear a surfeit of complaints.

But one senior Labour MP told The Independent the party was acting like the worst of the very worst employers and said Keir Starmer should get a grip on his officials.

To learn that our party are now using what can only be described as fire and rehire tactics appals me. Its everything we as a party should be aggressively opposing, they said.

Sacking individuals and hiring others with worse wages, terms and conditions are the actions of the worst of the very worst employers.

The Independent understands that the issue was discussed at a recent meeting of the partys National Executive Committee (NEC). General secretary David Evans, a former political consultant recruited by Keir Starmer last year, is said to have rejected the characterisation as fire and rehire and said the new employees were not agency workers.

Party leader Sir Keir told the Trades Union Congress in September that fire and rehire should be illegal and was not just wrong but against British values.

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After a decade of pay restraint thats the last thing working people need, and in the middle of a deep recession its the last thing our economy needs, he said at the time.

Speaking on the record about the job advert, a Labour spokesperson said: We dont comment on staffing.

A Labour source said: This is unrelated to the announcement about the voluntary severance scheme. It was agreed by the NEC several weeks ago as a necessary and temporary measure to help us clear the backlog of complaints as quickly as possible.

Referring to the redundancy scheme, a Labour source said this week: This is not an easy decision and we recognise it will be a very difficult time for staff. We will fully engage and consult with them and the trade unions throughout.

We are reshaping our partys operation with a view towards being fighting fit for upcoming campaigns and the next general election.
Sadiq Khans party has urged him to halt construction of a new road tunnel in London that campaigners say will make it impossible to meet climate targets.

In an overwhelming vote at the London Labour regional conference on Saturday delegates called for the Silvertown Tunnel to be scrapped by 74 per cent to 26 per cent.

The twin-bore road tunnel under the Thames is planned to link Silvertown to the Greenwich peninsula, with an expected opening date of 2025.

Transport for London says it will reduce congestion in the nearby Blackwall Tunnel but environmentalists say it will induce more demand and lead to worsening air quality and car dependency.

Experts have warned that that project is incompatible with Mr Khans rhetoric on climate change. It is opposed by the Green Party, Liberal Democrats, some Conservatives, and many of Labours own MPs and mayors.

Delegates at the conference, where Mr Khan spoke, approved a motion calling on the mayor to cancel this project on the basis that evidence shows the tunnel would worsen air pollution, traffic congestion, carbon emissions and is also financially unviable.

The agreed decision adds: One impact would be to enable HGVs to cross the river into Londons most polluted borough, passing dozens of schools and nurseries where tens of thousands of children play and learn.

Furthermore, research from the Tyndall Centre shows that Londons transport policy is currently incompatible with the rapid decarbonisation required to reach targets aligned with the Paris agreement and the tunnel will only make matters worse.

The motion, put forward by the Labour local constituency parties in Greenwich and Woolwich, Camberwell and Peckham, Lewisham Deptford, Leyton and Wanstead and Erith and Thamesmead, said TfL would become reliant on high traffic revenue to repay the private finance initiative (PFI) loan used to build it.

The conference resolved that there was no justification for the tunnel and that the project does not make economic sense and that revenue should be prioritised for accessible, affordable, green energy [-powered] and efficient public transport.

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan backs the project (REUTERS)

Approached by The Independent after the vote, a spokesperson for Mr Khan claimed the tunnel would reduce congestion and highlighted other green measures he had pursued in office.

Simon Pirani of the Stop the Silvertown Tunnel Coalition said: The Labour conference vote confirms that, not only is the tunnel project completely incompatible with Londons targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but it has no social licence.

The Labour party in London doesnt support it, many of the local councils and MPs dont support it, the population of Newham and Greenwich doesnt support it.

Only the haulage industry, and of course the construction companies, support it. Its time to scrap the project and focus on improving public transport.

In an open letter to Mr Khan and transport secretary Grant Shapps published by The Independent in April, dozens of academics said it would be foolhardy to press ahead with an infrastructure project that can only contribute to the UKs excessive greenhouse gas emissions.

Responding to the vote, a spokesperson for the Mayor of London said: The Mayor is taking some of the boldest action of any city in the world to tackle air pollution in London.

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The bridge was closed last year after cracks in it worsened during a heatwave Getty UK news in pictures 16 July 2021 The sun rises behind the Sefton Park Palm House, in Sefton Park, Liverpool PA UK news in pictures 15 July 2021 Sir Nicholas Serota watches a short film about sea monsters as he opens a 7.6 million, 360 immersive dome at Devonport's Market Hall in Plymouth, which is the first of its type to be built in Europe PA UK news in pictures 14 July 2021 Heidi Street, playing a gothic character, looks at a brain suspended in glass at the worlds first attraction dedicated to the author of Frankenstein inside the Mary Shelleys House of Frankenstein experience, located in a Georgian terraced house in Bath, as it prepares to open to the public on 19 July PA UK news in pictures 13 July 2021 Rehearsals are held in a car park in Glasgow for a parade scene ahead of filming for what is thought to be the new Indiana Jones 5 movie starring Harrison Ford PA UK news in pictures 12 July 2021 A local resident puts love hearts and slogans on the plastic that covers offensive graffiti on the vandalised mural of Manchester United striker and England player Marcus Rashford on the wall of a cafe on Copson Street, Withington in Manchester Getty Images UK news in pictures 11 July 2021 England's Bukayo Saka with manager Gareth Southgate after the match Pool via Reuters UK news in pictures 10 July 2021 Australias Ashleigh Barty holds the trophy after winning her final Wimbledon match against Czech Republics Karolina Pliskova Reuters UK news in pictures 9 July 2021 England 1966 World Cup winner Sir Geoff Hurst stands on top of a pod on the lastminute.com London Eye wearing a replica 1966 World Cup final kit and looking out towards Wembley Stadium in the north of the capital, where the England football team will play Italy in the Euro 2020 final on Sunday PA UK news in pictures 8 July 2021 Karolina Pliskova celebrates after defeating Aryna Sabalenka during the women's singles semifinals match on day ten of the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London AP UK news in pictures 7 July 2021 The residents of Towfield Court in Feltham have transformed their estate with England flags for the Euro 2020 tournament PA UK news in pictures 6 July 2021 A couple are hit by a wave as they walk along the promenade in Dover, Kent, during strong winds PA UK news in pictures 5 July 2021 Alexander Zverev playing against Felix Auger-Aliassime in the fourth round of the Gentlemen's Singles on Court 1 on day seven of Wimbledon at The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club PA UK news in pictures 4 July 2021 Aaron Carty and the Beyonce Experience perform on stage during UK Black Pride at The Roundhouse in London Getty for UK Black Pride UK news in pictures 3 July 2021 Englands Jordan Henderson celebrates after scoring his first international goal, his sides fourth against Ukraine during the Euro 2020 quarter final match at the Olympic stadium in Rome AP UK news in pictures 2 July 2021 Dan Evans serves against Sebastian Korda during their mens singles third round match at Wimbledon Getty UK news in pictures 1 July 2021 Prince William, left and Prince Harry unveil a statue they commissioned of their mother Princess Diana, on what would have been her 60th birthday, in the Sunken Garden at Kensington Palace, London AP UK news in pictures 30 June 2021 Dancers from the Billingham Festival and Balbir Singh Dance Company, during a preview for the The Two Fridas, UK Summer tour, presented by Billingham International Folklore Festival of World Dance in collaboration with Balbir Singh Dance Company, inspired by the life and times of female artists Frida Kahlo and Amrita Sher-Gil , which opens on July 10 at Ushaw Historic House, Chapel and Gardens in Durham PA UK news in pictures 29 June 2021 A boy kicks a soccer ball in front of the balconies and landings adorned with predominantly England flags at the Kirby housing estate in London AP UK news in pictures 28 June 2021 Emergency services attend a fire nearby the Elephant & Castle Rail Station in London Getty UK news in pictures 27 June 2021 People walk along Regent Street in central London during a #FreedomToDance march organised by Save Our Scene, in protest against the governments perceived disregard for the live music industry throughout the coronavirus pandemic PA UK news in pictures 26 June 2021 A pair of marchers in a Trans Pride rally share a smile in Soho Angela Christofilou/The Independent UK news in pictures 25 June 2021 Tim Duckworth during the Long Jump in the decathlon during day one of the Muller British Athletics Championships at Manchester Regional Arena PA UK news in pictures 24 June 2021 A member of staff poses with the work 'The Death of Cash' by XCopy at the 'CryptOGs: The Pioneers of NFT Art' auction at Bonhams auction house in London EPA UK news in pictures 23 June 2021 Bank of England Chief Cashier Sarah John displays the new 50-pound banknote at Daunt Books in London Bank of England via Reuters UK news in pictures 22 June 2021 Actor Isaac Hampstead Wright sits on the newly unveiled Game of Throne's "Iron Throne" statue, in Leicester Square, in London, Tuesday, June 22, 2021. The statue is the tenth to join the trail and commemorates 10 years since the TV show first aired, as well as in anticipation for HBO's release of House of the Dragon set to be released in 2022 AP UK news in pictures 21 June 2021 Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon receives her second dose of the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 20 June 2021 Joyce Paton, from Peterhead, on one of the remaining snow patches on Meall aBhuiridh in Glencoe during the Midsummer Ski. The event, organised by the Glencoe Mountain Resort, is held every year on the weekend closest to the Summer Solstice PA UK news in pictures 19 June 2021 England appeal LBW during day four of their Womens International Test match against India at the Bristol County Ground PA UK news in pictures 18 June 2021 Scotland fans let off flares in Leicester Square after Scotland's Euro 2020 match against England ended in a 0-0 draw Getty UK news in pictures 17 June 2021 Members of the Tootsie Rollers jazz band pose on the third day of the Royal Ascot horse racing meet AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 16 June 2021 A woman and child examine life-size sculptures of a herd of Asian elephants set up by the Elephant Family and The Real Elephant Collective to help educate the public on the elephants and the ways in which humans can better protect the planets biodiversity, in Green Park, central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 15 June 2021 Hydrotherapists with Dixie, a seven-year-old Dachshund who is being treated for back problems common with the breed, in the hydrotherapy pool during a facility at Battersea Dogs and Cats Home's in Battersea, London, to view their new hydrotherapy centre PA UK news in pictures 14 June 2021 Scotland's David Marshall in the net after Czech Republic's Patrik Schick scored their second goal at Hampden Park Reuters UK news in pictures 13 June 2021 Raheem Sterling celebrates with Harry Kane after scoring Englands first goal of the Euro 2021 tournament in a match against Croatia at Wembley Reuters UK news in pictures 12 June 2021 Oxfam campaigners wearing costumes depicting G7 leaders pose for photographers on Swanpool Beach near Falmouth, Cornwall EPA

This includes the central London ULEZ [Ultra Low Emission Zone], which has helped cut roadside concentrations of nitrogen dioxide in the central zone by nearly half. The ULEZ expansion will extend these benefits to millions of Londoners, both inside and outside the expanded zone.

Anyone who has been caught in traffic due to a problem in the Blackwall Tunnel will know that there is an urgent need for another river crossing in this part of London. Extensive modelling shows that the introduction of tolls on both tunnels at Silvertown and Blackwall will mean no overall increase in traffic and an overall improvement in air quality.

The new tunnel will mean fewer idling vehicles and better local bus services, including double decker, zero-emission buses which currently cant operate across the river because of the restrictive size of the Blackwall tunnel.

The extension of the Ultra Low Emission Zone from this October  covering the Silvertown area  will play a crucial role in tackling congestion and improving air quality.
A former Tory councillor was given a 120m government contract for personal protective equipment (PPE) which is now lying unused because of concerns about its quality, it has been revealed.

Steve Dechan, who owns medical device manufacturer Platform-14, had his offer to supply protective equipment from China fast-tracked through the governments controversial VIP lane.

The Sunday Times newspaper reports that fewer than 1 in 400 of the face shields procured by the company on behalf of the government have been used, because the regulator does not believe they meet the right standards.

The original order for 120 million shields has delivered just 274,200 into the NHS supply chain, representing 0.23 per cent of the overall stock.

It means the shields used so far have cost the equivalent of 423 each, despite similar ones being available to buy online for less than 1.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has to authorise all PPE that is not CE marked (an EU designation that means it complies with European standards).

But the regulator said: None of the documentation provided to HSE indicated the product to be CE marked.

The regulator wrote to officials in September last year saying the shields cannot enter the NHS supply chain and repeatedly refused to approve them.

But in February, the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) stepped in and directly approved the face shields, with 274,000 used in the NHS so far. At the height of the pandemic last year, none could be used.

Mr Dechan told The Sunday Times that the application and usage [of the shields] is entirely a matter for the DHSC.

He said they had met the required standards and added: As an NHS supplier for nearly 10 years, we will continue to provide innovative solutions and support trusts and patients across the UK.

The reports come amid concern about the governments procurement during the pandemic. The National Audit Office (NAO) found that firms referred to the VIP lane were 10 times more likely to have been given government contracts to supply PPE.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 31 July 2021 James Guy, Adam Peaty and Kathleen Dawson celebrate winning the gold medal in the mixed 4x100m medley relay final at the Tokyo Olympics AP UK news in pictures 30 July 2021 Great Britain's Bethany Shriever and Kye Whyte celebrate their Gold and Silver medals respectively for the Cycling BMX Racing at the Ariake Urban Sports Park on the seventh day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in Japan PA UK news in pictures 29 July 2021 Team GB's Mallory Franklin during the Womens Canoe Slalom Final on day six of the Tokyo Olympic Games. She went on to win the silver medal Getty UK news in pictures 28 July 2021 Canoers on Llyn Padarn lake in Snowdonia, Gwynedd. It was announced that the north-west Wales slate landscape has been granted UNESCO World Heritage Status PA UK news in pictures 27 July 2021 A view of one of two areas now being used at a warehouse facility in Dover, Kent, for boats used by people thought to be migrants. PA UK news in pictures 26 July 2021 A woman is helped by Border Force officers as a group of people thought to be migrants are brought in to Dover, Kent, onboard a Border Force vessel, following a small boat incident in the Channel PA UK news in pictures 25 July 2021 Vehicles drive through deep water on a flooded road in Nine Elms, London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 24 July 2021 Utilities workers inspect a 15x20ft sinkhole on Green Lane, Liverpool, which is suspected to have been caused by ruptured water main PA UK news in pictures 23 July 2021 Children interact with Mega Please Draw Freely by artist Ei Arakawa inside the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern in London, part of UNIQLO Tate Play the gallery's new free programme of art-inspired activities for families PA UK news in pictures 22 July 2021 Festivalgoers in the campsite at the Latitude festival in Henham Park, Southwold, Suffolk PA UK news in pictures 21 July 2021 A man walks past an artwork by Will Blood on the end of a property in Bedminster, Bristol, as the 75 murals project reaches the halfway point and various graffiti pieces are sprayed onto walls and buildings across the city over the Summer PA UK news in pictures 20 July 2021 People during morning prayer during Eid ul-Adha, or Festival of Sacrifice, in Southall Park, Uxbridge, London PA UK news in pictures 19 July 2021 Commuters, some not wearing facemasks, at Westminster Underground station, at 08:38 in London after the final legal Coronavirus restrictions were lifted in England PA UK news in pictures 18 July 2021 A view of spectators by the 2nd green during day four of The Open at The Royal St George's Golf Club in Sandwich, Kent PA UK news in pictures 17 July 2021 Cyclists ride over the Hammersmith Bridge in London. The bridge was closed last year after cracks in it worsened during a heatwave Getty UK news in pictures 16 July 2021 The sun rises behind the Sefton Park Palm House, in Sefton Park, Liverpool PA UK news in pictures 15 July 2021 Sir Nicholas Serota watches a short film about sea monsters as he opens a 7.6 million, 360 immersive dome at Devonport's Market Hall in Plymouth, which is the first of its type to be built in Europe PA UK news in pictures 14 July 2021 Heidi Street, playing a gothic character, looks at a brain suspended in glass at the worlds first attraction dedicated to the author of Frankenstein inside the Mary Shelleys House of Frankenstein experience, located in a Georgian terraced house in Bath, as it prepares to open to the public on 19 July PA UK news in pictures 13 July 2021 Rehearsals are held in a car park in Glasgow for a parade scene ahead of filming for what is thought to be the new Indiana Jones 5 movie starring Harrison Ford PA UK news in pictures 12 July 2021 A local resident puts love hearts and slogans on the plastic that covers offensive graffiti on the vandalised mural of Manchester United striker and England player Marcus Rashford on the wall of a cafe on Copson Street, Withington in Manchester Getty Images UK news in pictures 11 July 2021 England's Bukayo Saka with manager Gareth Southgate after the match Pool via Reuters UK news in pictures 10 July 2021 Australias Ashleigh Barty holds the trophy after winning her final Wimbledon match against Czech Republics Karolina Pliskova Reuters UK news in pictures 9 July 2021 England 1966 World Cup winner Sir Geoff Hurst stands on top of a pod on the lastminute.com London Eye wearing a replica 1966 World Cup final kit and looking out towards Wembley Stadium in the north of the capital, where the England football team will play Italy in the Euro 2020 final on Sunday PA UK news in pictures 8 July 2021 Karolina Pliskova celebrates after defeating Aryna Sabalenka during the women's singles semifinals match on day ten of the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London AP UK news in pictures 7 July 2021 The residents of Towfield Court in Feltham have transformed their estate with England flags for the Euro 2020 tournament PA UK news in pictures 6 July 2021 A couple are hit by a wave as they walk along the promenade in Dover, Kent, during strong winds PA UK news in pictures 5 July 2021 Alexander Zverev playing against Felix Auger-Aliassime in the fourth round of the Gentlemen's Singles on Court 1 on day seven of Wimbledon at The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club PA UK news in pictures 4 July 2021 Aaron Carty and the Beyonce Experience perform on stage during UK Black Pride at The Roundhouse in London Getty for UK Black Pride UK news in pictures 3 July 2021 Englands Jordan Henderson celebrates after scoring his first international goal, his sides fourth against Ukraine during the Euro 2020 quarter final match at the Olympic stadium in Rome AP UK news in pictures 2 July 2021 Dan Evans serves against Sebastian Korda during their mens singles third round match at Wimbledon Getty UK news in pictures 1 July 2021 Prince William, left and Prince Harry unveil a statue they commissioned of their mother Princess Diana, on what would have been her 60th birthday, in the Sunken Garden at Kensington Palace, London AP UK news in pictures 30 June 2021 Dancers from the Billingham Festival and Balbir Singh Dance Company, during a preview for the The Two Fridas, UK Summer tour, presented by Billingham International Folklore Festival of World Dance in collaboration with Balbir Singh Dance Company, inspired by the life and times of female artists Frida Kahlo and Amrita Sher-Gil , which opens on July 10 at Ushaw Historic House, Chapel and Gardens in Durham PA UK news in pictures 29 June 2021 A boy kicks a soccer ball in front of the balconies and landings adorned with predominantly England flags at the Kirby housing estate in London AP UK news in pictures 28 June 2021 Emergency services attend a fire nearby the Elephant & Castle Rail Station in London Getty UK news in pictures 27 June 2021 People walk along Regent Street in central London during a #FreedomToDance march organised by Save Our Scene, in protest against the governments perceived disregard for the live music industry throughout the coronavirus pandemic PA UK news in pictures 26 June 2021 A pair of marchers in a Trans Pride rally share a smile in Soho Angela Christofilou/The Independent UK news in pictures 25 June 2021 Tim Duckworth during the Long Jump in the decathlon during day one of the Muller British Athletics Championships at Manchester Regional Arena PA UK news in pictures 24 June 2021 A member of staff poses with the work 'The Death of Cash' by XCopy at the 'CryptOGs: The Pioneers of NFT Art' auction at Bonhams auction house in London EPA UK news in pictures 23 June 2021 Bank of England Chief Cashier Sarah John displays the new 50-pound banknote at Daunt Books in London Bank of England via Reuters UK news in pictures 22 June 2021 Actor Isaac Hampstead Wright sits on the newly unveiled Game of Throne's "Iron Throne" statue, in Leicester Square, in London, Tuesday, June 22, 2021. The statue is the tenth to join the trail and commemorates 10 years since the TV show first aired, as well as in anticipation for HBO's release of House of the Dragon set to be released in 2022 AP UK news in pictures 21 June 2021 Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon receives her second dose of the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 20 June 2021 Joyce Paton, from Peterhead, on one of the remaining snow patches on Meall aBhuiridh in Glencoe during the Midsummer Ski. The event, organised by the Glencoe Mountain Resort, is held every year on the weekend closest to the Summer Solstice PA UK news in pictures 19 June 2021 England appeal LBW during day four of their Womens International Test match against India at the Bristol County Ground PA UK news in pictures 18 June 2021 Scotland fans let off flares in Leicester Square after Scotland's Euro 2020 match against England ended in a 0-0 draw Getty UK news in pictures 17 June 2021 Members of the Tootsie Rollers jazz band pose on the third day of the Royal Ascot horse racing meet AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 16 June 2021 A woman and child examine life-size sculptures of a herd of Asian elephants set up by the Elephant Family and The Real Elephant Collective to help educate the public on the elephants and the ways in which humans can better protect the planets biodiversity, in Green Park, central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 15 June 2021 Hydrotherapists with Dixie, a seven-year-old Dachshund who is being treated for back problems common with the breed, in the hydrotherapy pool during a facility at Battersea Dogs and Cats Home's in Battersea, London, to view their new hydrotherapy centre PA UK news in pictures 14 June 2021 Scotland's David Marshall in the net after Czech Republic's Patrik Schick scored their second goal at Hampden Park Reuters UK news in pictures 13 June 2021 Raheem Sterling celebrates with Harry Kane after scoring Englands first goal of the Euro 2021 tournament in a match against Croatia at Wembley Reuters UK news in pictures 12 June 2021 Oxfam campaigners wearing costumes depicting G7 leaders pose for photographers on Swanpool Beach near Falmouth, Cornwall EPA

The NAO, the governments spending watchdog, said in a report in November 2020 that there was a lack of transparency and adequate documentation of some key decisions, such as why particular suppliers were chosen, or how the government identified and managed potential conflicts of interest in the awarding of some contracts.

Another report released by the Commons Public Accounts Committee on Sunday said that the government is still wasting vast amounts of money on PPE that is not fit for purpose a year and a half into the pandemic.

Official figures show that overall nearly 7 per cent of all items purchased by the DHSC have failed quality checks, while ministers are spending 6.7m every week to keep the items stored.

An eye-watering 2.1 billion items have already been found unsuitable for use in medical settings, and 10,000 shipping containers are still to be unpacked.

The same committee also warned of significant financial risks for decades to come, with the estimated lifetime cost of all the governments Covid measures reaching 372bn in May 2021.
Firefighters have concluded their search for bodies at the site of the collapsed condominium building in Surfside, Florida.

The announcement came on Friday, a month after the 24 June disaster that killed 97 people when the 12-storey building fell.

Nobody has been pulled alive from the rubble since the initial hours after the collapse which came at approximately 1.20am as many residents slept.

The search-and-rescue mission was switched to a recovery effort on 7 July.

One woman, Estelle Hedaya, is still officially unaccounted for as the search team has been unable to identify her remains.

Theyre closing the support room, theres nothing left, its finished, Ms Hedayas best friend, Lisa Shrem, told The Washington Post.

The site is even cleared below the foundation, so I feel like its, OK, close the book. What could be worse than that?

Rubble from the oceanfront Miami Beach site has been cleared and moved to a warehouse for further investigation.

For weeks, emergency responders coped with unstable debris and battled tropical storms during their search to identify victims. Their mission was halted several times when conditions were too dangerous.

The remaining portion of the building that still stood after the tragedy was demolished in a controlled explosion on 4 July.

Firefighters camped out at the site in the summer heat and worked 12-hour shifts.

Thanking them for their efforts, Fire Chief Alan Cominsky said: Its obviously devastating. Its obviously a difficult situation across the board.

He added: I couldnt be prouder of the men and women that represent Miami-Dade Fire Rescue.

If officially identified, Ms Hedaya would bring the final death toll to 98. Her younger brother has visited the site twice and provided a DNA sample.

Officials have declined to clarify whether they have one additional set of human remains in that pathologists are struggling to identify, or whether a search for that final set of remains continues.

Her family and friends feel helpless and are worried that she will be forgotten, the Associated Press reports.

Among the dead are members of the areas large Orthodox Jewish community, the sister of Paraguays first lady, her family, and their nanny, as well as a local salesman, his wife, and their two young daughters.

The collapse of the building began a debate regarding building safety, regulations, and inspections.

A 2018 engineering on the building, which opened in 1981, appears to not have been acted on despite highlighting significant problems with cracked and degraded concrete support beams in the underground parking garage.

Owners of the 136 apartments and the condo board argued over the estimated costs of the project to fix the problem  expected to top $15m at the time.

No decision has been made about the future of the site, though a judge presiding over several lawsuits filed since the collapse wants it sold at market rates, which could bring in $100m.

Some condo owners want to rebuild, while others would like a memorial erected.
US Rep Adam Kinzinger, a Republican congressman from Illinois known for his criticism of former President Donald Trump, has been appointed to the House panel being created to investigate the riot at the US Capitol on 6 January.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi confirmed on Sunday that she would ask the congressman to join the panel during an interview with ABCs This Week following days of speculation on the issue. Her office had refused to comment to The Independent on Mr Kinzingers potential appointment as recently as Thursday. In a statement later on Sunday, Ms Pelosi confirmed the appointment of Mr Kinzinger.

Mr Kinzinger will be one of two Republicans on the bipartisan committee following House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthys decision last week to withdraw all of his nominations after Ms Pelosi declined to name two of them, conservative Reps Jim Jordan and Jim Banks, citing Mr Jordans potential status as a material witness to the events of the riot and Mr Bankss unserious comments about the attack on the Capitol to members of the news media.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi tells @GStephanopoulos that she plans to name more Republicans to the Jan. 6 select committee after vetoing two of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthys recommendations: You could say that's the direction I would be going." https://t.co/3NlObOqjFv pic.twitter.com/4hJwViTMxK  This Week (@ThisWeekABC) July 25, 2021

Around noon on Sunday after Ms Pelosis comments were first made, Mr Kinzinger released a statement of his own, confirming his participation.

"Today, I was asked by the Speaker to serve on the House Select Committee to Investigate January 6th and I humbly accepted, he said, according to Forbes.

In her own statement, Ms Pelosi said that Mr Kinzingers addition would bring great patriotism to the panel.

NEW: Pelosi taps Kinzinger for Jan. 6 select committee.



"An Air Force veteran and Lieutenant Colonel in the Air National Guard... He brings great patriotism to the Committees mission: to find the facts and protect our Democracy."



Full statement  pic.twitter.com/l13KtfdXSH  Andrew Solender (@AndrewSolender) July 25, 2021

Democrats have faced sharp criticism from Mr McCarthy over their decision to block the two congressmen from participating, though Republicans declined to support legislation earlier this year that would have established a select commission to probe the attack and given Mr McCarthy full control over the selections for five spots on the panel.

The legislation to create such a commission was initially negotiated with the help of Republican members of Congress including Rep John Katko, but was staunchly opposed by Mr McCarthy and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell at the time, resulting in it gaining little GOP support on the House and Senate floors. Now, Republicans are hammering Ms Pelosi for exerting control over the Democrat-led House panel established by the speaker in response to the failure of that bill, and have complained that her decision to bar Mr Banks and Mr Jordan is undemocratic.

Ms Pelosi and her allies have responded by pointing to the statements of Mr Banks, who famously blamed the events of 6 January on the Biden administration despite the mob being made up of Trump supporters attempting to illegally block Mr Bidens election victory, and the Biden administration not existing at the time of the riot.

Ms Cheney noted in her own press conference on the steps of the Capitol that Mr Jordan may very well be a material witness to events that led to that day, to January 6.

In an angry response to Ms Pelosis decision on Wednesday, Mr McCarthy vowed that the GOP would pursue its own investigation into the 6 Jan attack, though as the minority party in the House and Senate, Republicans do not have the power to establish official committees.

Unless Speaker Pelosi reverses course and seats all five Republican nominees, Republicans will not be party to their sham process and will instead pursue our own investigation of the facts, claimed the California congressman.
Former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders is blaming President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for vaccine hesitancy in the US as she urges members of her home state to get vaccinated against Covid-19.

In an op-ed published in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on Sunday, the former top aide in the Trump White House blamed comments made by Ms Harris and Mr Biden on the campaign trail for the skepticism many Americans are still showing toward the Covid-19 vaccine, despite such hesitancy being pronounced in many states where conservative politics dominate such as Arkansas, where Ms Sanders is running for governor.

The New York Times ran an opinion piece claiming that whatever the Trump administration released would likely be a dangerous political stunt. CNN did the same. But no one did more to undercut public confidence in the vaccine than Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Biden doubted that the vaccine would be "real, while Harris said in a nationally televised debate that she would not take any vaccine the Trump administration had a hand in creating, Ms Sanders wrote.

If President Biden, Vice President Harris, and others on the left truly care about increasing the vaccination rate and saving lives, they should admit they were wrong to cast doubt on Operation Warp Speed and give President Trump and his team the credit they are due for the development of a safe and effective vaccine in record time, she added.

Her comments conflict with the reality of Mr Biden and Ms Harriss vocal and persistent advocacy for vaccinations throughout 2021, and obscure the truth about Ms Harriss comments. In a vice presidential debate against Mike Pence in 2020, she said that she would be one of the first lined up to take a vaccine endorsed by Dr Anthony Fauci or other top US health officials, while adding that she would not take a vaccine solely endorsed by former President Donald Trump.

"If Dr Fauci, the doctors, tell us that we should take it, I'll be the first in line to take it, Ms Harris said. "But if Donald Trump tells us we should take it, I'm not going to take it."

Ms Sanders went on in her op-ed, urging Arkansans to get the Covid-19 vaccine if they had not done so already.

Recent data demonstrates that those Arkansans who are not vaccinated are at significantly greater risk for serious illness from covid. In fact, 98 per cent of covid patients currently hospitalized in our state and 99 percent of recent covid deaths were people who were not vaccinated. It's clear that the Trump vaccine works and is saving lives, she wrote.

So to anyone still considering the merits of vaccination, I leave you with this encouragement: Pray about it, discuss it with your family and your doctor. Filter out the noise and fear-mongering and condescension, and make the best, most informed decision you can that helps your family, community, and our great state be its very best, Ms Sanders concluded.

Roughly 45.5 per cent of Arkansas total population has received one dose of a two-shot Covid-19 vaccine, while 36 per cent are fully vaccinated against the disease.

The spread of the Delta variant is driving rates of new Covid-19 cases up across the nation, and in Arkansas the rate of new infections has spiked to levels not seen since early this year, when the state recovered from a massive surge over the winter. More that 2,000 cases were reported in a single day on Saturday for the first time in months.

The states current governor, Asa Hutchinson, blamed misinformation surrounding vaccines and the disease in general for vaccine skepticism during an interview with CNNs State of the Union on Sunday.

"I don't know if I underestimated it, but, certainly, the resistance has hardened in certain elements, and is simply false information, he said of opposition to vaccinations.

After remarking that some have spread wild conspiracy theories about the jabs including claims of government mind control, Mr Hutchinson added: What's holding us back [from reopening] is a low vaccination rate.
Lawmakers racing to seal a bipartisan infrastructure deal early this coming week are hitting a major roadblock over how much money should go to public transit, the groups lead Republican negotiator said Sunday.

As discussions continued through the weekend, Ohio Sen. Rob Portman said both sides were about 90% of the way there on an agreement.

We have one issue outstanding, and were not getting much response from the Democrats on it, he said. Its about mass transit. Our transit number is very generous.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer D-N.Y., has said he wants to pass a bipartisan package and an accompanying $3.5 trillion budget plan before the Senate leaves for its August recess. He held a procedural vote last week to begin debate on the broad framework, but all 50 Senate Republicans voted against it, saying they needed to see the full details of the plan.

Democrats want to see more of the money in the roughly $1 trillion infrastructure agreement go toward boosting public transportation, which include subways, light-rail lines and buses, in line with President Joe Bidens original infrastructure proposal.

The bipartisan group originally appeared to be moving toward agreement on more money for transit before an objection by Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey the top Republican on the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee which oversees public transit. He cited, in part, previous COVID-19 federal relief money that had already been allocated to public transit.

Nobodys talking about cutting transit, Toomey said Sunday. The question is, how many tens of billions of dollars on top of the huge increase that they have already gotten is sufficient? And thats where there is a little disagreement.

Typically, spending from the federal Highway Trust Fund has followed the traditional formula of 80% for highways and 20% for transit. Republicans including Toomey want to change that, but Democratic Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Tom Carper of Delaware say they will oppose the deal if it does.

The White House has declined to say whether Biden would push for the additional funding for transit.

Transit funding is obviously extremely important to the president  the Amtrak President, as we may call him, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Friday. But we believe that members can get this work done and can work through these issues quite quickly.

The final package would need the support of 60 senators in the evenly split 50-50 Senate to advance past a filibuster -- meaning at least 10 Republicans along with every Democratic member. Last weeks test vote failed along party lines.

Democrats also are seeking to hammer out a compromise to pay for the package after Republicans dashed a plan to boost the IRS to go after tax scofflaws, but Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, a Democratic negotiator in the group, said he remains optimistic about reaching a deal soon.

Were down to the last couple of items, and I think youre going to see a bill Monday afternoon, Warner said Sunday.

Three rounds totaling nearly $70 billion in federal COVID-19 emergency assistance, including $30.5 billion that Biden signed into law in March, pulled transit agencies from the brink of financial collapse as riders steered clear of crowded spaces on subway cars and buses. That federal aid is expected to cover operating deficits from declining passenger revenue and costly COVID-19 cleaning and safety protocols through at least 2022.

But Democrats and public transit advocates see expanded public transit systems as key to easing traffic congestion, combating climate change and curbing car pollution.

Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., the chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, recently sent a letter with 30 Democrats on the panel warning that the Senate proposal was inadequate and that any deal should incorporate the House-passed $715 billion infrastructure bill, which includes more money for rail and transit.

The historical share for public transit from the Highway Trust Fund is 20%, Paul Skoutelas, president of the American Public Transportation Association said Sunday. It is the absolute minimum acceptable level to help sustain our nations public transportation systems. It is imperative that we make robust, forward looking investments to modernize and expand public transit that will assist in our economic recovery from the COVID pandemic and get Americans back to work.

Portman appeared on ABCs This Week, Toomey was on CNNs State of the Union and Warner spoke on Fox News Sunday.
Donald Trump pleased thousands of his political supporters on Saturday night when he returned to Arizona for a rally, delivering a near two-hour speech focused on bashing the Democrats and stirring up trouble with the Taliban.

Referring to the organisations leader, Mawlawi Hibatullah Akhundzada, the former US president appeared to forget his name  instead telling the 5,000-strong crowd he would just call him Mohammed.

Citing America and Natos withdrawal agreement from Afghanistan, Mr Trump said: I told the Taliban leader, I spoke to the leader and I said  lets call him Mohammed  I said, Mohammed, were leaving.

He went on to impersonate Akhundzada, performing a series of grunts to the jeering crowd, telling them: Hes a rough man.

Mr Trump characteristically used the Turning Point Action gathering to blast the disgraceful 2020 election, repeating previous and already debunked claims about votes being stolen from him.

Joe Biden and the radical Democrats are wrecking our nation, he said. I dont even believe its him. I dont think Joe knows where the hell he is.

Speaking from Phoenix, Arizona, Mr Trump claimed his party won the state [at last years election]  and won it decisively, when in actual fact the Republicans lost Arizona by less than 11,000 seats  making Mr Biden the first Democrat to win the red state since 1996.

In my opinion, theres no way [Democrats] win elections without cheating, Mr Trump went on to say before claiming he could handle losing an election  but only if it was won fairly.

If I lost this election, I could handle it pretty easily [but] when they steal it from you and rig it, thats not easy and we have to fight, he told the crowd as they began to cheer and stand. We have no choice, we have to fight.

However, on a night many believed he would announce plans for a political comeback at the 2024 presidential election, Mr Trump stopped short of making any such promise. Instead, he moved to criticise his opponent Mr Bidens first few months in the Oval Office.

Theyre saying it was the worst [first] six months in the history of the presidency, he said  without explaining who they are.

I dont know if thats true but Id say it is, Mr Trump added.

Repeating one specific accusation he previously made against ballot counters in Georgia  another state Mr Biden took from Mr Trump in the election  the former president said there were thousands of illegal ballots hidden under the skirting of tables and included in the official count.

Mr Trump is likely referring to a video taken during the election at a counting facility at the State Farm Arena, in Fulton County, suggesting it reveals fraudulent activity by election workers.

The footage shows officials returning to their counting areas and a container with ballots being pulled out from under a table. But election officials have previously responded to this accusation, saying the footage shows normal practice.

[The ballots] werent in boxes that ballots come in, though, they were in others, whether it was suitcases or something different, and [counters] took those and they started putting them in [the official boxes]  sometimes three times, sometimes five times, Mr Trump told the Arizona crowd last night. And Ill tell you what, when people looked at that [video] they got sick, people threw up looking at it  and law enforcement did very little.

He then claimed the courts were in the process of doing something about it  its a big thing going on, he said  though it is unclear if this is true.

Last year, when Mr Trump first alleged the criminal behaviour had taken place, Georgias voting system implementation manager, Gabriel Sterling, refuted the claim in a tweet. Meanwhile, an official investigation found the entire security footage revealed there were no mystery ballots that were brought in from an unknown location and hidden under tables.

Fulton County elections director Richard Barron added at the time workers put those ballot bins under their workspace because it's the most convenient place to put those things.

Turning to coronavirus  an issue considered to be the main reason he lost his bid for re-election  Mr Trump said not only that he came up with the vaccine but that he believed in peoples freedoms if they did not want to take it.

What about the vaccine? I came up with vaccine. They said itd take three to five years  its going to save the world. I recommend you take it but I also believe in your freedoms 100 per cent, he said.

Finishing by congratulating himself, Mr Trump added: But just so you understand, [the vaccine] was a great achievement.

His nonchalant attitude towards the nations vaccine rollout comes amid fears Covid is tightening its grip across all 50 states, after the US reported an average of around 43,700 new cases per day last week. This is up 65 per cent from the previous seven days and nearly three times as high as the level two weeks ago, data compiled by Johns Hopkins University shows.

Infections hit a 15-month low in late June before they began to rise again, with fewer people taking up the vaccine and the more infectious Delta variant sweeping across the country being blamed.

So far, 340 million doses of a coronavirus vaccine have been administered in the US  162 million of which were second jabs, according to the latest government data. The figures also show that, as of this week, there have been over 610,000 Covid-related deaths in the US.
The estranged partner of a Tory peers son who is accused of shooting a police officer in Belize has reportedly been arrested for assaulting a hotel worker.

Jasmine Hartin, 32, is charged with manslaughter by negligence and had been out on bail awaiting trial after the death of Police Superintendent Henry Jemmott on 28 May.

The mother-of-two, who is the estranged partner of Lord Ashcrofts son, Andrew Ashcroft, was arrested again on Thursday night and later remanded in prison after pleading not guilty to assault at a court in San Pedro, Belize, as reported by the Daily Mail.

The assault allegedly occurred on Tuesday afternoon when she reportedly pushed a hotel worker at the Alaia Belize hotel.

On the same day it is alleged Ms Hartin attempted to gain access to her family apartment at the Grand Colony resort, but was turned away by security, according to the report.

She then filmed herself confronting her former partner at the neighbouring Alaia Belize, which the couple previously ran together.

The confrontation has reportedly prompted the manager of the Grand Colony resort and a former associate of Ms Hartins, named Frank Habet, to withdraw bail money.

Ms Hartins legal team described the incident as an ambush and were attempting to find bail funds so she wouldnt have to spend time in Hattieville prison, a notorious jail once featured on a Netflix show about the worlds toughest jails.

She is still awaiting trial after the death of Mr Jemmott, whose body was discovered in the town of San Pedro last month.

The case is not expected to be heard in court for some time. Manslaughter by negligence carries a minimum sentence of $10,000 in Belize.
Hundreds of people were evacuated from their homes on the island of Sardinia as wildfires ravaged an estimated 10,000 acres of forest.

Several buildings were damaged as the flames spread towards residential areas in the mountainous area of Montiferru on Saturday night.

The fire was still raging on Sunday but no deaths or injuries have so far been reported.

Authorities evacuated 200 people from the town of Cuglieri overnight after the flames reportedly reached the central square. Another 155 were removed from Sennariolo.

In nearby Santu Lussurgiu, the mayor Diego Loi ordered 60 people to leave their homes in the area closest to the fire. Its a disaster, he said on Facebook. And we fear the worst. We need maximum deployment of all means to avoid irreparable damage... Saint Lussurgiu, protect us.

A second fire was also reported near the town of Usellus, further south in the same province of Oristano.

An aerial view of the wildfire that broke out near Santu Lussurgiu in Sardinia on Saturday (via REUTERS)

Around 200 people were evacuated overnight as the flames approached the town of Cuglieri (AP)

Scorched trees in the countryside near Cuglieri, Sardinia (AP)

The island's forestry agency said in a post on Facebook that it was a "tragic day".

"In Usellus the cursed fire entered forest areas, devastating hectares of cork," the agency said.

"In Santu Lussurgiu, Cuglieri and Scano Montiferru the flames run, and after devastating the forest garrison of Pabarile, it travelled through the territory of Cuglieri and now reaches Scano Montiferru.

"It's gonna be a hard night. We fight against this plague, in any way, for our tormented land."

The head of the islands civil protection agency, Antonio Belloi, said eleven aircraft including seven Canadair were working to put out the flames.

Additional reporting by agencies
Adnan al-Hamdo's neighbourhood is a ruin, the houses pitted by gunfire or crushed by shelling. The shops are empty or shuttered. Fields nearby are barren because the farmers have left.

His town sits along a front line between Syrian rebels and government forces. His neighbours and millions of other people across central and southern Idlib province have fled to the relative safety of areas north, along the Turkish border, where camps for the displaced have swollen into cities.

But Hamdo was standing firm, even as his town was disintegrating around him. God knows, things might escalate, he said during a recent interview in his spacious, spare sitting room, as neighbours told him about the latest mortar strike on the town. This is better than a camp.

After years of dithering and deadlock by the international community over the fate of Idlib, one of Syria's last rebel-held areas, the province is being transformed. Housing blocks and markets are rising in what were once vast olive groves along the Turkish border as Idlib's centre of gravity shifts from south to north. There, schools are filling with students and electricity is regular in places. There are endless traffic jams.

By comparison, other parts of Idlib feel discarded, in an arc stretching from the east, near the city of Aleppo, along twitchy front lines in the south and onto the city of Jisr al-Shughour, which sits on a road leading to the coast along the south  abandoned to the conflict between rebels and President Bashar al-Assad's government, which for years has tried to recapture the restive province.

More and more, the region feels like a province of Turkey, with the Turkish lira used as the local currency, along with the dollar, and cellphone service available on the Turkish network

Behind Idlib's transformation is a merciless, years-long dislocation of millions of Syrians from around the country, many displaced from homes multiple times before they ended up in this enclave. If the north of the province feels like a boomtown, for many it is a miserable one, filled with people who survive on handouts from humanitarian organisations as they wait to return their homes. For now, many are digging in, one cinder block at a time.

A decision this month by the UN Security Council to continue the flow of humanitarian aid to the province for another year did little to ease the sense of precariousness here. The vote came a day before the relief deliveries were to be cut off.

It was hailed by the United States and Russia as a rare example of cooperation. Russia had earlier threatened to veto any aid resolution.

But the vote left Idlib stuck where it was: seething, fragile and a riddle unsolved.

A standoff in the province has lasted for years. Idlib, a bastion of opposition to government rule, has been controlled since 2015 by Islamist extremist rebels with links to al-Qaeda.

Assad's forces, backed by Russian air power, have mounted a string of offensives to retake the province. The latest began in December 2019 and ended with a cease-fire a few months later, after Turkey, which supports some rebel groups, sent thousands of its own troops into Idlib in large part to prevent refugees from streaming over the border.

A woman carries a bag of food at a settlement for internally displaced people near Atma, in northern Idlib province (Washington Post)

One million people have settled in a district encompassing parts of northern Idlib, near the Turkish border, according to the United Nations. Rough wooden scaffolds mark the establishment of new construction sites. Local markets burst with eggplants and onions, watermelons and cherries. Motorcycles vie with tractor-trailers for space on ragged roads.

In previous years, Atma, a large camp for the displaced, was referred to by locals as the camp for those stranded on the border. For some, it was a way station before trying to cross illegally into Turkey.

When Ahmed al-Hijazi arrived there in 2013, there were a few hundred families in tents. Five years ago, there were about 13,000 families in what the United Nations calls the Atma cluster. Now there are more than 30,000 families, or about 160,000 people. It became a city, Hijazi said.

Residents of Maarat al-Naasan, where hospitals, clinics and most shops remain closed after much of the town was destroyed during the Syrian regime-led offensive between December 2019 and March 2020 (Washington Post)

As people lost hope of returning to their towns and villages, as he had, they began to build homes. Hijazi, who works for a nonprofit organisation, built a two-bedroom dwelling that cost roughly $10,000. The wealthy were building two- and three-story structures. The building spree had created some construction jobs, but they paid only a little more than $3 a day. Most people were unemployed, and many were stranded in tents.

There is no regular electricity in Atma, but a new Syrian company has provided service recently to other parts of northern Idlib as well as the provincial capital. There were plans, as yet unrealised, to repave and widen the local roads to accommodate surging traffic.

More and more, the region feels like a province of Turkey, with the Turkish lira used as the local currency, along with the dollar, and cellphone service available on the Turkish network. A Turkish non-governmental organisation is building tens of thousands of homes in the region.

It is shifting into what looks like a permanent situation, said Dareen Khalifa, senior Syria analyst with the International Crisis Group.

Turkey has been trying to create favourable living conditions to prevent people from crossing its border. Even Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the militant Islamist group that controls Idlib, has been seeking to stabilise the area, mostly to persuade Western countries and other foreign donors that it has shed its extremist roots and is worthy of international recognition, Khalifa said.

Doctors treat Bailasan Hindawi, 8, as she recovers in the intensive care unit at al-Shifa hospital in Idlib city earlier this month (Washington Post)

Stability is little salve for many Syrians. We have no hope to go back to our homes in the near future - not in the next 10 years, said Hijazi, whose home in southern Idlib was destroyed.

The truce in Idlib looks brittle from Hamdo's town, called Maarat al-Naasan, where the rebels and government forces hold positions barely a few miles apart. On the day reporters visited earlier this month, government forces shelled a group of civilians who had gathered at a water-pumping station on the outskirts of town, locals said. This time, no one was hurt.

Hamdo downplayed the danger, calling it something short of fighting. There are light clashes, he said. His main worry was that the tensions elsewhere in Idlib would have a domino effect  that if government forces started moving to retake territory in the west, rebels in his town, in eastern Idlib, would provoke a clash to divert them.

A surge of violence over the past few weeks has seemed ominous. Clashes have erupted across front lines in southern Idlib. Syrian government rocket and artillery strikes on civilian areas in Idlib and Aleppo's countryside have killed 13 children since late last week, Save the Children said in a statement on Sunday. They were among dozens of civilians killed in recent attacks, according to rescue workers and a conflict monitoring group  an escalation that has left locals worried that a larger military confrontation is brewing.

Still, Hamdo seemed determined to stay in his home.

He has little electricity, save what solar panels provide - enough to power some lights and sometimes a fan, he said. He laughed when asked how he powered the refrigerator. Without electricity, there was no need for a refrigerator. He had been displaced once, and while he was gone, someone stole all the doors in his house. There was not much else to take.

Men play table football at a square in the city of Idlib (Washington Post)

For a time, after the cease-fire was called last year, things seemed almost normal, he said. As they grew tense again, those like Hamdo who had returned from the camps refused to leave their homes again. They had property to protect. They had sanity to preserve.

A recent survey by the International Rescue Committee found evidence of an alarming rise in suicides in northwestern Syria, with a majority of respondents saying the reasons included depression and mental health issues or domestic violence against women. Fifty-three per cent said the suicides were due to loss of hope given the ongoing crisis and deteriorating conditions, the IRC said.

Those who returned left a bad situation in the camps, Hamdo said.

Like Hamdo, Fayha Shahin was able to go home  about two years ago, to the town of Ariha  after being displaced for a time by fighting. But the war found her again. This month, her four daughters were injured in a strike on their house while Shahin was away at work, she said.

Women walk through a souk in Idlib (Washington Post)

Her youngest, 8-year-old Bailasan Hindawi, was in danger of losing her leg, doctors at al-Shifa hospital in Idlib city said. Two other daughters were in the same hospital. Another was in the intensive care unit of a second hospital.

Hardship had clung to her family. Her husband was arrested by the government soon after the 2011 revolt against the Assad government, and had never been heard from again. She and her children had been wounded by shrapnel in a previous airstrike. The house struck more recently, a rental, was rubble.

Other displaced families in Idlib have found shelter on rocky hillsides, under olive trees, on an old railway berm that kept the water from pooling in tents. Shahin's home is the hospital, for now, and she has not given much consideration to what comes next.

I have two daughters in the ICU, she said. I am not thinking about anything else.

 The Washington Post
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South Carolinas governor said while getting the COVID-19 vaccine was the right decision for him, other people reluctant to get the shot need to talk to friends, pastors and doctors and decide if it is best for them
CHANGeUP GROUND Pohang aspires to establish the New Pacific Valley that represents Asia

POSCO held the opening ceremony for 'CHANGeUP GROUND Pohang' with the aim of fostering venture start-ups

Actively provides the best infrastructure and programs to CHANGeUP GROUND tenants

POSCO Group Chairman Jeong-Woo Choi: Our management philosophy  Corporate Citizenship  has taken root as a new cultural identity. CHANGeUP GROUND represents our commitment in corporate citizenship to create jobs and new growth engines through establishment of a venture platform.

https://ift.tt/3iEsnCd

POSCO Group (Chairman Jeong-Woo Choi) (KRX: 005490) held the opening ceremony for CHANGeUP GROUND Pohang at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), located in Pohang City.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210722005419/en/

POSCO Group opened CHANGeUP GROUND Pohang' which is a startup incubator to foster venture companies. Through the incubator, POSCO plans to discover and foster outstanding venture companies based on Pohang's cutting-edge science and technology infrastructure to produce unicorn companies as the New Pacific Valley. CHANGeUP GROUND has a total area of 28,000 square meters to host promising start-ups in fields such as machinery, materials, electronics, semiconductors, software, bio and medical, chemical, energy and resources. Sixty-two promising startups have already moved in, catching the attention of the startup industry in South Korea. (Graphic: Business Wire)

CHANGeUP GROUND is a startup incubator operated by POSCO to foster venture companies. Through the incubator, POSCO plans to discover and foster outstanding venture companies based on Pohang's cutting-edge science and technology infrastructure to produce unicorn companies as the New Pacific Valley, aiming to surpass Silicon Valley.

POSCO Group chairman Jeong-Woo Choi said: "CHANGeUP GROUND Pohang was launched today under the vision of creating the New Pacific Valley on the west coast of the Pacific to equal the Silicon Valley in the east. It is also one of the rich fruits of POSCOs commitment in corporate citizenship to create jobs and new growth engines through the establishment of a venture platform. POSCO lacked capital and experience when launched in the wasteland of Yeongil Bay 53 years ago but has found its way to success. I wish to support venture companies which will grow to become multinational companies and lead the future of South Korea.

POSCO intends to find and nurture venture companies, utilizing CHANGeUP GROUND as a space to grow together. Pohang is a global industry-academia cooperation hub supported by POSTECH's USD 2 billion research facility and 5,000 researchers, thus providing the best infrastructure for venture companies with promising potential to grow internationally. In addition, POSCO plans to operate CHANGeUP GROUND Pohang as a hub for mutual growth with the local community and a major local start-up hub, which it hopes to become a Pohang landmark, contributing to the development of the local economy.

CHANGeUP GROUND has a total area of 28,000 square meters to host promising start-ups in fields such as machinery, materials, electronics, semiconductors, software, bio and medical, chemical, energy and resources. Sixty-two promising startups have already moved in, catching the attention of the startup industry in South Korea.

CHANGeUP GROUND offers tour services that can be reserved via its website (http://www.changeupground.com). Further information about CHANGeUP GROUND, including basic information such as business overview, tenant companies, floor plan, and promotional materials, is also available there.

POSCO established its first CHANGeUP GROUND facility in July 2020 at Tipstown Yeoksam in Seoul. Through CHANGeUP GROUND, POSCO seeks to attract successful start-ups and support their growth in collaboration with venture capital funds as a hub connecting the metropolitan area and provinces. In addition, POSCO plans to foster tenant companies by connecting with venture funds valued at USD 800 million, while taking advantage of its own venture company cultivation program, Idea Market Place (IMP), to discover venture companies, attract new investment, and help explore markets. Through affiliates of POSCO Group, it also will help identify new overseas markets.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210722005419/en/
Electric cars have been the hottest vehicle that every automobile fanatic is eyeing nowadays. These cars not only have several different advantages but are also lighter on the pockets in the long run considering how the petrol prices have been at an all-time high currently.

So, for anyone who does have an interest in Electric Cars or vehicles but doesn't know the exact function let's get to know the basics and how they are different from fuel cars/ vehicles.





What Is An Electric Vehicle?

These kinds of vehicles operate via an electric motor. It doesn't operate via an internal combustion engine that generates power by burning a mix of fuel and gases.

The best thing about these electric vehicles is that drivers can plug them in to charge from an off-board electric power source. This distinguishes them from hybrid electric vehicles, which supplement an internal combustion engine with battery power but cannot be plugged in.

There are two basic types of EVs: all-electric vehicles (AEVs) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs). AEVs include Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) and Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles (FCEVs). All-electric vehicles (AEVs) run only on electricity. Most have all-electric ranges of 80 to 100 miles, while a few luxury models have ranges up to 400 kilometres. When the battery is over or less charged, it can take from 30 minutes (with fast charging) up to nearly a full day (with Level 1 charging) to recharge it, depending on the type of charger and battery.

Plug-in hybrid vehicles PHEVs run on electricity for shorter ranges (6 to 40 miles), then switch over to an internal combustion engine running on gasoline when the battery is depleted. The flexibility of PHEVs allows drivers to use electricity as often as possible while also being able to fuel up with gasoline if required.





Unsplash

How do Electric Cars work?

Electric cars work by plugging into a charge point and taking electricity from the grid. They store the electricity in rechargeable batteries that power an electric motor, which turns the wheels. Electric cars accelerate faster than vehicles with traditional fuel engines so while driving, they feel much lighter.





What Are The Benefits Of Electric Cars On The Environment?

Several car buyers want to switch to electric cars because they are better for the environment. The fully electric ones (not hybrids) don't use an exhaust system, they have no emissions. Without pumping any fumes into the air as gas engines do, electric cars can help achieve cleaner air, not cause air pollution and have fewer greenhouse gasses.



- They Are Much Quieter Than Any Fuel Or Gas Vehicle

Electric cars run very quietly and smoothly, especially when running fully on battery power. In some foreign countries, legislators have considered requiring electric cars to have noisemakers installed to let pedestrians know they're coming. So, imagine the low amount of noise pollution.



- Gasoline Is Not Renewable, Electricity Is

The best thing about these cars is that they can be powered by renewable resources like solar, wind, and water power. Gasoline, however, is created using oil, which is a natural resource, but not renewable. For those who want to keep the renewable energy flowing, even more, having solar panels installed in your home will in turn power your electric car in your garage. Electricity is also cheaper than gas. They typically cost one-third the cost of gas-powered vehicles to run. A lot of electric cars also use regenerative braking to add to the energy the car needs to run, which is completely cost-free.

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Are Electric Cars Worth It?



After so many pros if you still have doubts then we're here to tell you that yes they are definitely worth it. Not only do they benefit the environment but also benefit anyone who chooses to drive electric cars.

- Their Maintenance Is Less Expensive & Less Frequent

Electric cars don't need oil if there is no gas engine in addition to it. That means no more oil changes. Also, there are barely any maintenance and repairs associated with a traditional gas engine.

- Tax Credits Are Available For Electric Cars Owners

Owners who own the car can receive credit on their tax returns simply for owning a car that's better for the environment. In April 2014, the government of India announced a plan to provide subsidies for hybrid and electric cars. There are also deductions for interest paid on loans taken for the purchase of electric vehicles. Specific makes and models receive different credit amounts.

Unsplash



Cheapest New Electric Cars In India



Now that you know mostly everything there is to know about electric cars, here are the cheapest and the best electric cars for your money's worth :

1. Storm R3

Price - Rs.4.50 Lakh (ex-showroom)

It was launched with three wheels, placed in reverse orientation as compared to an auto-rickshaw. Which means two of its wheels are placed at the front while the rear is supported by a single wheel. The R3 seats two passengers in a two-door configuration. It ranges from 200 km on a single charge. Strom claims the lithium-ion battery pack takes around 3 hours for a full charge and has a lifespan of around 1 lakh km. The performance is taken care of by a 15 KW (20 hp) AC induction electric motor that promises a torque of 90 Nm and a top speed of 80 kmph that is electronically limited.



2. Tata Altroz

Price - Rs. 5.26 or 5.65 Lakhs

Tata Motors developed an all-electric version of the new Altroz hatchback. The company had made a public announcement that the Altroz's lithium-ion battery pack has a 'target range' of 250-300km, and can be charged to 80 per cent in 60 minutes with DC fast charging.



3. Tata Tigor EV

Price - Rs 12.59 Lakh onwards

This electric car makes use of a 21.5 kWh battery pack that puts out 40.2 bhp with 105 Nm of torque. It has a top speed of 80 km/h and the battery can be fully charged in around 11.5 hours using a standard AC charging point while a 15 kW fast charger can juice up the battery from zero to 80 per cent in 2 hours. As for the driving range, the company claims an ARAI certified driving range of 213 km on a single charge.



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4. Mahindra e-Verito

Price - Rs. 12.95 lakh onwards

This car is available with a 21.2 kWh lithium-ion battery pack that develops 41.5 bhp and 91 Nm of peak torque. This allows the electric car to cover up to 140 km on a single charge and attain a top speed of 86 km/h. Its battery takes around 11.5 hours to charge completely using a standard socket but the battery can be charged up to 80 per cent in 1.5 hours using DC fast charging.



5. MG ZS EV

Price - Rs. 20.99 lakh to Rs. 24.18 lakh

The i-Smart EV 2.0 connectivity interface on the ZS EV features an Eco Tree feature which allows users to track and view the real-time progress of CO2 savings with their car. It has provisions such as a panoramic sunroof, heated ORVMs (outside rearview mirrors), a tyre pressure monitoring system, a semi-digital instrument panel with a 3.5-inch MID, automatic headlamps, rain-sensing wipers, and a PM 2.5 filter. It has a Hi-Tech 44.5 kWh battery that makes 142 bhp and 353 Nm. It also offers a claimed driving range of 419 km/charge and can be fully charged in about 16 to 18 hours using a 15 Ampere socket. But, if you use the 7.4 kW wall-mounted AC fast charger, then the SUV can be completely charged in six to eight hours.



6. Hyundai Kona Electric

Price - Rs. 23.76 lakh to Rs. 23.95 lakh

It makes use of a 39.2 kWh battery pack that puts out 134 bhp with 395 Nm. It also offers a driving range of 452 km/charge and can be charged overnight when connected to a 15 Ampere standard socket. However, a 7.2 kW AC fast charger can fully charge the SUV's battery 6 hours 10 minutes while a DC fast charger can juice the e-SUV's battery from zero to 80 per cent in under 60 minutes.

So, go ahead and invest in sustainable living.
In a nerve-chilling incident, a tribal woman was beheaded in Odisha's Mayurbhanj district over suspicion of practicing witchcraft, police said on Saturday.

The incident took place at Purunapani village in the Bangriposhi police station area, the police told news agency PTI.

Representational Image

Police seized the skeleton and skull of the woman, identified as 55-year-old Kuni Jerai, on July 24, said inspector-in-charge Sanjay Kumar Parida.

Jamira Singh (30), the accused, was arrested and sent to judicial custody after being produced at the court on Saturday.

Singh suspected that his son died because of Jerai's witchcraft, they said. He beheaded the woman with an axe and threw the body at a place near the village on July 9, police said.

Representational Image

Jerai's family filed a missing report, following which police began an investigation.

The Police have also seized the murder weapon.
Last year we saw the Indian government ban several popular Chinese apps including those that were fairly loved by many including TikTok, PUBG and several others after a border dispute between the nations along with the fear of tracking user data for users in India and considering it a threat to its sovereignty.

Reuters

Also Read: An Idiot's Guide To VPN - What It Is And Why It's Important For You

However, while many ranted and eventually shifted to alternatives that could quench their thirst, many tech-savvy individuals used the VPN route to gain access to their beloved apps.



What is VPN?

VPN (also known as Virtual Private Network) creates a secure connection between you and the internet service provider where your traffic gets routed through an encrypted channel. It hides your IP address like Harry Potters invisibility cloak and does not allow any app to see its real location.

Getty Images

Also Read: Chinese Apps Ban: What It Means For India, And Will It Even Work?

To explain in a simpler way, the VPN app allows users to simulate their network to a different geographical location while hiding their identity. Basically, even though youre in India, using VPN you can let the website know that youre actually from the US, allowing you to see content that would otherwise only be permitted to be visible in that territory.



PUBG Players Continued Using VPN

Gamers continued to play PUBG Mobile on their smartphone by sideloading the app (on an Android phone) and using VPN in case the Indian network didnt allow connections with data servers. Sure it meant slower pings and at times a little janky internet connection, but they were easily able to get their fix.

And while many might be thinking that such bans only affected the way people entertained themselves (with TikTok and PUBG), there were also many who had their work impacted, and this included students remotely studying from Chinese educational institutions.

Also Read: Users Say Reliance Jio Is Blocking Access To VPN Services In Opposition Of Net Neutrality

Students using Chinese apps despite ban

According to a TOI report, there are over 23,000 students (20,000 of these are medical students) who were adversely affected by the ban on Chinese apps as most universities were using these Chinese apps for conducting live classes as well as communicating curriculum updates with them.

These students belong to the Indian Students in China. According to one student from Soochow University, the institution used WeChat for attending live classes for remote students. However, when WeChat got banned, the institution shifted to DingTalk. However, soon after, even DingTalk got banned.

The students were then forced to use VPN to keep attending their sessions, but as you might have guessed, VPN isnt the most effective and a slow internet connection only makes things worse.

Also Read: Boycott China? 52 Chinese Apps To Be Blocked, Indian Intelligence Agencies Warn

Reuters

Also Read: How Websites & VPNs Gradually Being Blocked In India Is A Danger To Access Of Ideas & Opinions

Another student from Vadodara who is also the national coordinator of ISC added that network issues led to a ton of disturbance with students unable to understand even the most basic terminologies.



These students have paid around three to four lakhs each in tuition fees and due to the pandemic situation, travelling to China isnt an option for them either.

Organisations in India are trying to raise awareness on these issues with authorities. Manish Kapadiya, a member of the Southern Gujarat Chamber of Commerce (SGCCI) said in a statement, On behalf of Gujarat students, I and some others are trying to arrange a meeting with ministers in the central government to discuss the issues of these students.
Seen at the donation event are (right to left) MedStars vice president Ed Johnson, Indian American cardiologist Siva Subramanian, Sewas former president Sree Sreenath, Sewas Maryland Chapter coordinator Anita Roy and Sewa volunteer from Washington, DC, Abhijit Kaushik, who were present at the MedStar warehouse in Hyattsville, Maryland. (photo provided)
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A Cork family has been threatened and sent excrement in the post by some of the people descending on their farm in large numbers since it featured in two recent films about the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier.

The Ungerer family has seen a sharp increase in visitors to their home at Three Castle Head, West Cork, since it featured prominently in two recent documentaries about the murder of the French filmmaker.

Three Castle Head was the last place Ms Toscan Du Plantier was seen alive when she went walking there hours before her death.

Hundreds of people now descend on the farm most days, parking on the Ungerers land and walking through their fields to visit the 15th-century castle and lake on their property.

While the volume of visitors is a concern to the family, their most immediate problem is the abuse they are subjected to on a near-daily basis.

The Ungerer family has seen a sharp increase in visitors to their home since it featured prominently in two recent documentaries about the murder of the Sophie Toscan du Plantier. Picture: Eddie O'Hare

This abuse has mostly come from people who insist on bringing dogs or drones onto their sheep farm and areas of special conservation despite signs requesting them not to.

Dogs have chased their sheep off the surrounding cliffs in the past and drones frighten the protected species of birds that live there, so both are banned.

But people often ignore these rules and continue to bring dogs and drones onto the land.

Uninvited visitors have also cut wire fencing and climbed on the castle, risking both their own lives and the structural integrity of the ancient building.

When they are challenged on their behaviour, people sometimes become aggressive, farm owner Lukas Ungerer said.

You get a lot of verbal abuse if you ask someone to go back with their dog. And we got excrement in our post box.

A lot of people bought dogs for the first time this year because of lockdown. And a lot of new dog owners are not really aware or have not made themselves aware or dont respect the wishes of others when it comes to dogs. They feel that because they have a dog theyre entitled to bring it.

Ive had to call the guards about dogs already this summer. I also had to call the guards about someone flying a drone.

People have just refused to back down, refused to leave the property.

Its a real slap in the face because we do a lot for people here. We have free parking, we maintain the walk, we do all these things off our own back so you would expect a modicum of respect.

Mr Ungerer stressed that 99% of people visiting are very respectful of the land and pick up their litter.

Ill always keep that in my mind, that the vast majority of people are decent and we will not let them be tarnished by the minority who dont care, he said.

There has been a surge in visitors walking near Three Castle Head.

But its a cumulative effect - the more people that come the bigger the risks, the more potential for trouble.

And with the documentary coming out you have more unusual people coming up. Three men came up the other day, one had his face painted, druidic clothing, 8ft wooden staff, I think they came up to do some ritual.

With all these people Im constantly looking over my shoulder, checking the castle throughout the day to make sure everythings okay or going up late at night.

And its just a matter of time until theres a serious criminal aspect or vandalism aspect or anti-social behaviour.

Legislation has kept public liability insurance costs manageable for landowners which makes it possible for people to permit others to walk on their land without fear of lawsuits, Mr Ungerer said.

Without that, walks all over the country would be closed because farmers could not afford the insurance or potential risks, he said.

Ireland does not have a right to roam over private lands which exist in some parts of Scandinavia and the UK.

So access to those lands largely relies on the goodwill of landowners.

The waymarked walking trails in Ireland are permissive routes that have been developed with the landowners agreement and are not rights of way.

The Criminal Justice (Public Order) Act 1994 makes it a criminal offence for anyone to enter, occupy or bring anything onto privately-owned land if it is likely to substantially damage the property or make it unsanitary or unsafe.

Mr Ungerer said that the land is starting to deteriorate due to the frequent visitors.

People climb the castles, the fences, the gates. And once you start climbing on things they get broken. The castles are definitely taking a hammering from children climbing them.

"And there's been a lot of erosion on the hills. With so many people walking it cuts a little gully in the summer, stripping it down to a dirt path and when the rain comes it washes straight down that and creates little rivulets which will erode into the hills. Theyre only rock and peat hills. Its quite a delicate ecosystem."

A steady procession of dogs could also create a potential biohazard in the environmentally sensitive area, he said, which has a wide range of rare flora and fauna including tiny, protected orchids.

Its quite an environmentally sensitive area and there are a lot of rare species growing here. Its easy to unbalance that, he said.

"Unfortunately, because were rapidly losing control due to the increase in numbers we may have to do something to control the flow of people from the front gate, which would probably mean introducing something like a parking fee," he said.
Grazing sheep have uncovered historic graves hidden for many decades by dense overgrowth in a Cork graveyard.

The long-lost grave of a child who died in 1872 was recently uncovered by the sheep in St Matthew's graveyard in Crosshaven.

That child's grand-nephew was tracked down by "history buffs" in the local volunteer group and he now plans to visit from the UK.

Bringing sheep cleaners to the graveyard was the brainchild of Fianna Fail Councillor Audrey Buckley.

She first encountered the idea on a trip to Mumbles, Wales and then introduced it in Crosshaven.

Goats were first used to clear out the overgrown site and sheep replaced them this year.

The sheep were moved on Wednesday night, then we used hand tools to gently remove scrub that was there for 50 to 100 years," Ms Buckley said.

A grave uncovered by sheep at St Matthew's graveyard in Crosshaven in Cork.

The grave of two-year-old Maria Kate Russel, who died on October 7, 1872, was discovered in the clear-out and local historian Marion Reardon managed to track down her grandnephew in the UK.

"He had been trying to find info on her and the family and had planned to come over from UK last year, but had to cancel due to Covid.

"He is thrilled and plans to visit as soon as he can. He is so thankful to all involved. Every now and then, the hard work pays off," Ms Buckley wrote in a Facebook post about the discovery.

She said the task of clearing the unusually large one-hectare graveyard is "sometimes overwhelming" but these finds make all the hard work worthwhile.

The pandemic has made the clear-out project possible, Ms Buckley said, as people have been staying local with more free time to volunteer.

One hoof in the graze: Graveyard committee member Cllr Audrey Buckley with her adopted sheep, Molly, at St Matthew's graveyard at Templebreedy Church. Picture: Denis Boyle

Volunteers from the Templebreedy Save our Steeple campaign and a Fort Camden group have been indispensable, she said.

The oldest gravestone found at the site dates from 1711.

Over 420 headstones have been found and registered on an international database.

We have some real history buffs that volunteer with us and when we find a new headstone they do some research and find out who that person was.

Some of these stones have not been seen in over 100 years.

This should be done nationally."

Ms Buckley believes that it is one of the largest graveyards in Ireland.

The six sheep currently used at the graveyard were gifted by the owner of Ballea Castle in nearby Carrigaline.

And Pat OSullivan of Carrigaline Council helped erect 10ft fencing and a water source to keep the sheep safe.

But despite the secure site, one male lamb aptly named Houdini kept escaping so was swapped for some calmer female sheep instead.

They are so friendly that they approach visitors for a rub and nuzzle in their bags in the hope of finding some sheep nuts, Ms Buckley said.
Make this a sweeter Sunday by enjoying a superb meal and a scrumptious dessert from one of our participating #tasteofkeybiscayne restaurants!

#Meal-Deals for Sunday, July 25, 2021

Pops Burger

At Pops, we love burgers and desserts! Complete your burger meal with delicious cheesecakes!

Our burgers are made with 100% certified Angus beef and we offer from the most basic burger or cheeseburger, to our new Signature Burgers!!

We also serve Hot Dogs, nachos with chili and many other favorites, in addition to shakes and desserts in a safe and family style setting - and we are pet friendly!

Pops Burger is located in the Square Mall, at 260 Crandon Blvd, Key Biscayne

We are open at Noon to 9 p.m. seven-days a week. We close at 10 p.m. on Friday and Saturday.

To place an order, please call 786-401-7474 or order online by clicking here.

We offer dine-in, takeout and delivery via UberEats and Postmates

Sake Room

Complete your Sake meal with our delicious mini-donuts!

Free Crunchy Crab Salad with $50 purchase

Special only good for orders called in to (305) 456-0488

We are open for Indoor & Outdoor Dining, Takeout or delivery daily from Noon to 10 p.m.

Call (305) 456-0488 to place a takeout or delivery order directly

Following all CDC safety protocols

328 Crandon Blvd Ste 108, Galleria Shopping Center

Grub hub  UberEats also available. Please if you can call us first

D'Lite Bistro & Bakery

Who says eating healthy means sacrificing taste and flavor? Not at DLite!

We are a unique and healthy restaurant that serves salads, wraps, sandwiches, bowls, protein smoothies and cold press juices made fresh every morning  including gluten-free, vegetarian and keto options.

Keep your Sunday going strong with one of our green smoothies!

We open at 7 a.m. daily and close at 8 p.m. everyday except Sat and Sun when we close at 6 p.m.

DLite is located in the Arcade Mall, 180 Crandon Blvd. To place an order, call (305) 882-9284 or visit us online by clicking here.

Boaters Grill & Lighthouse Cafe / Bill Baggs

The restaurants inside Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park  the popular Boaters Grill, located at No Name Harbor and accessible by boat, and the beachside Lighthouse Cafe.

Safe and friendly. Great service and great food.

After a great meal at Boaters, leave room for the most unique dessert on the island Boaters MATRIMONIO a combination of 2 traditional Cuban desserts in one! Flan and Arroz con leche!

Boaters Grill is open Sunday through Wednesday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Thursday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Lighthouse Cafe is open 7-days a week, from 9 a.m. to Sunset

The restaurants are located inside Bill Baggs State Park, at 1200 Crandon Blvd., Key Biscayne.

You can reach them at (305) 361-0080

32 Degrees by MG

Fresh-Frozen Gourmet Meals Delivered

We take the effort and hassle out of mealtime. Our meals are fresh, fast, and easy. They go from your freezer to your microwave to your plate in 5 minutes or less.

All meals are made fresh with no additives and preservatives. Our packaging technology ensures that your meal will stay good in your freezer for up to 12 months.

To place an order, click here

Artisan Kitchen & Bar

Make this Sunday special with our Key lime mousse

Open for Indoor dining & expanded Outdoor dining, Takeout or FREE Delivery.

We deliver our famous craft beers. Call for your favorite, or take advantage of our Wine sale! All our white & red wine bottles are $12 - and we will deliver

Hours of operations: Mon - Sat 8 AM to CLOSE

Sunday Brunch 9 AM to 4 PM

Call us directly at (305) 365-6003 to place an order.

Place your Order Online here

AMICI At Key Biscayne

Go on a date to Italy this evening well, at least to a slice of Italy right in Key Biscayne. And after a delicious authentic Italian meal, enjoy one of our spectacular desserts!

AMICI at Key Biscayne is located inside The Towers of Key Biscayne at 1111 Crandon Blvd. To make a reservation call (786) 453-0974 or Email info@amiciatkeybiscayne.com

Open for lunch Wed to Sun from Noon to 2:30 p.m. and for dinner 6 to 10 p.m. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays

To see the complete email and the history of the family behind the excellence that is AMICI, click here.

Costa Med Bistro

Enjoy Costa Med this evening either with it or at home this evening..

All our desserts are homemade and exclusive to Costa Med!. Enjoy!

Order online for take out, click here!

Costa Med, a TripAdvisor Traverlers Choice nominated restaurant, is located in the Square Shopping Center. 260 Crandon Blvd. Since they are operating at reduced capacity, reservations suggested. Call (305) 361-7575 to make a reservation

Hours.

Lunch Mon to Sat: Noon a.m. to 4 p.m.

Dinner Mon to Sat: 6 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. / Sun 6 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.

The Golden Hog

There is always room for dessert, especially tarts! Find the mixed berry, strawberry, and chocolate with dulce de leche tarts. Stop by our bakery!

Your local independent grocer can deliver freshly prepared meals or all the groceries you need. Email us your order here.

Before you leave, stop by our grill and enjoy our New BBB! Made for the Brave Burger. Grilled to Order in our meat market. Only offered Sundays and perfect to watch the big game today! And before you leave, stop by our bakery for a sweet completion

Call (305) 361-1300 for Sundays special menu.

The Golden-Hog has a complete line of specialty groceries for delivery.

Golden Hog puts safety first, shop with confidence. To place an order online, click here

Novecento

Join us for the best Sunday brunch on the island and we will treat you to a Mimosa on us!

Brunch served between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m.

And leave a little room for one of our delicious desserts

Deep in the heart of the island, Novecento is the neighborhood hotspot. Open for indoor or outdoor dining, takeout or delivery

Place your takeout or delivery order at (305) 362-0900

Novecento Key Biscayne Bistro Argentino is located at 620 Crandon Blvd in Key Biscayne.

Open daily Noon to 10 p.m.

You can order online by clicking here

Brasas KB

Have you tried our Peruvian Chicken Rotisserie for lunch or dinner that includes 2 sides and sauce of your choice: huancaina, aji amarillo, huacatay and olivas negras peruanas.

Our delicious half pound hamburger, with one side and a soda, only $10.99 - loaded it up with a fried egg, bacon, cheese and pickles to make it a "completa" for only $4 more! Can't beat the quality! Unmatched value!

We are open for Indoor & Outdoor Dining, Takeout or free delivery.

Call (786) 615-2399 to place a takeout order.

Open Noon to 8 p.m. for Dine-In, Takeout or delivery.

328 Crandon Blvd, Galleria Shopping Center

Randazzos Italian Seafood and Classics

Open for Indoor & Outdoor dining, Takeout or delivery. Reservations recommended

Save room and add our famous homemade tiramisu to any order!

Call us directly to order at (305) 456-0480. Offering Randazzos own delivery service. Local and safe

Open Tuesday to Sunday from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m.

328 Crandon Blvd Ste 112, Galleria Shopping Center

Outside the island delivery via @Postmates or @UberEats

La Scala

Closed Sundays. Check back Monday to select your Monday dinner!

To place a Monday takeout order call (786) 773-3633 or visit us online by clicking here.

Open 5 to 9 p.m.

180 Crandon Blvd  Arcade Shopping Center.

Kazumi

Closed Sunday.

Our modern Japanese fusion restaurant offers creative treatments & creativity in our dishes

To see our menu, click here Call us tomorrow at (305) 361-2675.

Corner Coffee and Pantry

Closed Sunday

Did you know you do not have to be a member of the Community Center to enjoy the best Italian Coffee on the island?

Delivery via UberEats and Postmates

Located in the lobby of the Key Biscayne Community Center at 10 Village Green Way. You can reach CCP at (786) 420-2666.

Open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Mon-Fri - closes at 2 p.m. on Saturdays

Check back tomorrow for more specials as we add more restaurants to #tasteofkeybiscayne-To-Go

And please remember to order from the restaurant directly before using one of the apps  this way we support the local restaurants by saving them the commission they are charged, which at times is as much as 30%
NASA just announced that it has awarded Elon Musk's aerospace company, SpaceX, a $178-million launch services contract for its first probe into Jupiter's moon Europa.

A mission called the "Europa Clipper" is slated for launch in October 2024, Fox 5 reported. It will lift off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

NASA Extends Vote of Confidence to SpaceX with Europa Clipper Mission

NASA's awarding of the Europa Clipper mission to SpaceX underscores the space agency's continuing vote of confidence for the Hawthrone, California-based firm. For what it's worth, SpaceX has sent several Crew Dragon missions with NASA astronauts on board carrying cargo payloads to the International Space Station, Reuters indicated in a report.

SpaceX also won a $2.9 billion NASA contract to construct a moon lander spacecraft for the Artemis program, sending astronauts back to the Moon--a first since the last Apollo mission in 1972. Its awarding, however, was suspended after protests from rival space companies like Blue Origin of billionaire Jeff Bezos and US defense contractor Dynetics.

Read Also: NASA Picks Lunar Lander Makers Bezo's Blue Origin, Musk's SpaceX, and Dynetics For Future Moon Landing

The Falcon Heavy, SpaceX's reusable space rocket, is considered the most powerful of its kind after launching the first commercial payloads into space in 2019.

NASA Europa Clipper Mission to Determine if Jupiter Moon Is Habitable

The Europa Clipper mission is set to make a detailed survey of the icy Europa moon, which is 90 percent the size of the Earth's own Moon.

Scientists will find out if Europa, Jupiter's icy moon, is in fact livable, the Fox 5 report added. Evidence from previous studies showed that Europa has a vast ocean underneath its crust. The moon was first discovered by astronomer Galileo Galilei, amongst other moons of Jupiter using a telescope of his own design in January 1610.

Europa's icy crust is believed to be 10 to 15 miles thick, and its internal ocean is approximately 40 to 100 miles deep.

NASA's Europa Clipper will make an orbit around Jupiter for close fly-bys of Europa, following an elliptical direction. It will measure the depth and salinity of Europa's ocean, and also the thickness of its icy shell, a NASA statement said. The spacecraft will also map Europa's surface and study its composition, seek plumes emanating from water vapor possibly from Europa's crust and subsurface lakes, and finally beam back high-resolution images of the lunar surface.

The U.S. space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory emphasized that exploring Europa's habitability should make scientists understand better how life began on Earth 382 million miles from it, aside from discovering life beyond our planet.

JPL leads efforts in building the spacecraft in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. NASA's Launch Services Program based in Kennedy Space Center in Florida will oversee the launching of the Europa Clipper mission. Meanwhile, the agency's Planetary Missions Office located in NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama will be assigned the mission's program management.

Related Article: SpaceX Starship Super Heavy Boosters Revealed: How to Rewatch Incredible Test Fire
The percentage of Texas Covid-19 tests coming back positive is now at levels considered red flags by Gov. Greg Abbott and the Trump administration during the height of the pandemic. State officials and virologists say the highly contagious delta variant is fueling the rise in new cases and hospitalizations, especially among the unvaccinated. The delta variant also is capable of infecting the vaccinated, considered breakthrough infections, although the vaccinated experience only mild cases. Should the public return to pandemic safety measures such as mask wearing in public places?

You voted:
Jacksonville, TX (75766)

Today

Mostly cloudy skies early, then partly cloudy after midnight. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 71F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Mostly cloudy skies early, then partly cloudy after midnight. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 71F. Winds light and variable.
I, Michael Gail Pence, was born in Ft. Wayne, Indiana on December 1, 1938. I went to my eternal rest on July 29, 2021, in Joplin, Missouri. I graduated from Roanoke, Indiana High School in 1956 and Purdue University in 1960 with a degree in mechanical engineering. I moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma 
Today

Mostly cloudy with some showers after midnight. Low 64F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 60%.

Tonight

Mostly cloudy with some showers after midnight. Low 64F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 60%.

Tomorrow

Rain early...then remaining cloudy with showers in the afternoon. High 73F. Winds E at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 60%. Rainfall near a quarter of an inch.
OKOTOKS, Alta. 

Warning: This story contains some pictures that may be disturbing.

April 26 is a day Tracey Tell will never forget.

Okotoks, Alta. A woman went home after a lunch break and found that a man who rented her basement suite had died.

I am ashamed, I am afraid, I am sad, Thiel said, holding back tears. This man is only a few steps away from us. He didnt ask for any help.

Thiel said that her husband Robert first heard about the shower in the basement at about 10 in the morning, but the water was still running two hours later.

My husband rushed downstairs to see what happened and found that he had fallen in the shower, so we called 911, she said. My husband performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation for him until the paramedic arrived, but unfortunately he was pronounced dead.

Emergency officials confirmed to CTV News that the man died at home and was taken care of by the RCMP at the scene. The exact cause of death is not yet known, but no criminal charges have been filed and no foul play has occurred. The investigation has now ended.

However, as the man fell and covered the drain while showering, water and blood began to overflow, and the entire basement began to flood, causing heavy losses. Thiel said that all gypsum boards 60 centimeters above the ground were covered with water.

The presence of blood also means that the entire area is considered a biological hazard.

The Tell family stated that they immediately contacted Airbnb, and Airbnb should contact them to clean the basement, but said they had not received a response for several days.

Instead, the family said they contacted a professional restoration company and disinfected their home promptly at their own expense.

We had a team coming in the next day, and they were wearing protective suits for hazardous materials, Thiel said. They built a tunnel from my basement to my garage, put everything in a sealed bag, put it in a funnel in my driveway, and it took three days to move everything in the basement. 

Based on the quotes the family received from the builder and restoration company, the basement loss is estimated to be US$54,778.

The family said they contacted their home insurance provider and they already knew they were renting out their basement. They said that the insurance company told them that because they were renting out the house at the time, Airbnbs host protection plan covered everything.

In an email, Airbnb gave the Tell family 14 days to submit all photos, repair costs, and each damaged item. The family said that the quotations they received from the company did not cover all aspects.

Settlement proposal from AIRBNB

According to the exchange, Airbnb offered Tells its first offer of US$49,320 on June 10, and the second offer of US$52,471 on June 18. The family rejected both proposals because not all losses were included.

The Tell family received an ultimatum to accept any proposal within 48 hours.

Airbnb sent a follow-up email to the family on June 22, which read: To expedite the claim, please tell us the value you are looking for so we can determine if it can be obtained.

The Tell family again requested a repair price of $54,778.

Three weeks later, on July 14, they received an email from Airbnb, offering them a new settlement agreement worth $17,840, which is about a quarter of the June 18 offer.

We were very shocked, Thiel said. The Airbnb mediator decided that because they couldnt see the water damage in certain areas of the basement, they did two-thirds of the work, so he would cancel two-thirds of the amount he thought it should have and pay us. 

AIRBNB response

Airbnbs host guarantee is not an insurance policy per se, but an internal plan that automatically applies to properties rented out through the site.

According to the companys website, it covers hosting of up to $1 million:

Damage to your property caused by guests;

Damage to items caused by guests and;

Damage caused by the guests assistance animal.

The program does not protect against theft of cash and securities, damage caused by ordinary wear and tear, or personal injury to guests or others.

A statement from Airbnb to CTV News said:

We strive to provide excellent support to our landlord community, especially since we take landlord guarantee claims very seriously. Our dedicated team is working hard to work with landlords and continue to support them through our landlord guarantee program.

In an email obtained by CTV News, an Airbnb adjuster from Crawford & Co. stated that a fixed depreciation cost of 5% was applied to the repairs and damages in Airbnbs claim.

Through depreciation, the claim was settled at actual cash value rather than replacement cost, which resulted in a quoted price of USD 52,471 on June 18.

However, Airbnb was unable to confirm to CTV News why the third and most recent $17,840 offer was made on July 14.

Traumatic effects

In the months after the incident, Tyre said that her life had changed drastically, and even seeing her basement made her cry.

Okotoks mother added that she felt traumatized and took a few days off to receive counseling to deal with it.

I didnt sleep, I had a lot of pain in my body, stress and pain didnt combine well, so to be honest, I didnt do well, Thiel said.

Someone contacted me to check into my Airbnb. They used to live with me and I had to refuse them.

Thiel added that in the past few months, her family and friends have been very supportive of her.

Sandy Scott has been a close friend of Thiel for the past few years, and he has witnessed the impact of the situation with his own eyes.

Tracy really has no sympathy for Airbnb, Scott said.

You will expect some kind of customer service, you will expect someone to say,Lets make it a priority because this is an extreme situation.'

Know Before You Rent: Insurance Expert

Experts who often deal with insurance claims point out that renters must always understand the policies they have signed with their suppliers and understand third-party insurance plans.

I think the most important thing is to keep your insurance company transparent, said Meaghan Dolan, office manager at Alport Insurance.

Dolan added that insurance providers accept Airbnb because they will provide home guarantee protection in the event of a problem, but certain items may not be covered.

Tell your insurance company, they may say its okay, but your policy will exclude the tenants vandalism, so any type of damage or theft caused by any tenant will not be covered by your policy, she said .

So, again, it depends on your insurance company. If you rent out your house, they may not provide you with a full insurance policy.

So far, Airbnb has not paid any compensation to the Tell family. At this point, they said they have to bear the entire cost of the renovation company.

Thiel said she has contacted the company again and is waiting for a response.
President Daniel Ortega has faced international condemnation for cracking down on potential opponents before the November election.

Another potential presidential candidate was arrested in Nicaragua because President Daniel Ortega continued to suppress potential opponents before the November election.

The police said on Saturday that Noel Vidaurre was placed under house arrest and accused of undermining national sovereignty, the latest in a series of arrests condemned by the United States and the European Union.

In the crackdown that began in early June, at least seven presidential candidates were arrested. Police raid At the home of Christiana Chamorro, daughter of former President Violetta Chamorro.

Six other potential candidates have been arrested, and nearly two dozen other journalists and opposition activists have also been detained.

Almost everyone was arrested under the treason law used by Ortega against political opponents, and most people face vague accusations of state crimes.

Ortega said that his government is targeting criminals who planned a coup against him to defend the continued wave of arrests.

But civil society and human rights organizations accused the 75-year-old president  who ruled Nicaragua from 1979 to 1990, regained power in 2007, and won two consecutive re-election campaigns since  becoming increasingly authoritarian.

Human Rights Watch Americas Director Jose Miguel Vivanco said in a statement last month: The Ortega governments brutal suppression of critics and opposition members has been severe in recent weeks. International pressure needs to be doubled for sex and strength.

The United States recently implemented a new Sanctions and Visa restrictions Nicaraguan officials expressed dissatisfaction with the crackdown and called on the Ortega government to respect the rule of law and ensure that free and fair elections can be held on November 7.

The European Union has stated that the November elections will be anything close to democratic competition, which is unbelievable.

Earlier this month, the EUs top diplomat, Jose Puborel, said that more stringent measures may be needed against Ortegas Sandinista government.

The situation has reached such an extreme that member states will have to study more specific actions, not justenough, Mr. Ortega,' Borrell said at a meeting of the European Parliament.

The 66-year-old Vidaurre is one of the potential candidates for the Alianza Ciudadanos por la Libertad organization, confronting Ortega, who is seeking a fourth consecutive term.

In recent weeks, potential candidates Juan Sebastian Chamorro and Arturo Cruz have also been arrested, while Leicester Aleman Former student leader Those who returned to Nicaragua after exile but stayed in the safe house Also detained.

Presidential candidates will be able to register between July 28 and August 2.
BAYWATCH star Charlotte McKinney (Charlotte McKinney) showed her dark side-wearing lace underwear for plump women.

The American model and actress helped design the collection of the British lingerie and swimwear brand Wolf and Whistle.

2 Beach Ambulance star Charlotte McKinney shows off her dark side-wearing lace underwear for busty women

Charlotte, Florida, 27, told the website FashionUnited: Inspired by the retro look of retro, from idols like Brigitte Bardot.

According to reports, this is the process of her efforts to find delicate underwear for her fuller breasts.

So it has fulfilled the intention of breasts.

2 Busty Charlotte says this design is a retro look
On Saturday, protesters in several Brazilian cities took to the streets to demand the impeachment of far-right President Bolsonaro. His reputation has declined in recent weeks due to corruption scandals in the context of the pandemic.

It was reported this week that Brazils Ministry of National Defense told the Congress leadership that if the countrys electronic voting system is not modified to include the paper record of each vote, next years election will not be held.

Bolsonaro has repeatedly hinted without evidence that the current system is prone to fraud, but the Brazilian government denied this accusation.

The president faces re-election in a possible race next year His political enemy, Former left-wing president Luis Inacio Lula da Silva. Current opinion polls show that Bolsonaro lost to Lula.

During a demonstration in Rio de Janeiro on Saturday, a protester showed a puppet version of Bolsonaro. (Ricardo Moras/Reuters)

Protesters continued opposition

Saturdays protest was at least the second time this month that Brazilians took to the streets in several cities against Bolsonaro.

Marcos Kirst, a protester in Sao Paulo, said: Im here because its time to react to our takeover of our countrys genocidal government.

Saturdays protests  including those in downtown Rio de Janeiro  were at least the second time this month that Brazilians took to the streets in multiple cities against the president. (Cald Souza/AFP/Getty Images)

More than 500,000 Brazilians have died of COVID-19 Under Bolsonaros leadership, Bolsonaro has been widely criticized for neglecting the severity of the disease and opposing wearing masks and maintaining physical distance.

Bolsonaro is currently under investigation in the Senate, which is investigating the possibility of corruption related to the purchase of Indias coronavirus vaccine.

On Saturday in Sao Paulo, Brazil, demonstrators took part in protests against the Bolsonaro government. (Miguel Cincario/AFP/Getty Images)

As of 4pm local time on Saturday, Paulista Avenue in Sao Paulo is a traditional place for political protests, and more than 1,000 people have gathered.

Bolsonaro greeted supporters while riding a motorcycle in the capital Brasilia on Saturday.
An awareness-raising rally was held for Chula Vistas mother who went missing in Seaport Village.

San Diego-On Saturday, family, friends and volunteers held an awareness-raising rally in Seaport Village to help spread the news of the disappearance of May Maya Millete.

After her husband, the search for the missing Chula Vista mother is stepping up Larry Millete is listed as an interested person In the case earlier this week.

We are working hard to raise peoples awareness and many people dont know that she is still missing, said volunteer Lisa Perez. A lot of people will say,Gosh, they havent found her yet?'

Maya Millete has been missing for nearly seven months, but her sister Maricris Drouaillet, family, friends and volunteers have not given up their efforts to find her.

We want her name to be the center of attention, Drouaillet said.

She said the progress of the case allowed them to move on.

Hopefully we will get the answer soon, Drouaillet said.

Perez said that as more information floods in, we cant relax.

This weekend was full of searches, gatherings and fundraising activities, and volunteers spent it all with their families.

Its like you cant give up on them, they havent given up, so we cant give up, Perez said.

Drouaillet says that support for Maya Millete keeps them moving forward.

So we are lucky, and we are really happy they are here, she said. They are the source of our strength, let us move on.

Larry Millete also enforced a gun violence restraining order in May. A court clerk told FOX that these documents will be unsealed before the weekend, but they have not yet been made public.
Vancouver-British Columbia welcomed about 100 firefighters who arrived from Mexico on Saturday to help extinguish the devastating wildfires that raged across the province.

These well-trained staff will be on site for 30 days, working side by side with our wildfire service personnel, said Mike Farnworth, the Minister of Public Safety and Attorney General of British Columbia.

On Saturday morning, Farnworth spoke at a press conference on the tarmac of Abbotsford International Airport, thanking the firefighters and the Mexican government for their help.

He said that the staff will be put into work as soon as possible.

Farnworth said: After customs clearance, they will go to a nearby aerial tanker base to conduct a rapid COVID-19 test and meet with representatives of the British Columbia wildfires and the Mexican Consulate.

more help

On Friday, some wildfire ground crews from the Canadian Army arrived in Vernon to report and accept their mission. Another 350 people came to British Columbia later this week.

According to the province Wildfire Dashboard, There were 259 active wildfires in BC on Saturday.

In the long run, we will definitely break some records this year, said Karley Desrosiers, information officer for the British Columbia Wildfire Bureau.

As of yesterday, since 1950, we were ranked in the top five in terms of maximum hectares burned.

So far, this wildfire season, about 400,000 hectares of land have been burned, and if there is no rainfall, this total seems likely to increase.

Desrosiers said: We are likely to be a record-breaking year for drought conditions this year.

There was no rain on the way, but unfortunately there was lightning in the forecast, and the province has seen a lot of lightning this year.

Desrosiers said: So far, the number of lightning strikes we have suffered is much higher than any one we have actually seen, especially in recent years, and the number of consecutive days.

Other provinces also provide assistance, including Alberta, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, as well as Canadian Parks.

Desrosiers said: We have 113 firefighters from Quebec who will go to the Okanagan complex, the Flat Lake fire, where we are still seeing moderate to high levels of fire.

The fire was out of control, covering an area of ??more than 32,000 hectares.

One in and one out

Katie Pasitney works on a ranch surrounded by wildfires.

We are now one in and one out, she told Vancouver CTV News. Our biggest threat right now is drought. There is no end in sight. There will be no rain in the next 7 days, high temperatures will come.

pasture Universal Ostrich -Located in Edgewood, about an hour and a half east of Vernon.???

We have 500 birds here, which many people cannot understand, but you cant load 500 birds as easily as 500 cows, Pasitney said. Towing these animals at such high temperatures will also put a lot of pressure on them.

She and her family, who ran the ranch, planned to stick to it. Although their area was under an evacuation order, they stayed where they were.

As long as that highway remains open, Highway No. 6, we only need resources, resources, resources, and we need to introduce feed, she explained.

Evacuation orders are downgraded near OSOYOOS

Elsewhere, the evacuation order issued by the Osoyoos Indian Band has been Downgrade to alert, Including Spirit Ridge Resort.according to A Facebook post, The resort is opening its doors to wildfire personnel, allowing them to stay there while fighting the NkMip Creek fire.

Desrosiers told CTV News that the fire was still growing, but not as fast as it was shortly after the ignition.

All of this happened in four days, said Sue McKortoff, the mayor of Osoyoos. We are all nervous.

She said that Saturday morning was smoky, but by noon the sun had begun to shine. The evacuation center in the area is located in Oliver.

Since the opening of the reception center, they have seen more than 500 people in the reception center, McCotoff said.

For tourists to the area, the mayor said that there is no reason for those already in the city to leave early, but those planning to travel to the area should plan ahead.

Please do your homework first, McCourtoff said. Check the access roads through DriveBC, because there are many roads closed.

She thanked the international support that arrived later on Saturday.

Our firefighters are exhausted, McCortoff said. They must be heroes.

Man-made fire low

The good news: So far, the number of man-made fires this year has been quite small.

Generally speaking. In any year, we have about 40% to 60% of human factors, Desrosiers said. Of the currently burning fires, we believe that about 5% are caused by humans.

A sort of GoFundMe page Has been established to help ensure that Universal Ostrich can afford the feed and resources to sustain its birds.
File-In a file photo on January 7, 2013, the convicted serial killer Rodney James Alcala appeared in a New York court. Alcala was sentenced to 25 years of life imprisonment after admitting to murdering two young women here in the 1970s. Alcala, a prolific serial torture killer known as the dating game killer, died while awaiting execution in California. Prison officials said in a statement that Rodney James Alcala was 77 years old. He died of natural causes in a hospital in San Joaquin Valley, California. Alcala was sentenced to death in 2010 for five murders in California between 1977 and 1979, including a 12-year-old girl, although authorities estimate that he may have killed as many as 130 people across the country. (AP Photo/David Handschuh, swimming pool, file)

Sacramento, California (AP)  Authorities say a prolific serial torture killer known as a date game killer died on Saturday while awaiting execution in California. Rodney James Alcala died at the age of 77.

Prison officials said in a statement that he died of natural causes in a hospital in San Joaquin Valley, California.

Alcala was sentenced to death in 2010 for five murders in California between 1977 and 1979, including a 12-year-old girl, although authorities estimate that he may have killed as many as 130 people across the country.

After pleading guilty to two homicides in New York in 2013, Alcala received an additional 25 years of life.

He was charged again in 2016 after DNA evidence linked him to the death of a 28-year-old woman found in a remote area of ??southwestern Wyoming in 1977. However, a prosecutor said that Alcala was too ill to accept the trial of the womans death. She was six months pregnant when she died.

Californias death row is in San Quentin State Prison near San Francisco, but Alcala has been held in Corcoran Prison more than 200 miles away for many years, where he can receive medical care around the clock.

Prosecutors said Alcala stalked women like prey and took earrings from some of his victims as trophies.

Attorney Matt Murphy of Orange County, California, said during the trial: You are talking about a man hunting in Southern California, because he likes to kill, so he likes to kill.

Investigators said that the number of his true victims may never be known.

The earrings helped put him on death row, even though Governor Gavin Newsom has suspended executions as long as he is the governor.

The mother of 12-year-old Robin Samsoe testified in his murder trial that the pair of golden ball earrings found in the jewelry bag in the Alcala locker belonged to her daughter.

But Alcala claimed that the earrings belonged to him, and a video clip that appeared in the Dating Game in 1978 showed that he wore the earrings nearly a year before Samsoes death. He denied the killing and cited inconsistencies in the witnesss statement and description.

California prosecutors said Alcala also took earrings from at least two of his adult victims as trophies.

Prosecutors said that two of the four women were naked after death, one was raped by a claw hammer, and all of them were repeatedly strangled and resuscitated to prolong their pain.

Investigators said that the DNA of a victim was found on the rose-shaped earrings owned by Alcala and his DNA was found in her body.

Before the murder of Samso, he was sentenced to death twice, but both convictions were overturned. More than two decades later, based on new DNA and other forensic evidence, he was accused of killing four adult women.

After the verdict, the authorities released more than 100 photos of young women and girls owned by Alcala, hoping to link him to other unsolved murders across the country.

There was murder and rape, and then there was a clear massacre of Rodney Alcala-style murder, said Bruce Barcomb, the brother of the 18-year-old victim Jill Barcomb, when he was sentenced to death in Alcala.
Last month, Emmanuel Macron opened a new battery factory in a former coal mine in northern France. The only problem is that the local politician and presidential candidate Xavier Bertrand announced the news three days ago.

In his first re-election campaign speech, Macron later outlined the necessity of Frances re-industrialization and expressed his hope that Hauts-de-Frances battery project heralded large-scale investment in the transformation of the automotive industry.

The important thing is not the speech. The real question is what is actually done, commented Bertrand, the center-right former Minister of Health who has been chairman of the regional committee since 2015.

Less than a year before the presidential election, the political struggle in the United States Upper France Reflects how the issue of reindustrialization took center stage in the movement, as the region became an experimental case of mainstream political revival.

The far-right party of Marine Le Pen has found fertile land in this once left-leaning province, which has the highest unemployment rate in France, at 9.4%.This National gathering Opinion polls show that he will get enough votes to enter the second round of presidential elections next spring. Her biggest election victory there.

Hauts-de-France is the obvious choice for battery projects.The French automobile industry invests heavily there Since the late 1960sThis partly helped offset the decline in mining and steel. But manufacturing is increasingly outsourced to cheap factories in emerging markets, and jobs are lost. Now, as automakers face EU antitrust review and emission regulations, factories are once again in danger.

According to data compiled by Paris-based consulting firm Trendeo, the northern region around Lille has ranked second in the number of factory closures in France in the past 12 years. Insee, the French statistical agency, stated that between 2006 and 2016, the regions industrial sector lost more than a quarter of its labor force, which was the largest decline recorded in a French metropolis.

But there are preliminary signs of improvement: the rate of factory closures has slowed in the past three years. According to data from the government agency Business France, since 2014, Hauts-de-France has also been one of the top destinations for foreign direct investment, with the highest per capita employment opportunities created by foreign direct investment.

Analysts said that although Macrons presidency and Bertrands local efforts have not reversed the trend of industrial decline in the region, the rise of the extreme right in impoverished provinces and Yellow vest The protest means that it has become the subject of more financial and political attention.

Senior economist Elie Cohen said that under the helm of a highly centralized government, Macron is injecting capital into new industries such as batteries and hydrogen energy, reducing red tape, and pleading the EU to take industrial autonomy more seriously. On the one hand, they deserve most of the honor. At the National Scientific Research Center.

During the pandemic, with logistics and supply issues in areas such as pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, and manufacturing components (including semiconductors), his efforts to bring production back to France received greater support.

These efforts were supplemented by funding and training provided by the regional committee chaired by Bertrand. Jean-Luis Guerin, an economist and director of Finorpa, a local private equity firm, said that he hands himself in an effort to attract companies and give them autonomy when they arrive.

In the northern city of Duvlin, the Automotive Battery Company (ACC), a joint venture between the car manufacturer Stellattis and the French energy group Total, will start producing batteries at the end of 2023 and will create 1,400-2,000 jobs by 2030. According to Yann Vincent, CEO of the joint venture, 1.2 billion euros and 120 million euros were invested in the region.

Vincent said that electric car batteries have become a national priority because Europe cannot be in the hands of China, which currently dominates the market.

Economists say that no matter what progress has been made, this transition is fragile. They pointed out that net foreign direct investment in France has declined during the pandemic last year. Some people believe that this should prompt people to rethink Frances central decision-making.

Daniela Ordonez of Oxford Economics says the countrys top-down strategy of injecting capital into large companies such as Stellattis has not done enough to promote the growth of small businesses . France is too paternalistic in choosing industry support.

Trade in industrial products is deteriorating every month, and our market share in world exports is deteriorating every quarter, said Patrick Artus, chief economist of the French Foreign Trade Bank. If you continue to create only bad jobs, even if you lower the unemployment rate, you will have more Yellow vest. 

At the same time, 40-year-old Fabrice Jamart, a member of the CGT union at the Stellattis factory, said that national policies and emerging industries avoided the more direct risk of job disappearance. He looked at the window of the temporary office outside the factory and said, I hope it is wonderful, but I hope I wont put food in my refrigerator.
The Turkish Ministry of Defense stated that two soldiers were killed in an armored vehicle attack in northern Syria and two were injured.

The Turkish Defense Ministry said on Saturday that two Turkish soldiers were killed in an attack on an armored vehicle in northern Syria and two were injured.

The ministry stated that the Turkish army immediately launched retaliatory fire.

Our punitive firepower against terrorist positions continues, said a statement shared on Twitter.

It said the attack took place in the area launched by Turkey Cross-border Operation Uphra Bottom The expulsion of Islamic State (ISIL) fighters and the Syrian Kurdish Peoples Protection Force (YPG) in 2016.

Media reports stated that the attack occurred in the al-Bab area.

Ankara considers YPG, which constitutes The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), A terrorist organization associated with the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), a Kurdish separatist organization in Turkey.

PKK is designated as a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union.

Al Jazeera from Istanbul reported that the Turkish army had retaliated against (against) YPG positions from its military posts in the area. These attacks seem to last all night, Serdar said.

More attention
88-year-old Lily Wong was admitted to Torontos Yikang Elderly Care Center. A few years later, her stroke severely affected her short-term memory, speaking ability and balance ability.

The waiting time for entering a long-term care home was nine to ten years, but Huang was admitted in less than seven years.

Its super fast, her son Tony Wong said.

Her son said that it has been two years since she was admitted and Lily Wong is doing well in a home that meets her cultural needs. This is also a relief for her children.

If you can enter a nursing home environment that speaks your language, has specific cultural activities, and has food you remember, its just a huge weight, said Tony Huang.

Its incredible to be able to experience this.

The portraits of Lily and Tony Wong are part of an exhibition of residents and their children at the Yikang Elderly Care Centre in Toronto. (Onnig Cavoukian)

Part of the reason for the long waiting time is that the Yikang Aged Care Center is one of the few culturally distinctive families serving the Chinese-Canadian communities in Toronto and surrounding areas.

Experts say that long-term care waiting times are the longest in nursing homes of a specific culture. A study by the Wellesley Institute, a non-profit organization engaged in health research and policy work, found that more than half of the top 20 houses with the longest waiting time in the Greater Toronto Area are nursing homes with cultural characteristics, reflecting the need More such facilities.

The demographic change has [driven] The demand for this kind of care is increasing, said Seong-gee Um, a researcher at the Wellesley Institute.

It is very important for the system to adapt and develop and reflect the diversity of its current and future residents.

Longer waiting time

More importantly, in 2017/2018, those who want to live in a nursing home with cultural characteristics Its 246 days on average than people waiting for mainstream housing , Even if they have the same level of demand.

These long waiting times may have health effects on elderly people waiting for long-term care.

We do know where [are] The different health outcomes of people from different communities, said Ashley Flanagan, whose work focuses on gender identity and aging issues at the National Institute of Aging, a think tank on aging in Canada.

Whether its entering the waiting list for houses with cultural background, [that] It often takes longer to be admitted.Therefore, you will see a decline in health, instead of [being] Can get care. 

A resident displays Chinese New Year handicrafts at the Mon Sheong Private Care Center in Markham. (Submitted by Mon Sheong Foundation)

Stella Lang, a senior manager of Mon Sheong Long-Term Care Centre, has four locations in the Greater Toronto Area. She says simple things, such as the language spoken by people who take care of residents.

Lang said that having health care providers and staff who can serve patients in Mandarin or Cantonese is of great significance to residents who may lose their ability to speak English in old age, which is a common situation among residents with dementia.

The staff can even help native Chinese residents and family members who may be the second generation in Canada and therefore understand English better.

Lang said: Thats why they dont feel so isolated and dont have too much depression.

Although the appreciation of houses with cultural characteristics is obvious, it is not enough to meet the demand level of the province. According to Ontario Long-Term Care COVID-19 Commission Final Report This requires the construction of more culturally distinctive residences to meet the needs of Ontarios diverse population.

Developed by the community

According to AdvantAge Ontario, an advocacy organization dedicated to advancing aged care, families with cultural characteristics often provide high standards of care, partly because of their funding structure and community support.

They are developed by the community for the community, said Lisa Levin, the groups chief executive officer.

Community integration is an integral part of its structure, because most of them are established in this way. More importantly, the board that manages a particular cultural house represents the community they provide care for.

This means nursing philosophy, nursing methods, nursing language food, traditions, celebrations, volunteers, they are all culturally appropriate, Levine said.

In February 2021, a community group visited the Mon Sheong Home for the Elderly in Toronto to celebrate the Lunar New Year. (Submitted by Mon Sheong Foundation)

Culture-specific nursing homes are also often non-profit. Advocates of the elderly believe that because of their operation, nursing homes play an important role in the health and well-being of residents.

All long-term care homes in Ontario receive the same funding formula from the province, which is sufficient 2.75 hours of direct care per resident per day .

Dr. Samir Sinha, director of geriatrics at Sinai Health, Toronto Academic Health Sciences Center, said culture-specific nursing homes and municipally funded nursing homes often further subsidize care.

Sinha said: They usually raise funds, hold parties, conduct baking sales, they will conduct a lot of fundraising activities, and the community will invest additional funds to build better facilities, beyond the scope of government funding.

In addition to government funding, AdvantAge Ontario reports that in Ontario alone, non-profit and municipal nursing homes contribute more than $300 million in additional funding each year. According to AdvantAge, the extra money is used to pay for higher salaries for employees and the facility itself, which helps improve the standard of care.

Strong demand but short supply

Although there are few data that specifically study the health status of elderly people receiving culturally appropriate care, the employees and children of residents of the Mengshang Long-term Care Center and Yikang Elderly Care Center support the view that elderly people will Do better. it.

For example, at the Mon Sheong Long-Term Care Center, residents can enjoy familiar dishes such as porridge at breakfast. Lang said that because they like food, they are more likely to eat it, which can provide better nutrition and improve overall health.

Despite the overall socio-psychological and physical benefits, there are still significant differences in visits and waiting times.

A resident performs a calligraphy activity at the Mengshang Private Nursing Center in Markham. (Submitted by Mon Sheong Foundation)

According to a Wellesley Institute Research The waiting time may vary depending on factors such as personal health or the urgency of long-term care admission. However, the waiting time is particularly long for those seeking to be placed in religious, ethnic or cultural families.

The same study found that families serving Chinese Canadians have a longer average waiting time than other groups, ranging from two to seven years.

Due to the lack of culturally appropriate options, some home caregivers may delay placing loved ones in long-term care.

A study in Journal of the American Medical Guidance Association It shows that elderly people from different backgrounds are under-represented in the Canadian long-term care population. The study stated that immigrants who arrived in Canada after 1985 accounted for only 4.4% of Ontarios long-term care residents, even though they accounted for 13.9% of the total population.

Although the facts have proved that nursing homes with cultural characteristics are very popular, some cultural groups are too small or have insufficient mobilization capacity to start their own families.

Generally, these communities are relatively new to Canada or lack critical mass or fundraising capacity.

When you have an Ismaili, a Somali, an Afghan who needs cultural security and proper care, there is no specific home that can meet the needs of these communities, Sinha said.

The way forward

Solutions to eliminate cultural safety and proper care barriers can be found in the data.

A recent study looked at Enhancing data collection in Canadian long-term care institutions Call on the government to collect a standardized set of socio-demographic information, including age, gender assigned at birth, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, language and indigenous identity-many other countries, including the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States, have done so .

I think if we accept this task and advocate better collection of sociodemographic data, we can better understand who is visiting and who is not, which will enable us to understand where to start to guide policies and implement measures, Lanagan said.
The Meteorological Department warned that there will be more downpours in the coming days as rescuers search for missing persons in the mud.

Floods and landslides caused by monsoon rains in India have killed more than 135 people, and rescuers are looking for dozens of missing people on Sunday.

Since Thursday, the west coast of the country has been flooded by heavy rains, and the Indian Meteorological Department has warned that there will be more downpours in the coming days.

In Maharashtra, 114 people were killed on Thursday, more than 40 of them were killed in a landslide that hit the hillside village of Taliye in southern Mumbai.

Relatives of villager Jayram Mahaske are still trapped. He told AFP that when the landslide occurred, many people were washed away while trying to escape.

Local residents told AFP that it razed dozens of houses to the ground within minutes, leaving only two concrete structures standing and cutting off the power source.

Rescuers are clearing the mud and debris, looking for at least 99 people who are still missing.

My entire team is now involved in rescue operations, Rajesh Yavale, an inspector of the National Disaster Response Force, who is responsible for coordinating rescue operations in the village, told AFP. Many corpses were washed away and some of them were found stuck in Among the trees downstream.

More than a dozen people were killed in two separate landslides south of Mumbai.

In parts of Chiplun, after 24 hours of uninterrupted rain flooding roads and houses, the water level rose to nearly 20 feet (6 meters) on Thursday.

According to reports, 8 patients in a local COVID hospital also died after the power to the ventilator was cut off by the flood.

In the neighbouring state of Goa, a woman drowned and a state government official told the Press Trust of India that Chief Minister Pramod Sawant called it the worst flood since 1982.

In the coastal plains across the states of Maharashtra and Goa, the flood level still rose after the river burst its banks.

Frightened residents climbed up the roofs and upstairs to escape the swelling sea.

According to a report released in April by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), climate change is making Indias monsoon stronger [AP Photo]

Officials said that in Karnataka further south, the death toll rose from three to nine overnight, and four others were missing.

Electricity supplies to 11 affected areas were interrupted, and officials added that large tracts of land had lost crops.

During Indias treacherous monsoon season, floods and landslides are common, and it is common to see poorly constructed buildings bending after several days of rain.

Authorities said that before dawn on Friday, a building in a slum in Mumbai collapsed, killing four people.

Less than a week after the incident, at least 34 people were killed when several houses in the city were crushed by collapsed walls and landslides.

According to a report released in April by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), climate change is making Indias monsoon stronger.

The report warned that food, agriculture and the economy could have serious consequences, affecting nearly one-fifth of the worlds population.
Indonesia has become the center of COVID-19 in Asia, and hospitals are overwhelmed, especially on the densely populated islands of Java and Bali.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo announced that it will extend COVID-19 restrictions for a week to August 2 to curb the infection. Previously, the government said it would add more intensive care units amid rising deaths.

Indonesia has become the epicenter of COVID-19 in Asia, with hospitals flooding, especially on the densely populated islands of Java and Bali, where oxygen supplies are scarce.

I want to thank all Indonesians for their understanding and support for the 23-day restrictions, the president known as Jokowi said on Sunday, adding that COVID infection and hospital bed occupancy rates have declined, but did not specify how many have been passed .

Jokowi said that the government will gradually adjust some restrictions on certain activities, while allowing traditional markets and restaurants with outdoor areas to open, but there are some restrictions.

Some businesses, from salons and laundries to auto repair shops, are now allowed to open.

Indonesia is the fourth most populous country in the world, with more than three million According to official data, coronavirus infection and 83,000 deaths. The spread, driven by the highly contagious Delta variant, shows no signs of slowing down.

According to the research organization Our Data World, the countrys death rate is three times the global average.

Since July 16, the daily death toll in Indonesia has been above 1,000. Experts say this number may be even higher due to the low rate of coronavirus testing. On Friday, it reported a record daily number of 1,566 COVID-19 deaths.

Senior Minister Luhut Pandjaitan, who oversees the COVID response in Java and Bali, said on Saturday, Due to a variety of factors, the number of deaths has risen: the overcrowding of hospitals will add to the area with the most reported deaths.

Asian countries are experiencing the worst epidemic so far. With Vietnam and Thailand facing new anti-virus rules, Indonesia has become a new global hot spot.

Representatives of two of the worlds leading coronavirus research teams in the United States expressed concern that the situation in Indonesia is ripe for new and worrying variants of COVID-19.

The more infections in the community, the greater the chance of a new variant, Say Ali Mokdad, Professor of Health Metrics Science, Seattle Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation.

He also expressed concern about Eid al-Adha and its peripheral activities this week.

Indonesias COVID-19 working group issued a special directive for holiday weeks to ban public travel across the country.

After a similar order was issued in May on Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, thousands of security personnel were deployed across the country to enforce the travel ban, but it did little to prevent people from traveling.

Among the 270 million people in Indonesia, less than 7% of the population has been vaccinated. The largest country in Southeast Asia mainly relies on vaccines produced by China Kexing Biotech.

Members of the COVID-19 Task Force wear protective equipment during the briefing on the handling of coronavirus cases after the Eid al-Fitr celebration in Kudus, Central Java [File: Yusuf Nugroho/Reuters]
Sign up for myFT Daily Digest and be the first to learn about EU trade news.

EU trade enforcers say that the Trump-era dispute settlement between the EU and the United States over steel and aluminum tariffs may not remove all barriers to protect these industries.

Valdis Dombrovskis, the European Unions executive vice-president for trade policy, said that although the ideal solution is the mutual suspension of tariffs reached by the two sides in this years Boeing-Airbus dispute, he Ready to see other possible solutions.

In an interview with the British Financial Times, Eastbrovskys said: We understand the willingness of the United States to protect its steel industry, but of course there are ways to do this in a way that is less destructive to EU producers. .

EU in May Plan on hold Raising tariffs on a range of American products is aimed at resolving a deadlock with Washington that dates back to 2018, when Donald Trump imposed high tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Europe and other economies.

The measures taken by the then President of the United States were controversial based on the national security grounds of Article 232 of the US Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which was a reason for a close strategic ally who was angered in Europe.

The EU retaliated with its own tariffs. But Joe Bidens entry into the White House this year prompted a renewed effort to improve transatlantic trade relations. In June, the two sides reached a consensus Major breakthrough With the settlement of a separate 17-year dispute over aircraft subsidies.

The removal of Section 232 tariffs is politically painful for the President of the United States because their politically strong steel industry and factory states are popular, including Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, which will be in the next election. Intense competition.

Dombrovskis is expected to visit Washington this fall to hold talks with colleagues including U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai on a range of trade topics.

He stated that negotiations with the United States on Article 232 tariffs are on a constructive track. The ideal solution is to completely withdraw Article 232 measures without taking any other measures.But he said that the EU is ready to examine [at] Other solutions, understand that the United States is also interested in protecting its steel industry.

He said that these measures need to be less destructive to EU producers and respect historical trade volume. Indeed, the steel industry is highly protected in the United States and the European Union, he said, including the use of anti-dumping and countervailing measures.

Dombrovskis did not disclose what this alternative solution might look like. However, one possibility may be some kind of licensing or supervision arrangement that allows EU exporters to control access to the US market.

The United States can also propose some form of export quota, although the EU has ruled out this possibility. Or it can choose to convert Article 232 tariffs into safeguard measures designed to deal with the sudden influx of imported goods, although these are difficult to comply with the rules of the World Trade Organization.

Respected

The two sides have now decided to find a solution by early December, which is also to solve the oversupply of steel caused by production in countries including China-this is not easy to achieve.

The discussion of Article 232 tariffs is part of a broader effort by the United States and the European Union to strengthen transatlantic relations after the pain of the Trump era.

One of the outcomes of the EU-US summit held in Brussels last month was the establishment of a new trade and technology committee aimed at promoting cooperation in key technologies.

Dombrovskis said that the goal of both parties is to establish 10 working groups in a range of areas and decide which topics to prioritize.

He said that key issues include 5G telecommunications, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, additive manufacturing and robotics, as well as investment screening and supervision of Internet platforms.
Israeli firefighters said they put out the bush fire at three points in a small area in the Eshkol area.

Defense officials say that after burning balloons launched from a Palestinian enclave caused a fire in Israel, Israel has halved the fishing area near Gaza.

It has been decided to reduce the fishing area in the Gaza Strip from 12 nautical miles to 6 nautical miles, the Israeli Military Service (COGAT), responsible for civil affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, said on Sunday.

It said in a statement: This decision was made after the continued launch of burning balloons from the Gaza Strip to Israel. This constitutes an infringement of Israeli sovereignty.

Earlier on Sunday, Israeli firefighters stated that they had extinguished the bush fire at three points in a small area in the Eshkol area, noting that the investigation had confirmed that the cause was a burning balloon.

On July 12, Israel announced that in view of the recent security situation calm, it was expanding the fishing zone near Gaza and allowed increased imports into the Palestinian territories.

The latest launch of the burning balloon is two months later 11-day Israeli attack Gaza, this increases the possibility of another Israeli attack on Hamas-controlled territories.

Before the May conflict, the fishing zone in Gaza was 15 nautical miles.

The May offensive killed at least 260 Palestinians, including 66 children, and caused extensive damage to infrastructure and residential areas. On the Israeli side, 13 people, including two children, were killed in a coastal enclave by rockets fired by Palestinian armed groups.

The Gaza Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment (RDNA) report released earlier this month estimated that the damage caused by the 11-day bombing was between US$290 million and US$380 million, while the recovery needs are estimated to be between US$345 million and US$485 million. between.

Hamas is disturbed that since the end of the fighting, Israel has taken little action to ease the severe blockade of the territory and has delayed in indirect negotiations with Israel to restore Qatars financial assistance to Gaza.

The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated areas in the world, with 2 million Palestinians  half of whom are under the age of 18  living in a coastal area of ??365 square kilometers (141 square miles). It has been blocked by Egypt and Israel for 14 years, resulting in a terrible humanitarian situation. A UN report predicts that it will be uninhabitable by 2020.

At least 800,000 people have no access to clean water and only a few hours of electricity supply each day. In addition, the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated the already weak healthcare system, with medical equipment and medicines in short supply.

The new Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett likened a balloon launch to a rocket launch and ordered an air strike after the previous launch.

The last time a balloon from Gaza caused a fire in Israel was on July 2.
Canadas vaccine campaign has been suppressing it recently, and its impressive that 80% of eligible Canadians have at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.

However, this statistic distracts the attention of a disturbing fact: more than 6 million Canadians are still not vaccinated, just as experts warn us that we need more reporting to combat the possible surge in cases in the fall.

The first dose of vaccination campaign now appears to be halting, with fewer than 50,000 people being vaccinated every daydown from the peak of more than 185,000 last monthalthough these doses are now easily available nationwide.

CBC News interviewed some Canadians who were not vaccinated to learn more about the hesitation in certain parts of the country.

Many opponents said they were worried about safety and side effects. Others said they were not satisfied with the products currently offered.

There are also practical considerations. Many people who have not been vaccinated have needle-related phobias, which can make injections a terrible experience. Some people are severely allergic to vaccine ingredients. Some rural Canadians have encountered difficulties in visiting.

On October 29, 2019, Ted Kuntz (middle), Director and Vice President of Vaccine Choice Canada, joined other protesters in a silent tribute to oppose Ontarios vaccination laws outside the Toronto legislature. One minute. (Chris Young/Canada Press)

Experts also suggest that approximately 2% to 10% of the population strongly oppose vaccines regardless of how public health officials evaluate the many benefits of vaccination.

Nadina Smith graduated from Teachers College this spring. She felt pressure from family and friends and asked her to get a chance before the start of the fall.

Smith from Alberta told CBC News that she has studied the science behind various COVID-19 vaccines. She is most satisfied with Johnsons single-dose injection, which uses more traditional viral vector vaccine technology.

Such vaccines use improved versions of different viruses (vectors) to deliver instructions to cells, and are widely used to prevent infectious diseases such as influenza.

New technology and old technology

Canada ordered Johnson & Johnson vaccine  300,000 doses were delivered a few months ago  but there are no plans to use it as part of a vaccination campaign. Government officials stated that the provinces and regions have no interest in obtaining this product.

I know that traditional vaccines have not been rated as very effective in the research-but I am satisfied with the style. I am happy to get it at this moment, Smith said.

Watch: What can you expect after the second vaccination

As Ontario accelerates the introduction of a second dose of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine for people, it is reported that many people have a stronger response to the second dose than the first dose. Dwight Drummond spoke with Dr. Jeff Kwong, a scientist at the Institute of Clinical Evaluation Science (ICES), about the science behind side effects. 3:35

Although Health Canada and other regulatory agencies carefully reviewed the clinical trial data, the mRNA products produced by Pfizer and Moderna are considered safe and effective, but Smith said that she is still unwilling to accept such a rapidly developed vaccine.

She said that she was not opposed to vaccines (she described herself not as hesitating about vaccines but hesitating about mRNA vaccines), but she was particularly worried about the possible long-term effects of mRNA injections using relatively new technologies .

I dont want to be a guinea pig

How do we know what effect this will have on our bodies? Will I have a third eye in 20 years? she said.

I mean, I know I wont have a third eye, but I just want to explain what I mean. In the long run, we dont know what the potential outcome is.

The only thing that impresses me is whether some research or research has been conducted on the long-term effects of COVID mRNA. For me, this is a huge problem, and I dont want to be a guinea pig.

A staff member set up an antibody production line at the Lonza Ibex building in Visp, Switzerland on September 29, 2020, which produced the Moderna mRNA coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccine. (Dennis Barribus/Reuters)

Messenger RNA or mRNA directs protein production in cells throughout the body to trigger an immune response and prevent infectious diseases.

Although mRNA vaccines have not been on the market until now, they have been tested in humans for at least four infectious diseases: rabies, influenza, cytomegalovirus and Zika virus. The long-term side effects of these products have not been reported.

For thirty years, researchers have been studying mRNA technology and its potential. By injecting hundreds of millions of dollars in emergency funding from the US government and other sources, companies such as Moderna and BioNTech (and BioNTechs partner Pfizer) have turned a promising molecular biology into a usable product that has been deployed for hundreds of millions People play a big role.

Mixed message

Lorie Carty, a retiree from Prince Edward County, Ontario, said that the National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) and Health Canada sometimes provide competing recommendations on vaccines, especially recommendations on AstraZeneca products. She questioned the safety of the vaccine.

Speaking of federal health officials, Katie said: They seem to be fidgeting, trying to figure out the truth of the matter as they move forward, but the information is very confusing.

Watch: Prime Minister and medical experts provide guarantee for COVID vaccine

After the National Advisory Committee on Immunization stated that certain vaccines are more popular than others, Prime Minister Jacin Trudeau and medical experts tried to assure Canadians that all approved COVID-19 vaccines are safe. 2:05

She said she had already made an appointment, but she had been rescheduling her time because she was not ready to commit.

I want to make sure before putting it in my body, because once its there, it cant go back again, Katie said.

Im not saying that I am a person who opposes vaccines. I just dont have enough confidence. We really dont know the long-term effects. There are too many problems, and you read different things every day.

Lorie Carty, a retiree from Prince Edward County, Ontario, said that the actions of the National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) and Health Canada made her doubt the safety of the vaccine. (Submitted by Lori Carty)

Andriy Petriv is a long-distance truck driver from the Toronto area. He said he and his wife contracted what they believed to be COVID-19 shortly after Christmas. Although they were not tested, Petriff said they had all the common symptoms.

I just dont understand this

He said that in order to satisfy his curiosity, he recently conducted an antibody test to see if he has developed any immunity to COVID-19. The test is used to determine past infections and shows that he has developed some antibodies to the virus.

Since I already have it, I dont think there is any point in getting a vaccine. In some cases it can be dangerous, and given that I already have antibodies, why should I take the risk? He said in an interview.

If I have to accept it, I will accept it. I am not afraid of vaccines. I just dont understand this. Why should I put something on me to get a certificate or something? If you are not afraid of getting thirsty, why do you want to Make others happy while drinking?

He said that he is also disturbed by the fact that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has so far only granted emergency use authorization for the COVID-19 vaccine, rather than full approval-a process that can sometimes take years . The FDA said it is about to receive full approval.

Health experts insist that even people who have been infected in the past should be vaccinated. However, some jurisdictions  including Quebec, France, Germany and Italy  have consistently given only one injection to anyone who was previously diagnosed.

Dr. Kumanan Wilson is a researcher at the University of Ottawa and Ottawa Hospital. His expertise includes infectious diseases. (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation)

Dr. Kummanan Wilson, professor of medicine at the University of Ottawa, said: Although you will gain some immunity from a previous infection, the duration and breadth of this immunity are still unclear.

Not sure if exposure to previous versions or variants of the virus will protect you from new variants as powerfully as a vaccine.

Vaccine acceptance is growing

Shannon MacDonald is an associate professor in the School of Nursing at the University of Alberta. Before the start of the immunization campaign, she conducted a study on the acceptability of the COVID-19 vaccine for the Canadian population.

She found that in general, the vast majority of Canadians are not completely opposed to vaccines. In fact, less than 2% of Canadian parents refuse to vaccinate their children for childhood.

As little is known about the vaccine that is about to be deployed, 65% of Canadians surveyed by MacDonald said that they will receive the COVID-19 vaccine once Health Canada approves the use-a number she described as very encouraging.

Since the publication of the study, the number of people willing to be vaccinated has been steadily increasing.

Unfortunately, a small group of people are very outspoken and people think they are bigger than them. I think paying attention to those who have real legal issues-when I say legal issues, I dont mean that their concerns must be based on Factsreally critical, McDonald said in an interview.

Breakthrough cases are extremely rare

MacDonald said that the best way to persuade people who are hesitant is to show them data on the effectiveness of vaccines in preventing infection.

For example, of the 403,149 COVID-19 cases reported in Ontario between December 14, 2020 and July 10 this year, only 0.4% were so-called breakthrough casesthe second time they received COVID-19 infection. People took it 14 days ago.

On June 17, 2021, a father held his son in the shade as his family waited for more than six hours for the COVID-19 vaccine at a pop-up mass vaccination clinic in Toronto. (Nathan Dennett/Canada Press)

Of all cases reported during this seven-month period, about 4% of people received only one dose of the vaccine. The rest, of course, were not vaccinated.

As of July 10, less than 18,200 of the 10,000,000 people in Ontario who have received at least one dose of the vaccine so far have been infected with the virus-16,358 people were infected when only partially vaccinated, and 1,765 people were infected after two doses. .

In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control estimates that 97% of recent hospital admissions for COVID-19 have not been vaccinated.

Trust factor

MacDonald said that the extremely low side effects should also convince hesitating people that these products are safe.

The security situation is very good, she said. You can put information on billboards, which may affect some people, but for those who do not trust the government, pharmaceutical companies, etc., they need to hear information from people they trust. We must spread the information Go out there.

You only need to have one case in your unvaccinated community and you are all at risk.

According to the Public Health Agency of Canada, as of July 9, Canada had only reported 2,222 serious adverse events after vaccination. This is only 0.005% of all vaccination doses.

On June 27, 2021, the large screen of the mass vaccination clinic at the Scotiabank Arena in Toronto showed the dose of the vaccine (25,000 doses), and the vaccinators cheered. (Colberston/Canada Press)

Despite these positive signs, McDonald said that the vaccination campaign will almost certainly encounter deep-rooted hesitation.

She said that the fourth wave of cases may lead unbelievers to believe that it is best for them to get a shot. You dont want to wait to see an outbreak and say,Look at this is what can happen. But this may be the case.

She said that public health authorities should still try to persuade some unvaccinated people, but at some point, the energy may be best used to get some of the vaccinated people back for a critical second vaccination.

Let us focus on them instead of jumping over a hundred hoops and trying to inoculate the first dose of people who are not interested, she said.
The British Columbia Wildfire Bureau stated that there are currently more than 250 wildfires burning across the province, and hundreds of firefighters continue to traverse challenging terrain in hot and dry conditions.

The agency said that this number has fallen compared to last week, when there were 300 fires.

On Saturday afternoon, Secretary of Public Safety Mike Farnworth (Mike Farnworth) greeted 101 firefighters from Mexico, who will help with British Columbia staff over the next 30 days.

Watch | Mexican firefighters help fight wildfires in British Columbia: On Saturday, the British Columbia government welcomed 101 firefighters from Mexico to help extinguish hundreds of wildfires that raged in the province. 2:20

As the fire continues to approach homes and communities, thousands of residents have been placed under evacuation orders and warnings. There are currently 58 evacuation orders in place, affecting approximately 4,400 properties, and nearly 17,500 properties are in evacuation alert status, which means that residents have been told to leave at any time.

Although the number of active wildfires has declined, Farnworth said the weather forecast is challenging.

The foreseeable future.
According to multiple reports, Republican governor candidate Charlie Groo is under investigation for his involvement in a Chester County car accident that caused the death of a motorcyclist and closed the Pennsylvania Turnpike for seven hours.

Police said the accident occurred at around 10pm on Wednesday night, west of the King of Prussia Interchange in the westbound lane of the toll road.The person who witnessed the car accident Tell Spotlight PAAngela Couloumbis said that Gerow drove a motorcycle for several miles, and the motorcycle was parked in front of his car.

exist Statement to the Associated PressGroo said through a spokesperson that he looks forward to the completion of their investigation by the state police and believes that the investigation will confirm that he was not the cause of the accident.

The motorcyclist was identified as 30-year-old Logan Carl Abbott in Bradford County. PennLive.comOfficials said Abbott died of multiple blunt impacts and toxicology tests are ongoing.

A report by the Pennsylvania State Police did not mention Jeros name, nor did it provide more details about the cause of the crash. Nicholas Forgette, a road construction worker, told Spotlight PA that he saw a Mercedes-Benz and a motorcycle plugged into its grill while working on the toll road on Wednesday night.

According to reports, the motorcycle sit upright with one side stuck in the front of the car. forget.

Thats also a big motorcycle. There are sparks. And its very loud, Forgette said, according to Spotlight PA, who works for a traffic control company in Pottstown.

Forgette told Spotlight PA that he saw the Mercedes being stopped by the state police, a few miles from where he first saw the car passing by. He said that Gerow sat on the guardrail, expressionless, a bit out of touch.

According to Spotlight PA, a Pennsylvania police spokesperson stated that the investigation is ongoing and the authorities are trying to determine whether other vehicles may be involved.

Gerow, 66 years old, running Quantum communication, A marketing company located in Harrisburg. He announced his candidacy for governor in June and previously ran for Congress and state legislatures.

According to the Associated Press, Gerow visited the Republican Partys event circuit in Pennsylvania for several months and talked to the audience as a potential candidate. For more than two decades, he has also served as a political commentator on the public affairs television program Face the Country.
What will the Duke and Duchess NETFLIX series tell?

Archewell Productions of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex announced on Wednesday that it will develop a program called Pearl for streaming services.

Megan created the idea of ??a family-centric animated series, inspired by various women in history.

She will serve as executive producer with film producer David Furnish, who has served as producer of Rocket Man and Sherlock Midget.

Megan said in a statement: Like many girls of the same age, our heroine Pearl is embarking on a journey of self-discovery. She is trying to overcome the daily challenges in life.

She added: I am very happy that Archewell Productions, in collaboration with the powerful Netflix platform and these incredible producers, will bring you this new animated series to celebrate the extraordinary women in history.
This is how England star Andrew Shim escaped a Spanish prison after he was caught with 75,000 pounds worth of marijuana.

After revealing that he was fighting against drug addiction, the judges did not let the actor playing Mirch go. Mirror report.

4 According to reports, this is England star Andrew Sim serving his sentence in Spain after being arrested on suspicion of drug trafficking. Credit: Getty

4 He starred in the highly sought-after Shane Meadows movies and TV series with Stephen Graham (left) and Thomas Turgus (right) Credit: Twitter

After admitting that he was a drug dealer, Shim was sentenced to probation in Spain.

He has been in jail Remand Since his arrest last year, in Alhaurin de la Torre prison near Malaga.

The convicted criminal reached a plea bargain agreement with the prosecutor on the day of the trial, pleading guilty to a crime of drug trafficking.

He was sentenced to three years and one day in prison.

Judge Monserrat Cortes Lopez suspended his imprisonment but warned Shim that if he offends him at any time within the next five years, he will be sent to prison.

The seven-page written sentence published on July 7 also sensationally described the child star as a drug addict.

His drug addiction was described as a contributing factor in the judges decision to probate his sentence, and the fact that he was not previously convicted in Spain was another reason.

Two British associates, Matthew Adam Neal and 38-year-old Michael Reagan, were also sentenced to probation after acknowledging their role in the drug conspiracy crushed by Spanish police.

Shim and Regan were arrested at a gas station near the southern Spanish city of Granada on October 20 last year after the police intercepted them and found 75,000 pounds of marijuana in their Mercedes van.

Vacation due to addiction

The Malaga Criminal Court ruled after the trio reached a plea deal that Neal had flown from the UK to Malaga to meet with his associates and help them with drug trafficking.

He drove a rented Fiat Tipo and a Shell gas station near the AP7 highway along the Costa del Sol, where he met Shim and Regan.

The seven-page sentence said: After inspecting the interior of the British gold-plated Mercedes Sprinter van, two other men drove to the gas station. He returned to the Fiat he had rented and sometimes used it as a lookout car. In front of Mercedes.

He started to go to the Repsol gas station in Huetor Santillan, Granada.

The Spanish National Police stopped the van there and identified two of its passengers.

During the search, they found 119 packets of a substance inside, which turned out to be marijuana, with a net weight of 59,88 kg and a black market value of 88,655 euros.

Andrew Shim and Michael Regan are addicted to drugs, which limits their ability to work within effective social parameters, which makes drug trafficking illegal.

In addition to being sentenced to probation, Shim was also ordered to pay a fine, totaling the black market value of the seized drugs-75,000.

Shim from Nottingham is best known for his role as Milky in Shane Meadows 2006 movie This Is England and subsequent C4 TV series.

He starred alongside Stephen Graham, who became famous as a Hollywood actor, and Vicky McClure, one of the stars of the BBCs popular police show Line of Duty. .

In a shocking scene in the movie, his character was brutally beaten by Grahams character.

Shim, who was born in the United States, also won praise for his performances in Meadows cult films A Room for Romeo Brass and Dead Mans Shoes.

4 The actor was allegedly remanded in Alhaurin de la Torre prison near Malaga

4 Allegedly, Shim and This Is England co-star Thomas Turgoose were arrested in October last year. Credit: Getty
Dr. Anthony Fauci, who urges people to get vaccinated, said the recent increase in the number of infections has been especially among the unvaccinated.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top US infectious disease expert, said that as the country has seen, the US is heading in the wrong direction in the fight against the coronavirus. Recent rise In infections, especially in states with low vaccination rates.

In an interview with CNNs State of the Union address on Sunday, Fauci said that many vulnerable people across the United States are still not vaccinated-and it is they who have stimulated the increase in COVID-19 cases.

We went in the wrong direction, Fauci said.

If you look at the changes in the new infection curve it is the unvaccinated population, and since 50% of our countries are not fully vaccinated, this is a problem-especially when you have Delta and other variants It has this extraordinary characteristic, can be very effective and very easy to spread from person to person. 

Dr. Anthony Fauci said that as the number of Covid-19 cases continues to increase, especially among unvaccinated Americans, the United States is going in the wrong direction. https://t.co/BtMUrX2WfD #CNNSOTU pic.twitter.com/QxPOQ3d2J3 -State of the Union Address (@CNNSotu) July 25, 2021

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the coronavirus vaccine is widely used in the United States. Less than 60% of adults are fully vaccinated, and 68.8% of adults have at least one dose of the vaccine data.

But millions of people are still not vaccinated, and the administration of President Joe Biden urges Americans to get vaccinatedespecially in states where cases have increased in recent weeks.

The areas with the fastest increase in COVID-19 infection rates are those with low vaccination rates. White House adviser Jeffrey Zienz said last week that Florida, Texas and Missouri accounted for 40% of all new cases in the country, and about one-fifth of them occurred in Florida.

Fauci said on Sunday: If you are vaccinated, this vaccine is highly protective against Delta variants, especially against serious diseases that lead to hospitalization or even death.

This is really an outbreak of unvaccinated peoplethats why we are outside actually begging unvaccinated people to go out and get vaccinated.

Fauci said that major government public health officials are actively considering recommendations to wear masks for vaccinations, May suggest boosting injections For people with suppressed immune systems that have been vaccinated.

Fauci, who is also Bidens chief medical adviser, said that he participated in a dialogue about the guidelines for changing masks.

He pointed out that some local jurisdictions with a surge in infection rates, such as Los Angeles County, have called on individuals to wear masks in public regardless of their vaccination status. He said this step is in line with the CDCs recommendations.

Due to the rise of the delta virus, Dr. Jeff Duchin, a senior public health official in Washingtons most populous county, also asked everyone on Friday to wear a mask in indoor public placeseven if they were vaccinated.
Following new masking guidance issued by the CDC to curb the spread of COVID-19, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas says that he will reinstate an indoor mask mandate for all persons aged five and older, regardless of vaccination status.
Six long years have passed since the romantic-comedy drama made viewers laugh and giggle at the Oh My Ghost cast cute and funny moments together in the Sun Restaurant. This tvN series ended with the third highest viewership rating among all the other dramas in 2015.

Truly, it is one of the most remarkable and unforgettable South Korean dramas of all time.

But viewers want to know what the amazing Oh My Ghost cast members are up to now. In this list is the recapitulation of the dramas they did within those six years, and an update of their new projects.

Park Bo Young

In the 2015 hit drama "Oh My Ghost," she starred as an introverted assistant chef in a restaurant who happens to see the dead. She then gets possessed by a lustful virgin ghost who loves to mess around while looking for the perfect man to fulfill her needs.

After playing the lead role in "Oh My Ghost," she played various different roles in several South Korean hit dramas "Abyss" and "Doom At Your Service."

She gained a lot of attention and popularity in JTBC's 2017 top-rating drama "Strong Woman Do Bong Soon" with ZE:A's Park Hyung Sik.

The actress with a youthful glow will come back to the big screen with "Concrete Utopia." Details and release date are yet to be announced.

Jo Jung Suk

The actor was 35 years old at the time of "Oh My Ghost" broadcast, and he starred as the cold and uptight Chef Kang Sun Woo who owns Sun Restaurant where Na Bong Soon (Park Bo Young) works.

He starred in many grossing films, such as "Time Renegade," "Hit-and-Run Squad," "Exit," and "My Annoying Brother" with EXO's D.O.

Jo Jung Suk also appeared in hit dramas "Don't Dare to Dream," "Legend of the Blue Sea," and "Nokdu Flower."

He is currently playing the role of Lee Ik Joon in tvN's hit medical dramedy "Hospital Playlist."

Watch 'Hospital Playlist' teaser here:



Kim Seul Gi

The lewd ghost who possessed Na Bong Soon (Park Bo Young) is played by actress Kim Seul Gi.

After playing the role of a ghost, she made her cameo in numerous top-rating dramas "Love in the Moonlight," "Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok Joo," "Legend of the Blue Sea," and "Hi Bye, Mama!".

Kim Seul Gi will star in the 2021 drama "Shh, Please Take Care of Him," produced by olleh tv, Seezn, and skylife.

Shin Hye Sun

Kang Sun Woo's (Jo Jung Suk) younger sister, who is physically disabled, was played by actress Shin Hye Sun.

Her portrayal of Kang Eun Hee was sterling that she gained praise from it, especially after showing her acting prowess and delving into other roles in new projects.

She appeared in "She Was Pretty," "Legend of the Blue Sea," and "Still 17," as well as in movies "Innocence," "Collectors," and "A Day."

The actress recently starred in tvN's historical-romance drama "Mr. Queen" with Kim Jung Hyun.

Watch 'Mr. Queen' trailer here:



Kwak Si Yang

The pretty boy and muscular assistant chef in Sun Restaurant was played by actor Kwak Si Yang. He gained popularity after portraying the role of Seo Joon, the mysterious, quiet type among the bunch.

After "Oh My Ghost," he made starred in popular dramas "Fight For My Way," "Chicago Typewriter," and "Alice."

He will be starring in JTBC's 2021 idol romance drama "Idol: The Coup" with EXID's Hani.

Follow KDramastars for more K-Drama, K-Movie, and celebrity news updates!



KDramastars owns this article.

Written by Elijah Mully.
Nevertheless episode 6 illustrates another whirlwind of emotions for Han So Hee as she gets caught up with her feelings for Song Kang and Chae Jong Hyeop.

To recall, the previous episode hints at Yoo Na Bi, played by "The World of Married" star, giving up on Park Jae Eon, portrayed by the 27-year-old South Korean heartthrob.

It came after his ex-girlfriend Yoon Seol Ah (Lee Yeol Eum) mentioned that she and Jae Eon are back together.

Of course, this hurt her feelings and distanced herself from Jae Eon.

Nevertheless Episode 6 Recap: Yoo Na Bi Goes Off the Grid to Avoid Park Jae Eon

The latest episode of the JTBC drama displayed Yoo Na Bi's decision to break away from Park Jae Eon once again. It appears that she is tired of him playing games and going to his usual self of toying with other's feelings.

Nevertheless episode 6 featured Na Bi going under the radar to clear her mind, and opted to stay at her aunt's place.

During their talk, her aunt shared that Yang Do Hyuk (Chae Jong Hyeop) is also back in their hometown to open up the restaurant.

Whether it is coincidence or fate, Yoo Na Bi seems surprised yet happy that her childhood friend is in their hometown.

Yoo Na Bi Spends Time with Yang Do Hyuk

Upon learning that Yoo Na Bi is also back, the culinary student immediately went to their place to visit her.

Nevertheless episode 6 displayed the sweet moments between the two as Yoo Na Bi and Yang Do Hyuk took trips to their hometown, rode bicycles, and even went to the market together. Basically, she had all the good experiences she has never done with Park Jae Eon.

Moreover, Chae Jong Hyeop's character showed how sincere and serious he is about his feelings for the art student.

Unfortunately, he doesn't excite her as much as Park Jae Eon. Upon revealing his feelings, Yoo Na Bi fell asleep and wasn't able to hear his confession.

From Friends to Lovers to It's Complicated

Another team-up that made the viewers' hearts flutter are Oh Bit Na and Nam Kyu Hyun, played by Yang Hye Ji and rookie actor Kim Min Gwi.

Nevertheless episode 6 shows that the duo's relationship is now official, but they decided not to tell everyone about it.

Unfortunately, he discovered Oh Bit Na is still active on dating apps. He asked her why she is still on it. This made her feel he's changing her and that it felt suffocating. Nam Kyu Hyun, on the other hand, felt disrespected.

During his deep conversation with Park Jae Eon, Nam Kyu Hyun thinks that it's best that he and Oh Bit Na stayed as friends and did not complicate things between them.

Yoon Seol Ah Reveals the Truth to Park Jae Eon

Park Jae Eon's ex decided to meet him at the campus to celebrate his birthday. However, Yoon Seol Ah chose to get honest with him regarding her confrontation with Yoo Na Bi.

She mentioned that she lied about telling Na Bi that she and Jae Eon are dating.

"She believed me right away. I didn't know she'd disappear like that," she explained.

There, he realized why Yoo Na Bi is ignoring his calls.

Yoo Na Bi Gets a Surprise Visit from Park Jae Eon

The junior art student reached out to Yoo Na Bi and mentioned he wanted to talk to her. However, it appears that she is still not prepared to have the conversation with Park Jae Eon.

Upon Yoo Na Bi and Yang Do Hyuk's arrival at the guest house, she was surprised to see Park Jae Eon.

At the end of Nevertheless episode 6, he introduced himself to Do Hyuk and vice versa, setting the tension up for the trio.

Can't wait for Nevertheless episode 7? Make sure to keep your tabs open here at KDramastars!





KDramastars owns this article.

Written by Geca Wills
Steve Edwards, the president and CEO of a health care system in Missouri, is troubled that health experts cannot seem to inspire more people to get vaccinated in his area, which is being hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Edwards, of Springfield-based Cox Health, told CNN on Friday that his system has had 534 Covid-19 patients die, with more than 100 of those deaths after vaccines became widely available. None of the patients who died were vaccinated.

He is desperately trying to figure out how to get through to people.

"If I knew how I was missing the mark, we could correct and change," he told CNN's Alisyn Camerota. The community needs 80 to 90% of people to get immunity either from getting inoculated or catching the virus, he said.

"We're not nearly halfway there. This will roar on for quite some time," he said.

He said he thinks the vaccine hesitancy stems from mistrust of the government or institutions. He said doctors have seen patients who didn't get a vaccine because it is under emergency use authorization who ask for monoclonal antibodies -- that are also available under an EUA.

"Someone got into their head that the vaccine is not safe," he said. "It might be the safest vaccine in the history of man. And we somehow have not overcome that."

Edwards said he feels guilty because he is the most prominent voice in the local health care community and people continue to die unnecessarily. He struggles because he thinks his voice could be heard better and he could have save some lives.

"Every vaccine can save a life," he said.

US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said he is concerned because the Delta variant of coronavirus is spreading quickly among unvaccinated people, who account for the vast majority of coronavirus hospitalizations and deaths nationwide.

"The thing that's making this possible is the fact that we are dealing with the most transmissible version of Covid-19 that we've seen to date," he said.

Despite being shown an AP-NORC poll that suggests 45% of people will definitely not get vaccinated, Murthy said: "Well, I'm certainly not giving up on making sure that we continue to work hard to get people vaccinated and I don't think that we've actually reached the limit (on vaccine outreach) yet.

"Every day more than half a million people are making the active choice to get vaccinated. That's a lot of people ... and so we are making progress. We just want to make faster progress."

Rise in hospitalizations is self-inflicted wound, expert says

Health experts blame the recent surges in Covid-19 cases on the low rate of vaccinations. And now the accelerating Delta variant is threatening to increase hospitalizations and deaths as well, one expert said Thursday.

"This is a self-inflicted wound, because we can prevent all of those hospitalizations and deaths -- or at least 98, 99% of them -- if we can encourage vaccination," Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, told CNN's Jim Acosta.

More than 91 million people live in a county considered to have high Covid-19 transmission, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Every state on Friday had a seven-day average of new cases higher than the week before, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

Yet, despite the warnings from health experts, the daily pace of people becoming fully vaccinated keeps falling. It's now the lowest it's been since the end of January, when the US had only been vaccinating for about six weeks, according to CDC data.

The US government has purchased an additional 200 million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, BioNTech said in a news release Friday. More than half should arrive by the end of the year, and the rest by May of next year. That would bring to 500 million the total number of doses supplied by Pfizer.

Only 48.9% of the US population is fully vaccinated, and the seven-day average pace is around 249,000. The average hasn't been above 500,000 fully vaccinated people per day since July 5, according to CDC data.

"We're all thinking that another surge is likely," said Dr. Christian Sandrock, director of critical care at UC Davis Medical Center, in a statement Thursday. "It is frightening. I don't think we'll go back to the worst we've seen, due to the vaccine, but it's hard to tell."

UC Davis epidemiology professor Lorena Garcia said the impact could be extremely devastating on rural communities with lower vaccination rates and limited access to care.

Alabama has the lowest rate of vaccinations at 33.9%, CDC numbers reveal. Mississippi has also vaccinated less than 35%.

After a news conference Thursday, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey encouraged people to get vaccinated.

"These folks are choosing a horrible lifestyle of self-inflicted pain," she said. "It's time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks, not the regular folks. It's the unvaccinated folks that are letting us down."

In Missouri, additional personnel and equipment are being sent to Springfield-Greene County to support the local health care system, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson announced Thursday.

A return to masks

Some regions are returning to masks in the hopes of slowing the spread.

In Texas, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo warned that the region is "at the beginning of a potentially very dangerous fourth wave of this pandemic" and raised the threat level from yellow to orange, urging community members to wear masks.

"So, I know they're uncomfortable, I don't like wearing masks either, but until we get the numbers back down, let's all wear masks again," the judge said of the county that includes Houston, the nation's fourth most populous city.

Masks are recommended indoors for all vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals, according to Austin-Travis County's Covid-19 risk-based guidelines. Austin Mayor Steve Adler says if he could "order all children and teachers to mask without ending up in court," he "would do it in a heartbeat."

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order in May prohibiting state governmental entities such as counties from requiring that masks be worn.

The number of hospitalizations has crossed the threshold of over 30 admissions per day, officials say.

The CDC still recommends that unvaccinated people wear masks, but the choice is up to the individual if they are vaccinated, Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said Thursday.

"If you are vaccinated, you get exceptional protection from the vaccines, but you have the opportunity to make the personal choice to add extra layers of protection if you so choose," she said.

Experts express concern even for vaccinated Americans

Experts are warning that even people who are vaccinated need to be concerned about the surge.

"If there's all kinds of virus around you, if you're in a community with a lot of virus, then because these vaccines are not 100%, it is going to impact you," CNN Medical Analyst Dr. Leana Wen told CNN's Anderson Cooper on Thursday.

At this time of the summer, transmission rates should be low, said CNN's Chief Medical Correspondent Sanjay Gupta, speaking on the same show. In the warm weather of July, people are primarily socializing outside, where the virus is less likely to spread, he said.

Come the drier, colder weather of the fall and winter, transmission rates might go up even more, Gupta added.

"So, this could be as good as it gets at least for a period of time," he said.

For people who are vaccinated, their immune systems are much better equipped to protect them against the virus, but not perfect, Gupta said. Some might not get symptoms if they are infected, but some might end up being protected from hospitalization and still get sick, he said.

Wen compared vaccination to wearing a seat belt: it is a crucial layer of protection, but it is not foolproof against the reckless behavior of others.

"But saying that doesn't mean undermining confidence in seat belts. It just saying that the choices that other people are making influence us, too," Wen said.

Vaccine effectiveness against Delta

Walensky said Thursday that the Delta variant is an "aggressive and much more transmissible" strain of the virus.

"It is one of the most infectious respiratory viruses we know of, and I have seen in my 20-year career," Walensky said at a White House Covid-19 briefing.

The spread of the variant makes vaccination even more important, Walensky said.

"If you are not vaccinated, please take the Delta variant seriously. This virus has no incentive to let up, and it remains in search of the next vulnerable person to infect," she said.

According to CDC data released earlier this week, the Delta variant represents an estimated 83% of all coronavirus samples sequenced in the last two weeks. The good news is data shows vaccines are working as they did in clinical trials against the variant, Walensky said.

Dr. Celine Gounder, who served on President Joe Biden's transition Covid-19 advisory board, said the variant might mean people need more measures to protect themselves.

"At the beginning of the pandemic, the CDC said that a close contact was somebody that you're indoors with unmasked for 15 minutes or more," Gounder said in an interview with STAT published Friday. "The equivalent of that with the Delta variant is not 15 minutes, it's one second."

Three important measures to fight the variant are vaccines, masks and good ventilation.

People should think in terms of how much virus there is in the air, plus how long they might be in contact with that virus-laden air.

"So if you're indoors, there's not a lot of air dilution unless you're opening up windows and doing that sort of thing. When you're outdoors, it's almost infinitely diluted. And so outdoors, your risk is really low," Gounder said.

She added that opening windows at home works really well.

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Christy Henry had played it safe during the pandemic.

Wearing a mask in public and rarely coming into contact with others, the 56-year-old former nurse, who now works as a nursing instructor, resides in southern Missouri with her retired husband and children.

However, after Covid-19 vaccines became widely distributed in the spring, Henry and her family chose to not get inoculated. Henry said they felt because of their rural location and lifestyle, their risk of exposure was low.

But then she began to feel unwell about three weeks ago. "Never in a million years do you think it's going to happen to you," she said.

Her family did not have any Fourth of July gatherings and she is not sure how they got infected. But now, she and her husband, Lonnie, are in the hospital recovering from Covid-19.

While one of her six children also tested positive and avoided hospitalization, Lonnie is currently on a ventilator. Christy herself was intubated for at least two days.

Her doctor told her she is lucky to be alive, Christy told CNN from her hospital bed.

"Covid-19 is extremely, extremely serious," she said, urging everyone she knows to get vaccinated.

Henry is one of many dealing with Covid-19 amid a summer surge that has again strained hospital resources.

The difference in prognoses between those vaccinated and those who are not is also growing apparent. More than 97% of people who are entering hospitals for Covid-19 treatment are unvaccinated, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said at a White House briefing last week.

"There is a clear message that is coming through. This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated," Walensky said.

Driven in large part by the Delta variant that is believed to be more transmissible and dangerous, 48 states are showing a seven-day average of new cases at least 10% higher than the week before, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Howard Jarvis, an emergency medical physician in Springfield, Missouri, noted that the Delta variant's infection rates are being seen readily in area hospitals.

"I think this variant is just more severe than what we were experiencing previously," he said.

Getting ahead of the surge in Missouri

Roughly 40% of Missouri residents are fully vaccinated, according to the state Department of Health and Senior Services, a number that trails the national average of nearly 49%. Covid-19 cases within the state have risen about 18% in the last two weeks, and hospitalizations are up sharply since May.

As the number of cases tick higher, nurses and doctors once again find themselves on the frontline of the pandemic.

Kate Giacchi, a critical care nurse at the University of Missouri Hospital, said that staff are "mentally and physically and emotionally worn out" from dealing with Covid-19 for more than a year, with no relief in sight.

"The disease is real and it's killing people and it is preventable," she said.

As health care workers are at greater risk of contracting Covid-19 as more patients arrive, some facilities are requiring all employees receive Covid-19 vaccinations. The Mercy Health system in Missouri and neighboring states has set a deadline of the end of September for employee vaccinations.

"We've got a narrow window to basically sustain or get ahead of where we are right now," said Craig McCoy, president of Mercy Springfield Communities.

"As of this morning, we've got 172 people hospitalized which is our all-time peak," he told CNN.

Susan Dean, a retired health care worker in Missouri, is like those in the industry who are vaccine-hesitant. She told CNN she is wary of the long-term effects the vaccine may have, and did not agree with mandates at hospitals like those administered by Mercy that all health care staff be vaccinated.

"I don't think we know enough about the vaccine to say, 'This is what it does,'" she said.

Despite the efficacy of the vaccines that have been proven in clinical trials as well as real-world data, vaccination rates in Missouri and nationwide are lagging from spring highs, and officials are encouraging unvaccinated Missourians to receive their doses as quickly as possible.

"While the Delta strain is more contagious, the vaccine has been proven to be safe and effective against it," Gov. Mike Parson said on Wednesday. "We encourage all Missourians to consider getting vaccinated as almost all new Covid hospitalizations can be attributed to unvaccinated individuals.

"We understand that some Missourians are on the fence as to whether to get vaccinated or not, and that is a big decision for many families," he said. "That is why we encourage you to engage in conversation with your personal doctor, your local health care officials or other trusted community leaders so that you can get the facts and decide when getting vaccinated is right for you."

Christy Henry, who asks for continued prayers for the health of her husband, agrees.

"I'm going to tell everybody, everybody I know and I love," she said, "that you need to get vaccinated."

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As dozens of wildfires burn across the West, officials declared additional states of emergency for counties in California and Nevada while the nation's largest blaze in Oregon continued to swell Friday.

The Bootleg Fire in southern Oregon has scorched 401,601 acres since it was sparked by lightning on July 6, according to officials. It is 42% contained while more than 2,000 people in the surrounding areas remain under some form of an evacuation order.

"Our firefighters have put in an incredible amount of hard work on this fire," Joe Hessel, an incident commander for the Oregon Department of Forestry, said in a statement Friday. "The fire continues to throw challenges at us, and we are going to continue to stay vigilant, work hard, and adapt."

Extreme fire behavior by the blaze helped to create a tornado last weekend, according to a post on the Bootleg Fire Info Facebook page Saturday.

The July 18 tornado was confirmed with the Medford National Weather Service Forecast Office, the post said.

"Extreme fire behavior, dry fuels and unstable atmosphere" combined to form the tornado, according to the post.

Overall, crews are battling 88 wildfires throughout the US, with six new large fires reported Saturday, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

Nearly 22,000 firefighters and support personnel have been deployed to tackle the blazes, which have collectively burned more than 1.4 million acres, the agency says.

The climate crisis is making deadlier and more destructive wildfires the new normal, devastating homes, forcing thousands to evacuate and even destroying trees intended to offset carbon emissions.

Hundreds more fires are burning in the Canadian province of British Columbia, where a state of emergency was also declared this week.

In California, where eight fires are currently active, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday declared a state of emergency in four Northern California counties due to the hasty spread of flames.

Butte and Lassen counties are under states of emergency prompted by the state's largest blaze, the Dixie fire, the governor said in a news release. The Dixie and Fly fires have pushed officials to put Plumas County under the emergency declaration as well as Alpine County due to the Tamarack Fire, which straddles the California-Nevada border, he said.

By Saturday, the Dixie Fire had ballooned to 181,289 acres and was 19% contained, according to Inciweb. Nearly 4,200 firefighters and personnel were battling the fire.

Smoke from the blaze has moved into the area above the Tamarack Fire and, according to Inciweb, may impact Air Operations.

The Tamarack Fire has burned more than 65,000 acres and was 4% contained as of Saturday. The blaze also prompted Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak to put Douglas County under an emergency declaration on Friday.

Officials alarmed over delays on the Tamarack Fire

The handling of the Tamarack Fire has squared off local politicians and forestry officials.

It was initially allowed to burn because federal forest officials determined it wouldn't be a threat.

But they were wrong.

The fire has destroyed nearly 60,000 acres and at least 10 structures in California and Nevada.

Additional evacuations were announced Friday, bringing the total to 2,439 evacuees, according to InciWeb.

Nevada and California officials are questioning why the blaze wasn't tamed when it was sparked July 4.

In a letter to Forest Service Chief Vickie Christiansen dated Tuesday, California Rep. Tom McClintock -- who represents the rugged Sierra Nevada region where the fire was sparked -- demanded to know "why there was a lack of suppression action to combat the Tamarack Fire that began on July 4, 2021 until after July 10, 2021," according to a statement from his office.

On Tuesday, the Tamarack Fire crossed the state line and into Douglas County, Nevada.

And on Thursday, Nevada state Assemblyman Jim Wheeler, who represents that district, tweeted his disbelief.

"Firefighters doing everything they can to stop this monster. Still can't believe the USFS and Cal Fire let it grow from  acre when it was first discovered," he wrote.

The US Forest Service defended its decision, saying in a statement "The steep, rugged, and remote terrain presented challenges to safely suppress this wilderness fire" and added that resources were limited and had to be assigned to higher-priority fires, like the East Fork Fire.

On Thursday, Nevada also received a grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to fight the fire after requesting assistance earlier that day.

"At the time of the request, the fire threatened approximately 800 homes in and around Holbrook Junction," FEMA said Friday in a news release. "The fire also threatened a water treatment plant, power distribution lines and substations, cellular communications towers, and U.S. Highway 395."

Wildfire smoke compromises air quality for millions

The smoke from the hundreds of wildfires in both the US and Canada has had an impact on millions far from where they're burning

The smoke has traveled far and wide and is expected to continue causing health problems across the US.

The air quality in New York City, home to more than 8 million people, took a hit Tuesday when the smoke created a hazy skyline and gave it the city's poorest air in 15 years.

While air conditions in the Northeast significantly improved Thursday -- thanks to a cold front that pushed out some of that smoke -- millions in the Midwest and Southeast are still breathing air compromised by blankets of smoke that linger.

Many areas in the Northwest and Rockies, where the wildfires are burning, are also under air quality alerts.

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YES: The competition is the same.

LESS: It's not the same without fans.

NO: It was silly to stage them.

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As companies get back-to-business they are sharing the words supply chain a lot. We read news of chip shortages closing auto plants, and building supplies going short. We talked to Gary Dickes, owner of Prairie Side ACE Hardware, 3505 80th St., to get some insight into his business, and what this supply chain issue means to him. Gary spent 25 years working in manufacturing before opening a retail hardware store 10 years ago.

Its a concern, and affects nearly every industry we get products from. From toys to tools, from paint to lawn mowers, industry is struggling with getting back to work, Gary said.

I see three main issues, he continued. Shifts in demand, available material and labor, and transporting goods.

Is this the supply chain?

Gary explained: Not exactly, but these are all elements that affect it. Lets say you want to buy a cordless drill. The drill comes from Milwaukee, but the electric motor comes from Indiana. The neo-magnets come from China. The tool case is molded from plastic in Mexico. The batteries might be assembled in Ohio, but have lithium mined in Peru. All these components must be planned, ordered, built, and shipped. This is the supply chain. Lets not forget packaging, factory supplies, and labor for each step as well.
Mahone Fund Chairman Tim Mahone said the high school group represents the future musicians in Kenosha, and it is important for them to demonstrate their talent in front of our audience and get exposure to nationally renowned, Grammy Award-winning artists.

The partnership with the symphony will also include future performances at different venues in the community, Mahone said.

James Kinchen, a professor of music and the director of choral activities at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, is the musical adviser for the Mahone-Kenosha Symphony collaboration.

He said the partnership will help use music as an instrumentality that speaks to the diverse cultures and musical experiences among us.

Coming off a year of civil unrest and a worldwide pandemic, there is a major need to find a common activity that can be fun and healing at the same time, organizers of the partnership said.

A component of the Kenosha Community Foundation, the Mahone Fund provides educational opportunities for economically and academically deserving youth, while supporting healthy lifestyle initiatives in communities of color. The HarborPark Jazz, Rhythm & Blues Festival is a fundraiser for the Mahone Fund.
The broad outlines set, President Joe Biden's $4 trillion economic agenda now faces exhaustive, microscopic congressional scrutiny over its spending and finance particulars.

But its fate hinges on more visceral considerations. The new President's ability to push his massive plans through the House and Senate will not turn on precise levels of new child care subsidies or Congressional Budget Office revenue projections.

"That's window-dressing," observed Ben Nelson, a former Democratic senator from Nebraska who has lived through comparable legislative slogs. "Terms rarely kill a deal. It boils down to the will."

The will, that is, of decisive players to act on their convictions when political cross-winds grow fiercest. Details that emerge from painstaking closed-door haggling end up largely as justifications -- or excuses.

Currently the spotlight shines brightest on 11 Republican senators whose votes Biden needs to overcome a filibuster of their $1.2 trillion compromise with Democrats on physical infrastructure. Their willingness to strike that bipartisan deal reflects the broad political appeal of upgrading America's roads, bridges and broadband networks.

When final votes are cast, will that outweigh fear of attack from conservative constituents, colleagues and media outlets? The 11 have been wobbling -- over potential revenue sources, and before that, Biden's acknowledgment that their deal will smooth passage of a larger spending bill designed for passage with Democratic votes alone.

"Useful idiots for the Left," Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham sneered at them on Twitter last week. When Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer moved to open debate on the deal, all 11 voted no.

But they haven't abandoned cooperation yet. As negotiations continue, Schumer plans to hold another vote next week.

The deal will also test the resolve of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Rallying his party for 2022 midterm elections, the Kentucky Republican has declared comprehensive opposition to the priorities of his former Senate colleague in the White House.

But roadblock opposition is riskier than it was when McConnell unified Republicans against the national health care plan of America's first Black president a dozen years ago. Biden and his infrastructure agenda offer smaller political targets.

Few doubt McConnell could peel off enough Republicans to sink the package if determined to do so. Nelson, among other Democrats, expects him to try.

The GOP leader hasn't signaled as much so far, however, instead expressing patience as talks drag on. One longtime adviser told CNN that McConnell will be loath to undercut the members of his conference involved.

Democratic challenges

Democratic progressives face their own gut check.

Exuberant over regaining power this year, they want to pack the costlier Democrats-only bill with a major expansion of Medicare, immigration reform and perhaps even voting rights "infrastructure."

Their test is maintaining the discipline to govern when the sweep of their plans hits the limits of Democratic unity. In a party that still includes a sprinkling of moderate-to-conservative members, they need near-unanimity to pass anything at all.

Some crucial voices, such as the self-described democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, have displayed pragmatism. After first calling for a $6 trillion Democrats-only package, Sanders quickly embraced the $3.5 trillion consensus advanced by party leaders.

Winning will require others to follow his example. House liberals blasting the bipartisan bill as inadequate would have to vote for it or risk knocking Biden off his legislative tightrope.

The most conservative Democrats face similar cross-pressures.

Last November, Sen. Joe Manchin's West Virginia constituents backed former President Donald Trump over Biden by more than 30 percentage points. Efforts to combat climate change in the Democrats-only bill seek to hasten the demise of coal, a leading state industry, as an American energy source.

Yet West Virginia is among the poorest states. Subsidies for struggling families in Biden's agenda would benefit its residents significantly.

Would Manchin sink Biden's economic agenda to preserve his politically valuable reputation as a maverick? He didn't on the President's $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill, which also required all 50 Senate Democrats.

The White House and party leaders doubt he will on the two-part infrastructure package. But they can't be certain.

In 2009, Nelson held the same clout as the Senate considered the Affordable Care Act. Then-President Barack Obama needed every single Democrat.

The Nebraska moderate, and other holdouts, forced concessions. But Obama ultimately won all their votes.

"Do you want half a loaf, or no loaf?" reasoned the former senator, author of a forthcoming book titled "Death of the Senate."

The loaf that would become known as Obamacare emerged only because its namesake refused to stop pressing for a comprehensive national health care plan. Facing intense resistance, some Obama aides had suggested retreating to a smaller, more easily achievable goal.

The next few months will test Biden's will to do the same. He hasn't retreated yet.

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EUGENE, Ore. -- Lane County Fair officials reopened the fairgrounds, after a shooting earlier in the afternoon on Saturday.

Rachel Bivens, a manager at the fair, said law enforcement officers are working with fair security to ensure the safety of fairgoers.

Around 4 p.m., one person was shot and two were arrested following a fight, according to police. Police had originally reported two people were injured.

Witnesses report that a gun went off when one of the subjects was taken to the ground by security. They said it began as an altercation between two men and a shot ricocheted off the ground and struck a woman in the arm.

"He got put to the ground and they were wrestling over the gun, and the gun went off, it dropped, and a lady got hit, and everybody started running and fleeing," Daniel Pena said.

Another witness describes what he saw at the fair once word spread about a shooting.

"All of sudden, everybody just started yelling, there's a shooting, there's a shooting," said witness Bryan Clark. "Then a big mob started coming."

Gregg Bergen was in the petting area at the time and shared what was going through his mind.

"Honestly, it was kind of a surreal moment," Bergen said. "It's one of those things you think could never happen to you or be a part of something like that. For me it was just to get my family out of there."

Police said all parties have been accounted for and there is currently no ongoing threat to the public.

Stay with KEZI for the latest.
LINN COUNTY, Ore. -- The search for a 33-year-old Salem resident, Steven Vanpelt, who deputies say fell among extreme mountainous terrain while descending Mount Jefferson Friday morning continues.

A witness described losing sight of Vanpelt after he fell several hundred feet, officials said.

This happened around 11:45 a.m. Friday.

Marion County Sheriff's Office received the initial information and started sending resources to the area and planning for a rescue. Linn County Deputies responded as well and have led the search efforts with the Linn County Search and Rescue Team.

Officials said this area is extremely dangerous and requires technical mountaineers to traverse the mountainside. Vanpelt has not yet been located due to the terrain consisting of snow, cliffs, large boulders, crevices and rock scree.

Deputies have called for help from multiple teams throughout Oregon as teams exhaust themselves in the search effort. Corvallis Mountain Rescue, Eugene Mountain Rescue, Deschutes Mountain Rescue and Portland Mountain Rescue have all responded to the area for the search effort, police said.

Multiple flights have been conducted by LifeFlight and the United States Army National Guard through the days following the initial report.
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Callans Bridge Street will remain one way for at least another year, it has been confirmed - however local councillors are concerned that the towns bypass is becoming a race track.



At the meeting of Callan Thomastown municipal district, last week, Area Engineer Declan Murphy said a notice concerning Bridge Street will be published in the near future.

A brief is being prepared for the design consultants who will work on the Bridge Street/ Flaggy Lane public realm project, he added.



Mr Murphy also told councillors that he is currently liaising with Transport Infrastructure Ireland on the Callan bypass project. It is planned to widen the footpaths along the route.



Cllr Joe Lyons asked if cycleways could be incorporated into the design. He also asked if a turning filter lane could be added to the bypass at the Aldi turn into the town and if there was a possibility of making Chapel Lane one way from Green Street out to the bypass.



Commenting on the dangers of the bypass, Cllr Matt Doran said accidents and near ones continue to happen, day in day out.

He asked the engineer to try to alleviate the race track that is there.



Dangerous Road

Years ago the Piltown bypass was considered to be the most dangerous road in the area, now its Callan, Cllr Doran said.

Try to make that right hand turn safer. It beggars belief TII continues to look at it and not make it safer. Every single week we have an issue there, turning off the bypass on to West Street.



He said TII had told him there was a plan of works but he was still waiting for it. I hope we wont have many more tips and near misses.

The area engineer said he would bring the matter to the engineer liaising with TII.

Mr Murphy added that the one waying of Chapel Lane needs to be progressed.
Amy Tignor remembers the crowds that attended the Ozark Empire Fair's rides, concerts and livestock shows in past years.

A resident of Springfield, Missouri, since 2005 and the operations manager of a local brewery, Tignor said nothing could "drag her there" this year, even though she's fully vaccinated.

"As you're sitting in a crowd, six out of the 10 people around you probably haven't been vaccinated," Tignor told CNN. "And that just seems like a risk that I'm not willing to take."

Springfield, where the Ozark Empire Fair will be held July 29 to Aug. 7, is in Greene County, one of the state's Covid hotspots.

Mercy Hospital in Springfield recorded 148 positive Covid-19 cases as of Thursday, an all-time high, said Sonya Kullmann, spokesperson for the hospital. Greene County currently has 4,663 active cases as of Friday morning, according to its website.

The uptick in cases is caused by the fast-spreading Delta variant; 95% of those cases were in unvaccinated people, Kullmann said.

Greene County, with a completed vaccination rate of about 35%, has declared a local emergency. Missouri Gov. Mike Parson sent additional life support ambulances and medical staff to the area in preparation of rising cases.

But the fair, which will feature food, a Ferris wheel and an exotic petting zoo  marketed on its website as "summer's biggest party"  will not be canceled.

"Amusements around the country go on every day with way bigger attendance, in a lot more confined space than what we offer," Aaron Owen, general manager of the fair, told CNN. "I've worried about it all, I know (the Delta variant) is real. But farmers and agriculture folks put their livelihood at stake on this. There's lots of factors that we have to take into consideration."

The fair's planning committee, separate from city and county leadership, plans to have Covid-19 precautions in place, Owen said. These include social distancing and hand washing stations throughout the park.

He said people won't be required to wear face masks, though the fair website had outdated Covid-19 guidance with mask mandates that are no longer in place. The page was last updated in April.

Owen said he sold 70,000 tickets in 2020 and says he believes that there was no evidence of Covid spread, based on conversations he had with some vendors after the fair. More vendors will be in attendance this year than last.

Loverboy, a Canadian rock band originally scheduled to play at the fair, has canceled its appearance because of Canadian travel restrictions, according to KYTV.

In the meantime, the city of Springfield has canceled its own annual event, the Birthplace of Route 66 festival. Cora Scott, the city's public information director and an organizer of the festival, said expected attendance would have surpassed 65,000 people, with a parade that would have celebrated the efforts of healthcare workers during the pandemic.

"The Delta variant has basically knocked us on our heels," Scott said. "I was disappointed that our community was not at a point with vaccinations that we could have this celebration."

In the coming week, Mercy Hospital's data team projects positive cases will rise to around 190, Kullmann said. The hospital has converted six units into Covid-19 care units, she said.

"We're stretched at this point," Kullmann said.

Dr. Alex Hover, president of the Missouri State Medical Association, said he credits Springfield for canceling the Route 66 festival, and as a resident of Springfield, he won't be attending the Ozark Empire Fair.

"Hearing from the physicians on (hospital) staff, it's a great strain and the hospitals are certainly at maximum capacity," Hover said. "If the fair goes on and people are going to attend, we would strongly urge that they mask and try to adhere to social distancing as much as possible."

Nick Palmer lives in adjacent Lawrence County and has multiple chronic illnesses that put him at severe risk from Covid-19. Palmer said he's worried about the fair's impacts on hospitals and the availability of beds for people who don't have Covid.

"It reminds me of the movie 'Jaws,' when the mayor's like, 'The beaches will be open,'" Palmer said. "The priorities are messed up. They're more worried about keeping the fair going than about what will happen to the people that go there."

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated Amy Tignor's job title. Tignor is the brewery's operations manager.

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DES MOINES, Iowa (AP)  More than 100 people gathered outside the Iowa state Capitol Saturday to rally against mandates requiring people to get vaccinated against COVID-19, such as the ones some Iowa hospitals have issued.

One of the speakers at the rally, Republican state Rep. Jeff Shipley, called vaccine mandates a crime against humanity. The event was organized by a group called Informed Choice Iowa that opposes mandatory coronavirus vaccinations and vaccine passports.

Brei Johnson with that group told the Des Moines Register that she believes vaccinations should be discussed between a health professional and patient, not made a condition of employment.
The American Legion and Steel Horse Militia hosted the Soldiers Rock fundraiser event in Kasson on Saturday.

Sales proceeds from the event will go towards a gold star family monument at the Mantorville government center.

Live music, The Taco Lab food truck and a silent auction were all featured at the event.

Travis Bretzman is a member of the Steel Horse Militia and said the fundraiser was their way of giving back to veterans.

"Looking at veterans, as they have sacrificed so much for us, it is our part as citizens to give back and see if we can help them out," Bretzman said.

Color guard member Rodney Peterson said the construction of the monument will begin soon.

"We had the groundbreaking ceremony and they are going to start breaking ground here within the next couple of days. We are hoping to have it fully built and up and operational so we have a dedication in September for the Gold Star Families event," Peterson said.

For those that want to donate, they can through this link: https://woodywilliams.org/monuments/mantorville-mn.html
Yes

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(MARYVILLE, Mo.) A Maryville radio station is celebrating a big milestone today.

50 years ago KXCV-FM signed on the air in its current form.

The overall history of the station dates back to the early 1940s according to station manager John Coffey. It was originally located in the Administration Building at Northwest Missouri State University.

A celebration was held near the campus Saturday which marked a notable event in the station's history.

Today, the station is an affiliate of National Public Radio and continues to be a jumping-off point for students in communication fields at the college.

KXCV-FM can be heard in parts of Missouri, Nebraska, Iowa, and Kansas.
How do you feel about the dispute between the Sandwich Creamery and some of their neighbors about the use of the private road leading to the popular ice cream spot?
I havent seen a debate here at all, she said. I think, to our districts credit  and Im still trying to help them figure out how to do this best  but they are shifting to providing more like equity professional learning for teachers.

Officials at Racine Unified School District and Kenosha Unified School District could not be reached for comment.

Kenosha schools are comprised of 14.2% African-American students, 28.9% Latino and 48.7% white students.

Burlington, meanwhile, has a mainly white student student body, with 80.2% being white. Latino students make up 13.6% of the population, and just 1.4% of students are African-American.

Hagopian and Kitts-Lewinski both said students of all races and ethnicities should be able to see themselves in the curriculum. For Hagopian and the Zinn Education Project, that means allowing teachers the freedom to teach that way.

Well, you know, were supporting teachers right to teach about the fact that structural racism is real, Hagopian said. And thats not divisive at all. No, racism is divisive.
The call to shift focus from rescue to recovery is made by a medical doctor on staff from Mercy Walworth who operates through the City of Lake Geneva Fire Department and EMS.

The doctor takes into consideration the weather, water temperature, surface temperature and how long the victim has been in the water, Hausner said. He alerts the first responders when he has determined that the possibility of recovery of life has passed.

In this case, we knew that time was against us, Hausner said. And you have to turn your efforts to recovery and closure for the family.

Recovery operations

The July 13 incident was uniquely challenging because of the depth, Hausner said. Because it was not safe to send in divers, sonar technology was used to detect and locate the body.

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These camera-equipped sonars are either dropped from a boat or dragged behind it. They act as underwater radars, detecting shapes and objects. Even at 128 feet and in darkness these sonars provide clear vision to the operators.

At approximately 11:45 p.m. on Tuesday, law enforcement found and marked the body. They maintained contact until the next morning, when they could send down remote operated vehicles (ROVs) to recover the body.
Hereford breeders aim to improve their industrys future by offering four $800 stipends for youths to use at an upcoming sale.

Recipients may use funds to buy a calf at the Northeast Elite Hereford Sale scheduled for Saturday, Sept. 11, at Trowbridge Farms in Ghent, Columbia County.

The event, for breeders from New York, New England, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, was first held in 2019 and is making a comeback after being idled last year by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Most beef producers in this part of the country have off-farm jobs, said event co-chair John Wagner, owner of JKW Polled Herefords in neighboring Greene County.

We were very hesitant to have a sale in 2020 because so many people were losing their jobs left and right. If breeders were working off the farm, we didnt know if theyd have money to spend.

The inaugural sale in 2019 featured about 90 cattle and attracted more than 200 people.

We expect at least that number this year, he said. Cattle sales have been doing very well nationally.

That first event offered two youth stipends of $500 each, which went to applicants from Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. The program was so well received that donors have stepped up to expand the initiative by offering four awards totaling $3,200 this year.

Applications are currently under review by a three-member panel. Winners will be announced by Aug. 1.

Why Herefords?

The program is open to anyone 21 or under. Wagner said evaluators screen submissions without knowing the applicants age or sex, and no points are deducted if the applicants parents dont own cattle.

Were encouraging any youth, he said.

But youths would be expected to show the stipend-purchased cattle at events such as the Great New York State Fair.

On the application, theyre asked if they belong to one of the Hereford associations involved in the sale. Youths are also asked if they have leadership roles in groups such as 4-H or FFA, and if they plan to show their calf at local, regional or national events.

In addition, they must also submit a 250-word essay entitled, Why Herefords?

For Wagner, the answer is simple.

JKW Polled Herefords, which he owns with his wife, Kathi, is the outgrowth of a hobby that Wagner began pursuing with his father, Henry, as a teenager in the mid-1960s.

My father purchased Herefords because they were the predominant breed back then, he said. We could have switched to Angus in the late 1970s and into the 80s as most cattle farmers and ranchers did. However, both Kathi and I have always enjoyed the breed and felt it had a lot to offer. Clearly, the Angus breed has very significant traits and advantages over other breeds, which is why they are the predominant breed throughout the world.

However, Hereford cattle do have very positive traits and in the last 10 years theyve made tremendous strides through genetic mating and cattle evaluations, Wagner said. We continue to be very positive about the Hereford breed and are spending significant time and resources to support the national Hereford effort to improve breed performance.

Wagner organized the first-ever Northeast sale, which took two years to pull together by garnering support from New York Hereford Breeders plus Hereford associations in New England, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

I had to travel to all their annual meetings, Wagner said. Each of the associations except New Jersey had independently run production sales in the past, but with limited success. They dont have as many big herds as you do in Virginia, Texas, Oklahoma and Ohio.

By joining forces, the different groups can offer a high-quality sale that brings together the best cattle and many more interested buyers than they would alone.

All the animals for this years event are consigned, and organizers are in the process of finalizing the catalog with the American Hereford Association.

The event is held at Trowbridge Farms because of its facilities, built specifically for sales, and central location for participating associations.

Owner Phil Trowbridge is past president of the New York Beef Producers Association and the 20,000-member American Angus Association.

Wagner and other sale organizers are hopeful the youth stipends will encourage a new generation of Hereford breeders to follow in their footsteps.

The deadline for this years awards has passed. For information about next years program and the Sept. 11 Hereford sale, email Wagner at jkwpolledherefords@gmail.com
London, Jul 24 (PTI) A longer gap between first and second doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine generates strong antibody and T cell immune responses, UK researchers have found.

The study, led by the University of Oxford, in collaboration with the Universities of Birmingham, Newcastle, Liverpool, Sheffield, and supported by the UK Coronavirus Immunology Consortium, is one of the most comprehensive studies into the immune response generated by the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine to date.

The Protective Immunity from T cells to Covid-19 in Health workers study' (PITCH) found that T cell levels are well-maintained and antibody levels are higher following a longer interval between the first and second dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, despite a significant drop in antibody levels between doses.

The studies worldwide are showing that both the short and long dosing schedules lead to strong real-world protection against COVID-19, emphasising the importance of having a second dose of the vaccine.

Our study shows the value of studying both antibody and T cell responses following SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, particularly to understand the multiple mechanisms of protection there may be against new Variants of Concern, said Dr Thushan de Silva, study author and Senior Clinical Lecturer in Infectious Diseases at the University of Sheffield.

The longer dosing interval that the UK has adopted appears to result in higher antibody levels after the second dose when compared to the shorter interval. However, there is a significant drop in antibody levels during this extended interval, while T cell responses are maintained. What is very clear is that two doses are required to maximise protection, particularly against the Delta variant, Silva said.

The study found that overall T cell, a different type of immune cell, levels were 1.6 times lower with a long gap compared with the short dosing schedule of 3-4 weeks, but that a higher proportion were "helper" T cells with the long gap, which support long-term immune memory.

The study of 503 healthcare workers published on Friday found that longer dosing intervals resulted in higher neutralising antibody levels, after the second dose, against the Delta variant and all other Variants of Concern tested.

It found that following two vaccine doses, neutralising antibody levels were twice as high after the longer dosing interval compared with the shorter dosing interval.

Regardless of the dosing schedule, the study found levels of antibodies and T cells varied significantly from person to person, which may depend on genetics, underlying health conditions, and past exposure to COVID-19 and other viruses.

Our study provides reassuring evidence that both dosing schedules generate robust immune responses against SARS-CoV-2 after two doses. For the longer schedule, the antibody levels dropped off between first and second dose, which included the loss of any neutralising effect against the Delta variant," said Dr Rebecca Payne, study author from Newcastle University.

However, T cell responses were consistent, indicating they may contribute to important protection against SARS-CoV-2 during this time, Payne said.

After the second dose on the longer dosing schedule, antibody levels surpassed those seen at the same time point after a shorter dosing interval. Although T cell levels were comparatively lower, the profile of T cells present suggested more support of immune memory and antibody generation. We now need to carry out more follow-up studies to understand the full clinical significance of our findings, Payne said.

This work is the result of a big team effort. The study would not have been possible without collaboration between the researchers across all five universities. It has allowed us to bring clinical cohorts together and conduct one of the most in-depth analyses of the immune response to a COVID-19 vaccine yet, said Professor Susanna Dunachie, PITCH study lead from the University of Oxford.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Jerusalem, July 25: New data from Israel and the UK is showing a contradictory picture on the effectiveness of Pfizer-BioNTech's Covid-19 vaccine in fighting off the Delta variant, the media reported.

A new Health Ministry statistics from Israel indicated that, on average, the Pfizer-BioNTech shot is now just 39 per cent effective against infection, while being only 41 per cent effective in preventing symptomatic Covid-19.

Previously, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was well over 90 per cent effective against infection, reports The Times of Israel. Meanwhile, a new UK study published this week in The New England Journal of Medicine found the same vaccine to be 88 per cent effective in preventing symptomatic Covid-19 -- more than twice the rate found in the Israeli data. Indias Cumulative COVID-19 Vaccination Coverage Achieves Milestone, Total 43 Crore Vaccine Doses Administered So Far.

Israel's research agreed, at least, that the shot was highly effective in avoiding serious illness, at 91.4 per cent effectiveness, the report said. Some analysts have warned that the figures on vaccine effectiveness are prone to major inaccuracies because of a range of factors, including questions over whether there is accurate data on infection levels among the non-vaccinated, which is vital for such stats.

The Israeli statistics also appeared to paint a picture of protection that gets weaker as months pass after vaccination, due to fading immunity. People vaccinated in January were said to have just 16 per cent protection against infection now, while in those vaccinated in April, effectiveness was at 75 per cent.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Jul 25, 2021 03:02 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).
The serial torturer Rodney Alcala also known as the "The Dating Game Killer" died while waiting for his execution in California, at 77 years old. ABC News reported that the death of Alcala was confirmed by the authorities on Saturday.

It can be recalled that Alcala was given the title as he appeared as a winning contestant of the television game show "The Dating Game" in 1978.

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Officials from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation confirmed that Alcala met his deathbed at a hospital in San Joaquin Valley, California, NBC News reported. The outlet further noted that Alcala died at around 1:43 a.m. His cause of death was claimed to be of natural causes.

Associated Press reported that the California death row is located at San Quentin State Prison near San Francisco. However, Alcala was housed in a prison at Corcoran, where "The Dating Game Killer" received medical care and treatment around the clock. The outlet further noted that the prison where Alcala was booked was 200 miles away from the state prison of San Quentin.

California Serial Killer Rodney Alcala and His Death Sentence

It can be recalled that "The Dating Game Killer" was sentenced to death in 2010 for five slayings that all happened in California between 1977 and 1979. Alcala was reported to kill at least five individuals, including the 12-year-old Robin Samsoe in 1979.

ABC News underscored that Alcala was twice served with a death sentence for murdering Samsoe in 1980 and 1986. However, the said sentences were overturned in appeals, granting new trials.

Alcala's death sentence came after he represented himself in Orange County court. Matt Murphy, the prosecutor of the Orange County in California described "The Dating Game Killer" as a guy who hunts through Southern California "looking for people to kill because he enjoyed it.

The California Serial Killer's execution was postponed because of the moratorium on the death penalty introduced in the state in 2019.

California Serial Killer Rodney Alcala and His Victims

Apart from the 12-year-old Samsoe, several other individuals were reported as victims of "The Dating Game Killer."

In 1977, an 18-year-old and 27-year-old were murdered by Alcala. Authorities identified the victims as Jill Barcomb and Georgia Wixted, respectively. In 1978, the serial killer victimized the 32-year-old Charlotte Lamb, and in 1979, Alcala killed Jill Parenteau who was 21 years old at that time.

Alcala also pleaded guilty to the killings of women in New York, identified as Cornelia Crilley, and Jane Hover. The said killings happened in 1971 and 1977. In 2016, he was also charged by prosecutors in Wyoming for murdering Christine Ruth Thornton who disappeared in 1978 while she was six months pregnant.

Investigators noted that "The Dating Game Killer," who was known to be a successful photographer, would lure women and girls by asking them on the street and offer to take their pictures before attacking them. In 2010, authorities released photos of unidentified individuals, as well as pieces of jewelry believed to be trophies of some of his victims.

Before Rodney Alcala's death, "The Dating Game Killer" did not disclose if there were other victims. However, investigators noted that his true victim counts may never be known.

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Written By: Joshua Summers

WATCH: Rodney Alcala, So-Called 'Dating-Game Killer,' Dies in Prison Sartuday Morning - From CBS Los Angeles
Three Kildare breweries were recently announced as taking part in a nationwide initiative to promote Irish craft breweries with the launch of a new online Irish beer map.

The resource was created to highlight the abundance of quality, independent craft breweries that are located throughout the country and to generate public interest in beer provenance, by linking craft breweries to specific destinations. The map, which currently has 60 breweries listed is available to view at irishbeer.ie.

Kildare brews

Similar to wine terroirs in other countries, the Irish Beer Map has the potential to build provenance of Irish beers and to directly link breweries to distinct regions for residents and holidaymakers.

From Kildare, Rye River, Kildare Brewing Co. and The Dew Drop Brewhouse are taking part in the initiative.

Rye River Brewing Company from Celbridge was founded in 2013 by Tom Cronin. Tom had worked in the drinks industry for many years for some large beer brands and through this, he saw an opportunity to tap into quality, small batch, locally-produced beers as consumer trends pivoted to drink less but better.

The brewery prides itself on its relationship with local customers and giving back to the area. The brewery is a local employer in the area and has a partnership with the WRAP programme at St John of Gods. In addition to this, the brewery has also implemented sustainability measures on-site which include: Reducing the number of logistics required to produce 1 HL of beer, source raw materials, along with reducing the frequency of waste and spent malt collections.

Rye River Brewing Companys core product range includes the McGargles and the Rye River Brewing Co brands.

These include McGargles Double IPA, Rosies Pale Ale; Franks Lager, Session IPA, Neds Retro IPA; Grannys Red Ale. The brewery also produces the Rye River Brewing Co. Big Bangin IPA, Lil Twist Grapefruit Session IPA, Hop Drops Citra Extra Pale and Costal IPA.

Kildare Brewing Co., from Sallins, was founded in 2017. Founded by Barry Flanagan, the inspiration behind this brewpub came from the realisation that the range of mainstream beers that were widely available lacked flavour and had no provenance to the local area where they were made.

Kildare Brewing Co. has integrated into the vibrant community of Sallins, providing Kildare's first ever brewpub which is based along the beautiful and picturesque Grand Canal.

All of the malt used is by the brewery is sourced from Minch Malt, which is located further along the Grand Canal in Athy. This means customers can enjoy a flavoursome beer while looking into the brewery from where it was made.

Through brewery tours, the brewpub add to the tourist attractions in the town and it is also the main sponsor of Sallins GAA along with sponsoring a Green Mile along the Grand Canal.

Kildare Brewing Co.s core product range includes Chapel Lane lager, Electric Juice IPA, Railway Heist red ale, Soldiers Island pale ale and WeissMill weiss beer.

The Dew Drop Brewhouse from Kill was established in 2015. It is part of the The Dew Drop Inn establishment which was taken over in 2007 by Ronan Kinsella and Paul Lenehan who also own and operate Hartes of Kildare in Kildare town and Ashtons Gastropub in Clonskeagh, Dublin 6.

In 2012, the pair were inspired to set up their own brewery when drinking English ales and seeing the exciting world of craft beer expand. The brewhouses top priority is serving quality draught beer to locals, and it takes pride in being a prominent part of the Kill community which has resulted in its continued success.

The Dew Drop Brewhouses core product range includes 96 Oatmeal pale ale, Zither Vienna lager, No Fury helles lager, Scientists Love Lasers blonde, Sleepy Head oatmeal stout, Wise Up weiss bier, Fourth Power American amber and Toothless session pale ale.

The Irish Beer map aims to raise awareness of the vibrant Irish microbrewing industry and to encourage consumers to seek out local beers wherever they are. The Irish Beer map is created in conjunction with the Independent Craft Brewers of Ireland (ICBI) and is supported by Bord Bia. Craft breweries who are not yet listed on the map are asked to register interest using the website contact form.

Visit irishbeer.ie to discover independent breweries nationwide
Kildare gardai seized nearly 900 vehicles within the Kildare Garda Division last year for having no insurance, new figures show.

The figures were supplied to Kildare North TD Catherine Murphy by the Minister for Justice Helen McEntee through a parliamentary question.

The minister also said that 391 vehicles were seized for having no insurance up to June 30 this year  which could average out at under 800 for the entire year.

The minister said: As the Deputy will be aware, under the Garda Siochana Act 2005, the Garda Commissioner is responsible for the management and administration of An Garda Siochana, including the enforcement of road traffic legislation. As Minister for Justice, I have no direct role in these matters.

She added that she had been provided with the breakdown of the number of incidents where a vehicle was seized under section 41 of the Road Traffic Act in the Kildare Division, for driving without insurance, by garda authorities. The data was obtained from the PULSE system. available on 12 July 2021 and is liable to change.
Why is there such a bad odour coming from the seweage plant in Leitrim Village?

Cllr Paddy Farrell has called on Leitrim County Council and Irish Water to investigate and explain the bad smell in the Shannonside village.



A report to the meeting from Water Services stated the Council is not aware of any odour emanating from the wastewater treatment plant at Leitrim Village.

However, there is possibly odour emanating from the foul sewer network which we are going to investigate further. We have recently had some sections of the foul sewer network cleaned by the jetting contractor due to blockages caused by fats, oils and grease, the reply noted.



The Council will also be getting the foul sewer wastewater pumping stations that it manages cleaned in the near future.

Odour may also be emanating from private wastewater pumping stations but this is not under our control but we will establish this as part of the survey work.

It should also be noted that by the very nature of foul sewers there are going to be odours from time to time and households/premises that experience these odours should also have their own plumbing checked to ensure it has been installed correctly and is operating satisfactorily, the reply concluded.



Cllr Farrell said people who live in the village have highlighted this problem to him and as it is the middle of a very busy tourist season its not very nice to have to put up with.

He said it was not a problem from a household, it was outside, and at times he said the smell could be horrendous.

Cllr Sean McGowan supported the motion and said Leitrim Village is a tourist village and added it was not a good situation with people dining outdoors having to put up with this stench.

Cllr Finola Armstrong- McGuire agreed and said we cant live with that kind of thing while Cllr Des Guckian also supported the motion and said he was glad it would be investigated.
FIANNA Fail TD and Minister of State, Niall Collins has called on the local council to step up to the plate as a matter of urgency on the issue of pyrite in Limerick homes.

This issue has been advanced by other local authorities who are now included in the scheme, he said this week. And he has urged the council to expedite the matter and make a formal submission to be included in the governments remediation scheme. The onus is now on the council here to have the issue expedited, he said adding that he has contacted the council on the matter, and made them aware of number of householders affected across Limerick.

His comments come after Minister for Housing, Darragh OBrien revealed in the Dail that, while preliminary discussions have taken place between the council and the Department of Housing about pyrite problems in Limerick homes, no formal submission has been made on the matter,

And until this is done, the wait will continue for householders such as Anne Ryan and her brother Kieran, who live in neighbouring houses outside Askeaton and whose story was highlighted last month in the Limerick Leader.

The Governments original remediation scheme, which was extended to Limerick last year, does not address their concerns as it involves only the house foundations, Anne Ryan explained. In both their cases, the foundations are sound because the blocks came from a different source. It is the concrete blocks used in the walls that are defective and now crumbling.

But before the new scheme, the Defective Concrete Blocks Grants Scheme, could even be considered for Limerick, Minister OBrien told his colleague Minister Collins, Limerick City and County Council would have to conduct the same rigorous analysis as was carried out in Donegal and Mayo.

The council, Minister OBrien continued would have to first of all demonstrate that the purported issues in Limerick are in fact due to the presence of excessive amounts of deleterious materials (mica or pyrite) in the aggregate used to manufacture the concrete blocks. The council would also have to quantify the extent of the problem in the area.

We want things to start moving forward, said Anne Ryan, who is chairperson and founding member of the Limerick Pyrite Action Group.

Since setting up the group, she has become aware of at least 15 households experiencing problems with pyrite, she said. If you are on your own, you are going nowhere, she added. The group can be contacted on Facebook or on 086-3369420.
THERE is only one Limerick TD on a committee set up to scrutinise the legislation for the new executive mayor.

Independent deputy Richard ODonoghue, who opposed the setting up of the office ahead of its plebiscite in 2019, is the sole voice from the city or county in the group.

This comes in spite of Limerick being the only city in Ireland whose population accepted the proposal.

And it comes as some high-profile figures  including John Moran, a key member of the yes campaign  start to raise concerns as to how the role will look.

Top local economist Dr Stephen Kinsella said on Twitter we are being sold a pup in regard of the new office.

He pointed out that the new directly elected mayor will take over all executive powers from the councils chief executive  who will be known as a director general  minus specified functions.

The problem is that almost all functions are specified, said the Murroe man, Much of the curtailing is fair enough. For example, you don't want a mayor who can arbitrarily give someone a house, or quash a summons for a mate, or hire their cousin into the council. But you probably do want a mayor who can exercise some control over the broad direction of things like housing, transport policy, etc, who can designate some areas for housing, who can alter key management positions underneath them.

The economist added: In essence, the general scheme offers us a vision of the [elected mayor] as a golden retriever. Good looking, shiny, everyone likes them. But they have little to no power to get things done for people. The vision is mayor as mascot, or spokesperson, more than person who gets things done.

The concerns are shared by Mr ODonoghue, who said: The Directly Elected Mayor [legislation] as it stands currently is not what they looked for.

The whole idea of having a directly elected mayor was to mirror other countries in that they would have exceptional powers. But this is not the case with the directly elected mayor here now. It doesnt represent to me a good use of the tax payers money, said the first-time TD.

To this end, the former Fianna Fail councillor has an amendment put down for the next committee meeting to turn the plan into a cost-neutral exercise.

He has warned that without serious powers, it will be hard to select a candidates with a strong pedigree for the role

If there was a good candidate for the whole county they need a vision and need a budget with executive powers, he said, We could have a mayor for seven years. If youre having a mayor for this time, youd want to make sure you are getting a person who has the ability and vision to bring Limerick to a new level. The level in which John Kiely brought in the second half of the Munster final against Tipperary.

He also raised concerns over the six figure salary  135,000  for the new first citizen.

Why should we pay this, plus expenses, secretarial staff, a chauffeur, a car and an office. The department is spending tax payers money on this for the first two years. Then after it, it comes out of our local area budget which is basically what our existing mayors are doing at a cost of 50,000, said Mr ODonoghue.

Prior to the 2019 plebiscite, he said he openly told people that he was not in favour of the new directly elected mayoralty.

He said: What I said to people at the time was that we currently have a mayor who is rotating, which represents the people of Limerick. When we had this, we had candidates from Askeaton, the city, Newcastle West. You rotate it so it covers different areas. They are the mayor of Limerick city and county. Thats why the mayoralty should have stayed how it was. 
MARIA McSweeney, a recent graduate of Limerick College of Art and Design, is determined to use her creativity to good, social, effect.

As a young woman whose art-work has a definite, political, tenor, her latest project, The Dp postcard project is aimed at raising awareness about Direct Provision centres. She also hopes that it will raise money for MASI, the Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland.

It is based around incidents that have happened in Direct Provision centres over the years, Maria explains. These incidents, reported in various newspapers, she has put on postcards and reproduced in a booklet that is now for sale.

When you see them all together, you see the problems in the system, she explains. You see there are a lot of injustices happening.

As an art undergraduate at LCAD, Maria says a lot of her work was politically situated but last year, she made contact with a voluntary organisation aimed at supporting asylum seekers called Consider a Cake, where volunteers bake a cake for the various celebrations that take place within Direct Provision centres. It could be a birthday, or St Patricks Day or Easter, explains Maria.

As a baker herself, Maria got involved and through talking to other volunteers came to a deeper understanding of what life is really like for asylum seekers. After the Mother and Baby Home revelations, I found a parallel that they are still institutionalising people in Ireland, she says. I wanted to look into it further and make more people aware.

As part of the undertaking, Maria also sent the postcards to the Minister for Justice. I havent got a response yet. I dont know if I will. I just wanted to be actively doing it, she says. It might inspire people to write as well. Small little changes can create a big change.

Currently, there are over 7,000 people living in 44 Direct Provision centres and 36 emergency accommodation settings around the country. Almost 1,100 of these are children.

Originally from Co Cork and now based in Limerick, Marias main medium is photography, experimental photography, but she often combines that with the written word.

You can acquire your copy of The Dp postcard project by emailing Maria at MariaMcs112@gmail.com or on Instagram on mariamcs__photography or through her Facebook page. Each booklet costs 10, with 7 euro going straight to MASI and 3 to cover print and post costs.
Chris Tun first fled Myanmars brutal military regime in 1989 as a student activist. He returned nearly a quarter-century later as a U.S. citizen and an executive at a global company, aiming to help foreign businesses set up in the country as it embarked on a historic shift toward democracy.

The door was open," Mr. Tun said. We had to go back, we had to help."

When Mr. Tun, 50, arrived in 2013 as a director at Deloitte Consulting (Myanmar) Ltd., the professional-services provider, the country was celebrating a new beginning after half a century of military repression and international isolation.

The democratic transition that had begun by 2011 was in its early stages, but many were hopeful of a better future. The U.S. lifted sanctions, garment factories opened, tourists streamed in, millions of citizens came online and exiles such as Mr. Tun returned.

This year, it all fell apart. The army staged a coup in February, taking the nation back to authoritarian rule. As security forces arrested hundreds of people and shot protesters, Mr. Tun decided he had to leave again, another stage in a personal journey that has mirrored the shattered promise of his native country. Many other expatriate workers and citizens have left the country, as foreign companies scale down operations amid a broader economic collapse.

There was a lot of hope that these people didnt want to go back into the stone ages," Mr. Tun said of the generals leading the military junta.

Before Mr. Tun first fled in 1989, he was part of a wave of student demonstrations against military rule. The rolling protests were suppressed with brutal force, as security forces fired on demonstrators and arrested their leaders. Some, like Mr. Tun, were forced into hiding and exile.

Mr. Tun traveled to Thailand, then Singapore, where he signed up for a computer programming course while working night shifts in a plastics factory. He met his now-wife, Ruth, while studying there, and they moved back to Myanmar together in 1997. In Myanmar, Mr. Tun started a business developing computer software, but he said he found himself under pressure to collaborate with people who were working with the military junta. He left again in 2001, this time for the U.S., where a community of Myanmar exiles helped him get asylum.

Living in Daly City, Calif., he worked for a while for a U.S. consulting firm on technology projects, and eventually took a job in 2008 with Deloitte, where he took on assignments such as helping to build a centralized data warehouse for a U.S. federal agency.

By 2012, Mr. Tuns work frequently took him to Washington, D.C., where a friend introduced him to U.S. business and government officials who wanted to know more about the democratic shift under way in Myanmar, he said.

After five decades of authoritarian rule, the country was opening up as the military sought to end Western sanctions and reduce their reliance on China. A nominally civilian government took power, freeing political prisoners and withdrawing some media restrictions. The U.S. began lifting sanctions in the hope of a democratic transition.

American companies saw an opportunity. In 2012, Mr. Tun helped coordinate a trip with dozens of business executives from U.S. companies including Chevron Corp., arranging meetings with members of Myanmars parliament and local businesses. The U.S. executives left excited, telling Mr. Tun that Myanmar had the potential for growth for 20 years, he said.

Myanmar was the shiny new coin," said Frances Zwenig, a former executive at the U.S.-ASEAN Business Council, a trade group, who helped coordinate the trip with Mr. Tun.

Senior partners at Deloitte in Asia asked if Mr. Tun would move back to Myanmar to help establish a local consulting unit to assist foreign businesses seeking to enter the country. Mr. Tun jumped at the chance.

He, like others, represented the promise of a new Myanmar that was springing forth," said Derek Mitchell, who from 2012 to 2016 served as the first U.S. ambassador to Myanmar in more than two decades.

For the next eight years, Mr. Tun had a front-row seat as changes swept his country. Elections in 2015 brought the pro-democracy political party of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi to power and hundreds of new lawmakers were sworn in, including former political prisoners. Mr. Tun organized training sessions for some, one of which was on how to assess the prospects of a Chinese-backed port project involving substantial amounts of debt, he said. Myanmars democratically elected government later pushed to reduce the scale of the port project.

Eventually, he moved on from Deloitte, working as an executive at a conglomerate with interests including cement manufacturing, hotels and gas stations, before taking a job in 2019 at one of the countrys largest privately owned banks to direct digital banking. Online transactions were booming in Myanmar as millions of people gained cellphone and internet access.

The exciting times were short lived.

On the morning of Feb. 1, he was leaving home for work when his wife, who was watching the news on TV, yelled out that the army had seized power. Mr. Tun was shocked, but hoped this was a temporary power play by the military.

Mr. Tun worked with others to arrange back-channel discussions between business and political officials close to the military and members of Ms. Suu Kyis political party, he said. Ms. Suu Kyi herself was detained, along with other senior government officials. I was hopeful that this was a misunderstanding that could be resolved," he said.

The military doubled down. The talks sputtered when security forces cracked down violently against protesters, according to Mr. Tun and another person, who helped coordinate the negotiations and is now in hiding from the military in Myanmar.

Dozens of pro-democracy leaders, some of whom Mr. Tun said he had been close to, were detained. A protest movement emerged and included employees in the banking sector, who were determined to boycott work and pressure the junta by shutting down the financial system.

Mr. Tun went to the office most days so that when military officials called, he could tell them he was maintaining operations as best he could, he said. In reality, he didnt have much to do, as the military had largely shut down the internet, effectively killing online banking, he said.

Friends who had fled the country called from Thailand, warning he could be at risk of arrest because he was close to detained government officials and pro-democracy activists.

On the streets, the military was using lethal force, killing dozens of protesters. Strikes paralyzed the ports and factories emptied out as workers took to the streets. Late in March, a young employee at his bank who joined the protest movement was shot dead by soldiers, Mr. Tun said, hardening his resolve to leave.

In mid-April, Mr. Tun and his wife made their way to the international airport in Yangon, Myanmars largest city, with few belongings other than their clothes, laptops and their pet dog, Carly, he said. They stood apart at check-in and immigration, where Mr. Tun thought he was at most risk of being plucked out of line and arrested. He was waved through.

As the flight took off, he and his wife exchanged a high-five. In mid-May, after a few weeks in Singapore, Mr. Tun arrived in Pleasanton, Calif., to begin a new life. He founded a software-development firm that will work with startups to grow their businesses.

Of his dreams of helping Myanmar transform, he said: I cannot even think of it."

This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text









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In his address at the first public event in Assam after victory in the assembly elections, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said the BJP is strengthening its base in the North East region.

The formation of the BJP government in Assam for the second time means that Assam has permanently rejected terrorism, riots and is moving towards development, Shah said.

Today, Amit Shah launched and laid the foundation stone of various development projects of Assam in Guwahati.

While addressing the public event, Shah said, "BJP is strengthening its base in North East. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's leadership has been accepted by everyone."

Lauding the efforts of former and current Assam Chief Ministers, Shah said, "For the last five years, the way the duo of former Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal and current Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has run the government, people of Assam have preferred the path of development. Himanta Biswa Sarma is the new CM as he preferred the path of development. I congratulate the Assam Ministers, CM Sarma as they mark BJP's second consecutive innings in state."

Targeting the opposition, Amit Shah hailed Prime Minister Narendra Modi's new Cabinet and highlighted the Centre's priorities towards the north-eastern region.

"Since independence, not once have five ministers from North East been selected in Cabinet. This was done for first time in PM Modi's Cabinet. This shows where North East stands in BJP and PM Modi's priorities. We want to increase North East's contribution in development," said Home Minister Amit Shah.

Shah also said, "PM Modi has started a new development road in North East. He has visited the region 35 times in 7 years! No other PM has travelled to the region so many times."

Appreciating Assam's heritage and culture, Shah said, "BJP wants to protect and preserve Assam's language, its heritage, and its culture. BJP believes that the languages, dialects, cuisines, and other such traits are India's jewels and we need to preserve them."

"Under PM Modi, the Bodoland Agreement was done. We have already met 90 percent of the conditions of the agreement," Shah said.

"We've already given land in 9 areas out of the 14 demanded under the Bru-Reang Agreement, and before 2022, 35,000 Bru families will get land to live, food grains, pension and respect as Indian citizens," Shah said.

Last year, in January 2020, Amit Shah had presided over the signing of a historic agreement between the Government of India, Government of Assam and Bodo representatives in New Delhi to end the over 50-year old Bodo crisis. Further, a permanent solution has been found out for the problem that has cost the region over 4,000 lives.

With this Bodoland agreement, over 1,500 armed cadres gave up violence and joined the mainstream. A Special Development Package 1500 crores over three years was given by the Union Government to undertake specific projects for the development of Bodo areas.

"The fruition of this vision can also be seen in the Bru-Reang agreement signed on January 16, 2020 to end the humanitarian crisis in Meghalaya and Tripura, recent surrender of 644 armed cadres in Assam and surrender of 88 armed NLFT cadres in Tripura to bring them to mainstream, in addition to this agreement," Shah had said last year.

This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Only the headline has been changed.

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The Baker Day explosion at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, as recorded by an automatically operated camera on a nearby island. Notice the mushroom cloud forming immediately after the explosion. (Image credit: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)

When a bomb goes off, energy is shot out indiscriminately in all directions. So, instead of an expanding ball of fire, why do nuclear explosions result in mushroom clouds?

Although the outburst of energy does initially form a sphere of hot air, that's only the beginning of the story, according to Katie Lundquist, a researcher of computational engineering at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Because hot air rises, the larger bulk of the sphere in the middle column  where the core of an apple would be  experiences more buoyancy than the edges do.

"The way that a sphere is shaped, you have the largest column of the low-density fluid in the middle, so that rises the fastest," like the middle of a cupcake rising in the oven, Lundquist said. (Although in vernacular English we tend to use "fluid" and "liquid" interchangeably, for scientists, the term "fluid" can refer to either a liquid or a gas; both lack a fixed shape, are able to flow and can be described by the same suite of mathematical equations, according to Lundquist.)

Related: How many atoms are in the observable universe?

Although the entire sphere rises, because this middle column elevates with greater urgency, the cooler air outside the sphere begins to "rush in below the bubble that's rising," Lundquist told Live Science.

This causes the rising bubble to distort into a torus, or doughnut shape. And because hot air molecules move around rapidly in their energized state, bouncing off each other at high velocities, they end up creating so much space between themselves that they form a near vacuum. There's "this jet of material that's being sucked into the vacuum that's pushing up, and so that forms the mushroom cloud on the top and the flatter area within the torus on the bottom," Lundquist said. This jet, which sucks up dirt and debris, forms the stem of the mushroom even as it feeds into the mushroom cap.

This diagram shows the direction in which fluids move following a nuclear explosion. (Image credit: Wikimedia Commons; (CC SA 1.0)

Nuclear bombs dropped during wartime and scientific experiments show that mushroom clouds can form on Earth, but what about in space? If the moon were nuked, would a mushroom cloud occur? Lundquist said the answer is "no."

"You need an atmosphere so they can have that fluid material," such as air, she said. "It's not going to happen in a vacuum." The moon's airless environment would have no way of distorting the initial sphere into a torus, and there would be no difference in air densities to suck up that pillar of material to grow the cloud.

Just as there are different species of mushrooms, there are varieties of mushroom clouds. Depending on the explosive yield of the bomb and the height at which it goes off, the resulting mushroom cloud will have different features. Explosions like the ones that took place over Hiroshima and Nagasaki , Japan, at the denouement of the second world war had two main parts. One part comprised the billows of white cloud above, made from the vaporized products of the bomb itself and condensing water from the surrounding air. The other part was a stem of brown material and debris stretching up from the ground. But the two didn't quite make contact, as you can see in the below photo.

The nuclear bomb attack against Nagasaki, Japan on Aug. 8, 1945. (Image credit: Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

There's "a very distinct white cloud, and then a brown below that," Lundquist said. The cap and stem on these clouds did not meet, because the bombs were detonated high up, nearly 2,000 feet (610 meters) aboveground. And although they wrought devastating amounts of damage, they were quite weak compared with later-made weapons, exploding with the force of around 20 kilotons of TNT or less, according to the U.S. Department of Energy . (On the other end of the spectrum, the Soviet Union's Tsar Bomba had a yield of 50,000 kilotons of TNT.)

Among the tested nuclear bombs that were stronger and/or exploded closer to the ground, the stem and cap merged into the classic mushroom profile, Lundquist said.

Lundquist and her lab colleagues study these effects so that, in the event of a nuclear crisis, they would be able to "know where the radiological particles are to correctly predict fallout and then provide guidance on consequence management that would protect public health."

While the threat of nuclear doomsday is real, the combined arsenals of the world contain nearly 10,000 nuclear bombs, down from over 60,000 in the 1980s, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists .

Originally published on Live Science.
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Hong Sangsoo characters have a habit of  you might even say a genius for  diffidence in the face of profundity. In that way, theyre very like the films in which they appear: outwardly casual, slight, polite, holding pain and truth and existential observation in check with an airy gesture, a sad smile or, in In Front of Your Face, the South Korean auteurs second film this year (after the Berlin-awarded Introduction), an unexpected peal of utterly genuine, soul-repairing laughter.

Certainly, Sangok (the luminous Lee Hyeyoung, who, like her character, gained considerable fame in South Korea decades ago but has not acted much recently) laughs at the strangest moments. A merry, musical gurgle bursts from her after she drunkenly shares her most painful secret  one she has not even confessed to her sister  with a relative stranger, whose sobbing response is much more appropriate. And again, at the very end of this wonderful, winsome tale, when the potentially important grace-note opportunity shes been offered evaporates over a single phone message, Sangok dissolves into an infectiously rueful, joyful belly laugh. One way to rob cruel fate of its triumph is by showing that despite its dispensing life and death, it is powerless over your mood.

Sangok is a well-known 90s actor who is now living in the States but has returned to Seoul for a visit. Shes staying with her sister Jeongok (Cho Yunhee)  whom she discovers she does not know terribly well  and has a loose plan to meet up with a celebrated Korean director (one of Hongs frequent stand-ins, Kwon Haehyo). During her stay, she breakfasts with Jeongok, sneaks a cigarette under a bridge, stains her blouse at a noodle shop and visits the house where she used to live, which is now a boutique. The encounters are banal, the dialogue eccentric, halting and very Hong Sangsoo. And yet not so, because we have already heard fragments of Sangoks occasional internal monologue  a flourish not typical of Hong  and these little poetic shards of observation have helped us guess the nature of Sangoks secret, even though its not till two-thirds through that she states it aloud.

It can be difficult, when discussing Hongs films, to sort the stand-alone virtues of the work in question from the manifold pleasures gained from a compare-and-contrast critique of the movie as a fragment of a greater whole, a riff on prevailing themes. But while In Front of Your Face presents that dilemma as well, it is . Instead there is an unusual emotional directness to this film, which is perhaps more intimately involved with one remarkably sympathetic womans internal journey than any of his since the 2017 Berlin Silver Bear winner On the Beach at Night Alone. Even there, the story was silvery opaque and oblique; here, it is simple and possesses what can only be called a hook, not something that Hong films can traditionally boast.

The drinking scene between Sangok and the director is a case in point of the minor altered detail marking a demonstrably different atmosphere. Where theres usually soju, here there is Chinese liquor. And where there are normally conversational games and gambits about memory and misremembering, and sly, easily retracted flirtations, here theres an almost overt courtship happening underneath the surface exchanges, even before Sangok asks bluntly, You want to sleep with me, dont you? and the director confesses he does.

With Hong wearing all available hats  as he has been doing increasingly  as writer, director, editor, composer and cinematographer (his partner and muse, Kim Minhee, does not appear on-screen but gets a line producer credit), we know its not by accident that even the shooting style is keyed to a slightly different register. Many of Hongs recent films have been monochrome, or of such a deliberately blanched palette that they might as well have been. But In Front of Your Face features vivid pops of color: green grass, a red top, a bright blue umbrella  that burst out like Sangoks enlivening bouts of laughter.

At one point, Sangok and the director are caught in a downpour and share a cigarette. She wears a trench coat. They juggle an umbrella. The alley is narrow, and at the far end a turquoise shutter frames them. It is an assemblage of Hong elements viewed from a moving point, and for a second, it fleetingly coalesces into an achingly romantic Wong Kar Wai composition. And then it flies apart again, the way all things do, the way all promises made rashly under the influence of alcohol are broken in the sober light of morning. Its a melancholic observation, but Hongs film and his radiant star are not made for melancholy, and so instead they laugh  at the absurdity of hoping for some castle in the air when theres so much life all around you, always, right in front of your face.

Reviewed in Cannes Film Festival (Cannes Premiere), July 16, 2021. Running time: 85 MIN. (Original title: Dangsin-Eolgul-Apeseo)

Running Time: 85 MIN.

Production

(South Korea) A Jeonwonsa Film Co. Prods. production. (World sales: FineCut, Seoul.) Producer: Hong Sangsoo.

Crew

Director, screenplay, camera, editor: Hong Sangsoo.

With

Lee Hyeyoung, Cho Yunhee, Kwon Haehyo, Shin Seokho, Kim Saebyeok, Ha Seungguk, Seo Younghwa, Lee Eunmi, Kang Yiseo, Kim Siha. (Korean dialogue)

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Jackie Mason, the stand-up comic whose career spanned several decades and became a template and poster child of sorts for Jewish self-deprecation, died Saturday at New Yorks Mount Sinai Hospital the age of 93. His friend, lawyer Raoul Felder, confirmed Masons death to the New York Times.

He died peacefully with several close friends and family at his side, Felder told CNN, adding that he had been hospitalized for two weeks with breathing difficulties.

My humor  its a man in a conversation, pointing things out to you, he told the Times in 1988. Hes not better than you, hes just another guy. I see life with love  Im your brother up there  but if I see you make a fool out of yourself, I owe it to you to point that out to you.

One of the best, tweeted Gilbert Gottfried.

Mason built his career out of political incorrectness, with his Jewish-themed humor, social commentary and pseudo-angry persona earning him a spot on Comedy Centrals 100 Greatest Stand-Ups of All Time. Mason had originally become a rabbi in a career that appeared preordained: his father, grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfathers had all become rabbis alongside Masons three older brothers. Despite completing his rabbinical studies and heading congregations, Mason knew early his true calling was in comedy. Somebody in the family had to make a living, he told Jewish News in 2015. Every night on stage I feel like I am standing up and giving a sermon to my people so its quite similar.

My parents never knew I was a comedian; my father was an orthodox rabbi who felt that all his sons should also become rabbis, he said in 2015. Being a comedian would be tantamount to being a murderer so to protect him I never told him. His style unabashedly drew from his Jewish upbringing. I find it hard to be told (as I often used to be) that I was too Jewish, he said in 2015. This is like saying to a bear, You have too much fur.'

Mason began his comedic career in the mid-1950s appearing throughout New York nightclubs and resorts in the Catskills, the then-bustling area of upstate New York that produced scores of famous comics. He expanded his audience via national appearances on The Tonight Show and The Ed Sullivan Show and through two albums: 1962s I Am the Greatest Comedian in the World Only Nobody Knows It Yet and 1963s I Want to Leave You With the Words of a Great Comedian.

It was The Ed Sullivan Show that brought Mason both fame and infamy: During an October 1964 episode, Mason  who was in the midst of a multi-episode contract that paid him $7,500 per monologue  was signaled off-camera by Sullivan to speed up his routine, as the show was about to be preempted by a live speech from then-President Lyndon B. Johnson. Mason, in turn, mentioned the signaling during his routine.

The studio audience laughed and I started making jokes about fingers, Mason told the New York Times in 1964. The comedian then, allegedly, pulled out his middle finger. Pointing in different directions, Mason said, Heres a finger for you and a finger for you and a finger for you.

Sullivan immediately banned Mason from the show for the obscene gesture onstage, as well as insubordination and gross deviation from material agreed upon. Masons contract with the Ed Sullivan Show was also terminated, resulting in a lengthy lawsuit between the host and the comedian. While the two later made amends, Mason cited the incident as near-career killing, with the comedian then considered, for the time, an obscene comic. I had no obscene thoughts in my mind, Mason said following the episode.

Masons career spiked in the 1980s thanks to the popular Broadway show The World According to Me (earning Mason both a Tony and Emmy) and his appearance as the obnoxious Jack Hartounian in Caddyshack II. He returned to Broadway in 1990 with his new show Brand New and performed in six different Broadway shows in total, including 1994s Politically Incorrect and 1996s Love Thy Neighbor.

Ladies and gentlemen, you cant please everyone, he said in The World According to Me. Take my girlfriend  I think shes the most remarkable woman in the world Thats me But to my wife

In 1992, Mason won an Emmy for his role of Rabbi Hyman Krustofsky, the disappointed father of Herschel Shmoikel Pinchas Yerucham Krustofsky, aka Krusty the Clown, on The Simpsons; the role mirrored Masons own life, as he  like Krusty  was the son of a rabbi who turned to comedy instead of the Talmud. (Mason would return to the role in numerous subsequent episodes.) I feel like Krusty, Simpsons writer Al Jean wrote on Twitter. We will very much miss Jackie Mason.

Doing comedy and finding new material is very easy for me, he said in 2015. I am an avid reader, I get through at least four newspapers a day and I am a TV news junkie so by the end of the day  with the world in such disarray  it is very easy to find humor in a dozen situations.

Additional reporting by Daniel Kreps

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The documentary "Ailey," opening nationwide in theaters Aug. 6, is a long-overdue portrait of the modern dance pioneer.

Alvin Ailey died in 1989 at age 58, but, significantly, much of the Insignia Films documentary was filmed in 2018 at a New York dance studio near a street named Alvin Ailey Place. As we watch a new generation of Ailey dancers taking direction from hip-hop choreographer Rennie Harris, it's as though Ailey never really left; he and his company have always evolved to meet the times.

At the time, Harris had been commissioned "out of the blue" by Robert Battle, artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, to create a work about Ailey for the 60th anniversary of the company, founded in 1958. We see him focusing intently in a screening room, watching and re-watching archival footage of Ailey, as he worked to create what would become "Lazarus."

"I just sit there and watch," Harris says, "to find out what made Mr. Ailey Mr. Ailey."

What did make Mr. Ailey Mr. Ailey? The director Jamila Wignot grapples with this question, too, in this compelling film about the legendary dancer, director and choreographer - the one who brought Black culture into the dance mainstream. The documentary premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival.

Given Ailey's stature and enduring impact, and given that he died more than three decades ago, it's a wonder that the question is still being asked. The Ailey company has performed on six continents for millions of people. Ailey's masterful 1960 ballet "Revelations," which draws on the sorrows and jubilation of African American spirituals, gospel and blues from the "blood memories" of his Texas childhood, is considered a cultural treasure. It's been said to be the most widely seen modern dance work in the world.

"They wouldn't let us off the stage," former Ailey dancer Hope Clarke recalls in the film, describing a performance in Europe. "It was about 80-some bows that we had to do. I've never seen people stand up and take their shoes off and hit the wall! No matter what we did, those people would not go home."

But Ailey's artistic legacy is more than the sum of the dances he created, searing though they are. It derived from his early years during the Depression, growing up Black in small-town Texas without a father, picking cotton with his mother when he was just 4 years old, sometimes going hungry.

"I mean, if you were Black, you were nothing," Ailey says in a segment of a rarely heard audio interview with journalist A. Peter Bailey that was recorded over 20 hours shortly before the choreographer died. "I remember seeing my mother on her knees scrubbing these White folks' rooms and homes."

Listening to his recollections, paired with moody and evocative archival footage of the Deep South, it's clear that Ailey was destined to dance. It's as though dance moves unfolded from his DNA. When he describes his rural childhood, it's in terms of movement and the placement of bodies in space. He speaks of "people moving in the twilight," "being glued to my mother's hip, sloshing through the terrain, branches slashing against a child's body ... looking for a place to be."

When Ailey was 12, his mother moved to Los Angeles to work in the aircraft industry and sent for him a few months later. As a teenager, he was drawn to dance and theater, although he never saw Black dancers or actors onstage - "nobody to model yourself after." Until he was 15, that is, and Katherine Dunham's company came to town. Ailey was gobsmacked.

"I couldn't believe there were Black people on the legitimate stage," he says. "I was just taken into another realm."

And he remained in this realm until he died, sacrificing everything to dance, embracing a mission that was revolutionary for his time. Ailey created a racially diverse company with all body types to celebrate, honor and reflect Black traditions and experiences. He very consciously created dance not for the elite, but for "the man in the street."

"Choreography was his catharsis," says Sarita Allen, a former Ailey dancer and one of more than a dozen dancers, directors and choreographers who shared stories about Ailey, including Judith Jamison, chosen by Ailey as his successor before he died; Battle, who took over in 2011; and guest choreographer Bill T. Jones.

Ailey's work also was lonely and exhausting, occasionally leading him to dark and destructive places. He let few people in - literally. Even close friends never saw the inside of his apartment.

Although not a dancer herself, Wignot, the film's director, is "a huge Ailey fan" who first saw the company perform when she was a college student in Boston in the 1990s. So when Stephen Ives and Amanda Pollak of Insignia Films approached her about directing a film about Ailey's life, she jumped at the opportunity.

At first, Wignot says, making a film about Ailey was just an idea, with a lot of unknowns: How much of him could be in the film? What material would be available to her? Who would tell the story? Most critically, how could she tell the story through Ailey's eyes?

"I wanted to know where this work emerged from, what experiences affected him," she says. "I wanted to know what was feeding him, as an artist, and a person."

Fortuitously, the Ailey company made Bailey's tapes available, and Wignot used them as a narrative device, as a sort of gritty audio equivalent of grainy footage. She also accessed tantalizing black-and-white footage of early dances, including scenes of the muscular and magnetic Ailey at a young age, and she wove in archival material that imagined and evoked his life and thoughts.

Given the enduring and kinetic nature of Ailey's work, the film called out for a contemporary element. "It needed to be a living, breathing entity," Wignot says. "Ailey was sensitive and vulnerable but very alive to the world."

In a "moment of serendipity," she says, when they first approached the company, Battle told them they'd just commissioned the Harris work. "Ailey" intercuts footage of rehearsals for "Lazarus," which addresses racial inequities Ailey faced throughout his life.

"I think the film really resonates today," Battle says. "We see some of the same conditions today, in terms of the racial upheaval, the bigotry, the hate, the injustice that in a way was the starting point for him wanting to have a company in the first place.

"The arts are the artifacts of human survival. And so this film offers us another point of view - that if (Ailey) could do it, then why can't I? We can't all be Alvin Ailey, but we can tell our story. We should tell our story, knowing we could liberate someone else."
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Travis Scott premiered a new song apparently titled Escape Plan during his headlining set at Day Two of the Rolling Loud Miami festival on Saturday night. Scott had teased the song and video earlier on Saturday with a minute-long clip  lensed in a wide variety of locations, including a private jet, a yacht and a number of expensive-looking tropical locales  with the caption Hmm someone [asked] me how Im starting I said this is how. Who can remember this by tonight.

The track is apparently the latest from Scotts upcoming fourth album and follow-up to his blockbuster Astroworld, which is apparently titled Utopia and hes been teasing since June of last year. He spoke with Variety about it during an interview earlier this year about The Plan, his song from the Tenet soundtrack.

Its feeling like a progression from Astroworld, Im starting to shape a new soundscape, its pretty interesting, he said. Im just growing from where I left off, and taking it to an untouchable height.

Asked whether hes looking at it as a thematically unified album or just a collection of songs, he said, Im totally working on an album  I definitely care more about making albums than just dropping songs. I like dropping songs as much as I wanna drop them, but I love albums  I grew up on them.

Asked what hes been listening to lately, he listed fellow Houstonites left-field alt-rock group (and fellow Houston-ites) Khruangbin, and Ive been going back to some old Bjork, my friend Toro Y Moi, and a lot of random soul. Yeah, man.

Earlier this week Scott was in the gravitational pull of Kanye Wests Donda album premiere in Atlanta, where his guest verse on a track apparently called Praise God was aired (Scott was not in attendance). Baby Keem appears on the track as well, although West (as usual) has postponed the albums release date, announced for Friday but reportedly now August 6.
Henry Cuellar provided his thoughts on Laredos rising COVID-19 situation on Friday as Laredos representative visited the area to announce a $6 million donation to Serving Children and Adults in Need for mental health.

Laredo is doing a much better job at vaccination than the state or national average, Cuellar said. Most of the cases we are seeing are unvaccinated. It doesnt mean that people who are vaccinated dont get it, but the grand majority are (unvaccinated). So we are asking that if you are unvaccinated, get vaccinated.

City of Laredo officials announced at noon Friday that the city currently has 287 active COVID-19 cases. Of those active, 123 of them (71%) are unvaccinated cases.

While Cuellar pointed out that unvaccinated people make up most of the Gateway Citys actives, that wasnt the only thing he credited to the rising COVID-19 situation. The state representative brought up how the CBP operation of bringing and releasing migrants from surrounding sectors has affected Laredos coronavirus condition.

The United States government needs to understand that they just cant come and release people into communities that havent been tested, Cuellar said.

Roughly 15.3% of the citys active cases  44 out of 287  are due to detainees/refugees from one of the local detentions/holding centers. Cuellar said that he would like to see CBP get migrants who are sent to the Gateway City vaccinated before they arrive into the community.

Local officials have made attempts to put a stop to increase in migrants entering the area as Webb County Judge Tano Tijerina declared a local state of disaster order on Tuesday, just days after the city filed a lawsuit against the United States. The disaster order stated the county would temporarily not allow incoming buses transporting migrants from other sectors like the Rio Grande Valley or Del Rio, and while the judge was concerned about whether he actually had the power for the decision to stick, his decision was allowed to remain. The order signed is Texas Government code 418.018, which involves the movement of people during natural disaster areas for the preservation of life.

Tijerina explained Tuesday that the main point is to stop the CBP operation of bringing migrants from surrounding sectors to Laredo, but it does not stop the ongoing operations of the agency within the county. This would allow law enforcement to stop buses or vans they believe are transporting migrants to Webb County from any of the surrounding sectors.

We cannot allow any more migrants to come in because of the COVID crisis that we have, Tijerina said earlier this week.

The CBP stated it will honor the declaration on Thursday and hold off on sending buses transporting migrants to Laredo. The declaration is expected to last seven days after starting on Tuesday.

Although this is one way city officials have attempted to slow the spread of COVID-19 within the community, Cuellar offered up the idea of testing every migrant who is crossing legally at the land ports.

We let people come in from Mexico by flying, Cuellar said. They check to see who comes in. We can do that at the land borders. It is going to be slow when checking to see if we dont let anyone in who is positive.

Cuellar understands that theres an uptick in COVID-19 cases within Laredo. He credits the issues to a multitude of reasons. But at the end of the day, he stresses that everyone, from government officials to basic citizens, must take every precaution necessary to stop the spread of the virus.

We have to make sure we take all the precautions, Cuellar said. I say this: I believe in legal migration, but I dont believe in illegal migration. Right now, they are letting the undocumented people in and not the ones with legal visa holders.

gkroeger@lmtonline.com
The Chief Executive of the Restaurants Association of Ireland Adrian Cummins has told the state broadcaster RTE that one out of every four businesses will not reopen for indoor dining, when new laws are relaxed from tomorrow, Monday July 26.

"That is my gut feeling based on listening to businesses," he said.

He added that the "single biggest issue" for the hospitality sector was staffing problems.

"We don't have enough staff and we have to make sure we source as many as possible for our sector."

Longford in line for major centre of excellence facility A tentative location has been identified for a state of the art centre of educational excellence in Longford town.

"What we need to do now is get our doors open from Monday and then look at how the operation of this new regime is in flow, and then we may have to go back to the Government to streamline what it is there to make it more operational for our industry."

"We are moving in the right direction but need to make sure it's streamlined into the future," he told RTE.
A man caught drinking in a public laneway which is the target of a garda offensive against anti-social behavour has been told to return to Dublin with his toothbrush.

Mariusz Liptak(a41) of no fixed abode was sternly advised to return to the capital at last Friday's sitting of Longford District Court following an incident at Garvey's Lane, Longford on July 16.

Sgt Darran Conlon gave evidence of arresting both Mr Liptak and co accused Damian Brzozowy (43) , 99 Teffia Park, Longford shortly before 2:30pm.

Sgt Conlon, who heads up Longford's Community Garda Policing Unit, has recently told of how the laneway together with a number of others around the county town are being actively targeted by gardai in a bid to improve public safety and access.

He said he came across both men who were obviously intoxicated and causing a disturbance to passers by during the middle of a busy shopping afternoon in the town.

He also revealed how both men made no reply after charging and cautioning the pair.

Sgt Conlon said due to the speed in which the prosecution was brought before the court, it was not possible to ascertain what, if any previous convictions both men had to their names.

In defence, solicitor Frank Gearty described the episode as absolutely shocking and one which had caused extreme embarrassment to Mr Brzozowy's sister, who accompanied her brother in court.

He also told Judge Bernadette Owens that his co accused's stay in Longford would only be a fleeting one.

Mr Liptak is a visitor from Dublin and he will be going back to Dublin with his toothbrush, he said.

Judge Owens said in light of the fact there was no evidence of any previous convictions against both men, she would be handing down a 150 fine, giving the pair two months to pay.
The election of Uruemu Adejinmi to the position of Cathaoirleach of Longford Municipal District attracted significant media attention across Ireland and abroad - and rightly so.

The Fianna Fail politician has been working hard for Longford since long before she was co-opted to the council last year.

Ms Adejinmi grew up in Warri, Delta State, Nigeria, in what she refers to as a middle class household in Nigeria where she led a sheltered life.

The second of seven children, she went to boarding school in Nigeria before going to University and earning herself a degree in mathematics.

And then I started working in Nigeria. So, shortly after I got married, there was a change in my personal circumstances and thats what led me to come to Ireland in 2003, she told the Longford Leader over coffee last week.

Now, I dont know what made me settle in Longford but Longford was the first town I lived in. I think there was a family that

I knew in Longford so I suppose I just gravitated towards Longford because I knew somebody there. And I think when I settled in Longford, I didnt really have a reason to leave. Its a lovely town, a great place to raise kids.

Uruemu now lives a very happy life in the Longford Municipal District with her husband, Kenny, her three children, Tomson, Samuel and Alexandra, and the family dog, Georgie.

It was around the time of the 2016 General Election that Uruemu started to consider a political path.

An ad campaign popped up on my feed and it was Jimmy Morgan running for the General Election as an Independent candidate, she explained.

And he posted one of his manifestos and I can't remember what it was, but I just commented on it in passing. The next thing he responded to my comment. He sent me a friend request, and I thought this is all a bit much. But I accepted and he asked to meet for coffee so he can explain why hes running.

I ended up introducing him to Africans in the community. And unfortunately he didnt get elected, but then Joe Flaherty, who lives three doors down from me, came to me and said, I didnt know you have an interest in politics. You should join my party and work with us, she said.

And so I read up on Fianna Fail and I was happy enough with their policies, so I joined and started participating actively.

Uruemus political activism is just another layer to a very busy and socially involved life. Shes also on the board of management of her childrens primary school and is very involved in St Mels parish, sitting on the parish council.

As if that wasnt already enough, she set up the hugely successful Longford Africans Network after she started her political journey .

Uruemu was co-opted to Longford County Council last year after former councillor Joe Flaherty was elected to Dail Eireann, leaving his seat vacant. Fast forward to June 2021 and she now wears the cathaoirleachs chain for Longford Municipal District, making her the first black female to be elected to a mayoral position in Irish politics.

Its beyond anything I ever thought of, because obviously the reason I got involved is to help and to strengthen relations and to just be that tool to increase interactions, increase integration, which will help us stamp down on discrimination, on racism, on negative experiences people have, she said.

So to get this benefit of an increase in my profile is just an unbelievable benefit. And Im so fortunate and so grateful to my councillors for such a vote of confidence in my abilities as well. And to the African community, to the native community in Longford, to the migrant community in general, theres been such an overwhelmingly positive reaction to this news.

And I think you barely see any negative reaction to this, which is so great. Its encouraging for me because its showing that my efforts are being received positively and being encouraged to continue in this direction and people have been inspired as well.

Im really thankful. I feel incredibly fortunate to have this opportunity. And I continue to work hard to represent the good people of Longford who have embraced me from day one in Ireland. And just to encourage people, both natives and migrants, whatever situation they are at, to continue to push, continue to aspire, continue to go for any dream they have; go for it - even if it doesnt happen.

Like was my story in 2019, I didnt get elected but it didnt stop me and I continued to be active within the party. And then, suddenly, in 2020 another opportunity came for me. So its just so important for people to continue to push their dreams.

In recent years, the issue of racism has been very much brought to the fore of peoples minds in Longford. Last year, a very successful Black Lives Matter event was hosted in the Market Square while, a year earlier, far-right activist, Gemma ODoherty, visited Longford and live-streamed her tour around the town, causing outrage among locals and inviting racist comments via online platforms.

But if theres one thing the people of Longford have proven again and again its that there is no place for racism in the local community.

I think the worst of it in Longford is if somebody is not comfortable, they just dont interact. Which is perfectly fine because something youre not used to, you can either keep your distance, or you can make an attempt to get familiar with it, and whatever anybody chooses is fine, said Uruemu.

But I dont think theres any kind of racially motivated attacks like somebody randomly coming to you and spewing hatred in your face. I dont think theres anything like that in Longford. And I hope there isnt because Im conscious that everybody has different lived experiences.

But personally I think Longford is a very welcoming community. Look at my journey from 2003. I went from working, to progressing, to becoming a councillor, to becoming mayor. I see Longford as a land of opportunities for myself, as a migrant, and for anybody, native and migrant alike.

My friendships are brilliant. I have native friends, I have migrant friends, I have Nigerian friends, African friends, Asian friends, European friends. Theres such a diverse community in Longford and everybody gets on.

As Cathaoirleach of Longford MD, Uruemu hopes to tackle a number of important issues in the area. Top of that list is housing.

We need to look at the issues that are affecting people in the community and a big one is housing. Theres a long waiting list.

Theres people in housing assisted payments and you have people struggling with their finances and still having to pay exorbitant rents, she explained.

And property prices are going up now and cost of rent is increasing and peoples wages are not increasing in that scale as well. So we need to work on housing, get social housing in here and get land and build as opposed to investing in private rented accommodation.

And a lot of money is going into that at the moment. So I am working hard with my councilor colleagues and the council executives to try and increase our social housing stock so that more people get into houses and can start planning for their future as well.

So housing is the big ticket item for me. And Im hoping that we can get a lot of work done. A lot has happened in the last year with funding being allocated to bring voids back into habitable states.
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Dacias mantra to offer simple, spacious and reliable motoring at an unbeatable value-for-money price continues with their new generation Sandero 5-seat family car which comes with a start price of 12,999 making it Irelands most affordable new car.

Earlier allocations in May and June sold out in two weeks. A new allocation is due shortly.

Having recently enjoyed a proper test drive in the car, not just the 20 minutes or so behind the wheel at its mid-May launch, I can honestly say Im won over by whats on offer for this bargain-basement price. The car is a practical family car offering good interior space, a decent drive, low fuel consumption, and also debuts some new technology to the brand.

Based on the CMF modular platform which provides more strength and rigidity, Dacia say the new Sandero is more robust, safer, spacious and better to drive. It has been totally redesigned from the ground up and looks very different to before.

While exterior dimensions remain the same, with some subtle tweaks the new car now has greater presence and looks way more expensive than it actually is with smoother lines, a more sloped windscreen, and flowing roofline; new LED lights (offered as standard and which increase night-time visibility), a black grille with chrome bar, body-tone front and rear bumpers, and 15-inch steel wheels. The pale Highland Grey paint work of my review car enhanced the look considerably. Ground clearance remains at 133mm loaded.

The interior is spacious with good rear head and leg room, sporting new upholstery, nice trim on the dash and doors, new and comfortable front seats with anti-whiplash headrests for better protection as well as a decent glovebox and generous door bins and cubbies.

The first thing you notice is no screen or radio on the central console which visually takes a bit of getting used to. Along with other drive information, radio settings are show on the 3.5-inch TFT digital display between the dials.

This new model comes with higher levels of standard equipment and debuts new technology to Dacia. My car featured a Media Control where smartphones can be placed on a removable smartphone support in front of the driver to become a remote multimedia system via the new free Dacia Media Control app and a Bluetooth or USB connection (the USB port is beside the Media Control up on the dash). The system provides easy access to the radio, music, calls, messages, sat nav apps and other features like Siri and Android voice recognition. Controls are either on the steering wheel for the radio, or behind it for the sat nav.

The no unnecessary frills meant you have a key to start the engine, theres no front armrest, just manual adjustments for side mirrors which works fine, wind up windows in the rear, and there is no spare tyre - but a well is provided for one which you can purchase from your local dealer. The boot floor is low and boot capacity is 328 litres.

However, my car had many necessary items such as cruise control, air conditioning, remote central locking, height/reach adjustable steering wheel, Hill Start Assist, Bluetooth and ISOFIX child seat anchors.

On the safety front, six airbags are standard and a broader selection of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems is now available including Emergency Brake Assist (standard), Blind spot warning, Park Assist parking sensors and Hill Start Assist which prevents the car from rolling backwards for more than two seconds when you lift your foot off the brake pedal to move to the accelerator when pulling away on a hill. All-round visibility is good. Sanderos sibling Sandero Stepway, is also built on the same platform, and has achieved a two-star safety rating from EuroNCAP.

The engine range includes a SCe 65hp 1.0 3-cylinder petrol paired with a five-speed manual transmission (my test car) and a TCe 90 turbocharged 1.0 petrol paired with a six-speed manual gearbox or a new CVT automatic transmission. There is also a new LPG bi-fuelled turbocharged 1.0 unit; the LPG tank is located where the spare wheel would be.

I found the 65hp engine slow to gain speed from start and requires a fair bit of revving, and time, to reach the 100km/h mark. But when you get there, its absolutely fine. The car also cruises the motorway nicely at 120km/h. My choice, though, would be the more powerful TCe 90. After a few days of test drives, the fuel consumption showed a 6.0L/100kms return.

Dacia and Renault boss Paddy Magee believes there is no longer a status applied to cars as people seek out good value which includes a good return when it comes to changing cars. He said Sanderos absolutely hold their resale value. Residual values were expected to be between 39pc and 42pc but trade-ins are now getting up to 60pc. Sanderos biggest advantage is that it is a proper B-segment car, an affordable car doing its job and gaining a big chunk of the market.

He said parents looking to purchase a good second hand car for their offspring should take a look at buying a New Sandero for them instead for the same price as theyd expect to pay for a good second hand car, but also with the added benefit of Dacias comprehensive three-year /100,000km warranty and Roadside Assistance.
A new multilingual souvenir audio player has been launched by Longford County Council to complement the Longford Town Walking Trail.

Cathaoirleach of Longford County Council Cllr Peggy Nolan officiated at the launch which took place on Thursday last, July 15.

The 2km trail, established in 2018, covers 20 locations around Longford town starting off at the Market Square and taking visitors on an historic and sensory experience around the town, ending at the Convent of Mercy. A short video showcasing the walking trail and its new audio guide, is available on the Longford Tourism YouTube Channel.

Thanks to support from Longford Community Resources Ltd and LEADER funding, the souvenir audio player means the trail is now available to explorers in four different languages: English, Irish, French and German.

To coincide with the launch, Longford Tourism held a competition with pupils in Scoil Eimear in Longford town. Each of the members of sixth class produced and presented excellent projects on County Longford to Longford Tourism.

Every pupil received a Souvenir Audio Player for the Longford Town Walking Trail and the winner of the competition, Collette Erhagbe from sixth class, won a voucher for a visit to the Knights and Conquests Heritage Centre in Granard.

Speaking at the launch Cathaoirleach of Longford County Council Cllr Peggy Nolan thanked Longford Tourism and the staff of Scoil Eimear and the Knights and Conquests Heritage Centre in Granard for their support. We should all be ambassadors for Longford, just like the pupils of sixth class in Scoil Eimear  congratulations to them all on their great work and to Longford Tourism for working so hard to promote our beautiful county town which has so much to offer as a tourism destination.

Chief Executive of Longford County Council Paddy Mahon said he was also delighted to see the beauty of our county town being showcased in such a positive way. Longford Town has an abundance of beautiful and historic sites to visit and this audio player makes our lovely walking trail even more accessible to visitors and those living locally than ever before. Congratulations to Longford Tourism on this exciting addition to the local tourism offering.

Longford Tourism Officer Dympna Reilly explained, This trail is perfect for those interested in history. Being available in four languages, it is both ideal for school tours and visitors coming to Longford. I would like to encourage everyone to get out and explore County Longford.

Souvenir audio players are available to buy from Longford Tourism for 5 alongside a map and brochure for the trail.

These will also be available from Longford Branch Library in line with Covid-19 public health guidelines.

For information on things to do in County Longford, visit www.longford.ie and find out all you need to know about accommodation, food and drink, activities, events and more.

Youll also find ready-made itineraries listed to help visitors plan ahead. Follow Longford Tourism on Social Media for further great ideas and activities.

The local monthly events guide is also available on www.Longford.ie.
Race Against Amber

The week started with a mass exodus of unvaccinated British tourists as they rushed to beat Mondays 4am quarantine deadline. UK Transport Secretary Grant Shapps announced the Balearics demotion to the amber list on Thursday, sparking a mad scramble for flight tickets and pre-flight testing. The unjabbed youth were most affected, with plenty openly expressing their disgruntlement on social media - particularly as the UK was experiencing higher positive test rates than the Balearics. The incessant rule changing is creating huge uncertainty in the travel sector, with many now opting to stay home to avoid any hassle. On the flipside, double-jabbed holidaymakers were able to remain poolside, San Miguel in hand, as Monday also heralded the start of isolation-free amber travel for the fully-vaccinated elite. Spain is now collectively crossing its fingers against Mr Shapps dreaded amber-plus.

easyJet Remains Upbeat

Despite constantly changing travel rules, easyJet boss Johan Lundgren told reporters on Tuesday that he was confident that UK travel demand would continue to pick up now rules for fully-vaccinated Britons had relaxed. The airline plans to fly 60% of its pre-pandemic capacity between July and September and says its able to cope with shifting demands. easyJet shares traded up 2% after Johans buoyant update, having lost around 20% of their value over the last month. Meanwhile, more than 2.3 million international travellers arrived in Spanish airports in June 2021, the highest figure since the start of the pandemic. This is still 76% down on June 2019.

Restriction Rumour Mill was Rife

As record coronavirus cases were reported in the Balearics, the rumour mill went into overdrive as to what restrictions would be thrown at us next. Would we see the return of outdoor mask wearing? A new curfew? Or worse? Instead, the Government continued to focus on the behaviour of the younger unvaccinated members of society and, from Thursday 22 July, ordered a 01:00 closure for restaurants in Majorca, Minorca and Ibiza, and limited seating to four per table inside, eight outside. From Saturday, social gatherings were banned between 01:00 and 06:00. Formentera was allowed to retain its freedom. Some pretty hefty fines were also introduced for stores selling alcohol after 22:00, illegal street drinking parties, and breaking quarantine after a positive test - among others.

Low-Key Start to Troubled Tokyo 2020

Fridays Olympic opening ceremony (without a creative director, he was fired over a Holocaust joke he made in 1998), was performed to a crowd of just a thousand dignitaries, diplomats and sponsors, as the stripped-back games continued to battle a series of scandals. Year-long delay aside, Tokyo has contended with a somewhat troublesome backdrop, from an alleged rape committed by a Uzbek working in the national stadium to a vanishing Ugandan weightlifter. Anti-Olympics protests are ongoing, with locals expressing their anger at hosting 11,000 overseas athletes in a city that is under a state of emergency for rising COVID-19 cases. Indeed, there have already been positive coronavirus tests within the Olympic Village. To cap it off, Tokyo is set to be the hottest Olympics on record, with temperatures topping the 30s on a daily basis - perhaps putting some athletes in physical danger. Its certainly secured its place in the history books.

Chump of the Week

This accolade went to a British stag who, during a spirited night out in Magalluf, decided to ditch his rented moped dunce-like into the Med. Every action has a consequence, and for this chap that was a tap on the shoulder from the police as he was about to board his flight back home. A Palma judge slapped him with a 6,000 euro fine and took his passport for safe keeping. Unlucky for him, he was due to get married the next day and had to beg his furious fiancee to postpone the nuptials as he made frantic phone calls to collate the cash. One suspects hes now booked in for an extended holiday in the dog house.
92, of Mankato, died July 30, 2021. Memorial service will be 11:00a.m., August 21, 2021 at Northview-North Mankato Mortuary with visitation one hour prior to the service. Burial will be at Beauford Oak Hill Cemetery. www.mankatomortuary.com.
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MSP Recruiting Event Sault Ste Marie

MSP Recruiting Event Sault Ste Marie

SAULT STE. MARIE - The Michigan State Police are seeking motivated individuals who desire a career as a trooper.

The Michigan State Police is planning to hire more troopers to fill vacancies throughout the state, including those in the Upper Peninsula, by hosting a drive-in style recruiting event from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on July 3 at the Sault Ste. Marie Post parking lot located at 3900 I-75 Business Spur in the Sault. Interested individuals will pull up in the parking lot and will be greeted by a Michigan State Police recruiter who can answer questions about the job and can give direction about how to start the application process.

"There is a significant need for additional troopers throughout the Upper Peninsula and specifically at the Sault Ste. Marie Post," said Michigan State Police Recruiter Sergeant Ben Eckola. The Sault Ste. Marie Post provides law enforcement and public safety services to Chippewa and Luce counties.
JERUSALEM (AP)  Two Israeli airlines launched their first commercial flights between Israel and Morocco on Sunday, less than a year after the countries officially normalized relations.

Israir's flight departed Tel Aviv for Marrakech with around 100 Israeli tourists, the company said, hours before Israeli national carrier El Al dispatched its first direct flight to the same destination.

Israeli Tourism Minister Yoel Razvozov said the new direct flights would help advance fruitful tourism, trade and economic cooperation and diplomatic agreements between the two countries.

Israel and Morocco agreed to normalize relations in late 2020 as part of the U.S.-brokered Abraham Accords. Morocco was among four Arab nations, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan, to establish diplomatic relations with Israel.

As part of the deal, the United States agreed to recognize Moroccos claim to the long-disputed Western Sahara region, however the Biden administration said it will review this decision. Moroccos 1975 annexation of Western Sahara is not recognized by the United Nations.

Many Israeli Jews have lineage that traces back to Morocco, which is still home to a small Jewish community of several thousand.

El Al said in a statement before the departure of its first flight that the company plans to operate five flights per week between Israel and Morocco.

We hope that now many can know Morocco better, to experience and be excited by this special country that is deeply rooted in Israeli heritage, culture and experience, said El Al CEO Avigal Sorek.

After the first flight arrived in Marrakech, the director of the Moroccan national tourism office, Adil Fakir, called it a crowning moment of the important decision taken by Morocco to resume relations between the two countries.

The head of the Israeli liaison office in Rabat, David Govrin, said it would "strengthen the existing ties between our two people. The head of the Jewish community in the Marrakech-Safi region, Jacky Kadoch, also welcomed the development.
MIDDLETOWN  A city police officer is the first in the departments history to receive the national officer of the month award after he surprised a 5-year-old at his birthday party.

The National Law Enforcement Memorial and Museum has announced Officer Emilio Magnano was selected as the officer of the month for May. Magnano serves as a school resource officer at Middletown High.

Middletown Police Chief Michael Timbro praised Magnano at last weeks Public Safety Committee meeting.

Its a pretty prestigious honor, Timbro said.

Timbro said Kiarra Bennett, a school employee, told Magnano about her son, Kanaan Boatengs police-themed birthday party. Magnano tried to set up a drive-by appearance from a member of the police department  something Timbro said became popular during the pandemic.

When all patrol officers were busy at the time of the party, Magnano decided he would go himself  even though he was off-duty.

He put his uniform on on his day off, Timbro said. He didnt want to disappoint.

Magnano arrived with a police officer costume for Boateng and let him sit in his cruiser.

Bennett wrote a letter to Timbro expressing her gratitude for Magnanos visit.

I was so thankful, Bennett wrote. To see the look of amazement on all of the kids faces was incredible.

Since 1996, the officer of the month award program has recognized local, state and federal officers who distinguish themselves through exemplary law enforcement service and devotion to duty.

Recipients of the award are honored at an annual awards reception in Washington and they are featured in the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Funds annual calendar.

Magnano is the first Middletown officer to receive this honor.
WASHINGTON (AP)  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sunday named a second Republican critic of Donald Trump, Rep. Adam Kinzinger, to a special committee investigating the Capitol riot and pledged that the Democratic-majority panel will get to the truth. Kinzinger said he humbly accepted the appointment even as his party's leadership is boycotting the inquiry.

With the committee set to hold its first meeting, hearing from police officers who battled the rioters, Pelosi said it was imperative to learn what happened on Jan. 6, when insurrectionists disrupted the congressional certification of Joe Biden's presidential victory, and why the violent siege took place. That mission, she said, must be pursued in a bipartisan manner to ensure such an attack can never happen again.

Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican, will bring "great patriotism to the committees mission: to find the facts and protect our Democracy, she said in a statement.

He joins Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, as the two committee's Republicans, both selected by the leader of the opposition party. Kinzinger and Cheney were among the 10 House Republicans to vote for Trumps second impeachment. They were the only two Republicans who voted last month to form the special committee.

For months, lies and conspiracy theories have been spread, threatening our self-governance, Kinzinger said in a statement. For months, I have said that the American people deserve transparency and truth on how and why thousands showed up to attack our democracy.

I will work diligently to ensure we get to the truth and hold those responsible for the attack fully accountable," he said.

House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy has said the GOP will not participate after Pelosi, D-Calif., refused to accept two of the members he picked.

McCarthy, R-Calif., has said the committee was a sham process and withdrew his five members when Pelosi rejected two of them, Reps. Jim Banks of Indiana and Jim Jordan of Ohio. Both voted on Jan. 6 against certifying Bidens election victory over Trump and both are outspoken allies of the former president.

In a statement Sunday, McCarthy said Pelosi's decision to reject his picks and appoint members who share her preconceived narrative will not yield a serious investigation and is intended to satisfy her political objectives.

Kinzinger and Cheney have faulted Trump as a factor in spurring the insurrection with his persistently false claims that the 2020 election was stolen due to voting fraud.

In recent weeks, Kinzinger has suggested he would be open to serving on the committee, despite threats from McCarthy that Republicans who accept a spot could be stripped of their regular committee assignments as retaliation for participating.

It's clear that Pelosi only wants members on this committee who will stick to her talking points and stick to her narrative. Thats why shes picked the group that shes already picked, Banks said on Fox News Sunday. He said that anyone that she asks to be on this committee, from this point moving forward, will be stuck to her -- her narrative, to her point of view. There wont be another side.

The House voted in May to create an independent investigation that would have been evenly split between the parties, but Senate Republicans blocked that approach. Pelosi said the new panel was being created only because a bipartisan commission was no longer an option.

Currently Cheney sits on the committee along with seven Democrats  ensuring they have a quorum to proceed, whether other Republicans participate or not.

Pelosi expressed confidence that the committees work will be seen as bipartisan and credible even with McCarthys effort to boycott the panel.

We have to, again, ignore the antics of those who do not want to find the truth, she said. We will find the truth. That truth will have the confidence of the American people because it will be done patriotically and not in a partisan way.

Seven people died during and after the rioting, including a woman who was shot by police as she tried to break into the House chamber and three other Trump supporters who suffered medical emergencies. Two police officers died by suicide in the days that followed, and a third officer, Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, collapsed and later died after engaging with the protesters. A medical examiner determined he died of natural causes.
WASHINGTON (AP)  Lawmakers racing to seal a bipartisan infrastructure deal early this coming week are hitting a major roadblock over how much money should go to public transit, the groups lead Republican negotiator said Sunday.

As discussions continued through the weekend, Ohio Sen. Rob Portman said both sides were about 90% of the way there on an agreement.

We have one issue outstanding, and were not getting much response from the Democrats on it, he said. Its about mass transit. Our transit number is very generous.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has said he wants to pass a bipartisan package and an accompanying $3.5 trillion budget plan before the Senate leaves for its August recess. He held a procedural vote last week to begin debate on the broad framework, but all 50 Senate Republicans voted against it, saying they needed to see the full details of the plan.

Democrats want to see more of the money in the roughly $1 trillion infrastructure agreement go toward boosting public transportation, which includes subways, light-rail lines and buses, in line with President Joe Bidens original infrastructure proposal.

The bipartisan group originally appeared to be moving toward agreement on more money for transit. But Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, the top Republican on the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, which oversees public transit, was still negotiating the details. He cited, in part, previous COVID-19 federal relief money that had already been allocated to public transit.

Nobodys talking about cutting transit, Toomey said Sunday. The question is, how many tens of billions of dollars on top of the huge increase that they have already gotten is sufficient? And thats where there is a little disagreement.

Typically, spending from the federal Highway Trust Fund has followed a formula of 80% for highways and 20% for transit. Democratic Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Tom Carper of Delaware say they will oppose the deal if it reduces that.

The White House has declined to say whether Biden would push for the additional funding for transit.

Transit funding is obviously extremely important to the president  the Amtrak President, as we may call him, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Friday. But we believe that members can get this work done and can work through these issues quite quickly.

The final package would need the support of 60 senators in the evenly split 50-50 Senate to advance past a filibuster  meaning at least 10 Republicans along with every Democratic member. Last weeks test vote failed along party lines.

A Democratic aide granted anonymity to discuss the private talks said beyond transit, there are other remaining issues still unresolved around how to pay for it. For instance, details on broadband funding, as well as whether to tap into leftover COVID relief funds previously passed by Congress, continue to be discussed, the aide said.

Democrats are seeking a compromise to pay for the package after Republicans dashed a plan to boost the IRS to go after tax scofflaws, though Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, a Democratic negotiator in the group, said he remains optimistic about reaching a deal soon.

Were down to the last couple of items, and I think youre going to see a bill Monday afternoon, Warner said Sunday.

Three rounds totaling nearly $70 billion in federal COVID-19 emergency assistance, including $30.5 billion that Biden signed into law in March, pulled transit agencies from the brink of financial collapse as riders steered clear of crowded spaces on subway cars and buses. That federal aid is expected to cover operating deficits from declining passenger revenue and costly COVID-19 cleaning and safety protocols through at least 2022.

But Democrats and public transit advocates see expanded public transit systems as key to easing traffic congestion, combating climate change and curbing car pollution.

Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., the chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, recently sent a letter with 30 Democrats on the panel warning that the Senate proposal was inadequate and that any deal should incorporate the House-passed $715 billion infrastructure bill, which includes more money for rail and transit.

The historical share for public transit from the Highway Trust Fund is 20%, Paul Skoutelas, president of the American Public Transportation Association, said Sunday. It is the absolute minimum acceptable level to help sustain our nations public transportation systems. It is imperative that we make robust, forward looking investments to modernize and expand public transit that will assist in our economic recovery from the COVID pandemic and get Americans back to work.

Portman appeared on ABCs This Week, Toomey was on CNNs State of the Union and Warner spoke on Fox News Sunday.
ISTANBUL (AP)  Two Turkish soldiers were killed and two others were wounded in an attack in northern Syria, Turkeys defense ministry said Sunday.

The ministry tweeted that a Turkish armored vehicle was attacked. The assault occurred Saturday in the so-called Euphrates Shield area, which consists of a region between the Turkish border and northern Aleppo, including the towns of Jarablus and al-Bab.

The ministry said it struck terror targets in retaliation. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that dozens of Turkish rockets were fired at northern Aleppo, with no reports of injuries. Turkey, however, said seven fighters were neutralized."

The statement didn't say who attacked the soldiers but called them terrorists. Turkey has been fighting the Syrian Kurdish militia Peoples Protection Units, or YPG. Turkey considers them an extension of a Kurdish group which has waged a decades-long insurgency inside Turkey.

Turkey launched its first cross-border operation into Syria in the summer of 2016 with the aim of clearing out the Islamic State group after several deadly bombings in Turkey. The operation was called Euphrates Shield. Turkey conducted three other operations in northern Syria, a majority of them to fight the YPG.

Turkey has been infuriated by American support for Syrian Kurdish fighters who formed the backbone of a unit that fought IS.
Evan Hafer just wants the vitriol to stop.

The founder and CEO of veteran-owned Black Rifle Coffee Company has received copious hate mail, social media backlash and disparaging phone calls in the wake of a New York Times' article profiling the company, which paints itself as an organization not only serving up a basic cup of joe, but with an extra shot of patriotism delivered by military veterans.

Hafer and his colleagues hoped the article, which ran July 14, would give them the opportunity to distance Black Rifle from right-wing fringe groups and individuals who've adopted its merchandise as their own. The piece would be the company's chance to denounce racism, hatred, bigotry and antisemitism from its brand once and for all, arguing that the vitriol never aligned with the firm's mission.

That backfired.

Instead, pundits and trolls alike immediately took Black Rifle's latest message to mean it was shutting out all conservative voices, something Hafer says has been unreasonably conflated.

"You can taste the bigotry," an unidentified man says, exhaling with satisfaction after sipping from a supposed cup of Black Rifle Coffee in a fake commercial the company's IT department stumbled upon last week. In the mock advertisement, which is seemingly intended to associate the brand more closely with the very people Hafer is publicly pushing away, the man says that the coffee gets "you in the right headspace before oppressing minorities."

Read Next: 'Incel' Sought Fort Benning Training in Plot to Slaughter Women at an Ohio School, Feds Say

Now, the seven-year-old organization, which is "pro-constitution, pro-individuality," is doing what it can to make sure its employees are taken care of since it expects the hostility to ramp up from angry fans and hecklers who aim to disparage or threaten Black Rifle and its patrons online and even at home.

"These aren't our customers," Hafer said in an interview Wednesday. "These are people that are making very illogical, irrational statements about the company that are misleading," he said, referring to the relentless harassment and racist rhetoric he's seen cropping up on Twitter.

"I don't participate in the daily dialogue of what's happening, you know, in the fringe aspects of Twitter," he added. "I participate in real conversations with real people as I'm serving coffee at my coffee shop; those are the people I talk to, people that I can put a face to a name."

Hafer says he's not been one to engage in a culture war or political statements when promoting his coffee. Yet in a 2018 video, Hafer and Mat Best, the company's vice president, team up to parody opposing political viewpoints. Dubbed "Conservative Comes Out," which has received 3.4 million views on YouTube, Best and Hafer use extreme satire to depict a son "coming out" -- not as gay, but as a supporter of the Second Amendment and other conservative causes. The depiction quickly turns into chaos when Hafer, playing the role of Best's liberal father, and the remaining members of the progressive family become hysterical, slamming a cat to its death and pouring gasoline on one another in response to conservative viewpoints. One member even threatens to blow himself up with a suicide vest.

After years of hyping up a certain gun-toting, unruffled machismo leaning heavily on the founders' military experience and veteran status to build its fan base -- a version of the "tactical lifestyle" that's hugely popular with paramilitary and ultranationalist groups -- did Black Rifle ultimately mislead the type of clientele they serve?

Hafer said he doesn't see it that way because, at its core, Black Rifle is about brewing good coffee and supporting veterans and first responders.

"We always do that with an eye toward inspiring, educating and entertaining, and we always take care of our community," a company spokesperson said. "It's what we've always done and will continue to do."

"We're a group of guys that we've been working overseas the majority of our adult lives; we're veterans from the special operations community," added Hafer, a former Green Beret and contractor for the CIA who served in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"We just looked at what we were doing as, 'This is the type of content that we want to see. It's funny, it's irreverent,'" he said.

Evan Hafer, Green Beret veteran, Founder and CEO of Black Rifle Coffee Company

Hafer and his team don't connect to a single stereotype, either. Hafer sees himself as the pro-vet, pro-law enforcement, pro-Second Amendment rights guy who also wears argyle socks and Birkenstocks and drives a Volvo.

"[Our message is] not meant to be like, 'No, you can't, drink a vanilla latte if you're a Republican!' That's absurd," Hafer said. "If you think you have to conform to these humorous, exaggerated stereotypes, because that's how you think people actually live? Like, wow, how isolated and alone and miserable that person must be."

He added, "We're not engaged in the war of words. We're more concerned with how funny our videos are -- whether or not they're making a political point."

Not Just a Brouhaha over Brew

Despite the executive's assertions that Black Rifle is apolitical, the company has waded into the political fray often at a time when politics and identity have become increasingly merged.

In 2017, for instance, Black Rifle touted a "Make Covfefe Great Again" T-shirt, which was a combination of then-President Donald Trump's popular "Make America Great Again" slogan and his viral "covfefe" tweet, which looks a little like "coffee" -- a presumed typo made by the president that quickly became a meme.

Though the shirt has been removed from the company's website, the spokesperson said it wasn't an endorsement of a political view, just a play on the meme meant to be humorous.

It wasn't just merchandise. Soon enough, Fox's Sean Hannity and Donald Trump Jr. were singing Black Rifle's praises, giving the company more momentum with the MAGA crowd.

But then came a time when the company had to deliberately state what kind of followers wouldn't be tolerated: extremists.

In November 2020, Black Rifle publicly disavowed any support or sponsorship of Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old Illinois resident who traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he shot and killed two people during a Black Lives Matter protest. In his post-jail photo, Rittenhouse donned a shirt with Black Rifle's logo. "We're not in the business of profiting from tragedy," Hafer said in a video statement at the time.

Another instance was the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol attack. Black Rifle's branding made a splash when Eric Munchel, first known as one of the "zip-tie guys," sported a company hat.

"Oh, [expletive], here we go again," Hafer told The New York Times, describing his thinking upon seeing the photos of Munchel before he was formally identified.

In the Rittenhouse case, Hafer drew a line in the sand to distance Black Rifle from extremist views. The company kept quiet in regard to Munchel, but still got a heaping of backlash from the incident. Hafer made his position known again in the Times article, specifically calling out racists and the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist group of males who often show up to rallies, gatherings or protests to oppose liberal or progressive groups.

"The misinformation that's being put out is that I have somehow connected those two groups with conservatives," he told Military.com. Hafer, who is Jewish, has received antisemitic remarks too, which he's openly condemned.

"I don't believe conservatives are either racist or anti-Semites, I was merely stating these groups don't have a place in my company," Hafer said. "I don't know how you can actually interpret that from the story even as you're reading it, but it's not [for] me to kind of weigh in on people's literacy levels."

The company spokesperson said it's the third time that hate mail; doxxing, or publishing private and identifying information on specific people; and trolling have come to rear their ugly heads. The spokesperson asked not to be identified because of the threats that company employees are facing.

In some cases, staff members' official photos have been pulled into Reddit chat threads or on Twitter, where trolls mock and make discriminatory remarks about their appearance or race. Other times, employees receive the same cruel email hundreds of times in their inbox.

"A lot of focus right now is support for our internal team members who've been sifting through this stuff," the spokesperson said. "[That they] are taken care of, have any resources they may need."

The organization has yet to see evidence of coordinated online attacks -- but in an era of disinformation and misinformation, Black Rifle isn't naive to groups concocting some type of scheme.

"Anything associated with any of these extremist groups, that's just not who we are," the spokesperson said.

-- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at Oriana.Pawlyk@Monster.com. Follow her on Twitter @oriana0214.

Related: 'Beijing Biden Is Not My President:' Troops' Social Media Posts in Spotlight After Capitol Riots
Weather Alert

...AIR QUALITY ALERT IN EFFECT... The Montana Department of Environmental Quality has issued an air quality alert for Big Horn, Carbon, Lake, Lincoln, Mineral, Missoula, Rosebud, Sanders, and Yellowstone counties in effect until further notice due to elevated particulate concentrations from local and regional fires. This alert will be updated again at 9 AM MDT 8/3/21. An Air Quality Alert means that particulates have been trending upwards and that an exceedence of the 24 hour National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) has occurred or may occur in the near future. As of 9 AM MDT, Particulate levels in Libby and Thompson Falls are Unhealthy As of 9 AM MDT, Particulate levels in Billings, Birney, Broadus, and Seeley Lake are Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups. As of 9 AM MDT, Particulate levels in Bozeman, Butte, Columbia Falls, Cut Bank, Frenchtown, Great Falls, Hamilton, Lewistown, Malta, Missoula are Moderate. When air quality is Unhealthy... State and local health officials recommend that people with respiratory or heart disease, the elderly, and children should avoid prolonged exertion; everyone else should limit prolonged exertion. When air quality is Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups... State and local health officials recommend that people with respiratory or heart disease, the elderly and children should limit prolonged exertion. When air quality is Moderate... State and local health officials recommend that unusually sensitive people should consider reducing prolonged or heavy exertion. For more information visit the Montana Department of Environmental Quality at http://todaysair.mt.gov
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Lansdale, PA (19446)

Today

Mostly clear this evening then becoming cloudy after midnight. Low near 55F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Mostly clear this evening then becoming cloudy after midnight. Low near 55F. Winds light and variable.
July 25, 2021

The MoA Week In Review - OT 2021-057

Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:

---

Other issues:

Billionaires are system errors:

Covid Politics:

Covid China:

Miscellaneous:

Use as open thread ...

Posted by b on July 25, 2021 at 13:33 UTC | Permalink

Comments

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It's a race against the clock for the Grand Strand Humane Society as they look for people to adopt or foster over 200 cats and dogs before they have to vacate the building on Aug. 1 due to a rat infestation issue.

Jessica Wnuk, executive director of the Grand Strand Humane Society, said the rat issue has been a problem that has increased over the years because of storms the area has seen such as Matthew and Florence.

"Unfortunately, being kind of sandwiched between the waterway makes it more of a problem for us in this location," Wnuk said. "Of course, we have food out for our animals, we have a unique situation here."

Wnuk said that the summertime is one of the busiest times of the year for the shelter.

"Our number of intakes is skyrocketing and the number of adoptions that we do is typically lower with people on vacation and out doing things. They're not really thinking about coming in to adopt an animal," Wnuk said.

Wnuk added that typically relocating during their busiest time of the year is a challenge but they remain appreciative to those that have helped in their time of need from the city of Myrtle Beach to community members. The city owns the building, which has been there for 20 years.

"We're very appreciative of the city coming in and doing some work here in the building so we're going to make it work," Wnuk said. "We're so luck that the community has our back."

According to city of Myrtle Beach spokesperson Mark Kruea, the city is paying for the cost to take care of the infestation issue, a process that will take at least a month before anyone can return to the shelter.

Over the weekend, GSHS held a fee waived adoption event, hoping to reduce the number of pets in the shelter before they move. On Saturday, there were 26 adoptions, shy of half the two-day goal of 60.

John Tempesta, who recently moved to the area from New York, took advantage of the waived fees and finally got him something he'd always wanted - a puppy.
Reporter

Christian is Texas native who welcomes any chance to do a story in the marsh or on the beach. He's a dog park regular and enjoys spending time in the kitchen. He says his margarita recipes are better than anything you'll find in a restaurant.
Lets face it, weve all fallen for a prank at one time or another.

Its downright embarrassing for anyone to admit when youve been punked, but imagine how Charles Curtis felt.

Who?

Exactly.

Curtis was Herbert Hoovers vice president. And if being stuck playing second fiddle to the president during the Great Depression wasnt bad enough, two college boys pulled a fast one on the Veep in 1930. Heres how it happened:

Lester Blumner and Edward T. Horn III were stumped. The students worked on their school newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun, and were tasked with finding a way to make the upcoming staff banquet interesting. A university soiree  especially one happening amid the worst economic crisis in the countrys history  hardly gets the pulse racing.

So, the pair turned to the favorite gimmick of college boys ever since Aristotle sat at Platos feet: The hoax.

More Information Holy Cow! History is written by novelist, former television journalist and diehard history buff J. Mark Powell. Have a historic mystery that needs solving? A forgotten moment worth remembering? Send it to HolyCow@insidesources.com. See More Collapse

It had all started a few days earlier when a professor was discussing how several prominent French politicians had been swept up in a scandal by supporting a swindler. That, the instructor smugly sniffed, could never happen in the United States.

College boys rarely let a challenge go unanswered. It suddenly occurred to Blumner and Horn that they could kill two birds with one stone. They could make the Daily Suns banquet an affair to remember while also proving the professor wrong in the bargain.

The two prepared ornate invitations to the dinner which, they claimed, was being held to honor the founder of the Republican Party in New York state, one Yugo N. Fry. (You go and fry, it should be noted, was a Victorian way of suggesting someone take up residence in the devils domain). Blumner and Horn then mailed the invitations to VIPs far and wide.

None of them attended the dinner. But nobody, it seems, bothered to stop and consider that the New York Republican State Committee was founded in 1855, which would have made the fictitious Fry at least 100 years old. Not wanting to risk offending a supposed grand old man of the Grand Old Party, many sent letters larded with flowery language praising the venerable political pioneer for his decades of toil.

When the big night came, Blumner and Horn had the banqueters in stitches by reading the celebrities correspondence. The showstopper was the letter from vice president Curtis, commending Fry for his long service to the Party of Lincoln. Both guys went home satisfied they had proven their professor wrong by showing American pols are just as gullible as those anywhere else.

And if that had been the end of it, the matter likely would have become lost in the sea of good-natured college pranks.

But it wasnt the end. Because one banquet attendee had a friend who worked at The New York Times and promptly told him about it. Since the prank involved the vice president, the Times reported the story.

Suddenly, Yugo N. Fry was national news.

Now the universitys name was dragged into the mess. The reaction of Cornell officials is best described with Queen Victorias famous line: We are not amused. They demanded Blumner and Horns heads on a platter.

The guys eventually cut a deal. They issued a humble apology for the embarrassment they had inadvertently caused the school and resigned their positions on the Daily Sun. In exchange, they were not expelled. However, the pair managed to get the last laugh: They continued printing stories in the school paper under assumed names right up until their graduation.

The Yugo N. Fry incident didnt harm its perpetrators. Blumner went on to serve honorably in the Army in World War II. Horn even became a prominent Lutheran pastor.

And the person who was supposedly victimized by the prank got the biggest kick of all from it. VP Curtis reportedly thought it was clever and chuckled over the whole thing.

Proving there actually was a time once when our countrys leaders could laugh at things.

Even themselves.
MEXICO CITY (AP)  President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Saturday that Cuba is an example of resistance, and proposed the entire country should be declared a World Heritage site.

While much of Cuba seems stuck technologically in the middle of the last century, Lopez Obrador did not appear to be speaking ironically when he proposed the world heritage designation, which is usually used by the United Nations to honor historical sites.

The Mexican leader praised Cuba's ability to stand up to U.S. hostility since 1959. Lopez Obrador did not mention recent street protests that were violently repressed by the Cuban government.

Lopez Obrador has in the past stated his opposition to U.S. sanctions that limit commerce with the island, and said they should be ended.

Lopez Obrador also said the Organization of American States should be replaced by a body that is truly autonomous, not anybodys lackey.

Mexico has publicly disagreed with the OAS leadership over its role in the political situation in countries like Bolivia.

Lopez Obrador spoke Saturday at a ceremony attended by Cubas foreign minister to mark the 238th birthday of Simon Bolivar, who led the fight to liberate several South American countries from Spanish rule in the early 1800s.

The Mexican government has said it is sending two navy ships to Cuba with food and medical aid on Sunday.

The Foreign Relations Department said the ships will will carry oxygen tanks, needles and syringes, and basic food items like rice and beans.

The announcement came on Thursday, the same day that the U.S. government tightened the sanctions on some Cuban officials after they violently put down rare street protests earlier this month. The new sanctions target a Cuban official and a government special brigade the United States says was involved in human rights abuses during the government crackdown.
ZAGREB, Croatia (AP)  A bus swerved off a highway and crashed in Croatia early Sunday after the driver apparently fell asleep, killing 10 people and injuring at least 44 others  some of them seriously, authorities said.

The crash happened about 6 a.m. near the town of Slavonski Brod on the highway between the Croatian capital of Zagreb and the Serbian border, a key artery over the summer due to tourists and workers coming home from Western Europe. Police said the bus had Kosovo license plates and was traveling from Frankfurt, Germany, to Kosovos capital of Pristina, which is south of Serbia.

Officials said the bus was carrying 67 passengers, including children, and two drivers, one of whom died in the crash. The 44 injured were transferred to local hospitals. Slavonski Brod hospital chief Josip Samardzic said eight people had serious injuries.

Authorities said the bus driver was detained after he apparently lost control of the vehicle after briefly falling asleep.

He said he fell asleep for a moment, local deputy prosecutor Slavko Pranjic said, according to Index news site in Croatia.

Police said the bus slid off the road into the grass before flipping on its side.

One passenger, Ramo Gashi, told state HRT television that something burst.

I saw, in a split second, all these people, the entire meadow, the channel below, behind the motorway, he said. I saw the wounded, the dead, I saw everything."

Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic expressed sadness and grief and extended his condolences to the victims' relatives and the people of Kosovo. Croatian President Zoran Milanovic also expressed condolences and wished a speedy recovery to the injured.

Kosovo President Vjosa Osmani, who cut short her stay in Tokyo at the Olympic Games because of the crash, extended her sorrow in a message on Facebook and declared Monday a national day of mourning in Kosovo.

With our heart and in spirit, we are close to the families who lost their loved ones in this tragedy," Osmani said. It is an indescribable pain and a great loss."

Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti said this is a tragic day for our country and for our people. He arrived in Croatia later Sunday and visited the injured in the hospital with Croatia's prime minister.

We are here to be with our citizens, Kurti said, according to Index. Hundreds of citizens who live outside Kosovo, they come to Kosovo and our economy depends on this.

Traffic on the highway was halted for hours before the bus was removed and one lane was reopened.
One Los Angeles-based columnist has a lot to say when it comes to why former Californians should leave Texas  and he's not entirely wrong with how much the Lone Star State has been through in the past year.

It's no secret that Californians have been  and still are  moving to Texas for affordable mortgages or better opportunities. It's also been an ongoing joke (for some) how Texans don't want Californians to come here. However, Joe Ferullo's piece in the Hill responds by explaining the state of Texas  generally, a big mess. He headlines it, "Don't mess around with Texas  just move back to California."

And it's hard not to see his point.

Ferullo, a contributing media politics columnist for The Hill and a former executive producer for CBS, NBC, and ABC, first points to Texas politics, bringing up the latest legislation drama of Democratic leaders, who left the state and headed to Washington, D.C. to break quorum and halt the passing of two controversial GOP-led voting rights bills.

READ ALSO: The spires on top of the Texas Children's building are just ... gone

"There's no question that those ballot constraints will be pushed through by the state GOP," Ferullo writes, "even though a study last year already judged Texas to be the nation's hardest state in which to vote."

Ferullo also notes the recently passed law that allows adults to carry handguns without licenses or permits. He says the bill "seems in conflict with the cutting-edge image of those California-bred high-tech companies now calling Texas home." And, of course, he mentions the passing of the "heartbeat bill," the latest restrictive measure passed in the state legislature that bans abortions after six weeks.

He goes on about the failed energy grid that left many Texans without water and heat during a devastating winter storm (thanks for bringing up bad memories). He also points out the difference in minimum wage between Cali ($16.07) and Texas ($7.25).

Is Texas having a bad year? Absolutely. Should Californians flee as the Democrats did? They totally can.

But, the fact is most Texans love Texas, not because of the mind-numbing politics or the erratic weather or the frustrating response to the pandemic.

The spirit of grit and determination is part of every Texan, and when coupled with our love for all things H-E-B and Whataburger, scenic road trips to charming towns, and all manner of food hello, breakfast tacos  it makes leaving the state hard to imagine. We can go on and on about what Texas offers and what it doesn't (and how embarrassing it is that the state trends weekly Twitter for something ridiculous, like dropping a teaching requirement to condemn the KKK as morally wrong).

Texas has been through a lot this year  and it's only July. We are all tired. Ferullo's piece serves as a reminder of all that, but also that Californians might have a hard time finding the silver lining when they realize they're sharing a tiny apartment with several roommates while also battling earthquakes and wildfires.
WASHINGTON - The phrase "all is fair in love and war" took on a new meaning Friday, when a Texas man was arrested after boasting to a match in a dating app about participating in the Jan. 6 riot "from the very beginning."

Andrew Taake of Houston was charged with assaulting police and storming the Capitol building. His arrest follows a months-long investigation spurred by a tip and a FedEx delivery driver who confirmed his identity to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to the government.

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Taake made his initial court appearance Friday in the Southern District of Texas, according to a Department of Justice news release. His public defender did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Similarly to another arrested rioter, it all started with a conversation on Bumble, a dating app, according to court documents.

Washington Post photo by Ricky Carioti.

The unnamed Bumble user asked if he had been "near all the action." Taake claimed he was pepper-sprayed by police after gathering to protest the presidential election results, according to a July 21 criminal complaint.

"About 30 minutes after being sprayed," he said of a selfie showing him wearing a gray beanie and a dark gaiter. "Safe to say, I was the very first person to be sprayed that day . . . all while just standing there."

The two never got to meet face to face.

Three days after the events, the match sent the conversation to officials, along with screenshots of Taake's location on Jan. 6 - shown as Alexandria, Va., just outside Washington, D.C. - according to the complaint.

After the tip, officials reviewed flight records, security footage and photos and videos posted across social media. What they found was far more than a participant "peacefully standing there," as Taake claimed on Bumble, according to the complaint.

A federal agent said images show the Texas man "using what appears to be a metal whip and pepper spray to attack law enforcement officers."

Body-camera footage provided by D.C. police allegedly reveals Taake emerging from the crowd of rioters on the other side of a bike rack barricade crafted by the authorities. He pepper-sprayed the officers, retreated and is then seen "striking officers with a weapon that appears to be a whip," the federal agent wrote.

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Once the crowd managed to break into the building, the U.S. Senate's security cameras caught Taake - with his whip still in hand - walking down the aisles, the complaint says.

But how did officials conclude it was him?

After gathering images, FBI agents showed them to a FedEx driver who had delivered a package "minutes before" at Taake's address, according to court documents. The driver then identified Taake as the man in the photos, the goverment said.

An interview between the federal agent and Taake led to his identity confirmation after the official reviewed the amassed evidence, court documents said.

Authorities also said they found a link between Taake's phone number and the Jan. 5 Spirit Airlines ticket to Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport that he bought from George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston.

Identified in the document as the co-owner of a home-cleaning and pressure-washing service - officials matched the phone number listed on the company's Facebook page with the cellphone Taake used to book his flight. According to the complaint, it was connected to cellphone sites that would be utilized from inside the Capitol building.

Taake faces charges including attempting to obstruct the work of law enforcement, causing a disturbance during a session of Congress and entering a restricted building that contained the vice president.

He is one of the more than 535 individuals to be arrested in breaching the Capitol and one of the more than 165 people charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement.

TEXAN PRIDE: Your guide to shopping for cowboy boots in Houston: from $ to $$$

Taake is also the second to have been charged after a Bumble encounter - though others have been flagged by the dating app.

"Bumble prohibits content that promotes racism or encourages any illegal activity including terrorism and the incitement of violence," a spokesperson for the company said in a statement to The Washington Post. "Additionally, the spreading of misinformation, such as disputing the certified results of the U.S. Election, is prohibited."
As the months go by and the pandemic drags on, it only gets harder for Amber Giese to talk with her parents about the coronavirus vaccine. Each time she brings it up, the conversation devolves into an argument. Facts and data don't seem to register. Emotional appeals haven't worked either.

It's even more frustrating when the 33-year-old from Milwaukee considers the worrying turn the public health crisis has taken lately. The highly transmissible delta variant of the novel virus is rapidly driving infections and hospitalizations back up for the first time in months. Yet her parents refuse to get the shots.

MORE CORONAVIRUS: What is a Covid-19 breakthrough case?

"It's exhausting, so I've started to back off lately. But I think about it a lot, especially now that the delta variant is spreading aggressively among the unvaccinated," Giese said. "I think about it daily."

The vaccines are proven safe and are more widely available than ever, but countless Americans still find themselves in the same position as Giese, struggling to convince vaccine-hesitant loved ones of the importance of getting inoculated. Even in the face of what the Biden administration warns could be a "pandemic of the unvaccinated," millions of people are avoiding the jabs or rejecting them outright.

There's evidence that vaccine resistance is hardening. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 29% of Americans said they are unlikely to get vaccinated. That's up from 24% three months ago.

But experts say there's still plenty of room to reach friends and family who have held out on getting the shots - it just might take closer listening, a refined message and more patience.

"The effort is worthwhile," said Stacy Wood, a professor at North Carolina State University who has studied coronavirus vaccine promotion. "A lot of people are convinced over time from small bits of information that trickle in."

Here's what experts say about navigating these difficult conversations.

- Be a good listener. People cite a range of reasons for being reluctant or unwilling to get the coronavirus vaccines. Some view their refusal as an integral part of their political identity. Others, particularly members of minority populations, may hold a long-standing distrust of government institutions or health-care companies that have historically failed them. Before even opening up a discussion, it's essential to consider why a person holds their beliefs, experts said.

"Realize that all the different reasons for why people aren't currently vaccinated are diverse and various," Wood said. "You can't start persuading someone unless you know what reason is the real hurdle."

Moreover, not all vaccine hesitancy is rooted in personal beliefs or ideology. For many people, practical considerations - seemingly minor complications at home or at their job - may be holding them up. Those things may not be obvious, even to close friends and family.

"Maybe they have to take days off work, maybe have trouble with transportation or child care," said Gretchen Chapman, a professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon. "Don't make assumptions about what the barrier is. Listen to them and hear where they are. There could be a reason that surprises you."

- Tailor your message. Behavioral scientists, psychologists and marketing specialists who study vaccine uptake tend to divide the hesitant into a few general groups, all with a degree of overlap. One group is the apathetic, those who view the shots as an inconvenience or unnecessary given their circumstances. Another includes people who are skeptical of the medical science behind the shots or wary of their safety. A third is made up of people who refuse the shots for political or ideological reasons.

It's important to think about who you're approaching, experts said. A friendly nudge to a college student who simply wasn't motivated to get the jab probably won't fly with a longtime vaccine skeptic who takes his health cues from Facebook memes.

RELATED: Biden admin stepping up community grants from Covid bill

For the apathetic group, incentives tend to work well, according to experts. Wood said it may help to barter with these individuals.

"You can say, 'I get it. I respect your decision that it's not that important to you, but it's causing me to lose sleep. What can I do for you that would make it worthwhile?' " she said. " 'Can I mow your lawn? Can I take your kids for the weekend? Let's trade.' This is the kind of thing that family can do that the CDC can't do."

Those who distrust the vaccine because they think it was approved too quickly or wasn't properly vetted may be more difficult to convince. For them, a logical appeal may carry more weight, according to Wood. She proposed framing the decision as a choice: "Should you take a chance on the vaccine or should you take a chance on covid?"

People who oppose vaccines for political or identity reasons can be the hardest to approach. They're often surrounded by like-minded people in their communities and social networks, where their beliefs are continually reinforced. This can make changing course a challenge because it feels like changing an aspect of their identity.

"We humans like to be consistent," Chapman said. "If I've said now for months and I've illustrated to myself that I'm the sort of person who's not going to get vaccinated, now I need a cover story to change my mind."

A good approach, experts said, is to point them to people who share their identity who have argued in favor of vaccinations. "Here's someone you really respect of the same political persuasion, and they say you should do it," Wood said. "It's making the narrative fit the identity."

- Focus on your relationship and avoid debate. Data on the safety and efficacy of vaccines is easy to come by. But pelting vaccine holdouts with facts and figures is all but certain to be a losing strategy, experts said. If anything, it will probably cause them to dig in further.

Health workers sometimes use "motivational interviewing" - which involves asking questions about what might boost people's confidence in the shots - to address vaccine hesitancy. Experts said this approach may be useful in one-on-one conversations too. But it can be a difficult balance, especially in this stage of the country's mass immunization campaign.

"We're in a tough place right now," Chapman said. "People who have held out, they have some reason they don't want to get vaccinated. The easy customers, we've already convinced them. We're now down to tough customers."

Wood echoed her concerns. "The evidence is piling up that the vaccine is good. But the personal evidence that they don't need it is also piling up," she said. "Until that person actually gets ill, they have evidence - personal evidence - that they don't need it."

NOT JUST A FRIEND: Dating app honeytraps another Capitol Riot suspect, this time from Texas

De-escalation is key if a vaccine conversation gets heated. Trying to get the last word in a debate could only inflame things further, experts said. Instead, they said, it's important to remind people that your love or friendship is why you're approaching them in the first place.

"You have to keep saying over and over again how much the person means to you," Wood said.

"You don't have to be successful right off the bat or in some conventional way," she said. "But they themselves will feel better and the relationship will only grow if you let people know you're concerned about their health because you want them around."
Stephen F. Austin, Donnie Darko and a person who calls himself the King of the Wild Frontier were among the first people to give money to support Gov. Greg Abbotts border wall effort after he announced he would be seeking private donations to help fund it.

But theres no way to verify if Austin, who donated $10, is of any relation to the man known as the Father of Texas, or if Darko, who gave $25, bears resemblance to the titular character in the cult film about a teenage boy who meets a man in a bunny suit who tells him the world will end in 28 days. The King of the Wild Frontier donated $50, but public records dont state where he lives.

RELATED: Can Greg Abbott actually build Trump's border wall?

Despite promises from Abbott that transparency in the crowdfunding process for the border wall would be paramount, donor information released to The Texas Tribune for the first week of collections was bereft of any way to verify the identities of the majority of the donors. Abbotts office is not disclosing the locations of donors, nor is it requiring that they identify themselves with their real names.

We expect full transparency and accountability, Abbott said in June when announcing the crowdfunding effort. So the public will know all the money coming in and how that money is being used.

The shortcomings in the donation disclosures have raised ethical concerns about the private fundraising effort for the governors major state initiative. Experts have warned that without clear disclosure rules and enforcement, the public may never truly know who is funding the states border wall. Worse, they warned, it could invite the perception of a pay to play system in which donors, who are anonymous to the public, benefit from their donations to one of Abbotts priority projects.

You dont want to have this big slush fund of money that is going to this pet project of the state executive that has zero accountability to anybody, with money coming in from who knows what and God knows who, said Beth Rotman, national director of money in politics and ethics at Common Cause, the government watchdog group.

The Tribune reviewed donations to Abbotts border wall efforts that covered the first eight days of its existence, from June 10-17. During that time, the state received more than 3,300 individual donations. The highest was $5,000.

As of Thursday, the total donations for the wall exceeded more than $873,000, but the list of individual donor names beyond the first eight days was not immediately available.

In addition to potentially fake names, the list also includes dozens of incomplete names. Donors are identified as R T, S P, Red A and A Rim.

Abbotts office did release the city and state information for just 25 donors who had sent money in the mail prior to the establishment of its online fundraising portal on June 16. All except two of those donations came from outside of Texas. One $10 donation received by mail was from American Citizen/Veteran and was listed as anonymous.

READ MORE: Abbott wants to build a border wall. South Texas landowners are divided over whether they want it.

After being presented with the Tribunes findings, Abbott spokesperson Renae Eze repeated the governors commitment to ensuring full transparency and accountability to our fellow Texans, saying Abbott had followed a process that has been around for decades to oversee gifts, grants, and donations, to establish the border walls funding mechanism.

Eze added that the donations were subject to the states public information laws and that Abbotts office was releasing the information in accordance with those laws.

Due to the sensitive nature of the personal information for the credit card transactions, and the very real fear of retaliation for donating to the border security mission, billing information is only being kept by the state agency responsible for processing the credit card financial transactions, Eze said in a statement. Until the Biden Administration starts doing their job, Texas is stepping up to secure our southern border and protect Texans and Americans alike.

The Tribune has not sought the disclosure of the donors credit card numbers, but it has asked for donor names, cities and states to aid in the verification of identities.

In a similar instance, when Arizona tried to crowdfund the legal defense of a controversial immigration law that allowed police to ask citizens for their citizenship status, the state released the names of donors and the states where they lived.

Not everyone who donated to Texas wall hid their identity.

Political consultants like Sherry Sylvester, a top aide to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, gave at least $50, and Allen Blakemore, who advises some of the states top GOP politicians, including Patrick, donated $25.

Most people dont have a problem with it, said Robin Kolodny, chair of the political science department at Temple University. Look at the Koch brothers, [Sheldon] Adelson, Michael Bloomberg. They hide nothing. Im not saying there arent people trying to hide. But theres a lot of people who dont have a problem.

Kolodny, who has studied public disclosures in campaign financing, said people who donate to efforts like Abbotts border wall do so because they believe in the cause.

Its solidarity, she said. Its me showing Im with this.

Experts likened the fundraising effort for the wall to political contributions for campaigns and said that Abbotts office should put in place tools to reassure the public of the projects transparency.

'I'M JUST STUNNED': Texas leaders react to Abbott's announcement about border wall

You dont want to have anonymity because it raises the danger that somebody will be steering public policy, said Richard Briffault, a law professor at Columbia University.

Under Texas political reporting laws, campaigns are required to ask donors for their name, address and business occupation when asking for donations to verify their identity. But Abbotts border wall fundraising is not governed by those laws and does not have those requirements.

It makes sense, certainly, that you have an executive saying that we are going to disclose where the funds are coming from, Rotman said. But if thats not meaningful disclosure ... when its just a pledge, then its not really worth the paper that its written on.

Rotman said Abbott could start by adding language to the website asking donors to certify that they use their legal name. His office could also list donor names on the website contemporaneously for the public  as opposed to only providing them in response to open records requests  and add software that would prevent donors from listing incomplete names.

If you think its important, then you have to say Im not going to let somebody write down Donnie Darko and give me the cash, she said. There are a lot of well-developed states and a lot of well-developed models. Its very possible for Texas to do this in a way that Texans will have disclosure in the way that the governor has promised.

Beyond getting rid of the cloud of anonymity, experts also said more disclosure could help remove the perception of pay to play, in which influential donors could give money to Abbotts border wall project in the hopes of political favors or government contracts in the future.

If youre looking at lobbyists or political advisers who want him to hire them because he wants to run for president, maybe theyre all staking their claims, Kolodny said.

Abbotts office did not respond to questions about those concerns.

On the flip side, a requirement for addresses and occupations could help avoid confusion. One name among the list of early donors is Mike Toomey, who donated $100. That is the name of one of the states top lobbyists, whom Abbott tapped last year to head a strike force to reopen Texas during the coronavirus pandemic.

But Toomey, the lobbyist, said he had not donated to the border wall.

Thats not me, he said.

The system has also opened the door for creative donors to send political messages to state officials.

On June 17, one donor gave $1, the minimum amount required to donate to the campaign. Under the field for name, the donor listed StopWasting TaxpayerMoney.
International

Afghan forces kill 81 militants in Balkh province

Kabul, Jul 25 (IANS) | Publish Date: 7/25/2021 1:21:44 PM IST

A total of 81 militants were confirmed dead as the Afghan forces, backed by helicopters and fighter planes, launched airstrikes in the northern Balkh province, an army statement released here on Sunday said.

The sorties were launched on Saturday in parts of the restive Kaldar and Chamtal districts, leaving 81 insurgents dead and injuring 43 others, reports Xinhua news agency. A large number of arms and ammunition, as well as over two dozen vehicles and motorbikes of the militants, were also destroyed during the air raids, the statement added. The Taliban militants have claimed capturing nearly 200 districts since early May across Afghanistan.
By Dana Nuccitelli, an environmental scientist, writer, and author of Climatology versus Pseudoscience, published in 2015. Originally published at Yale Climate Connections.

In its 2001 Third Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) foresaw that global warming would lead to increasingly deadly heatwaves. More hot days and heatwaves are very likely over nearly all land areas, the worlds top climate scientists warned. These increases are projected to be largest mainly in areas where soil moisture decreases occur.

The greatest increases in thermal stress are forecast for mid- to high-latitude (temperate) cities, especially in populations with non-adapted architecture and limited air conditioning, they wrote at the time. A number of U.S. cities would experience, on average, several hundred extra deaths each summer.

Sound prescient? And familiar? All too much so.

Twenty years later, it seems as though these climate scientists were gazing into a crystal ball rather than computer monitors. At the end of June 2021, the normally temperate Pacific Northwest experienced a record-shattering heatwave. The village of Lytton, in British Columbia, set a new all-time Canadian temperature record of 49.6 degrees Celsius (121.3 degrees Fahrenheit) and was largely destroyed by a wildfire soon thereafter. Quillayute in the northwest corner of Washington, shattered its previous high temperature record by a full 11F.

At least 800 deaths have so far been attributed to the extreme heat, and experts say they expect the final mortality tally to be considerably higher. Because of the regions historically temperate weather, many homes lack air conditioning; residents were enveloped by temperatures well in excess of 100F.

University of British Columbia marine biologist Christopher Harley estimates that the heatwave also caused over a billion marine wildlife deaths, as shells of dead mussels and clams coated rocks along the Pacific seashore.

Climate Change Made the Heatwave More Deadly

Contributing to the World Weather Attribution project, 27 scientists worked around the clock for a week immediately after this extreme event to determine the role played by climate change. The team used published peer-reviewed methods, comparing numerous model simulations of two scenarios: the world as it was when the event occurred, and a counterfactual world that might have been had humans not altered Earths climate by burning fossil fuels over the past 150 years.

The results are striking. The authors concluded that a heat event so extreme was virtually impossible without human-caused climate change. While its difficult to quantify the rarity of such unprecedented weather, their best estimate was that it was a 1-in-1,000-year event. Without human-caused climate change, such an extreme event would be at least 150 times rarer, and the heatwave was about 3.6F hotter than it would have been naturally.

But continued climate change will make these extreme events much more common. If global warming breaches the Paris Climate Agreement guardrail of 2C (3.6F) above pre-industrial temperatures (compared to todays 1.2C, or 2.2F higher), the scientists estimate that an event like this would occur roughly every 5 to 10 years. As study co-author Dim Coumou of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research suggested, we may have crossed a threshold in the climate system where a small amount of additional global warming causes a faster rise in extreme temperatures.

Heatwave Climate Connections

In fact, a 2020 analysis by Columbia University climate scientists James Hansen and Makiko Sato found that what was considered extreme Northern Hemisphere summer heat in the 1950s to 1980s is about 200 times more likely to occur today as a result of shifting temperature patterns.

But one question the new attribution studys authors were unable to answer involves whether the June 2021 event was simply a case of really bad luck  just a natural extreme heatwave amplified by global warming  or whether climate change has loaded the dice in favor of this type of extreme heatwave in other ways.

For example, higher temperatures also draw more moisture out of the soil and vegetation and into the atmosphere, thus tending to exacerbate droughts. The region between southern British Columbia and California has been anomalously dry this year, with below-normal soil moisture since the beginning of April 2021 as a result of low precipitation. With less soil moisture available to evaporate, there is more heatwave energy available to raise air temperatures, as the 2001 IPCC report alluded to.

In short, its possible that climate change will worsen droughts in western North America, which will in turn worsen heatwaves.

Another possible factor involves a slowing jet stream resulting from human-caused changes in the Arctic. The June heatwave was characterized by an atmospheric heat dome trapped by an omega blocking pattern, so-called because the shape of the jet stream current resembles the Greek symbol . Authors of a 2018 study in Science Advances concluded that climate change is making these sorts of jet stream patterns occur more frequently in the Northern Hemisphere summer. But in the June 2021 event, the rapid attribution study concluded that  unlike the record temperatures on the ground  the jet stream circulation pattern was not particularly exceptional.

Those researchers were able to rule out a common suspect often posited by those described as climate deniers  ocean cycles. The El Nino cycle was in a neutral phase leading up to the heatwave, and the authors concluded it had no influence on the occurrence of the heatwave. Another ocean cycle called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation was found to slightly favor cooler conditions for this region at the time.

What Makes Extreme Heat Especially Deadly?

The combination of rising heat and humidity is especially dangerous, as Texas A&M climate scientist Andrew Dessler explained in a Twitter thread. The human body generates heat, and at temperatures above around 82F, the surrounding air no longer carries away enough heat to keep the body cool. The remaining options to avoid a dangerously overheating body involve air flow across the skin (for example from wind or a fan) or evaporating sweat. And as climate change draws more moisture from the soil into the atmosphere, thus increasing humidity, sweating offers less relief. At 100% relative humidity, the body cant evaporate any sweat (hence dry heat is less uncomfortable because of the bodys ability to cool itself by sweating).

Scientists combine measurements of heat and humidity through what are known as wet bulb temperatures. Prolonged wet bulb values close to body temperature (98F) are not survivable. A 2020 study in Science Advances found that areas near the equator like the Persian Gulf and portions of Central America, India, and Southeast Asia are already very close to this survivability limit, and that the limit will be regularly exceeded if global warming approaches 2.5C (4.5F) above pre-industrial temperatures, rendering these regions potentially uninhabitable.

Our results provide a strong warning: Our rapidly warming climate is bringing us into uncharted territory that has significant consequences for health, well-being, and livelihoods, the authors of the new attribution study concluded. Greenhouse gas mitigation goals should take into account the increasing risks associated with unprecedented climate conditions if warming would be allowed to continue.
By Jerri-Lynn Scofield, who has worked as a securities lawyer and a derivatives trader. She is currently writing a book about textile artisans.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Wednesday voted 5-0 to issue a policy statement outlining a new enforcement policy for right to repair restrictions.

This initiative comes as no surprise. In May, the FTC published a report , Nixing the Fix: an FTC Report to Congress on Repair Initiatives discussing the issue (see Big Tech Goes All In to Thwart Right to Repair Initiatives). And earlier this month, as part of a broader executive order to promote competition, President Joe Biden directed the FTC to address restrictions that thwart consumer efforts to repair products they own (see Steve Wozniak Endorses the Right to Repair).

The policy statement explained the FTCs basis and rationale for the new policy:

Restricting consumers and businesses from choosing how they repair products can substantially increase the total cost of repairs, generate harmful electronic waste, and unnecessarily increase wait times for repairs. In contrast, providing more choice in repairs can lead to lower costs, reduce e-waste by extending the useful lifespan of products, enable more timely repairs, and provide economic opportunities for entrepreneurs and local businesses. In 2019, the Commission convened a workshop on Nixing the Fix and sought input from consumers, independent businesses, manufacturers, and others. Through this work, the Commission uncovered evidence that manufacturers and sellers may, without reasonable justification, be restricting competition for repair services in numerous ways, including: imposing physical restrictions (e.g., the use of adhesives); limiting the availability of parts, manuals, diagnostic software, and tools to manufacturers authorized repair networks; using designs that make independent repairs less safe; limiting the availability of telematics information (i.e., information on the operation and status of a vehicle that is collected by a system contained in the vehicle and wirelessly relayed to a central location, often the manufacturer or dealer of the vehicle); asserting patent rights and enforcement of trademarks in an unlawful, overbroad manner; disparaging non-OEM parts and independent repair; using unjustified software locks, digital rights management, and technical protection measures; and imposing restrictive end user license agreements. The Commissions report on repair restrictions explores and discusses a number of these issues and describes the hardships repair restrictions create for families and businesses. The Commission is concerned that this burden is borne more heavily by underserved communities, including communities of color and lower-income Americans. The pandemic exacerbated these effects as consumers relied more heavily on technology than ever before [Jerri-Lynn here: citations omitted].

Noting that unlawful repair restrictions have generally not been an enforcement priority for a number of years, the policy statement succinctly outlined the legal steps the FTC will take to enforce the right to repair. These rely on existing statutory authority, including antitrust laws, the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, and Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act.

First, the Commission urges the public to submit complaints and provide other information to aid in greater enforcement of the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act and its implementing regulations. While current law does not provide for civil penalties or redress, the Commission will consider filing suit against violators of the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act to seek appropriate injunctive relief. The Commission will also closely monitor private litigation to determine whether the Commission may wish to investigate a pattern of unfair or deceptive acts or practices or file an amicus brief. Further, the Commission will explore rulemaking, as appropriate. Second, the Commission will scrutinize repair restrictions for violations of the antitrust laws. For example, certain repair restrictions may constitute tying arrangements or monopolistic practicessuch as refusals to deal, exclusive dealing, or exclusionary designthat violate the Sherman Act. Violations of the Sherman Act also violate the prohibition on unfair methods of competition codified in Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act. Third, the Commission will assess whether repair restrictions constitute unfair acts or practices, which are also prohibited by Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act. In addition, the Commission will analyze any material claims made to purchasers and users to ascertain whether there are any prohibited deceptive acts or practices, in violation of Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act. Finally, the Commission will bring an interdisciplinary approach to this issue, using resources and expertise from throughout the agency to combat unlawful repair restrictions. The FTC will also closely coordinate with state law enforcement and policymakers to ensure compliance and to update existing law and regulation to advance the goal of open repair markets [Jerri-Lynn here: citations omitted].

Note that FTC promise to work with states on both enforcement and on drafting state right to repair laws. The right to repair movement has been steadily advancing at the state level, with 27 states considering such laws so far this year, according to a press release issued by U.S. PIRG, a public interest group that has spearheaded many of these initiatives. FTC support will help galvanise these efforts. Once one state passes such a measure, manufacturers may voluntarily extend the protections countrywide  as happened when Massachusetts passed an auto right to repair provision in 2013 (see Right to Repair Redux: Massachusetts Ballot Questions).

Bravo FTC. I hope this is just the first of many pro-consumer policies that will emerge from an active, energized agency under the leadership of new chair Lina Khan (see Biden Taps Lina Khan to Chair the FTC). Enforcement of the right to repair was an issue teed up and ready to be implemented, due to previous preparatory work done before Khans appointment. The new policy statement enjoys the unanimous support of all five FTC commissioners.
(Natural News) A serious cold snap has hit Brazils coffee belt, pushing temperatures below freezing in a matter of mere minutes, seriously jeopardizing next years crops and damaging countless coffee trees. In addition to hurting the coffee industry, its also a big blow for those who insist that manmade global warming is causing rising temperatures across the planet.

On the morning of July 20, temperatures in Brazils biggest coffee-growing regions dropped below freezing, registering -1.2 degrees Celsius (29 degrees Fahrenheit). Its the coldest temperature seen in Minas Gerais, the countrys biggest-producing state, since 1994. Brazil is the worlds biggest coffee producer thanks to its climates particular suitability to bean production.

In response to the frost, coffee prices surged by almost 13 percent to reach a 6.5-year high. The effect will also be felt next year as coffee trees are on a two-year cycle and many of those affected were expected to produce more next season.

One local coffee producer, Mario Alvarenga, told Reuters: Ive never seen something like that. We knew it would be cold, we were monitoring, but temperatures suddenly went several degrees down when it was already early morning.

The frost blackened the crops. Coffee trees are known for being highly sensitive to frost, which kills their leaves; a severe frost can kill them completely. Some farmers expect they will need to take their trees out completely and replant.

Coffee farmer Airton Goncalves said he thinks hell have to take out 80,000 trees as they are burned to the bottom. He said that when he got in his truck that morning and an ice sensor went off, he thought something was wrong with the system. However, once he made his way to the farm, he found the crops and the roofs of the buildings there covered in ice. He estimates that his production next year will fall to 1,500 bags from 5,500 bags. Frosts were also reported in Sao Paulo.

Exporters initially said they believed that next years harvest could drop by as much as 1 to 2 million bags, but a source told Reuters that a trader of global agricultural commodities told them that figure now looks like its too optimistic, with the real numbers expected to be nearly double that. The Brazilian exporter Guaxupe, meanwhile, has said it is expecting a reduction of 4.5 million bags on its initial projections for 2022 of nearly 70 million bags.

Frost comes after severe drought impacted coffee crops

This is the second major blow for coffee growers recently, who also suffered through a severe drought that left their fields parched and depleted the reservoirs they use for irrigation. Forecasters expect the La Nina weather patterns that delay much-needed rainfall to return, which means the drought could worsen.

Particularly hard-hit areas included Minas and Sao Paulo, who saw the production of arabica coffee drop significantly. Soil moisture there is now at 20 percent, which is well below the 60 percent they need for crop development. These are the beans favored by Starbucks.

Meanwhile, the robusta beans used by Nestle for Nescafe instant coffee are also seeing lower productivity this season just as demand has risen due to the pandemic. All of this means consumers should expect to pay more for coffee at supermarkets and coffee shops. Some experts have said that next year could be the worst high-yield cycle in decades.

With another cold front expected in the later part of next week and parts of Australia and Africa also being

hit with historic lows recently, it is going to be hard for climate change alarmists to argue that everything that happens in agriculture is related to manmade global warming.

Sources for this article include:

ZeroHedge.com

NASDAQ.com

Reuters.com

Bloomberg.com

Reuters.com
(Natural News) In a fascinating interview with Stew Peters of The Stew Peters Show, Dr. David Martin blew the lid on Tony Fauci and Peter Daszak, both of whom committed treasonous acts of domestic terrorism against the entire world with their coordinated release of the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19).

Now that we know for a fact that the Chinese Virus came about thanks to Faucis illegal gain of function research, which he was funding with American taxpayer dollars at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China, truth-seekers are diving even deeper into the scandal to uncover the depths of the evil that has taken place.

During the interview  you can watch it below at Brighteon  Dr. Martin explains how the release of the Fauci Flu was coordinated with the mainstream media, Big Pharma, and corrupt government entities to generate massive profits for the elite while killing off millions of people.

Not only that, but the so-called vaccine that was created in response to the plandemic has inflicted even more harm into the bodies of people who have been deceived into believing that it provides protection against infection, which it does not.

When you inject a known toxin into a person, you are actually injecting an agent of death, Dr. Martin explained. And you cannot sit there and hide behind the diaphanous fig leaf of going, well, were doing it in the public interest, when you know, not have a hunch, that it is in fact lethal in many instances.

Pfizer has even stated that they have an acceptable death rate.'

Fauci, Daszak are domestic terrorists who need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law

One of the newly uncovered Fauci emails shows Daszak openly admitting to committing heinous crimes against humanity, of which Fauci is also guilty. While the duo schemed up a narrative to make it appear as though they were merely looking out for public health, the truth is that Fauci and Daszak were committing serious crimes that violate both U.S. and international law.

We have in Faucis emails now on Feb. 6 and Feb. 7 Peter Daszak on the record stating that we need a cover story that distances him and the Chinese from this particular pathogen, and thats in public records, thats not my opinion, Dr. Martin elaborated, reading portions of the email showing that Daszak knew full well what he was doing by rallying power players from the sectors of media, medicine and the stock market to usher in the scheme.

That is collusion, that is racketeering, and that is under the Patriot Act domestic terrorism, Dr. Martin stated plainly.

Its also a violation of U.S. law, the injection of a bioweapon, added Peters.

Another thing to keep in mind about the injections is that they bear none of the characteristics necessary to qualify as actual vaccines. Instead, they function more like computer programs to alter peoples DNA and turn them into walking spike protein factories.

People think that somehow or another a piece of SARS coronavirus was turned into a vaccine. That is not true, Dr. Martin contends.

A computer-simulated, synthetic, chimeric, computer-generated code was given by China to Moderna to put into an injection so that your cells, in the case of mRNA vaccines, would produce the S1 spike protein synthesis, not the actual virus, the way we used to do vaccines. This was a computer code uploaded by China to inject a pathogen stimulant into the American population.

Be sure to watch the full interview above. You can also keep up with the latest Chinese Virus news by checking out Pandemic.news.

Sources for this article include:

Brighteon.com

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) As many on this blog are aware, I have long been an advocate of public education and we feel deeply fortunate to have sent all four of our kids to public schools in Alexandria and McLean in Fairfax County. I still have one child in the Fairfax system. I was therefore shocked like many Fairfax parents to see the videotape of Michelle Leete, Vice President of Training at the Virginia PTA, Vice President of Communications for the Fairfax County PTA and First Vice President of the Fairfax County NAACP as she lashed out against those who oppose critical race theory and identity divisional lessons in school. What was even more unnerving is the applause from other parents to her let them die declaration.

(Article by Jonathan Turley republished from JonathanTurley.org)

The video was taken by a Fairfax parent, Asra Nomani, whose son recently graduated from Fairfax County Public Schools and helps run the watchdog group Parents Defending Education. The speech was reportedly held at a counter-protest a meeting billed as STOP CRT RALLY. Nomani included the video in her posting below.

Leete railed against those objecting to the identity-based lesson plans. Notably, Leete fell back on the same shaming of parents with opposing views  accusing them of hating everything and everyone because they do not want this material to be taught to their children. Keep in mind that this would encompass the majority of parents according to recent polls.

So lets meet and remain steadfast in speaking truth, tearing down double standards, and refuting double talk. Lets not allow any double downing on lies. Lets prepare our children for a world they deserve. Lets deny this off-key band of people that are anti-education, anti-teacher, anti-equity, anti-history, anti-racial reckoning, anti-opportunities, anti-help people, anti-diversity, anti-platform, anti-science, anti-change agent, anti-social justice, anti-healthcare, anti-worker, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-children, anti-healthcare, anti-worker, anti-environment, anti-admissions policy change, anti-inclusion, anti-live-and-let live people. Let them die. Dont let these uncomfortable people, dont let these uncomfortable people deter us from our bold march forward.

Let them die, says @FairfaxNAACP leader Michelle Leete at protest before @fcpsnews board. Folks against critical race theory are here, with protestors including Leete opposing them. Itll be  tonight. Watch at https://t.co/KuScNenTVQ pic.twitter.com/Csb5faEYKG  Asra Q. Nomani (@AsraNomani) July 15, 2021

The unhinged attack on parents opposing these lessons is all-too-familiar in our age of rage. It is not enough to disagree on what is appropriate for our schools, you have to paint the other side as bizarrely opposing the environment, workers, help people, inclusion, healthcare, LGBTQ, and of course children. Fairfax has become a major battleground over CRT and race-based programs.

That debate has reached out Thomas Jefferson High School, ranked No. 1 among all public high schools nationwide by U.S. News & World Report. TJ is a source of pride for the county as an elite school that offers advanced courses for our best students. However, as with other jurisdictions where meritocracy and standardized testing have been declared racist, school officials have moved to drop actual grades and scores as the critical qualifications for entry in order to increase African American participation.

The race-blind entrance exam was successful in picking the best students in the county and the school serves as a wonderful goal for students who need advanced school work. So the school board went to a holistic approach to increase diversity. The primary racial group targeted by the board was Asian students. The result was that this year Asian-Americans admitted to TJ dropped to 54% this year from 73% last year. These students were no longer admitted entirely on their academic achievement on tests and scores. Their race was the motivating factor in changing the entry requirements.

In some ways, Fairfax is still better than many jurisdictions that are eliminating elite schools and advanced courses because of the race of the students in those programs.

It is incredibly sad to see this type of reckless rhetoric in our school district. Many of us came to Fairfax because it has always been viewed as a district that put academic excellence as the highest priority. We have found the schools in McLean to be terrific and the teachers to be incredibly supportive. I hate to see that long-successful approach swamped by the unrestrained rage and divisions of our contemporary politics.

Update: The PTA has announced that it has accepted Leetes resignation. The Virginia Parent-Teacher Association declared that

Today, the Virginia PTA executive committee requested and received the resignation of Michelle Leete, who served as Vice President of Training. The actions & rhetoric of Ms. Leete & all of the like-minded partisan supporters of the SB are deeply disappointing. It evinces a deep lack of concern for children & parents, particularly where the wellbeing of children & families clash with political considerations.

Virginia PTA requests and receives the resignation of Michelle Leete due to her comments wishing the death of parents who disagree with her. Ms. Leete is still serving as the VP for @FairfaxNAACP . pic.twitter.com/tkMpgoU6v1  Fairfax County Parents Assocation (@FFXParentsAssoc) July 17, 2021

There is no statement from the NAACP or any of the many parents applauding Leetes diatribe.

According to The Washington Post, Leete said she intended to wish death on the various ideals from parents, not the parents themselves.

Read more at: JonathanTurley.org
Anthony Fauci Backed Virus Experiments Despite Pandemic Risk

(Natural News) The Australian reported:

Americas top medical adviser for the coronavirus, Anthony Fauci, argued that the benefits of experimenting on contagious viruses  manipulating and heightening their infectious potency  was worth the risk of a laboratory accident sparking a pandemic.

In previously unreported remarks, Dr. Fauci supported the contentious gain-of-function experiments that some now fear might have led to an escape from a Wuhan laboratory causing the COVID-19 pandemic, calling them important work.

An investigation by The Weekend Australian has also confirmed Dr Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, did not alert senior White House officials before lifting the ban on gain-of-function research in 2017.

(Article republished from ChildrensHealthDefense.org)

Minnesota Candidate Backs Move to Block COVID Shots for Kids

WEAU News reported:

Minnesota Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott Jensen is backing a court action to stop COVID-19 vaccinations for 12- to 16-year-olds that, among other things, compares the inoculations to Nazi experimentation on imprisoned Jews.

Jensen is a family physician and former state senator from Chaska. And hes the first named plaintiff in a petition filed in federal court in Alabama by Americas Frontline Doctors, which calls the vaccines dangerous biological agents.

Coronavirus Cases Slow at College Campuses Across the U.S.

The New York Times reported:

As spring classes draw to a close and more people in the United States get vaccinated, coronavirus infections, which plagued college campuses across the country and seeped into the community at large, appear to be slowing among students and employees.

The New York Times has been tracking virus cases at U.S. colleges and universities for nearly a year and has identified about 700,000 infections involving students and employees. Of those, more than 260,000 cases have occurred since Jan. 1.

The Times has regularly surveyed more than 1,900 colleges and universities for coronavirus information for nearly a year. Altogether, the colleges reported about 60,000 cases each month between January and late April. From late April to late May, however, they reported fewer than 30,000 cases. Some of the newly identified cases may be from earlier in the pandemic and cases may be slowing in some places because spring semesters ended in early May, but the decline suggests that the overall outlook might be improving.

Legislators Ask North Dakota Health Department to End Vaccination Phone Calls to Residents

The Bismarck Tribune reported:

Two legislators are asking North Dakotas Health Department to end phone calls to residents that inform them of how and where to get a COVID-19 vaccine.

The state health officer in a response said immunization reminders are routine, callers are state-employed and trained on federal privacy law, and people can opt out of state-issued reminders.

Sens. Jessica Bell, R-Beulah, and Nicole Poolman, R-Bismarck, sent a letter to State Health Officer Dr. Nizar Wehbi on Tuesday about the calls, listing concerns with patient privacy and the role of state government in personal health choices.

Canadas Secret COVID-19 Vaccine Contracts Hinder the Fight To Boost Vaccine Confidence, Researchers Say

The Star reported:

Canada, unlike its southern neighbour, is keeping secret the details of its vaccine contracts with big pharma, including what theyre paying for doses  and experts say thats a problem in the fight to build confidence with the public and contain vaccine hesitancy.

As part of a study in vaccine clinical trial and procurement transparency by the University of Toronto and Transparency International, Canada is being called on by researchers to be more forthcoming with details on the total cost and price per dose for COVID-19 vaccines in a bid to ensure fair pricing globally, instill trust with the public and counter hesitancy.

The report notes that 1.3 billion people globally are unwilling to take a COVID vaccine, according to a recent Gallup poll.

Read more at: ChildrensHealthDefense.org
(Natural News) A report has revealed that a Chinese military scientist filed a patent for a Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine prior to the March 2020 pandemic. It stated that Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) scientist Yusen Zhou filed the paperwork for the vaccine in February 2020 before he mysteriously died. The reports revelation appeared to support emerging claims that the pathogen behind COVID-19 emerged from a laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

According to The Australian, Zhou worked at the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology. The PLA-controlled Chinese Academy of Military Medical Sciences oversaw the institute. He graduated from the academy in 1998, garnering first prize for the PLAs scientific and technical progress award. Zhou subsequently worked under PLA Senior Colonel Wuchun Cao  who also sits on the board of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

Aside from his work with the PLA, the report said Zhou also worked closely with WIV scientists. The researchers he collaborated with at the WIV included Dr. Shi Zhengli  dubbed the bat woman due to her research on bat coronaviruses. Both Zhou and Shi focused on new infectious disease pathogens and immunology as their fields of research.

Outside of China, the PLA scientist also had ties to American educational institutions. Zhou did his post-doctoral research at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He also closely worked with the New York Blood Center  as evidenced by a study published in February 2020. Zhou joined 12 other researchers  including some from the center  in examining the pathogens responsible for the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

Their study found that the MERS and SARS coronaviruses could be used as avenues for antibody-based antiviral drug therapy. The 13 authors also remarked that the novel molecular mechanism for antibody-enhanced viral entry they worked on could guide future vaccination and antiviral strategies.

Zhous patent filing for the vaccine also reflected this earlier study. The application stated: The invention relates to the field of biomedicine, and relates to a COVID-19 vaccine, preparation methods and applications. The patent also added that the vaccines fusion protein can be utilized to create other medical treatments for the disease.

Zhous WIV ties only support the theory of the institutes secret military activity

A New York Post report touched on the mysterious demise of Zhou. According to the paper, the award-winning PLA scientist died in May 2020. However, there were no reports or tributes about Zhou published in Chinese media outlets. His death was only mentioned in passing  listing him as deceased  in a July 2020 media report and a December 2020 scientific paper.

Nevertheless, the close working relationship between Zhou and Shi only supported claims of the WIV conducting secret military activity. Declassified U.S. intelligence released in January 2021 attested to this allegation, The Australian noted.

It said: Despite the WIV presenting itself as a civilian institution, the U.S. has determined that the WIV has collaborated on publications and secret projects with Chinas military. The intelligence also noted: The U.S. and other donors who funded or collaborated on civilian research at the WIV have a right and obligation to determine whether any of our research funding was diverted to secret Chinese military projects.

The COVID-19 laboratory leak theory first gained ground during the Trump administration, but was dismissed by scientists and mainstream media. Negative sentiment against former President Donald Trump contributed to the lab leak possibility being branded as a conspiracy theory. Meanwhile, China insisted early on that the virus did not escape the Wuhan facility. It instead pointed to the citys Huanan Seafood Market as the possible site of the animal-to-human transmission.

But sentiment toward the lab leak theory appeared to be doing a complete 180-degree turn. Many leading scientists worldwide have pushed for a further probe of the WIV. Even incumbent President Joe Biden called for a re-investigation of the Wuhan laboratory despite closing an earlier probe led by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Biden said in a May 26 statement that he has asked the intelligence community to redouble [its] efforts and analyze information  [toward] a definitive conclusion on the origins of COVID-19.

Speaking to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) said the current administrations response was better late than never, but far from adequate. He continued that the U.S. intelligence community has been looking at the lab leak theory for more than a year. Theyve done good work on it, but in the end  the answer lies in the hands of [the Chinese government,] not people working for American intelligence agencies, Cotton said.

The lawmaker also pointed out that Beijing officials have not been transparent on the COVID-19 pandemics origins. He told the paper: We should be insisting that they come clean  [and] provide us a clear and unvarnished look at what was happening in the Wuhan labs.

Visit Pandemic.news to read more articles about the COVID-19 lab leak theory.

Sources include:

DailyMail.co.uk

NYPost.com

WhiteHouse.gov
(Natural News) A new study has found the main reason why Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccines cause adverse reactions. The confidential study leaked online pointed to spike proteins in the vaccines as responsible for the reported serious side effects. These spike proteins from the COVID-19 vaccines also affected people who have not been inoculated yet  aside from vaccinated individuals themselves.

The study surfaced as many who were inoculated with the COVID-19 vaccine reported post-vaccination adverse reactions. A number of women reported unusual menstruation cycles following their vaccination or after being around vaccinated people. Some teenagers experienced a type of heart inflammation called myocarditis after they got inoculated. Worse, reports of Guillain-Barre syndrome and other neurological disorders were documented after COVID-19 vaccination.

According to the leaked Pfizer study, the spike protein from COVID-19 vaccines does not remain near the injection site like traditional vaccines. Instead, the spike protein enters a persons bloodstream and spread throughout the body. It then accumulates in different organs and tissues  causing serious damage. However, the study showed that the liver processes most of the spike protein.

A December 2020 study published in Nature Neuroscience appeared to bolster the findings of the Pfizer study. The paper found that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein used in the COVID-19 vaccines can cross the blood-brain barrier. Further research revealed that animals injected with the spike protein developed cardiovascular issues.

Viral immunologist Dr. Byram Bridle of the University of Guelph in Canada elaborated on the Pfizer studys grim discovery. During an interview with Canadian broadcaster Alex Pierson, the scientist admitted that he and others made a big mistake with the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. He said: We thought the spike protein was a great target antigen, [but] we never knew the spike protein itself was a toxin and  a pathogenic protein.

Bridle admitted that by injecting people with the COVID-19 vaccines, they were inadvertently inoculating them with a toxin. The spike proteins accumulation appeared to damage tissues, which the virologist pointed to as the cause of the different adverse reactions in vaccinated individuals. (Related: We made a big mistake  COVID vaccine spike protein travels from injection site, can cause organ damage.)

Vaccine makers are racing to administer more doses into peoples arms

Despite the vaccines being more dangerous than COVID-19 itself, vaccine manufacturers are racing to inject more doses into peoples arms. They are now setting their sights on children and teenagers  who have a higher chance of surviving a bout of COVID-19. Pfizer is one of the vaccine manufacturers aiming to administer its mRNA COVID-19 vaccine to a younger cohort.

In May 2020, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the Pfizer vaccine for use on teens aged 12 to 15 years old. The regulator expanded the mRNA vaccines original emergency use authorization (EUA) originally issued in December 2020, to include younger Americans. According to the original EUA, the Pfizer vaccine  manufactured in partnership with German firm BioNTech  was initially approved for people aged 16 and older.

FDA Acting Commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock called the agencys expansion of the EUA a significant step in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. She added: Parents and guardians can rest assured that the agency undertook a rigorous and thorough review of all available data, as we have with all of our COVID-19 vaccine [EUAs.]

The American regulator continued: [The] Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine has met the statutory criteria to amend the EUA, and that the known and potential benefits of this vaccine in individuals 12 years of age and older outweigh the known and potential risks.

Meanwhile, Pfizer lauded the FDAs move to expand its COVID-19 vaccines EUA in a May 10 statement. Pfizer Chairman and CEO Albert Bourla said: [the] expansion of our EUA represents a significant step in helping  protect adolescents before the start of the next school year. BioNTech Co-Founder and CEO Dr. Ugur Sahin added that both companies aim to submit vaccine data for pre-school and school-age children in September 2021.

The statement mentioned that Pfizers vaccine clinical trials on children six months to 11 years old is ongoing. The company added that it plans to submit a EUA application for two cohorts  children two to five years old, and children aged five to 11  by September of this year. (Related: Two-year-old baby DIES during Pfizers Covid-19 vaccine experiments on children.)

Visit DangerousMedicine.com to read more articles about the dangers of the spike protein used in COVID-19 vaccines.

Sources include:

NaturalHealth365.com

FDA.gov

BusinessWire.com
(Natural News) As we watch liberals eat their own with the White House attacking Facebook, with Joe Biden accusing them of killing people, and Facebook issuing a statement pushing back, we see a few points getting lost in the chaos of the battle.

(Article by Susan Duclos republished from AllNewsPipeline.com)

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki recently admitted that the Biden regimes was flagging problematic posts on Facebook, for removal, if the Biden regime deems those posts to be misinformation.

Lets deal with that first, because according to the constitution Americans have the right to speak freely, and if Psaki was telling the truth, which she was this time, they are actively violating Americans constitutional rights by colluding with social media companies to flag and have posts removed, no matter what excuse or justification they offer.

WH AND FB, OTHER SOCIAL SITES PUSHING MISINFORMATION

Another disturbing aspect of this is Psakis reference to misinformation, as the truth has thus far been labeled as misinformation and people have been removed from Facebook because of that reason.

Facebook admits in a statement to removing over 18 million instances of COVID-19 misinformation.

The problematic issue, to use Psakis own words, is many of those removals were people debating whether the COVID virus was created and leaked from a lab in Wuhan.

That was labeled misinformation, at the time, posts were removed, accounts were suspended for speaking freely about their opinions on how the virus originated.

Now it is common knowledge that there is a very high probability that COVID originated in the lab at Wuhan.

Facebook has not reinstated the accounts of those that spoke the truth, but were silenced for actually telling the truth.

So the White House, and Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms, such as YouTube, were the ones pushing misinformation by asserting the lab theory was misinformation.

By colluding with the White House, it could also be said that Facebook, and other platforms, are acting as a government entity and should be help accountable for pushing fake news, while removing things that ended up being truthful news, all on behalf of the Biden regime.

Almost like China/Iran, North Korea state media.

Which brings us to a side issue before going into the battle of words and finger pointing between the White House and Facebook.

Social medias 230 immunity protections under the Communications Decency Act, meaning they are protected from being held accountable for their censorship practices by claiming they are not a publisher.

Congress has complained, whined and got their soundbites during congressional testimony by reps Google, Facebook, Twitter and such, yet have not done a thing to rein in out-of-control social media companies, but the courts may just take care of the issue before Congress gets off their duff.

Long story short: A court ruled the 230 immunity clause protected social media from being penalized for censorship, after a video platform removed a video from a religious group. Now the U.S. Appeals Court for the Second Circuit in New York, known for refusing to hear many cases, has agreed to review the lower courts decision.

Via Epoch Times: (Link offers full access to the entire article to ANP readers)

There currently are 10 active judges on the Second Circuit, as well as 13 semi-retired senior judges. This ruling puts Section 230 immunity in the crosshairs of judicial review. We suspect that the en banc court recognizes that Big Tech is not exempt from state and federal civil rights laws, said attorney Robert Tyler, general counsel for the California-based Advocates for Faith & Freedom. His law firm, Tyler & Bursch, represents Pastor Jim Domen and the California-based Church United nonprofit. Section 230 was not intended to give Big Tech the right to exclude persons from their platform just because the customer is black, Muslim, white, Christian, homosexual, or formerly homosexual. That is plain invidious discrimination.

According to BallotPedia there is a nearly an equal makeup of judges at the Second Circuit between those appointed between Democrat and Republican presidents, five of which were appointed by President Donald Trump.

Other countries are also taking social media platforms to task for censorship, as Germany has fined YouTube more than $100,000 for censoring a video of an anti-lockdown protest.

While $100,000 is a drop in the bucket compared to the Google-owned YouTube, this was one video, so one could imagine the billions in potential fines should should the U.S. start holding them accountable for every act of censorship.

LIBERALS EATING THEIR OWN

As cannibals are guaranteed to do, Facebook and the White House has started eating each other.

As Psaki spoke about colluding with social media, naming Facebook by name for not removing posts fast enough,, the White House is being accused by Facebook of attempting to scapegoat Facebook because the Biden regime missed their vaccination goals.

Joe Biden also stated that Facebook and other social media companies were killing people.

The first paragraph of Facebooks response, in a post titled Moving Past the Finger Pointing, offer a strawman claim if we ever saw one.

At a time when COVID-19 cases are rising in America, the Biden administration has chosen to blame a handful of American social media companies. While social media plays an important role in society, it is clear that we need a whole of society approach to end this pandemic. And facts  not allegations  should help inform that effort. The fact is that vaccine acceptance among Facebook users in the US has increased. These and other facts tell a very different story to the one promoted by the administration in recent days.

No it hasnt. Facebook removed any and all opposition to vaccines, along with preventing any real debate or even discussion about the safety of a vaccine that hasnt even been tested for two years.

Therefore, the only people they have left on the platform to be counted as their claim of increased participation, are those accepting that Facebook has the right to deem whatever tthey want to be true and false.

This despite the demonstrable and documented censoring of the lab leak theory, which we know now is a legitimate line of discussion.

Another side note: In that same lengthy statement, Facebook informs readers that they recently expanded our pop-up vaccine clinics in low-income and underserved communities. 

What the hell is Facebook doing having anything to do with medical clinics? They are a social media and data mining company.

Period.

Read the entire statement, because there is just so many WTF assertions and claims. Readers should feel free to share what they find to be the most egregious statements and/or lies in that FB statement.

BOTTOM LINE

The U.S. government has no business colluding with social media companies, otherwise those companies become nothing more than a government mouthpiece and entity and should be labeled and advertised as such.

In their original sign up pages, Facebook should be forced to inform their possible new users that they are a government controlled website, so people have the truth before deciding to sign up.

Read more at: AllNewsPipeline.com
Beverly "Beebe" Guinaugh, 85, of St. Louis, Missouri, formerly a longtime resident of New Castle, passed away on Saturday, July 24, 2021, at the Bethesda Meadow Nursing Home, Ellisville, Missouri. Mrs. Guinaugh was born on Jan. 18, 1936, in New Castle, a daughter of the late Ferdinand and Do
Bosky Khanna By

Express News Service

BENGALURU: The problem of willy-nilly parking and the question of where to park vehicles will soon be addressed as the Department of Urban Land Transport (DULT) is set to come out with parking policy 2.0. During the lockdown, DULT officials had chalked out the draft of where parking should be restricted and where permitted. Now field surveys are being done to finalise their blueprint.

Earlier, the parking plan was prepared for 85 roads and it was approved by the government. The policy 2.0 has also been approved. There will be a revision in base parking rates, area-wise, when compared to what has been already been approved by the government, officials from the Urban Development Department told TNSE.

The new policy is for other roads apart from the 85 already listed. It will be introduced in stages. To start with, the policy will cover prime commercial spaces, after which it will be introduced in residential areas. This is because a more detailed study and ward-wise action plan needs to be prepared, DULT Commissioner V Manjula said.

The DULT is also working on meetings with the BBMP zonal commissioners and the zonal task force to discuss the parking policy and its implementation. The government is also working on how a public consultation meeting can be held.

In the new policy, the department is working on how parking can be restricted on roads through designated parking zones and small pockets. Officials pointed out that parking was easier to regulate in commercial spaces as there are many options - alternate days, streets and sides of the road, utilising existing terminals and commercial spaces. But this is difficult in residential areas where people have more vehicles than parking spaces. Moreover, there are mixed zones and very few true residential areas.
By Express News Service

BHUBANESWAR: Dengue in the State Capital has breached the 300 cases mark and taken 50 localities under its grip with the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) struggling to contain its spread.

According to the statistics of BMC, the number of dengue cases which was 51 on July 11 has increased to 330 by Saturday, a six-fold rise in the last 14 days.

As many as 39 new dengue cases were reported from different parts of the city in the last 24 hours as the total infection count on Friday was 291. What raises more concern is that new cases have started surfacing from different parts of the city in the middle of Covid-19 pandemic.

Sources in the BMC said that the number of areas from where dengue cases had been reported till July 15 was around 35. In the last nine days, the infection has spread to 15 more areas. These include Jayadev Vihar, Unit-IV, Salia Sahi, Excise Colony, RMRC, Mancheswar, Old Station Bazar, Madhusudan Nagar, Patia, Budha Nagar and Budheswari Colony.

While around 50 cases have been reported from Niladri Vihar and its nearby slums, close to 30 cases have been reported from Sailashree Vihar area. As of July 17, the two localities had 37 and 18 cases respectively.

An official from the civic body said that of the 1,029 breeding grounds they detected and destroyed during source reduction drive till Saturday, larvae were found in 451 breeding points in different parts of the city.

The existing drive to eliminate breeding sources and raise awareness has failed to yield desired results due to poor lifting of garbage and enforcement in residential areas as well as public places including offices and markets.

BMC officials informed that they have covered over 19,000 people in the awareness drive and had been taking anti-larval measures to contain the spread of the infection. IEC activities have also been intensified, while orders have also been issued to check buildings and other areas, they added.

ALARMING RISE
By Express News Service

KOCHI: In order to unravel the alleged mystery behind the death of transwoman and activist Ananya Kumari Alex, 28, the police will interrogate more persons, including the doctor of the private hospital in Kochi, where she underwent sex reassignment surgery.

The Kalamassery police, who are investigating the case, on Saturday received the detailed report of the postmortem. The autopsy was conducted by a two-member expert medical team at the Government Medical College, Kalamassery, on Thursday. However, police officers did not divulge details of the report citing that it will affect the ongoing inquiry.

A case has been registered for unnatural death and we are examining the reasons that prompted the victim to take the extreme step, an officer with the investigation team said. Though the autopsy was scheduled to be held on Wednesday, it was postponed after Ananyas father and a group of trans rights activists submitted a petition before the Kalamassery police, demanding that the autopsy be conducted only by a team of expert doctors.

The preliminary investigation by the police reached a conclusion that Ananyas death was a suicide. It is learnt that the report received by the police also confirms this. The investigation team will collect the statements of the doctors who performed the autopsy on Monday to examine the allegation of medical negligence.
By Express News Service

KOCHI: Police will question the Assamese relatives of Afghan national Idgul alias Abbas Khan, who was arrested for working at the Cochin Shipyard Limited (CSL) using forged documents. His relatives have also been working at the shipyard under a contractor.

Meanwhile, the police have approached the Chief Judicial Magistrate court here seeking a seven-day custody of the Afghan national. The court will be consider the plea on Monday.

Idguls mother, an Assam native, had left for Afghanistan several years ago and got married to an Afghanistan national there. Idgul, who was born and brought up in Afghanistan, came to Assam using a medical visa two years ago. He managed to get a fake school transfer certificate using which he took an Aadhaar card.

Later, he came to Kochi as his uncles were working at the shipyard. The accused also managed to get a job after getting recruited by a contractor. His uncles did not inform the authorities about his nationality and the fake documents he used to get the job until recently when there was a fight between one of the uncles and the accused. We will record their detailed statements soon, said a police officer.

Police expect to get more details about the incident after interrogating Idgul. It was in June the CSL informed the police about a person working for a contractor with suspicious identity. In the detailed probe, the police found that accused was an Afghan national. Though, the accused went hiding after the incident, police nabbed him from Kolkata recently.
By Express News Service

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: On Saturday, the state recorded the highest single-day vaccination coverage when 4.53 lakh doses were administered. They were administered at 1,522 centres.

Of them, 1,380 are government hospitals and the rest are private hospitals. Kannur topped the list by administering vaccines to 59,374 people. It was followed by Thrissur (53,841) and Kottayam (51,276). All districts administered over 10,000 doses.

So far, the state has administered 1,83,89,973 doses of which 1,28,23,869 were first doses and 55,66,104 were second doses. 38.39% of the total population were administered the first dose and 16.66% the second dose. The statistics are based on the 2011 census data. A statement from the health ministers office said that the state is left with only 2 lakh doses which will not be sufficient for Sunday. The drive will come to a standstill if more doses are not received from the centre on Sunday, according to the health minister.

This has disproved the fake campaign that Kerala had hidden 10 lakh doses. Keralas vaccination coverage is above the national average, said Health Minister Veena George. Hundred per cent coverage was achieved in the first dose administration to health workers, she said. The previous highest single-day vaccination coverage was on July 19 when 3,55,196 doses were administered.rses.

Covid vaccination crosses 20 lakh in district

TPuram: The Covid vaccination number in the district crossed the 20-lakh mark. As per the data available with district administration, a total of 20,86,755 doses have been administered so far. Of these, 14,54,219 were given the first dose and 6,32,536 were given the second dose. A major push vaccination drive, special arrangements would be done for the people belonging to the special category. District Collector Navjot Khosa said special vaccination campaigns are being carried out for bedridden patients, those in tribal settlements, old age homes, migrant workers, transgender people, pregnant women.
By Express News Service

HYDERABAD: Suhrit Padakanti, a class XII student along with his brother Sudhit Padakanti, a class VIII student, have donated Rs 3.50 lakh to LV Prasad Eye Institute (LVPEI) in Hyderabad to support eye health research activities, and for eye operations for the poor. During the Covid first wave, Suhrit had organised a campaign to provide meals to the poor and daily-wage labourers and raised funds and donated Rs 60,000 to Akshaya Patra foundation.

LVPEI said that the funds donated by the siblings will be used for Stevens Johnson Syndrome (SJS) research. Their parents Srinivasa Rao and Aparna, gifted them this amount after seeing Suhrits selfless activities.
By ANI

CAMBRIDGE: A new study has found that cells sampled at the time of diagnosis from patients who later developed severe COVID-19 show a muted antiviral response.

The findings were published in the journal Cell. Over the past 18 months, researchers have learned much about COVID-19 and its viral cause, SARS-CoV-2. They know how the virus enters the body, coming in through the nose and mouth and beginning its infection in the mucus layers of the nasal passageway.

They know that infections that remain in the upper airway are likely to be mild or asymptomatic, while infections that progress down the airway to the lungs are much more severe and can lead to fatal diseases.

They have also identified common risk factors for severe diseases, like age, gender, and obesity. But there are still many unanswered questions -- such as when, and where, the course of severe COVID-19 is determined. Does the pathway to severe disease begin only after the body has failed to control mild disease, or could it start much earlier than that?

ALSO READ | 2 in 3 persons have Covid antibodies in Odisha: Sero-survey

Researchers at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard; the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Boston Children's Hospital (BCH); MIT; and the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) wondered whether this path towards severe disease could start much earlier than expected -- perhaps even within the initial response created when the virus enters the nose.

To test this, they studied cells taken from nasal swabs of patients at the time of their initial COVID-19 diagnosis, comparing patients who went on to develop mild COVID-19 to those who progressed into more severe disease and eventually required respiratory support.

Their results showed that patients who went on to develop severe COVID-19 exhibited a much more muted antiviral response in the cells collected from those early swabs, compared to patients who had a mild course of the disease.

"We wanted to understand if there were pronounced differences in samples taken early in the course of disease that were associated with different severities of COVID-19 as the disease progressed," said co-senior author Jose Ordovas-Montanes, an associate member in the Klarman Cell Observatory at Broad and assistant professor at BCH and Harvard Medical School.

Jose added, "Our findings suggest that the course of severe COVID-19 may be determined by the body's intrinsic antiviral response to initial infection, opening up new avenues for early interventions that could prevent severe disease."

ALSO READ | Rise in neurological issues faced by recovered Covid patients: Delhi private hospital

To understand the early response to infection, Sarah Glover of the Division of Digestive Diseases at UMMC and her laboratory collected nasal swabs from 58 people. Thirty-five swabs came from COVID-19 patients, taken at the time of diagnosis, representing a variety of disease states from mild to severe. Seventeen swabs came from healthy volunteers and six came from patients with respiratory failure due to other causes.

The team isolated individual cells from each sample and sequenced them, looking for RNA that would indicate what kind of proteins the cells were making -- a proxy for understanding what a given cell is doing at the moment of collection.

Cells use RNA as instructions to make proteins -- tools, machinery, and building blocks used within and by the cell to perform different functions and respond to its environment. By studying the collection of RNA in a cell -- its transcriptome -- researchers understand how a cell is responding, at that particular moment in time, to environmental changes such as a viral infection. Researchers can even use the transcriptome to see if individual cells are infected by an RNA virus-like SARS-CoV-2.

Alex Shalek, co-senior author on the study, a member of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard, and an institute member at Broad specializes in studying the transcriptomes of individual cells. His lab has helped develop innovative approaches to sequence thousands of single cells from low-input clinical samples, as the nasal swab of COVID-19 patients, and uses the resulting data to create high-resolution pictures of the body's orchestrated response to infection at the sample site.

"Our single-cell sequencing approaches allow us to comprehensively study the body's response to disease at a specific moment in time," said Shalek, who is also an associate professor at MIT in the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, the Department of Chemistry, and the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research."

He further continued, "This gives us the ability to systematically explore features that differentiate one course of the disease from another as well as cells that are infected from those that are not. We can then leverage this information to guide the development of more effective preventions and cures for COVID-19 and other viral infections."

Ordovas-Montanes's lab studies inflammatory responses and their memory, specializing in those found in epithelial cells -- the top layer of cells, like those that line your nasal passageways and are collected by nasal swabs. Working with the Shalek lab and that of Bruce Horwitz, a senior associate physician in the BCH Division of Emergency Medicine, the researchers interrogated how both epithelial and immune cells were responding to early COVID-19 infection from the single-cell transcriptome data.

First, the team found that the antiviral response, driven by a family of proteins called interferons, was much more muted in patients who went on to develop severe COVID-19. Second, patients with severe COVID-19 had higher amounts of highly inflammatory macrophages, immune cells that contribute to high amounts of inflammation, often found in severe or fatal COVID-19.

Since these samples were taken well before COVID-19 had reached its peak state of disease in the patients, both these findings indicate that the course of COVID-19 may be determined by the initial or very early response of the nasal epithelial and immune cells to the virus.

The lack of a strong initial antiviral response may allow the virus to spread more rapidly, increasing the chances that it can move from the upper to lower airways, while the recruitment of inflammatory immune cells could help drive the dangerous inflammation in severe disease.

Finally, the team also identified infected host cells and pathways associated with protection against infection -- cells and responses unique to patients that went on to develop the mild disease. These findings may allow researchers to discover new therapeutic strategies for COVID-19 and other respiratory viral infections.

If, as the team's evidence suggests, the early stages of infection can determine disease, it opens a path for scientists to develop early interventions that can help prevent severe COVID-19 from developing. The team's work even identified potential markers of severe disease, genes that were expressed in mild COVID-19 but not in severe COVID-19.

"Nearly all our severe COVID-19 samples lacked expression of several genes we would typically expect to see in an antiviral response," said Carly Ziegler, a graduate student in the Health Science and Technology program at MIT and Harvard and one of the study's co-first authors. "If further studies support our findings, we could use the same nasal swabs we use to diagnose COVID-19 to identity potentially severe cases before severe disease develops, creating an opportunity for effective early intervention."
By PTI

GUWAHATI: The Assam government is yet to settle queries regarding alleged irregularities to the tune of Rs 2,15,286 crore highlighted by the CAG in various departments over a span of 25 years since 1994, according to the latest report of the public auditor tabled in the state assembly.

In its report on social, economic (non-PSUs), and general sectors for the financial year that ended on March 31, 2019, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) said that the alleged irregularities were pointed out in 2,734 inspection reports (IRs) issued between 1994-95 and 2018-19 covering 55 departments of the state government.

"We report that on IRs issued up to December 2018, 39,479 paragraphs pertaining to 6,385 IRs were outstanding for settlement at the end of June 2019," said the report, which was tabled during the ongoing Budget Session of the Assam assembly.

ALSO READ | CAG pulls up Assam government on pension scheme for families of deceased staff

These IRs are related to various departments like Public Health Engineering, PWD, Water Resource, Irrigation and Inland Water Transport, and other civil departments, it said.

"Of these, 1,208 IRs containing 5,262 paragraphs had not been replied to/settled for more than 10 years.

Even initial replies, which were required to be received from the heads of offices within four weeks from the date of issue, were not received from 55 departments in respect of 2,734 IRs containing 20,575 paragraphs issued between 1994-95 and 2018-19.

"As a result, serious irregularities commented upon through 39,591 paragraphs involving Rs 2,15,285.77 crore, had not been addressed as of June 2019," the CAG said.

Giving a break-up of the figure, the auditor said that alleged irregularities of Rs 24,240.61 crore were related to non-observance of rules in respect of custody and handling of cash, maintenance of cash book and muster roll.

Pending utilisation certificate and audited accounts of grant-in-aids resulted in possible irregularities of Rs 9,381.61 crore, while the delay in recovery of receipts, advances and other charges added up to alleged irregularities of Rs 8,821.35 crore.

The CAG said that the actual payees' receipts wanting was estimated at Rs 7,309.12 crore, non-receipt of securities from persons holding cash and stores stood at Rs 1,056.29 crore, and non-recovery of overpayments were found to be at Rs 673.62 crore.

Not maintaining stores properly cost the exchequer Rs 602.28 crore, while Rs 155.54 crore alleged irregularities have been attributed to the want of sanction to write-off loans and losses, it said.

The CAG has further put Rs 1,63,045.36 crore of alleged irregularities under the head "others".

"Non-receipt of replies to the IRs in respect of the 55 departments were indicative of the failure on the part of the heads of departments (directors/executive engineers) to initiate action with regard to defects, omissions and irregularities pointed out by audit," the report stated.

The commissioners and secretaries, who are superiors to directors and executive engineers concerned, were informed of the status of these IRs through half-yearly reports, but they too "failed to ensure prompt and timely action" by the officers of the respective departments, it said.

"The above-mentioned facts also indicate inaction against the defaulting officers thereby facilitating continuation of serious financial irregularities and potential loss to the government though these were pointed out in the audit," the CAG said.

The report noted that the government had constituted one Audit Objection Committee (AOC) in May 2018 to discuss the outstanding audit objections up to 2017-18.

It has so far discussed 1,102 IRs and 5,512 paragraphs, of which only 91 IRs and 981 paragraphs have been settled.

The CAG recommended that the state government reviews the matter and ensure an effective system for action against defaulting officials who fail to reply to the IRs; recover losses, outstanding advances and overpayments, and revamp the entire mechanism for prompt and timely responses to audit observations.
Rajesh Kumar Thakur By

Express News Service

PATNA: Rinku (name changed), 14, was lured for a job in Bihar with handsome salary. She was

brought from a place in West Bengal a few months ago by an orchestra organiser in Gopalganj district of Bihar.

Rinku, along with two other minor girls, was forced to dance in the orchestra and thereafter one of them was allegedly raped by a youth at an isolated place. The survivor, along with the other girls, later reported the incident to police and an FIR was lodged against the culprit.

In another incident, a minor girl was employed in an orchestra party in West Champaran and was allegedly physically exploited. Later in July this year, 6 minor girls including her were rescued following an initiative of a social activist. In the orchestra, they were allegedly being exploited physically by the owner and organisers.



Similarly, 6 minors were rescued from an orchestra unit in Rohtas district of Bihar and 5 persons were

arrested by police for forced flesh-trade.

In past, many minor girls and women were rescued from the clutches of orchestras organisers, who were lured for jobs from many states, like Maharashtra, West Bengal, UP, Odisha, Nepal and other places. They were also allegedly being exploited physically in the guise of orchestra performances.

Taking serious note of such frequently reported incidents of sexual exploitations in the orchestra groups with minor girls, the state governments social welfare department in a first such move has directed the district magistrates and the Superintendents of Police (SPs) of districts, identified vulnerable for engaging minor girls in flesh trade in the guise of orchestras, to keep strict vigil on the functioning of musical orchestra groups and units and the artists being hired for performances by the organisers.

Raj Kumar-the director of social welfare department of state government, said that that all the orchestras and musical groups, who employ the girls, would be constantly watched by the local administrations.



Social activist Shiana Parween had written a letter on July 3 this year to the department informing that illegal activities like exploitation of girls in many orchestra groups. In the letter, the woman activist had pointed out that many organisers use the financial difficulties of families emerged in the

wake of Covid-19 pandemic to lure girls.

Social welfare director Raj Kumar the district magistrates of Bihars 31 districts and the SPs of 21 districts have been directed to keep strict vigil on the functioning of orchestra groups in their districts and ensure complete ban on the engagement of minor-aged girls in the orchestra.

28 districts have started keeping watch on the orchestra groups and action would be taken upon finding minor girls being used in orchestras in the guise of musical performers, the director said, adding that the National Human Rights Commission(Law Division) has being communicated about steps taken prevent entry of minor girls in orchestra.

In Bihar as per a rough estimate, more than 3500 orchestra groups and units are functioning in many districts.
Mukesh Ranjan By

Express News Service

RANCHI: Terming entire episode of the alleged plot to topple the JMM-led alliance government in Jharkhand as fishy, State BJP legislative party leader Babulal Marandi on Sunday has demanded impartial probe into the matter by forming a Special Investigation Team (SIT) headed by a sitting High Court Judge to get into the details of the matter.

Talking to the media persons at State BJP Office in Ranchi, Marandi also questioned the role of Jharkhand Police as none of the officials so far have come forward with details of the case, given the fact that the three accused persons have been booked under sedition law.

Notably, three persons -- Abhishek Kumar Dubey, Amit Singh and Niwaran Prasad, were arrested, allegedly for hatching conspiracy to destabilize the JMM-led alliance government in Jharkhand. Marandi also demanded immediate release of the three persons arrested in the case.

"BJP demands immediate release of the three persons arrested in the case. We also demand an impartial probe into the whole episode by forming a SIT headed by a sitting High Court Judge to get into the details of the matter," said Marandi. BJP will not sit back till SIT probe is ordered in the case, as being in the opposition, it is also their responsibility to protect the rights of the people of Jharkhand, he added.

ALSO READ: Why is 'colonial' sedition law still required 75 years after independence, SC asks Centre

"This heinous act of the State Police is unforgivable and could not be ignored at any cost," opined Marandi.

Warning the State Police for becoming a tool of the State Government, Marandi, said that the officials involved in the entire episode would not be spared at any cost and action will be taken against them once the BJP Government comes to power. Some of the senior officials in Jharkhand Police are under the misconception that the current governments will last forever, said the BJP legislative party leader. He also appealed police department not to become the tool of the ruling alliance.

Putting police department into the docks, Marandi also questioned why, despite being a serious matter where people have been charged for sedition, none of the senior police officials came forward to explain the entire episode and publicized the evidences on the basis of which the three persons were arrested.

According to Marandi, one of the accused persons was a fruit seller; another one is a contract labourer, while the third one is unemployed. He also questioned how such people would hatch a conspiracy to topple the government.

Meanwhile, State Police is tightlipped over the issue.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: After the Centre said it has no record of farmers who have died during the agitation at Delhi's borders against three agri laws since 2020, Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Sunday alleged that the government has been constantly "insulting" the farmers and demanded that it must repeal the legislations.

Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar informed Parliament on Friday that the government has no record of farmers who have died during the agitation at Delhi's borders against three new farm laws since last year.

ALSO READ | Had you understood India's 'mann ki baat..': Rahul slams govt for pace of COVID-19 vaccinations

"The BJP government said in Parliament that neither it made any effort to know farmers' opinion on the three black agri laws nor does it have any data on how many farmers have been martyred," Priyanka Gandhi said.

Alleging that the government was looking at the issue from the prism of its "billionaire friends", the Congress general secretary said this government is "constantly insulting farmers".

She made the remarks in a tweet in Hindi using a Hindi hashtag which translated to "Take back black farm laws".

Farmers, mainly from Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, have been camping at Delhi's borders since November last year in protest against the three laws.

Out of them, a small group of 200 farmers are now staging a protest at Jantar Mantar in central Delhi after getting special permission.
By Express News Service

KOLKATA: A new equation between the Trinamool Congress and the Congress appears to have emerged in West Bengal as the two bitter political rivals are coming closer on the issue of Pegasus snooping.

A day before TMC chairperson Mamata Banerjees visit to Delhi and her plan to meet the opposition party leaders, partys national spokesperson Derek OBrien shared Congresss tweet displaying Bengal CMs nephew and partys national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee as a victim of Pegasus spyware snooping. The vice president of Congresss Bengal chapter Diptiman Ghosh said the party has already extended its hand to the TMC.

OBrien retweeted Congresss tweet which said, "PM Modi took the adage, 'keep your enemies closer' a little too far. #PegasusSnoopgate" The tweet, displaying Abhisheks photo, said, "Aap chronology samajhiye. Target of Pegasus spyware. Who? Abhishek Banerjee-nephew of Mamata Banerjee. When? 2021. Why? West Bengal elections. Modi Govts insecurities are endless."

The word "chronology" was used frequently by Union Home Minister ahead of the 2021 West Bengal Assembly elections when he elaborated implementation of contentious Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) and National Register of Citzens (NRC). "First the CAA will come. All refugees will get citizenship. Then NRC will comeunderstand the chronology," Shah had said repeatedly.

The Congress in West Bengal also softened its stance on the issue of dealing with the ruling TMC. The state Congress president had earlier said that the party would not field any candidate against Mamata Banerjee in Bhowanipore Assembly by elections as the chief minister will have to get elected as she lost in Nandigram.

On Friday, state Congress vice president Ghosh said, "Mamata Banerjee faced many challenges to reach her todays position in politics. If she urged all anti-BJP political forces to come under one umbrella, we are all set to respond. On this issue, we should echo the same. We have already extended our hands to the TMC."

Mamata will leave for Delhi on July 21 and and she has announced her plans to meet leaders of non-BJP parties. She also requested NCP chief Sharad Pawar and Congress leader P Chidambaram to arrange a meeting while giving a call to uproot the BJP from the Centre in the 2024 general elections.

TMC leaders admitted that the partys political stance has been changed after the partys stupendous victory in the recent Assembly elections and Mamatas emergence as an anti-BJP leader in the country. "She is now eyeing the 2024 Lok Sabha polls and for this, she is gearing up for taking the TMC into the arena of national politics," said a TMC leader.
By PTI

CHANDIGARH: Senior Congress leader, Bhupinder Singh Hooda, has expressed concern over "high" unemployment in Haryana, claiming that people with bachelor and higher degrees like BA, MSc and PhD are applying for government peon jobs.

He also alleged that the policies of the Haryana government are directly responsible for the rising unemployment in the state. There is no attention of the government towards private investment as big industries are "migrating from Haryana, one after another", Hooda said, adding that Haryana, "which once gave employment to youths of other states, is today itself plagued with the highest unemployment in the country".

"The situation of unemployment in the state is such that this month 8.39 lakh youths applied for the recruitment of only 5,500 constable posts," he said in a statement.

The leader of opposition in the Haryana assembly also said that according to this year's economic survey, "about nine lakh youths had registered in the employment exchange but only 2,800 youths got jobs".

"Even before this, when the government had taken out recruitment for 18,000 peon posts and other fourth-class positions, lakhs of educated youth had applied," Hooda said. Not only this, about 25 lakh youths had applied for 6,000 posts for clerks, he claimed.

The former chief minister said in the past, about 7,000 youths had applied for just 10 posts of peons at the Jagadhri court and about 15,000 youths had applied for recruitment of 13 posts of peons in a court in Panipat.

"Candidates holding BA, MA, M.Sc, M.Com, M.Phil and Ph.D degrees had also applied for the recruitment of peons where the minimum qualification of is class 8 pass," he said in the statement.

Hooda said that according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), "the unemployment rate in the country is 9.17 per cent while in Haryana this rate is 27.9 per cent".

He said that organisations like CMIE are showing the mirror to the state government through their surveys and reports but the BJP-JJP government in Haryana wants to live in a denial by putting a question mark on these institutions.

The Congress leader claimed that except Haryana, no other state has raised objections to the CMIE report. If it does not find it credible, the Haryana government should challenge this report, he said.

Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar has in the recent past said that Hooda and other Congress leaders were quoting unemployment data from reports of an institution that "didn't have any credibility" and is a private body. Hooda said the government cannot run away from its responsibility by questioning the institutions.

"Due to unemployment, the youth of the state is moving towards drugs and crime. Instead of paying attention to this problem and finding a solution, the government, which specialises in event management, wants to hide its failures with the help of lies, making political statements," he alleged.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: Senior Congress leader P Chidambaram on Sunday said the government should either call for a joint parliamentary committee probe into the Pegasus snooping allegations or request the Supreme Court to appoint a sitting judge to investigate the matter, and demanded that Prime Minister Narendra Modi make a statement in Parliament clarifying whether there had been surveillance or not.

The former home minister said he was not sure that one can go to the extent of saying that the entire electoral mandate of 2019 was vitiated by the "unlawful snooping" but added that it may have "helped" the BJP to score that victory which has been "tainted" by the allegations.

In an interview with PTI, Chidambaram also said a probe by a joint parliamentary committee (JPC) can be more effective than an investigation by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology, asserting that the former would be more empowered by Parliament.

ALSO READ | Shiv Sena's Sanjay Raut questions Pegasus funding, compares it with Hiroshima bombing

Asked about Parliament IT panel head Shashi Tharoor's remarks that the subject is "already on the mandate of my committee" and a JPC is not required, Chidambaram expressed doubts whether the IT panel with a majority of BJP members will allow a full investigation into the matter.

"The parliamentary committee rules are rather strict. For example they cannot take evidence openly but a JPC can be empowered by Parliament to take evidence in public view, to cross examine witnesses, and to summon documents. So I think a JPC will have far more powers than a parliamentary committee," he said.

At the same time, he said he is not diminishing the role of the parliamentary committee to the extent it can probe the matter and is welcome to do so.

Last Sunday, an international media consortium reported that over 300 verified Indian mobile phone numbers, including of two ministers, over 40 journalists, three opposition leaders besides scores of businesspersons and activists in India, could have been targeted for hacking through the Pegasus spyware of the Israeli firm NSO.

The government has been denying all Opposition allegations in the matter.

On the government's response to the allegations, Chidambaram referred to IT and Communications Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw statement in Parliament, saying he is obviously a very "clever minister" and therefore the statement has been "very cleverly worded".

"He (Vaishnaw) denies that there was any unauthorised surveillance. He does not deny that there was surveillance. He does not deny that there was authorised surveillance. Surely the minister knows the difference between authorised surveillance and unauthorised surveillance," the Congress leader said.

Posing questions for the government, he asked whether there was surveillance at all and whether snooping was done through Pegasus.

READ EDITORIAL | No place for Centre to hide on Pegasus snoopgate

"If Pegasus spyware was used, who acquired it? Was it acquired by the government or by one of its agencies," he asked.

The Rajya Sabha member also asked the government to come clean on the amount paid to acquire the spyware.

"These are simple, straightforward questions which the average citizen is asking and the minister should answer that directly.

After all, France has ordered an investigation when it was revealed that President (Emmanuel) Macron's number was one of the numbers that were hacked. Israel itself has ordered an investigation by its National Security Council," he said.

If two major countries can order investigation, why should India not order a probe and find answers to the four simple questions, he asked rhetorically.

Chidambaram said the matter also raises issues of national security because, if the government says that it did not conduct surveillance, then the question arises who conducted the snooping.

"Was it a rogue agency in India doing it without the knowledge of the government or was it a foreign agency hacking into Indian telephones without the knowledge of the government. Either way, it is a more serious matter than the government conducting the surveillance," he said.

Asked about the Opposition's demand of a Supreme Court-monitored probe and whether the top court should take it up suo motu, Chidambaram said he would not want to comment on what the court may or may not do, but pointed out that there is already a public interest litigation filed by one or two persons, separately, asking it to take suo motu cognisance of the Pegasus revelations.

"Be that as it may, the government should request either Parliament to constitute a JPC or the government should request the Supreme Court to spare an honourable judge to conduct the investigation," he said.

Asked about Home Minister Amit Shah's assertion that the allegations were aimed at humiliating India at the world stage, Chidambaram said the home minister chose his words very carefully and did not deny that there was surveillance.

"He (Shah) does not deny that a certain number of telephones in India were hacked using Pegasus software. So, in fact, rather than what the home minister said, what he did not say is more important," he said.

If the home minister is unable to categorically deny that Indian telephones were infiltrated by the spyware, then obviously he must take responsibility for this "scandal" happening under his watch, Chidambaram said.

Asked about the logjam in Parliament over the issue and calls from Opposition ranks that the PM should make a statement on the Pegasus issue, he said Modi should have made a statement on the first day of Parliament's Monsoon Session itself when the allegations came to the fore.

"There are only a few agencies which could have done this surveillance. All the agencies are under the prime minister's control," he said.

"Each minister knows only what is under his department. The PM knows what is happening under all departments. So, it is the prime minister who should come forward and say whether there was surveillance or not and if there was surveillance whether it was authorised or not," Chidambaram said.
Rajesh Asnani By

Express News Service

JAIPUR: After settling the rift in the Punjab unit, the Congress High Command is all set to resolve the tussle in the Rajasthan Congress. AICC general secretaries K C Venugopal and Ajay Maken who visited the Rajasthan Congress office on Sunday clearly signalled that the issue of cabinet reshuffle and political appointments in the state would soon be decided by the partys central leadership.

Venugopal and Maken held a meeting with PCC president Govind Sigh Dotasra state ministers, MLAs and office bearers of the party in Jaipur. The meeting was also atteded by former Deputy CM Sachin Pilot and his group of MLAs who demanded that they be accommodated in the government and various party positions. A number of Pilot supporters also shouted sloans outside the PCC office while the meeting was underway forcing the former deputy chief minister to send out some of his leaders to pacify them.

While the workers outside seemed in an aggressive mood, AICC general secretary Maken said all the leaders inside have unanimously left the decision of the cabinet reshuffle to the party high command. Though Maken did not disclose a date of the cabinet expansion, he told reporters, I can say that there is no contradiction among the party leaders and they all have left the final decision about the cabinet expansion to the party high command.

Venugopal, Maken and Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot reportedly held detailed discussions about the forthcoming cabinet reshuffle and other political appointments, according to party sources. "We're discussing the cabinet expansion, appointment of district and block-level chiefs of Congress and appointments in boards and corporations with our leaders. Everyone has said they would accept what leadership decides," Maken told the media in Jaipur.

TheAICC general secretary incharge for Rajasthan also confirmed that he will be back later this month to take first-hand feedback from party MLAs. All Congress MLAs have been asked to be in Jaipur on July 28 and 29 for these one-on-one meetings with Maken and other senior leaders.

The Rajasthan impasse has been continuing ever since Sachin Pilot, along with 18 MLAs, had rebelled against the leadership of CM Ashok Gehlot last July. Though Pilot had returned to the party fold after Priyanka Gandhis intervention, his demands have been pending for almost a year. Last month, some MLAs from Pilot camp had said that the party should fulfil the promises made to Pilot. And in recent days, the demand for cabinet expansion and political appointments has gained considerable momentum.

The Rajasthan cabinet can have a maximum of 30 ministers but currently it has 21 members in the council of ministers, including the Chief Minister. Besides the nine slots that are vacant in the Gehlot ministry, several key appointments of office bearers in the state and district Congress units are also pending for a long time.
By PTI

KOLKATA: West Bengal BJP president Dilip Ghosh on Sunday claimed Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, having "misused" central resources, now wants to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi "to beg for funds with folded hands".

His remark, however, drew flak of the ruling party, which said that Ghosh should be having a "better understanding of the federal system", under which a head of the state can always meet the PM.

Ghosh, while talking to reporters, also alleged that TMC members have siphoned off money from state coffers and left it near-empty.

"She has misused the funds that were allocated by the Centre and now she wants to meet the PM to ask for more with folded hands as the state has gone virtually bankrupt," the senior BJP leader said when asked about Banerjee's slated visit to the national capital.

West Bengal is facing a financial crisis due to large-scale corruption on the part of the Mamata Banerjee government, Ghosh maintained.

Given the financial situation in the state, and the rising factionalism within the TMC camp, Didi has realised that she won't be able to run the state well ahead of 2024 Lok Sabha polls, he added.

Expressing shock over the state BJP president's assertions, TMC state spokesperson Kunal Ghosh said he is known for such ignorant comments.

"Does he understand about the federal set up where the head of a state can always meet the PM? Dilipda should check facts. Bengal has mopped up more revenue under the TMC rule than in the past," he noted.

Echoing him, state minister and TMC MLA Chandrima Bhattacharya sought to know "if the CM has whispered into the ears of the BJP leader the purpose of her visit".

Banerjee had told reporters on Friday that the prime minister has granted her time for a meeting during her scheduled Delhi visit in the last week of July, but did not specify the date.
By PTI

SRINAGAR: A month after Prime Minister Narendra Modi's outreach to mainstream leaders of Jammu and Kashmir, National Conference president Farooq Abdullah said on Sunday that there has been "no follow-up results" on the ground.

Abdullah said this in reference to the prime minister's remarks at the June 24 meeting in New Delhi that he wanted to win the hearts of the people of Jammu and Kashmir and remove "Dilli ki doori" (the distance from Delhi) and "dil ki doori" (distance between hearts).

"That was a welcome statement but there is no effort on the ground to win the hearts of the people.

People continue to be locked up and dissent is not tolerated. We want to see the change on the ground, a visible effort to win back the people who went through the trauma of their state being dismembered, its special status removed in one sudden blow," the three-time former chief minister told PTI here.

"We are yet to see any follow-up results even after a month," he said.

"Trust is something that has been missing from both sides (Delhi and Srinagar). Successive prime ministers -- Jawaharlal Nehru, Narasimha Rao, Atal Bihari Vajpayee -- made promises but the trust deficit has persisted," he added.

ALSO READ | Back from Delhi, Farooq Abdullah says 'level of mistrust' in J&K; Omar demands statehood before polls

The 83-year-old veteran politician said that he and his party had attended the Delhi meeting because it was an invitation from the prime minister although he had no expectations from it.

Yet, he had hoped for steps to win the hearts and minds of people but nothing had happened.

Abdullah insisted that restoration of "full, undiluted" statehood to Jammu and Kashmir should precede the elections to its Assembly.

All major parties have demanded that and the Centre should prove its bona fide by agreeing to that.

Asked if his party would take part in the elections if the statehood was not granted before that, the NC president said, "We will decide at that time when the bugle is blown. We will then sit down and decide what we should do."

In reply to a question about the fate of the People's Alliance for Gupkar Declaration (PAGD), a conglomerate of six mainstream political parties including the NC and its arch-rival PDP, Abdullah said the alliance stands and "we are together. We all are there. We haven't left."

ALSO READ | PPP leader Bilawal slams Imran's PoK referendum proposal, says Pak PM 'always manages to say wrong things about Kashmir'

He said the alliance was cobbled up together in a hurry when the special status of Jammu and Kashmir was abrogated on August 5, 2019.

"We all are like-minded people who joined together to work for restoration, knowing fully well that under this government it will not be restored."

"But we will continue to fight democratically and legally. People after us will also stand and try and work for the restoration of this," he said.

Abdullah also pointed out that earlier this month the Delimitation Commission came to Jammu and Kashmir and no members of Parliament, who are its associate members, were invited to sit and watch the proceedings.

Abdullah, who currently represents Srinagar in Parliament, urged the opposition national political parties to "forget" their plans and standings and get together to put the pillar of democracy far more strongly because the "time is running out".

"The tragedy with India is that the opposition is divided and unless they unite for restoration of democracy and forget their own party plans and party standings, we will never be able to get our democratic structure back.

"And I think efforts are being made, I see they are trying to get together and I hope it does happen soon because time is running out," he said.

The National Conference was part of a gathering at the residence of Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar on June 22, two days before Prime Minister Modi chaired the meeting with leaders from Jammu and Kashmir.

The meeting at Pawar's residence was called "non-political" but an interaction of like-minded people by CPI(M) leader Nilotpal Basu who was among the participants.

To a question whether he would be playing a role in binding the opposition parties across the country together, Abdullah said, "All, whether you are in south, east, west or north, we all have to get together, aim to strengthen democracy, to put the pillar of democracy far more strongly. This will happen because it is the need of the hour."

Abdullah, who was detained under the stringent Public Safety Act after the Centre abrogated special status of the erstwhile state and bifurcated it into two union territories, said the biggest problem today was the COVID-19 pandemic which shut everything down, bringing the political process "really to a naught".

Now that things have started to improve and Covid is under control, "you will see political activity on a much bigger scale. I am sure as the things improve the political parties will meet and draw strategies for the future."

He referred to the demand made by all leaders at the June 24 meeting for making a level-playing field allowing the political parties to perform their duties and ensuring security.

"Forget about reviewing the security. I can tell you that some more leaders have lost their security after the meeting. Whereas their people, who don't have any standing with the people, have all the security, all the vehicles and then they say we are just.

"Where is justice? "We have shown them even when we were locked up in the local body elections without getting to the people, still people voted for us in huge numbers which has shaken them," he added.

Abdullah, his son Omar Abdullah, Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad and PDP chief Mehbooba Mufti -- all former chief ministers -- were part of the 14-member delegation from Jammu and Kashmir to attend the meeting with the prime minister.
By PTI

PANAJI: BJP president J P Nadda on Sunday termed as baseless the Pegasus snooping allegations, and hit out at the opposition parties over it saying that there was no issue left with them.

He also said that although the Centre was ready to hold talks over different issues, the "disappointed" and "issueless" opposition parties led by Congress were disrupting the proceedings of Parliament.

Nadda was speaking to reporters here at the end of his two-day Goa visit.

Replying to a question over the Pegasus snooping row, he said, "It is baseless. It is issueless. The opposition parties led by the Congress do not have any issue which they want to raise for people. That is why they raise this kind of issue."

ALSO READ | If France, Israel can order investigation into Pegasus snooping matter, why not India: Chidambaram

Last Sunday, an international media consortium had reported that over 300 verified Indian mobile phone numbers, including of two ministers, over 40 journalists, three opposition leaders besides scores of businesspersons and activists in India, could have been targeted for hacking through the Pegasus spyware of the Israeli firm NSO.

However, the government has been denying all Opposition allegations in the matter.

Speaking about frequent disruptions of the parliamentary proceedings, Nadda said, "We are ready for all types of discussion, but Congress along with other opposition parties, has become disappointed and issueless and hence resorts to such disruptions. They do not know what to do. They want to stop Parliament over issueless things."

"But people know that despite all their efforts, the productivity of Parliament has broken all the records under the dynamic leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, the business has broken all the records," he added.
By PTI

MUMBAI: Amid the rain havoc in parts of Maharashtra, Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray on Sunday said a separate force on the lines of the NDRF will be set up in all districts of the state and the State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) will also be strengthened.

The number of deaths due to flooding, landslides and other rain-related incidents in parts of Maharashtra reached 113 on Sunday with one more casualty reported in the last 24 hours, while 100 people were missing after the monsoon fury, the state government said.

So far, 50 people have also been injured in these incidents, the government said in a statement.

On Sunday, Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray visited Chiplun, the site of severe flooding in Ratnagiri district of the Konkan region.

Addressing a press conference in the rain-battered town, Thackeray said, "Considering the frequent natural calamities, a separate force on the lines of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) will be set up in all districts of the state. Similarly, a flood management machinery will also be set up."

He directed the local administration to provide food, water and medicines to the displaced people.

Thackeray also said he will not celebrate his birthday on July 27, in the wake of the rain havoc claiming several lives in Maharashtra, and asked people not to put up hoardings or come to meet him in person.

ALSO READ | Maharashtra floods: 'Central war room' formed for coordination among 3 services for rescue operations

He said there should be no public programmes on his birthday in view of the COVID-19 pandemic, and urged people to contribute to the chief minister's relief fund.

Meanwhile, Union MSME Minister Narayan Rane, who also visited the rain-hit Chiplun town, lashed out at the chief minister over flood management, saying the local administration was irresponsible.

"There is no chief minister or administration in the state," alleged Rane, the Maratha leader having pockets of influence in the coastal Konkan region.

The state government had not made arrangements for providing food to the displaced people, the Union minister said, adding that he will submit a report to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Dr Chandrakant Lahariya By

The fourth round of the nationwide seroprevalence survey has revealed that 67.6% of Indias population has antibodies against SARS-CoV-2. This sero-survey included those in the six-years-and-above population as well as healthcare workers. The seroprevalence in urban and rural areas are 69.6% and 66.7%; the difference was not statistically significant. The seroprevalence in the 6-17 years and adult population was very similar and when adjusted for vaccination, the difference was not statistically significant. The seroprevalence in those vaccinated was higher than those not vaccinated, a factor also reflected in the higher seroprevalence in the 45-plus age group (which started vaccination on March 1) in comparison to the 18-44 age group (for which vaccination started on May 1). The seroprevalence in healthcare workers was 85.2%, higher than any other subgroup. This survey was conducted in the same districts where the previous three sero-surveys were done, which makes comparisons internally valid.

Scientifically, antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 can be detected around 10-14 days after natural infection or the vaccination. As the samples for this sero-survey were collected in the last 10 days of June and first week of July, the findings capture the seroprevalence for around June 20 (10 days before the midpoint). Till June 20, India had reported three crore cases. For every officially reported Covid-19 case, there were about 28-30 unreported ones in the country, a pattern very similar to previous national surveys. From then to now, 13 lakh additional cases have been reported and around 12 crore additional vaccine shots have been administered. Therefore, the proportion of the population with antibodies is likely to have crossed 70% by July 20. The susceptible population in India remains around 30%, or about 40 crore.

The findings of the sero-survey are reassuring in some sense. The third sero-survey (Dec 2020-Jan 2021) reported that around 24% of Indias population had antibodies and 76% were susceptible. The high susceptible pool of people and highly transmissible Delta variant were responsible for the ferocious second wave. The susceptible pool is far smaller now compared to before the second wave. There are a few practical implications of the findings.

If the seroprevalence is adjusted for the vaccination in adult age sub-groups, it is very clear that children have a very similar or even higher rate of infections than the adults. A few sero-surveys including one conducted by AIIMS, New Delhi, has found that up to three-fourth of total children in the survey population had antibodies, well before the middle of the second wave of the pandemic. The proportion of susceptible children is likely to have gone down further since then. Alongside this, various analyses of hospitalised Covid-19 cases have pointed out that the share of children as a proportion of total hospital admission for the virus remains very low. These findings assure us that our children are protected and at low risk. They scientifically dispel the undue concern that children would be at excessive risk in subsequent waves. In fact, the findings of the national survey make a strong case for governments giving serious consideration to open schools with due planning and precautions. By July 2021, schools have been functioning in 170 countries across the world and evidence is piling up that with precautions, schools do not pose much risk to children. Evidence supports that benefits of children coming to school are far greater than any minimal risk associated. Even that small risk can be ameliorated with effective planning.

The findings provide some additional insight into the susceptible pool and extent of the next wave of Covid. Aggregate data shows that the susceptible pool at the national level is declining; however, it is difficult to assess whether and where there could be pockets of susceptible populations with larger pools. Therefore, it is still possible to have localised/district-specific and statewise rise in cases and new waves. Alongside, as the susceptible pool of people has come down to around 30% (in comparison to 76% before the second wave), the next wave would be far smaller than the second wave in India. Some of the unknowns that are impossible to predict are the emergence of a new variant and how it will respond to existing antibodies. Therefore, we can be assured of smaller waves but should be cautious enough to increase vaccination and follow Covid-appropriate behaviour as it takes a minimum of 4-6 weeks, generally even longer, to identify a new variant after it has emerged.

The findings of national surveys can and should be used by state authorities with available findings from local and state-specific surveys for targeted ramping up of vaccination and Covid-appropriate behaviour. If needed, additional sero-surveys should be conducted in identified high-priority districts for local interventions.

The seroprevalence in rural and urban populations have been found to be almost similar. The health infrastructure in rural areas has been weaker than urban settings and it may have an impact on case fatality rate and resulting deaths in India, with under-reporting highly debated in the country. The sero-survey data can be used by epidemiologists and disease modellers to provide better insight on excess deaths in India. There is likely a temptation among some to conclude that India is approaching herd or population immunity. However, there is a need for being cautious before arriving at any such conclusion as we know new variants can be more transmissible (for example, Delta can spread 50-70% faster). It is also known that as the transmissibility of a virus or pathogen increases, the herd immunity threshold goes up. Currently, the herd immunity threshold is being considered 85% or higher, which is further away. Furthermore, neither vaccination nor natural infection fully stop the likelihood of disease transmission. Therefore, having antibodies should not be seen as equivalent to having protection from getting infected or stopping the transmission.

The fourth nationwide sero-survey has provided important insights into the pandemic and the proportion of population affected. Now, it is for technical experts and policymakers to use this information for effective pandemic response and development of appropriate strategies.

Dr Chandrakant Lahariya, Epidemiologist and public health specialist, (c.lahariya@gmail.com)

(Dr Lahariya is the co-author of the book Till We Win: Indias Fight Against The Covid-19 Pandemic)
By PTI

HUBBALLI: Union Minister for Coal, Mines and Parliamentary Affairs Pralhad Joshi on Saturday said the BJP top leadership has not spoken to him about succeeding Chief Minister B S Yediyurappa, whose exit seems imminent, and it is only the media which is discussing the matter.

As Yediyurappa had announced that he would abide by the party's top brass instruction on July 25, Joshi said he has no clue whether the central leadership has asked him to resign.

ALSO READ | BJP high command will take a call on new Karnataka CM: Eshwarappa

"No one has spoken to me about it (succeeding Yediyurappa). It's only the media, which is discussing it. As no one has spoken to me, there is no need to react to it," Joshi told reporters.

Asked what if he is made the chief minister, the Union Minister quipped, "I never answer hypothetical questions with 'ifs' and 'buts'..I don't want to answer such questions."

To a question, Joshi said he would not react because he was not aware that the chief minister had been asked to resign.

He emphasised that the 'supreme leaders' Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah apart from the BJP leadership led by party president J P Nadda would decide.

"There is no high command in the BJP but national leadership. We got different leaderships from time to time. There was Rajnath Singh, after which Nitin Gadkari came, who was succeeded by Amit Shah and now J P Nadda is there. In the present situation, we have supreme leaders in Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah. They will decide," Joshi said.

ALSO READ | With exit likely, Yediyurappa doles out largesse to loyalists

He declined to comment on seers of the dominant Lingayat community warning the BJP that it would be ruined if Lingayat strongman Yediyurappa is removed from the post.

The 58-year-old Joshi has been Dharwad MP since 2004.

He had also served as the BJP's state unit president from July 2012 to January 2016.

With Yediyurappa dropping a strong hint that his exit as chief minister was on the cards, speculation is rife that Joshi would take on the mantle.
K Shiva Kumar By

Express News Service

MYSURU: Amid speculation over a change of guard to replace Lingayat strongman and Chief Minister BS Yediyurappa, trouble erupted from an unexpected quarter  seers from various mutts across the state. This threatens to upset political calculations for the BJP if the party top bosses betray Yediyurappa and the dominant Lingayat community. The buzz is that the BJP high command is working out an amicable formula to replace Yediyurappa while ensuring a smooth transition.

The backing of the seers enjoyed by Yediyurappa portrays the power mutts wield in Karnataka politics. The seers have served an ultimatum to the party high command to retain Yediyurappa as CM or ensure that only a Lingayat is chosen as replacement. Sri Prasanna Renuka Veerasomeshwara Shivacharya Swamiji of Rambapuri Peetha said Yediyurappa is the unquestionable leader of the Lingayat community, which will be hurt if he is removed. Shivamurthy Sharanaru of Muruga Mutt said, If he is disturbed, the party will suffer. He has worked for the development of all castes. So, it is important for him to continue as CM, and we express our solidarity with him.

Political observers feel this is threatening to usher in a trend of religious heads taking control of the levers of power to shake the very foundation of constitutional democracy, undermining the citizenry and the rights bestowed on them in a parliamentary democracy system, besides undermining the rights of elected party MLAs to choose their new leader.

Yediyurappa is a four-time CM among the 12 CMs in the state so far from the Veerashaiva (Lingayat) community. He has a political career spanning over four decades, and can sense the party high commands mood, because of which he declared his readiness to obey their instructions, for a smooth change in leadership, if any. But the seers, in no mood to accept a change, have threatened to bring 500 of them to Bengaluru to exert pressure on the party against any such decision.

LONG HISTORY

Karnataka has a long history of mutts having close proximity to political power centres. Erstwhile kings like Nalwadi Krishnaraja Wadiyar and Baroda Maharaja Sayaji Gaikawad visited mutts in Sringeri, Tumakuru, among others. Even Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1919) and Mahatma Gandhi (1924) called on the Siddharoodha Mutt seer for guidance, blessings during the freedom struggle and before proceeding for the All India Congress session.

Many were impressed with the mutts following Basavas philosophy  offering free food, community feeding and developing education in rural areas, lessening the democratically elected governments burdens.

This made former PM Indira Gandhi visit Siddaganga Mutt and other mutts in the vicinity, growing in influence during her contest from the Chikkamagalur Lok Sabha seat which gave her political rebirth post Emergency. Rajiv Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi too strengthened their bridges with mutts, visiting Siddaganga Mutt, JSS Mutt and also a few others in North Karnataka.

Senior BJP leaders A B Vajpayee, L K Advani and others, with Hindutva and nationalistic agenda, were close to Vishwesha Theerta Swami of Pejawar Mutt and had also called on dominant Veerashaiva mutts.

But the Sringeri Sharada Mutt, draws netas from all political denominations and keeps away from interfering in political developments either directly or indirectly. Former Prime Minister H D Deve Gowda is one of the most frequent visitors here. A few other mutts too have always maintained a healthy distance from politics.

Successive governments have encouraged the mutts to start educational institutions and hostels and extended them grants, besides sanctioning government land. Late Chief Minister Ramakrishna Hegde of the then Janata Party kept the mutts in good humour to win over the dominant community in North Karnataka which supported the Congress, encouraging the mutts to enter the higher education sector, and sanctioning medical, engineering and dental colleges. But the Hegde government also came under fire for encouraging capitation fee.

NEW TWIST IN STATE POLITICS

The fractured mandate and strategy to pull down the Congress-led coalition government to form the first JD(S)-BJP government with 20-20 power-sharing agreement started a new chapter in Karnataka politics when the JDS refused to make way for Yediyurappa to become CM in 2008. Yediyurappa, as Finance Minister in the coalition government, announced sops in the form of grants to religious mutts. When H D Kumaraswamy ditched the BJP, the Lingayat strongman hit the streets in protest against the betrayal of the Lingayats and launched a Dharmayuddha from the premises of Siddaganga Mutt that got the seers to rally behind him and the BJP.

Yediyurappa helped BJP cross the three-digit figure in the Assembly and formed the government with the support of Independents while doling out more sops to see that the bonding is rock solid. Even when the Karnataka Lokayukta indicted Yediyurappa in the mining cases, leading to his arrest and resignation as CM, he later launched KJP which managed to get 10% votes, reducing BJPs strength to 40 in the Assembly. The Linagayats and their seers rallied behind him, forcing the BJP top brass to bring back Yediyurappa into the party fold with a free hand to lead the party in the 2018 polls.

In October 2011, when Yediyurappa was jailed, the centenarian seer of Siddaganga Mutt, Sri Shivakumara Swamiji, who was known as the Walking God, paid a surprise visit to him at the Sri Jayadeva Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences and Research Centre in Bengaluru. The seer was not used to issuing political statements in favour of any politician or party, but his support for Yediyurappa was evident.

Despite, financial constraints, Yediyurappa announced funds liberally for various mutts of all castes that got them to pitch in in his favour.

(With inputs from: Devaraj B Hirehalli; Mahesh Goudar; Raghu Koppar; Udaya Kumar BR; Ramkrishna Badseshi; G Subhash Chandra; Pramodkumar Vaidya and Prakash Samaga)
By Express News Service

BELAGAVI: Expressing his gratitude to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union minister Amit Shah and BJP chief JP Nadda, Karnataka chief minister said that he has enjoyed all positions offered to him in the party. "I have enjoyed all the positions in the BJP and government than any other leader in the state," BS Yediurappa said on Sunday.

BSY was speaking to reporters after an hour-long meeting with the ministers and MLAs at Belagavi circuit house.When asked whether his removal will damage BJP's reputation, he said, "There are several tall leaders in the party and all of them are bound to the decisions taken by the high command and will work together. Our target is to complete the remaining term successfully and bring BJP to power once again."

Reacting to former CM Siddaramaiah's criticism, BSY said that "hundreds of people like Siddaramaiah will come and we will still return to power."

Coordinating with Maharashtra over releasing of water in Krishna basin

The Karnataka chief minister said that he discussed the burning issues of Belagavi and the recent flood situation in the meeting. About 113 villages of seven taluks of the district are affected by the flood. Till now, 19035 people have been shifted to safer places. The CM also informed that 8975 flood-hit persons have been shifted to 89 care centres.

"All the dams and reservoirs of the Krishna Basin in Maharashtra are full and the water is being released in our state. We are in touch with Maharashtra government and are closely monitoring the water flow levels. The outflow has been increased as all the dams of Krishna basin in Karnataka too are almost full. This has resulted in flooding at some places in the state," BSY cautioned.

The CM further informed that a total of seven NDRF and 15 SDRF teams have been deputed in the flood-affected region. "There is no shortage of funds to carry out the rescue operations. The bridge roads and other infrastructure is damaged by the floods. Funds will be released for temporary repair works. A letter will be sent to the central government seeking funds to take up permanent repairs. I will visit Uttara Kannada district on Monday if possible," he said.
By Express News Service

BELAGAVI: In the midst of speculations on change of guard in the state, Chief Minister BS Yediyurappa said on Sunday morning said that a message on change of CM will come from the party high command by today evening.

He is expected to return to Belagavi city at 2 pm after winding up his review of flood-affected areas. He will later go to Bengaluru in the evening. ''By evening a message will be sent from the high command. You (media) will also come to know about it,'' he reiterated.

To a question on whether a Dalit CM will be named, he said it was a prerogative of the party high command to take a call on it.

There was no clear message from the BJP central leadership even on Saturday, just two days ahead of BS Yediyurappas government completing two years in office, though some party seniors indicated that the leadership change, which has been the buzzword for the last few days, may not happen in the immediate future. But other sections within the party said the BJP high command could take a decision on Sunday.

Yediyurappa, however, seemed to have resigned his fate to the party decision, saying earlier that he is expecting a message from the high command by this weekend and he would abide by it. But on Monday, he is going ahead with the celebration of completion of two years of his government. An event has been organised at Vidhana Soudha to mark the milestone, where a booklet will be released listing the achievements of his government.

Party sources said that though central leaders seemed keen on leadership change, they are yet to decide on Yediyurappas successor. Also, they may not take the risk of changing the chief minister at a time when thousands of people are displaced by floods. It may not happen anytime soon, the sources said. The entire administrative machinery has been pressed into action to assist people affected by floods, while the chief minister is rushing to take stock of the situation in Belagavi, which is one of the worst-affected districts in the State.
G Subash Chandra By

Express News Service

CHITRADURGA: The Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns have had a severe impact across the globe, throwing thousands of lives out of gear and bringing financial gloom, causing people emotional, mental and physical stress. Many are still struggling to return to some semblance of stability, especially on the livelihood front.

In such a scenario, Bengaluru-based SELCO Foundation brought a ray of light for people in Davanagere and Chitradurga districts, by introducing the concept of Solar Kuteer (shed), providing solar-powered livelihood solutions.

Mangala in front of her grocery shop at

Nanjayyanakottige village, Hiriyur taluk | Express

Mangala, a resident of Nanjayyanakottige in Hiriyur taluk of Chitradurga district, owns a solar-powered photocopy machine that helps her earn nearly Rs 1,000 per day. She also runs a canteen and a grocery shop. In all, her daily income now ranges between Rs 5,000 and Rs 5,500. After losing her husband Srinivas in 2002, Mangala, who owned a small roadside eatery, took the pledge that she would ensure her sons, Ravikiran and Deepak, complete their formal education, and the two lived up to their mothers expectations. Recently, Ravikiran completed B.Com and Deepak is pursuing a bachelors degree in Commerce.

My life was at the crossroads during the lockdown and I was struggling to manage my financial challenges. It was then that SELCO Foundation, under the Solar Kuteer project, funded me. It has helped me earn a decent income of Rs 1,000 per day, Mangala told TNSE.

The total cost of the project at Nanjayyanakottige was Rs 2.63 lakh, of which the Foundation invested Rs 1.90 lakh, whereas the remaining amount was pumped in by Mangala. Since then, there has been no looking back, as the project has helped her improve her financial status.

Like Mangala, Nittuvalli-based Naghabhushan Ds life has also changed, thanks to the Solar Kuteer project. I was living without a vision; there was no one to help me take up income-generating activities. Luckily, SELCO Foundation came to my rescue and helped me set up a common services centre, says Naghabhushan, who suffers from a spinal cord injury. Today, he earns Rs 300-500 per day, depending on the number of applicants and customers.

Due to my precision in work and availability, many youngsters wait for me to arrive from Nittuvalli, for job applications and printing documents, he adds. Earlier, Naghabhushan was earning Rs 100-150 a day, and struggling to make ends meet. However, the Foundations timely intervention helped him improve his economic status. It provided him with a light, fan and the all-weather solar kuteer.

Similarly, HT Yogeshwarachari, a tailor from Hireuda village of Davanagere district, was having a hard time running his tailoring business. After the Foundation gave him a solar-powered motor to operate the sewing machine, Yogeshwarachari, a paraplegic, today earns approximately Rs 400 per day. Earlier, I used to peddle the machine for my livelihood, but it wasnt easy, and I couldnt complete my orders on time. Ever since I started using the mechanical device, my income has doubled, he says with a smile.

During the lockdown imposed to curb the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, Yogeshwarachari stitched masks and sold them to villagers, to make some extra income. Like him, Jayapadma from Davanagere district today earns between Rs 200 and Rs 400 a day, after SELCO gave her a sewing machine that operates on solar-powered motor. Until recently, Jayapadma, who suffered a spinal cord injury in 2004, was sitting idle.

Apart from initiating the Solar Kuteer project during the lockdown, SELCO also provided a solar rope-making machine to 24 ropemakers of Patrehalli village  mostly inhabited by the Banjara community. Along with the machine, the Foundation also gave them coir worth Rs 4,000 each. The project has helped them earn Rs10,000 to Rs 15,000 per month, informed Kumar, one of the beneficiaries.

Manjunath Bhagwath, head of SELCO Foundation in Chitradurga and Davanagere, said that SELCO has been funding such projects for the uplift of marginalised populations. With a nominal amount from the beneficiary, the Foundation ensures that the latter feel responsible towards their work. The projects were implemented in association with organisations that work for women and differently-abled citizens.
By Express News Service

BHUBANESWAR: In a major haul, a joint team of Dhenkanal Forest Division and Wildlife Crime Control Bureau (WCCB) Central Region seized 14.2 kg pangolin scales from Damodarnali area of Kapilash range in Dhenkanal district and arrested two persons on Sunday.

DFO Prakash Chand Gogineni said the scales were seized on the basis of the intelligence input from the WCCB. This is one of the biggest seizures of pangolin scales in the Dhenkanal division so far.

He said accused Ratnakar Rout (51) and Firoj Khan (52), both from the Dhenkanal town, had stored the pangolin scales at a godown in Banasinga area of Sarangi range in the division.

Seized pangolin scales

Acting on the intelligence input, a joint team of Dhenkanal Forest Division and WCCB Central Region, Jabalpur posing as customers struck a deal with the smugglers and apprehended them with the scales at Damodarnali area of Kapilash range on Saturday night.

The amount of scales recovered from the two accused gives a clear indication that at least six to seven pangolins have been illegally hunted, Gogineni said.

He said from preliminary investigation it has come to light that the duo was collecting scales from poachers within Dhenkanal and nearby areas. They, however, had not been able to sell it due to Covid-19 pandemic.

The joint team has seized a two-wheeler and two mobile phones from their possession.

We are examining their contact details to find out others involved in this illegal trade and operation, the DFO said.

After Covid test, the duo will be produced in Court where the Dhenkanal division will seek their remand for further investigation.

This is the biggest seizure of pangolin scales in the state since June this year.

On June 11, the special task force of Crime Branch had also seized pangolin scales weighing 4.82 kgs from Balichua village in Mayurbhanj district and had arrested one Suren Prusty.
By Express News Service

ROURKELA: With the easing of restrictions, a sense of complacency has crept into residents of the Steel City since the day the second Covid wave showed signs of waning. Covid appropriate behaviour is not being followed by the majority of population despite threat of a third wave looming large. Dropping their guard, people are going about life as if the pandemic is over. Sources said at many places of Rourkela, people have stopped using masks.

Besides, as enforcement activities become lax with relaxation of curbs, roadside vendors, shopkeepers and customers are not adhering to the safety guidelines. As Sundargarh is a category A district, government offices and courts have started working normally and educational institutions are headed for graded reopening while economic activities are being allowed till 8 pm.

Health officials said the disastrous impact of second wave has lessened visibly, but the threat is not over. Considering the rapid surge in Covid-19 cases in Sundargarh from April 9 and quick community spread, it is imperative to stay protected all the time.

The second wave has officially claimed 267 lives in Sundargarh district in just two months as compared to 173 Covid deaths during the first wave last year. During the first wave, the district had reported 17,500 positive cases and in the second, 42,700 cases were recorded in Sundargarh.

With the Test Positivity Rate of Sundargarh consistently remaining below three per cent, all the three dedicated Covid hospitals and care centres have been closed from July 1. Only 200 beds have been kept ready at JP hospital. Besides, the district is also lagging behind in vaccination as 5,44,537 of the projected 17.87 lakh adult population have received the first dose so far. Chief district medical officer Dr SK Mishra said Covid appropriate behaviour is the only way to prevent the third wave. He appealed to people to remain cautious.
SV Krishna Chaitanya By

Express News Service

CHENNAI: A recent rapid stock status assessment done by Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute (CMFRI) in Tamil Nadu coastal waters shows the quantity of landings of many fish varieties, which was once in abundance, is now declining across Palk Bay, Coromandel Coast, and the Gulf of Mannar.

For instance, the historical maximum catch of oil sardine is 1,24,276 MT and the recent three-year average catch has dropped to 40,766 MT, a fall of a staggering 67 per cent. In the Gulf of Mannar, oil sardine landings fell from 34,559 MT to 2,776 MT, a 92 per cent depletion. One reason for this was, in Thoothukudi area, the gillnetters target lesser sardine and avoid oil sardine shoals due to a lack of local demand. But the landings of lesser sardine also dropped by 40 per cent. This raises the question of sustainability.

However, the long-awaited draft Indian Marine Fisheries Bill (IMF), 2021, which the Union government is planning to table in the Monsoon session of Parliament, does not make a mention of sustainability and conservation unlike its earlier drafts.

Sources told Express the Bill is more of a framework heavily focussed on checking unregulated fishing in Indias Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). But the original Bill, which was framed after consultations with all maritime States, research institutes like CMFRI, and fishermen bodies, was voluminous, and included several sub-clauses and deals with the issues of sustainability and biodiversity. But the Union government has removed several portions. We hope the Bill will be amended, said a senior official.

The CMFRI study shows that there is currently an over-capacity of fishery. In order to keep the effort sustainable, the maximum number of mechanised trawlers may be limited to 1,698 (79.4 per cent of the existing) in Coromandel Coast, 685 (75.4 per cent of the existing) in Gulf of Mannar and 610 (23 per cent of the existing) in Palk Bay.

The engine power of the boat is also more than required.... Only vessels which conform to the specifications of the government may be registered and permitted for fishing, the study says. It also highlights the need to control the indiscriminate harvest of juveniles and uncontrolled exploitation of non-edible resources.

Earlier, non-edible fish were taken by merchants and sent to fish meal plants after drying. It was only an ancillary activity. But, with the setting up of fish oil companies, which require fresh fish, the demand for fresh by-catch became very high. This, coupled with income, acted as an impetus to undertake even targeted fishing for by-catch in the Gulf of Mannar and places like Nagapattinam, a CMFRI scientist said.

This resulted in an increase in exploitation of certain resources, which otherwise formed only normal by-catch.

In Nagapattinam, there is even targeted fishing for low-value fish. Sometimes, even quality fish, like mackerel and oil sardine, are used for oil extraction. At the Chennai fishing harbour, the estimated low-value by-catch in a single day trawl was 13 per cent (3,000 tonnes) of the total landing in 2008, which increased to 17 per cent (5,000 tonnes) in 2011. The reported discard was only 1 per cent.

K Bharathi, president, South Indian Fishermen Welfare Association, said the draft IMF Bill favours the interests of big vessels and ignores the welfare of small-scale fishermen. The burden of sustainability cant be placed solely on fishermen. What has the government done to improve fishing stocks? All the pollution is discharged into the sea and estuaries, he stated.


Express News Service By

NEW DELHI: With Covid-19 cases continuing to decline, the Delhi government on Saturday decided to further ease restrictions from Monday. While cinema halls, theatres and multiplexes will be allowed to open with 50 percent seating capacity, spa centers can reopen on the condition that its staff are fully vaccinated and all employees shall undergo an RT-PCR test every fortnight.

All spa visitors will have to sign a declaration form that they have not contracted Covid-19 or if they had they have tested negative. The order states that compliance of these orders would be the responsibility of the owner of the establishment and would be held responsible if the visitors violated the conditions. Bringing relief to commuters, the Delhi government has allowed buses and the Delhi Metro to run at full capacity from next week.

The Metro serves as a major form of travel by the public relies. During the lockdown citizens had to face difficulties as metro services were either suspended or were running at half the capacity. Autorickshaws and taxis are allowed to carry only two passengers while an RTV can carry up to 11 passengers.

For marriage related gatherings, the government has allowed 100 people from next week, which was one of the demands of business owners related to wedding functions. The relaxations are expected to bring much relief to traders and the business community. Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal had said a few days back that the Delhi Disaster Management Authourity was unlocking the city in phases.
Express News Service By

NEW DELHI: Ahead of secretary of state Antony Blinkens visit to India the US said New Delhi was a critical partner in the region with a shared interest in a stable and secure Afghanistan but that would not stop the American dignitary from raising human rights issues and democracy during the visit.

With respect to the human rights and democracy question, yes, youre right; I will tell you that we will raise it, and we will continue that conversation, because we firmly believe that we have more values in common on those fronts than we dont, said acting assistant secretary for south and central Asian affairs Dean Thompson.

Thompson said the US welcomed Indias shared commitment to peace and supporting economic development in Afghanistan. We expect that all the countries in the region have a shared interest in a stable and secure Afghanistan going forward and so we will certainly be looking at talking with our Indian partners about how we can work together to realise that goal, to find ways to bring the parties together, and continue to pursue a negotiated settlement to end the longstanding war, he added.

The acting assistant secretary for south and central Asian affairs said discussions during Blinkens visit would look to expand ties in the fields of security, defence, cyber and counterterrorism cooperation. Blinken, who will arrive in India on Tuesday, will be second high ranking official of the Joe Biden administration after Secretary of Defence Llyod Austin to visit India.

The secretary of state will call on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and hold discussions with external affairs minister S Jaishankar and national security advisor Ajit Doval. The discussions between the leaders are expected to focus around the coronavirus pandemic, Quad, Indo-Pacific region and Afghanistan.

On the Afghanistan issue, both sides have continued to engage following the US withdrawal of troops. Last week, Jaishankar met US deputy NSA Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall and US special representative on Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad on the sidelines of the connectivity summit in Tashkent.

On the India-Pakistan issue, Thompson said both countries need to work with each other to resolve their issues. With regard to India-Pakistan, I would just note that we strongly believe that India and Pakistans issues are ones for them to work out between themselves. We are pleased to see that the ceasefire that went into place earlier this year is - has remained intact, and we certainly always encourage them to continue their efforts to find ways to build a more stable relationship going forward, he added.
By PTI

UNITED NATIONS: A country of the size of India with its independent foreign policy has been a welcome entrant into the UN Security Council, providing "much-needed" balance vis-a-vis the powerful UN body's five permanent members and their inter-se fissures, New Delhi's envoy to the UN said ahead of its Presidency of the Council in August.

India will assume the rotating Presidency of the UN Security Council on August 1, the country's first Presidency during its 2021-22 tenure as a non-permanent member of the 15-nation UN body.

India will again preside over the Council in December next year, the last month of its two-year tenure.

ALSO READ: UNGA president commends India for 'rich' programme of work during upcoming UN Security Council presidency

"We are in the Security Council at a very significant juncture where we are not only grappling with the unprecedented COVID pandemic, but also dealing with fissures, both in the Security Council and outside, which need to be bridged through greater collective action rather than individual initiatives," India's Permanent Representative to the UN Ambassador T S Tirumurti said.

In response to a question on how India will work to bridge differences and divisions among UNSC members as Council President at a time when the UN body has been found to be divided on several issues, Tirumurti said India has not hesitated in taking a "principled position" on a wide variety of issues over the last seven months of its tenure in the Security Council.

"We have also been unafraid of shouldering responsibilities," Tirumurti said.

"To begin with, a country of the size of India with its independent foreign policy has been a welcome entrant into the Council. It has provided the much-needed balance vis-a-vis the P-5 (the five permanent members of the Council) and their inter-se fissures," he said.

He was referring to the veto-wielding permanent members -- China, France, Russia, the UK and the US.

He said India has been "the bridge to ensure that polarisation of the Council doesn't affect its ability to take a well-considered view".

Tirumurti cited the example of issues in India's neighbourhood relating to, inter alia, Myanmar and Afghanistan, "where, time and again, we have stepped in to ensure that Council discussions and outcomes are focussed, forward-looking and sensitive to the situation on the ground".

India is Chair of the Taliban Sanctions Committee and continues to play an important role.

India is also chairing the Libya Sanctions Committee at a critical juncture in their country, he said.

In the case of Africa, India has always been sensitive to African priorities and the needs of the African countries, he said adding that this is in keeping with Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ten guiding principles on Africa.

"We are convinced that African countries under sanctions need to be assisted to come out of it rather than be burdened with unrealistic benchmarks and expectations from the Permanent Members," Tirumurti said, emphasising that this is why India had abstained on the UNSC resolution on South Sudan.

In late May, the Council renewed the arms embargo, travel ban and assets freeze imposed on South Sudan for another year till May 31, 2022.

The Council also extended the mandate of the panel of experts tasked with helping to oversee those measures for 13 months.

India and Kenya had abstained on the resolution while the other 13 UNSC members voted in favour.

Tirumurti said similarly, in the Middle East, India has leveraged its strong and historical links to convey its views on Palestine, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq.

He underlined that developing countries, particularly small states in Africa, have been disproportionately affected in the recent past and terrorism has only increased and not decreased during this period.

The Security Council itself has come under criticism for not playing its role, mainly because of differences among the P-5, he said.

"Consequently, we have been a voice for greater engagement among various member states in the Security Council, a bridge between differing views and coherent and compelling voice for the developing world at a time when they are facing conflict and COVID-19," he said.

"India, during last 7 months, has been a strong voice, inter alia, for combating terrorism, strengthening peacekeeping and furthering peace processes," Tirumurti said.
By Express News Service

KOCHI: Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi & Dy. Supreme Commander of UAE Armed Forces issued a resolution to form a new Board of Directors for Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ADCCI), chaired by Abdullah Mohamed Al Mazrouei and prominent Indian businessman Yusuffali MA as the vice-chairman.

ADCCI is the apex govt. body of all business established in Abu Dhabi and functions as an effective bridge between the Govt and business sector. Each of the business establishments in Abu Dhabi, one of the wealthiest and most influential economic hubs in the region, has to be licensed by ADCCI.

Yusuffali is the only Indian in the 29-member board, which is primarily constituted of Emirati business owners and CEOs, a release said here.

Commenting on the appointment Yusuffali said truly a very humbling and proud moment in my life. My sincere gratitude to the visionary leadership of this great country and I will strive to do my best towards justifying the great responsibility entrusted upon me. Apart from working for the growth of Abu Dhabi economy & the larger business community, I will sincerely work towards further boosting the Indo-UAE trade relations.

HH Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan recently had honored Yusuffali with the 'Abu Dhabi Award 2021', the highest civilian honor for his almost 5-decade long contributions in the fields of economic development & philanthropy.


By ANI

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari on Sunday called upon the Pakistan-occupied Kashmir Election Commission (EC) to ensure free and fair elections as polling for the occupied region's Legislative Assembly is underway.

"The visit of Prime Minister Imran Khan to the PoK can never be justified as lawful," The Express Tribune quoted Bilawal as saying. He added that the premier's visit was a sheer manifestation of the PTI government's "absolute disregard" for the writ of the Pak-occupied Kashmir election commission.

He made these remarks while addressing a press conference in Karachi.

Bilawal accused Prime Minister Imran Khan of harming the Kashmir cause saying the "puppet government of the PTI had not done anything for the people of the region in its tenure and left them helpless", reported The Express Tribune.

Despite appeals to postpone the polls for two months due to the threat of a resurgence of coronavirus, the polling for general elections in PoK began on Sunday.

Earlier on Saturday, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif also appealed to locals in the area to exercise their voting rights and also to ensure that "ballot thieves" do not win, referring to the Imran Khan-led ruling government.

Meanwhile, Imran Khan had made tall promises in a bid to woo voters amid lackluster support to his party.

Leader of Opposition in the Pakistan National Assembly Shehbaz Sharif later on Saturday slammed Pakistan PM for his statement assuring Kashmiris a right to opt for independence. Shehbaz Sharif said the Khan's remarks were a 'deviation' from Pakistan's historical stance on the issue, Dawn reported.

Last year, Pakistan conducted the Legislative Assembly election in occupied Gilgit-Baltistan.

The main opposition parties-- Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and PPP-- had termed the occupied Gilgit-Baltistan election rigged as the polls were in favour of Imran Khan's PTI party.
By PTI

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has banned the domestic air travel for unvaccinated people as the COVID-19 cases crossed the 1 million-mark in the country on Sunday, according to officials.

The travel restriction, imposed by the National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC), will be applicable from August 1 on unvaccinated people of over 18 years of age.

Restriction is for domestic air travel and people travelling from Pakistan to abroad or from abroad to Pakistan are exempted from restriction. It is also not applicable on link flights if these are within 72 hours of arrival or departure, according to an NCOC document.

Partially vaccinated people, foreign nationals, Pakistani nationals having documentary proof of vaccination abroad and patients with clinical conditions will be exempted from the restriction, it said.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of National Health Services said that 45 people died in the last 24 hours due to the COVID-19, taking the death toll to 23,016.

It said that 2,819 new cases were reported, taking the national tally to 10,04,694.

The positivity rate reached 6.32 per cent which is the highest during the fourth wave of the pandemic which hit the country early this month.

Minister for Planning Asad Umar, who is also the chief of the NCOC, said that the coronavirus death toll in Pakistan was lower as compared to other regional countries.

Covid deaths/million population in our region: Iran 1,037, Nepal 326, India 301, Sri Lanka 186, Afghanistan 160, Bangladesh 113, Pakistan 102, he tweeted.

He said that the risk was not over, urging people to get vaccinated.

In another development, a senior Supreme Court judge and his wife tested positive for coronavirus.

In November last year, 59-year-old Justice Waqar Ahmad Seth, the then chief justice of the Peshawar High Court, died due to the contagion.
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People on the far left have become so predictable that their statements are no longer "breaking news." They would be hilarious if they weren't outrageous or if they didn't contribute to the undermining of human rights and freedom in other countries.

Some on the left speak favorably about the evil twins of communism and socialism.

One of many examples has resurfaced after last week's uprising in Cuba by thousands who have demanded freedom from dictatorship. Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the "1619 Project," which seeks to teach history to public school students through the prism of slavery, said in a 2019 podcast that she believes Cuba is the most equal country in the Western hemisphere and might serve as a model for her project's integration agenda.

While acknowledging she is not an expert on race, Hannah-Jones said she believes Cuba is the most "equal" and "multiracial" country in the hemisphere, which she attributed to socialism.

In 2017, The Wall Street Journal published an opinion column by author David Satter titled, "100 years of Communism -- 100 million dead."

Such numbers do not deter communism's enablers.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) did not disappoint with her own predictable response to the demonstrations in Cuba. While making an obligatory defense of "human rights" and "free speech," she blamed Cuba's deplorable economic condition, not on communism or socialism, but on America's "cruel" embargo, which she said has caused "human suffering."

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Cuba trades with much of the rest of the world, so the island's problems can't be all, or even mostly, America's fault.

Should human suffering not include the number of people imprisoned by Castro and his successors? As one might expect, Cuba does not publish information about the number of humans suffering in their prisons, but in 2012, Reuters reported that Cuban authorities acknowledged 57,337 of its 11.2 million population were incarcerated. The Cuban Prisoners Defenders group, based in Madrid, estimates the number is far higher -- 123,000, which would make it first in the global ranking of prison populations per capita.

For years the Hollywood left, liberal clergy and some American politicians have touted the supposed greatness of Cuba's literacy program and "free" health care.

Steven G. Ullman, a School of Business Administration professor and chair, Department of Health Sector Management and Policy at the University of Miami, told UM News that while universal health care in Cuba may have been a good idea in theory, in practice it is a failure: "...the doctors and nurses have very few supplies, including antibiotics, with which to treat patients, so prevention and treatment become problematic. That's in addition to a lack of potable water. There is a significant shortage of supplies in the most populated rural areas. For example, clinics now require patients to bring their own bedding and food. There is a deterioration in sterilizing processes, reusing syringes, issues associated with old X-ray machines, no film available. With this breakdown, the theoretical concept has also fallen apart."

As for literacy, how does it help if all Cubans can read if all they're allowed to read is communist propaganda?

If the Biden administration and its leftist friends truly care about human suffering, the least they can do is use technology to re-open internet access in Cuba, which the government shut down during the demonstrations. Words are not enough. Cuba libre! Should be more than a slogan. It should be American policy.
Pikeville, KY (41501)

Today

Showers early then scattered thunderstorms developing later in the day. High 77F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 60%..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms during the evening, then partly cloudy overnight. Low 62F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 50%.
Don Follis counsels pastors and consults with a wide array of churches. He blogs at donfollis.com, where you can subscribe to his posts. He can be reached at donscolumn@gmail.com.
Dr. Peter Chin-Hong is associate dean

for regional campuses and director of the immunocompromised-host infectious-

diseases program at the University of California, San Francisco. He wrote this for The Conversation, an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.
One of Editor & Publishers 10 That Do It Right 2021
In this March 19 file photo, Suhail Shaheen, Afghan Taliban spokesman and a member of the negotiation team, gestures while speaking during a joint news conference in Moscow, Russia. In an interview with The Associated Press Thursday, Shaheen said the insurgent movement does not want to monopolize power, but there wont be peace until there is a new, negotiated government in Kabul and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani is removed. Shaheen said women will be allowed to work, go to school, and participate in politics but will have to wear the hijab, or headscarf. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, Pool, File)
Sleep disturbances alongside mood disorders urogenital symptoms, altered sexual function, and fatigue are some of the major symptoms associated with menopause. Menopause occurs when menstruation stops permanently due to the loss of ovarian follicular activity. To this end, menopause occurs following the final menstrual period and is diagnosed clinically following 12 months of amenorrhea.

Image Credit: fizkes / Shutterstock.com

The stages of menopause

The mean age of natural menopause varies across the world; however, in the United Kingdom menopause occurs at an average age of 51 years. Early menopause occurs between the ages of 40 and 45 years, while premature ovarian insufficiency is a clinical syndrome defined as the transient or permanent loss of ovarian function before reaching the age of 40.

Perimenopause, which is defined as the period before menopause, is characterized by irregular cycles of ovulation and menstruation, ending 12 months after the last menstrual period. Comparatively, postmenopause occurs after the point at which a woman has not had a menstrual period for 12 consecutive months.

Vasomotor symptoms of menopause

The causes of sleep disturbances in menopause can be attributed to several symptoms. Vasomotor symptoms, which are characterized by hot flushes and night sweats, are the most commonly reported symptoms of menopause. Alongside these symptoms is peripheral vasodilatation, which occurs around the face and the chest and is usually followed by sweating, causing evaporative cooling.

The vasomotor symptoms of menopause can also be characterized as a type of climacteric symptom, which also includes the endocrinal, somatic, and transitory psychological changes occurring in the transition to menopause. Additional climacteric symptoms associated with menopause include palpitations, headaches, myalgia (muscular pain), numbness, vaginal dryness, dizziness, and urinary tract symptoms. Several mental symptoms have also been reported during menopause, including anxiety, depression, a decline in libido, reduced concentration, and impaired memory.

Epidemiology of vasomotor symptoms during menopause

It is estimated that approximately 80% of postmenopausal women experience these symptoms, with 25% reporting an impact on their quality of life. The severity and duration of the vasomotor symptoms of menopause are wide-ranging. In general, these occur for approximately 12 years; however, approximately 25% of women will experience them for five years with an additional 9% experiencing lifelong symptoms.

A multi-ethnic longitudinal cohort study of women in the United States was found that vasomotor symptoms are more prevalent among African American and Hispanic women. These symptoms were less prevalent among Japanese and Chinese women, with the lowest reported prevalence among nonHispanic Caucasian women.

The link between vasomotor symptoms and sleep disturbances is well established. In studies of selfreported sleeping problems and climacteric symptoms with over 5,000 women and 12,600 women respectively, the odds ratio for sleeping problems in women with climacteric symptoms was 2.0 compared with asymptomatic women.

Sleep-disordered breathing: an obstruction to sleep

Obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome (OSAS) is the most clinically important abnormality with an incidence of 12% of the general population. It is characterized by open airway obstruction, leading to apnoea or significantly decreased airflow (hypopnea), along with snoring episodes.

The diagnosis of OSAS is dependent on daytime sleepiness. In women, particularly those who are in the transition to menopause and after menopause, obstruction of the upper airway is a more common nocturnal breathing disorder than OSAS.

Upper airway obstruction symptoms, which often resemble those of sleep apnea, include excessive sleepiness, snoring, increased tendency to fall asleep, morning headache, sweating, low energy, concentration difficulties, poor memory, and low mental tolerance.

The cause of sleep-disordered breathing is related to physiological or structural variables. Following menopause, body fat is redistributed, which results in an increased waist to hip ratio and increased neck width, which can put pressure on the airways. Another causal link is a decrease in the female sex hormones, particularly progesterone, which has been shown to stimulate the respiratory system.

Menopause, mood, and sleep

Women experiencing menopause report an increase in the frequency of their mood symptoms, particularly depression and anxiety, relative to men.

It is estimated that between 70 and 90% of climactically symptomatic women report feelings of depression. Reduced estrogen may also reduce the serotonin concentration in the brain, which is a critical neurotransmitter for mood regulation. Dopaminergic and androgenic activity can also fluctuate during menopause, which suggests that estrogen may produce an anti-depressive effect.

Dr. Susan Kok - Sleep and Menopause Play

Restless legs syndrome

Restless legs syndrome (RLS) is a condition that is more prevalent among women. According to a recent survey, approximately 15% of women between the ages of 18 and 64 years were found to have symptoms of RLS. Notably, this studys findings found that the prevalence of RLS was unaffected by the menopausal status.

However, the experience of menopause can increase the perceived severity of RLS. Several theories have been proposed to explain the reasoning for this, which include iron deficiency or persistently high levels of estrogen during pregnancy. Conversely, the fall of estrogen and melatonin at menopause may be a causative mechanism. These mechanisms are contentious, particularly because menopause does not influence the prevalence of RLS, and hormone replacement therapy does not appear to alter the clinical outcomes in affected women.

Alongside RLS are periodic limb movement syndromes (PLMS) characterized by abrupt and repetitive movements last 0.55 s with short intervals. RLS occurs in 515% of the adult population and PLMS in 30%.

Alleviating the impact of menopause on seep

Several treatment options are used to treat the symptoms that affect sleep in peri, post and menopausal women. The first-line therapy for the alleviation of menopause-related insomnia is often hormone therapy (HT). Climacteric women whose insomnia is related to mood also benefit from HT, with an additional vasomotor asymptomatic subset benefitting from this.

It should be noted that HT is associated with an increased risk of the development of breast cancer. However, as long as these effects are carefully considered and HT is accompanied by yearly breast examination and biannual mammograms, the use of HT is a viable therapeutic route.

Additional pharmacological options for menopause-related sleep insomnia include selective serotoninreuptake inhibitors, as well as antidepressants, hypnotics, or anxiolytics. Improved sleep hygiene practices such as sleeping in a dark quiet room at a cooler room temperature, avoiding daytime napping, decreasing the intake of caffeinated beverages, and relaxation training such as yoga and progressive muscle relaxation, have also been found to improve the quantity and quality of sleep in affected women. Cognitive-behavioral or sleep restriction and sleep consolidation therapies can also be beneficial.

Conclusion

Menopause and its associated symptoms, particularly climactic symptoms, harm sleep quality. Reduced sleep quality is connected to systemic disease, mental illnesses, and an increased risk of accidents.

Menopause, and especially menopauseassociated symptoms like sweating and nocturnal hot flushes, often precipitate and exacerbate sleep disturbances. These sleep issues are common among women and their prevalence is increasing with more women seeking assistance for sleep problems as compared to men across all age ranges.

References

Baker FC, et al. Sleep problems during the menopausal transition: prevalence, impact, and management challenges. Nat Sci Sleep. 2018;10:7395. doi:10.2147/NSS.S125807

PoloKantola P. Sleep and Menopause. Womens Health. 2007:99106. doi:10.2217/17455057.3.1.99

Jehan S, et al. Sleep Disorders in Postmenopausal Women. J Sleep Disord Ther. 2015;4(5):212.

Wesstrom J et al. Restless legs syndrome among women: prevalence, co-morbidity and possible relationship to menopause. Climacteric. 2008;11(5):422428. doi: 10.1080/13697130802359683.

Dancey DR, et al. Impact of menopause on the prevalence and severity of sleep apnea. Chest 2001;120:151155. doi: 10.1378/chest.120.1.151.

Phillips T, et al. Does hormone therapy improve age-related skin changes in postmenopausal women? A randomized, double-blind, double-dummy, placebo-controlled multicenter study assessing the effects of noethindrone acetate and ethinyl estradiol in the improvement of mild to moderate age-related skin changes in postmenopausal women. J Am Acad Dermatol. 2008;59:397404. doi: 10.1016/j.jaad.2008.05.009.

Gambacciani M, et al. Climacteric modifications in body weight and fat tissue distribution. Climacteric. 1999;2:3744. doi: 10.3109/13697139909025561.

Kim HK, et al. The Recent Review of the Genitourinary Syndrome of Menopause. J Menopausal Med. 2015;21(2):65-71. doi:10.6118/jmm.2015.21.2.65.

nice.org.uk (2020) Menopause. https://cks.nice.org.uk/topics/menopause/

Lee J, et al. Sleep Disorders and Menopause [published correction appears in J Menopausal Med. 2019 Dec;25(3):172]. J Menopausal Med. 2019;25(2):8387. doi:10.6118/jmm.19192

Further Reading
New Global Dashboard on COVID-19 Vaccine Equity finds low-income countries would add $38 billion to their GDP forecast for 2021 if they had the same vaccination rate as high-income countries. Global economic recovery at risk if vaccines are not equitably manufactured, scaled up and distributed.

COVID-19 vaccine inequity will have a lasting and profound impact on socio-economic recovery in low- and lower-middle income countries without urgent action to boost supply and assure equitable access for every country, including through dose sharing, according to new data released today by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Health Organization (WHO) and the University of Oxford.

An acceleration in scaling up manufacturing and sharing enough vaccine doses with low-income countries could have added $38 billion to their GDP forecast for 2021 if they had similar vaccination rates as high income countries. At a time when richer countries have paid trillions in stimulus to prop up flagging economies, now is the moment to ensure vaccine doses are shared quickly, all barriers to increasing vaccine manufacturing are removed and financing support is secured so vaccines are distributed equitably and a truly global economic recovery can take place.

A high price per COVID-19 vaccine dose relative to other vaccines and delivery costs  including for the health workforce surge  could put a huge strain on fragile health systems and undermine routine immunization and essential health services and could cause alarming spikes in measles, pneumonia and diarrhea. There is also a clear risk in terms of foregone opportunities for the expansion of other immunization services, for example the safe and effective rollout of HPV vaccines. Lower income countries need timely access to sustainably priced vaccines and timely financial support.

These insights come from the Global Dashboard for COVID-19 Vaccine Equity, a joint initiative from UNDP, WHO and the University of Oxford's Blavatnik School of Government, which combines the latest information on COVID-19 vaccination with the most recent socio-economic data to illustrate why accelerating vaccine equity is not only critical to saving lives but also to driving a faster and fairer recovery from the pandemic with benefits for all.

In some low- and middle-income countries, less than 1 per cent of the population is vaccinated  this is contributing to a two-track recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. It's time for swift, collective action  this new COVID-19 Vaccine Equity Dashboard will provide Governments, policymakers and international organisations with unique insights to accelerate the global delivery of vaccines and mitigate the devastating socio-economic impacts of the pandemic." Achim Steiner, UNDP Administrator

According to the new Dashboard, which builds on data from multiple entities including the IMF, World Bank, UNICEF and Gavi, and analysis on per capita GDP growth rates from the World Economic Outlook, richer countries are projected to vaccinate quicker and recover economically quicker from COVID-19, while poorer countries haven't even been able to vaccinate their health workers and most at-risk population and may not achieve pre-COVID-19 levels of growth until 2024. Meanwhile, Delta and other variants are driving some countries to reinstate strict public health social measures. This is further worsening the social, economic and health impact, especially for the most vulnerable and marginalised people. Vaccine inequity threatens all countries and risks reversing hard won progress on the Sustainable Development Goals.

"Vaccine inequity is the world's biggest obstacle to ending this pandemic and recovering from COVID-19," said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization. "Economically, epidemiologically and morally, it is in all countries' best interest to use the latest available data to make lifesaving vaccines available to all."

Designed to empower policy makers and development partners to take urgent action to reduce vaccine inequity, the Global Dashboard breaks down the impact of accessibility against a target for countries to vaccinate their at-risk populations first to reduce mortality and protect the health system and then move on to vaccinating larger shares of the population to reduce disease burden and re-open socio-economic activity.

The Dashboard is facilitated by the Global Action Plan for Healthy Lives and Well-being for All (SDG3 GAP), which aims to improve collaboration across the multilateral system to support an equitable and resilient recovery from the pandemic and drive progress towards the health-related SDGs.
Determining who is the biological father of a child is a sensitive subject, but the answer can be crucial in important issues. In a nationwide study published in the Journal of Internal Medicine, researchers from Karolinska Institutet, by using two different models, have been able to show that the proportion of incorrectly established paternities in Sweden is as low as 1.7 percent, a figure that has decreased over time.

The genetic link between a father and a child is an eternal question which, for obvious reasons, can often be difficult to determine. However, with the discovery of blood groups at the beginning of the 20th century and how these are inherited, it has been possible to obtain a reliable answer in some individual cases." Gustaf Edgren, Researcher, Department of Medicine, Solna, Karolinska Institutet

An incorrectly attributed paternity, where a man is wrongly believed to be the genetic father of a child, can have consequences both for the family in question, but also for society at large.

Inheritance disputes and order of succession are assessed on the basis of biological parenthood, and in medical research and healthcare, correct knowledge of biological kinship can be of central importance.

Based on previous studies with selected groups, the frequency of misattributed paternity has been estimated to be as high as 20 to 30 percent.

"However, there has been a lack of research that has studied this in a reliable and therefore meaningful manner," says Gustaf Edgren.

In this new study, researchers at Karolinska Institutet linked two different registers: a transfusion database containing blood group data and the Swedish multigenerational register containing detailed information on kinship, for example, who is registered as the mother and father.

Based on children born between 1930 and 2010, nearly two million so-called family units were created with information on the blood type of the mother, father, and child.

"To analyze these data, we used two independent statistical methods, to ensure the results," explains Gustaf Edgren.

The first method examined all blood group combinations that are genetically impossible if there is to be biological compliance. One such example is that both parents have blood type O, while the child has a different blood type.

Using the second method, the research group instead proceeded from a distribution of blood groups and examined both impossible and possible blood group combinations for the child.

"Both methods yielded the same results, where the incidence of incorrectly established paternities was an average of 1.7 percent. This shows that the frequency is significantly lower than in many previous studies," says Gustaf Edgren.

The research results are also consistent with other Western European studies, including Dutch and Flemish genealogy materials where the estimated incidence of incorrectly established paternity is between one and two per cent.

The study also shows that the number of incorrectly established paternities was higher in the 1930s, with a figure of about three percent - a figure that has decreased gradually over the years.

"If we look at the latter part of the 20th century, the number drops to about one percent. Why exactly is difficult to say, but one hypothesis is that we now have better and more accessible contraceptives. Society has also changed, for example, in the past divorce was not as acceptable", says Gustaf Edgren.

The study also shows that incorrectly established paternity is more common among parents with a shorter education.

The findings fill a scientific knowledge gap and further contribute to our understanding of population genetics and social structures.

"The presence of incorrectly determined paternity is lower than we expected and is important, for example, for everyone working with the Swedish multigenerational register. This knowledge provides an understanding of family relationships and forms a good basis for discussion in genetic counselling, but it is also useful for an evolutionary understanding in sociology," concludes Gustaf Edgren.
In the final report from the Start Free, Stay Free, AIDS Free initiative, UNAIDS and partners warn that progress towards ending AIDS among children, adolescents and young women has stalled and none of the targets for 2020 were met.

The report shows that the total number of children on treatment declined for the first time, despite the fact that nearly 800 000 children living with HIV are not currently on treatment. It also shows that opportunities to identify infants and young children living with HIV early are being missed-;more than one third of children born to mothers living with HIV were not tested. If untreated, around 50% of children living with HIV die before they reach their second birthday.

Over 20 years ago, initiatives for families and children to prevent vertical transmission and to eliminate children dying of AIDS truly kick-started what has now become our global AIDS response. This stemmed from an unprecedented activation of all partners, yet, despite early and dramatic progress, despite more tools and knowledge than ever before, children are falling way behind adults and way behind our goals. The inequalities are striking-;children are nearly 40% less likely than adults to be on life-saving treatment (54% of children versus 74% of adults), and account for a disproportionate number of deaths (just 5% of all people living with HIV are children, but children account for 15% of all AIDS-related deaths). This is about children's right to health and healthy lives, their value in our societies. It's time to reactivate on all fronts-;we need the leadership, activism, and investments to do what's right for kids." Shannon Hader, UNAIDS Deputy Executive Director, Programme

Start Free, Stay Free, AIDS Free is a five-year framework that began in 2015, following on from the hugely successful Global Plan towards the elimination of new HIV infections among children by 2015 and keeping their mothers alive. It called for a super Fast-Track approach to ensure that every child has an HIV-free beginning, that they stay HIV-free through adolescence and that every child and adolescent living with HIV has access to antiretroviral therapy. The approach intensified focus on 23 countries, 21 of which were in Africa, that accounted for 83% of the global number of pregnant women living with HIV, 80% of children living with HIV and 78% of young women aged 1524 years newly infected with HIV.

"The HIV community has a long history of tackling unprecedented challenges, today we need that same energy and perseverance to address the needs of the most vulnerable-;our children. African leaders have the power to help us change the pace of care and should act and lead until no child living with HIV is left behind," said Ren Minghui, Assistant Director-General of the Universal Health Coverage/Communicable and Noncommunicable Diseases Division of the World Health Organization.

Although the 2020 targets were missed, the 21 focus countries in Africa made better progress than the non-focus countries. However, there were major disparities between countries, and these countries still bear the highest burden of disease: 11 countries account for nearly 70% of the "missing children"-;those living with HIV but not on treatment. There was a 24% decline in new HIV infections among children from 2015 to 2020 in focus countries versus a 20% decline globally. Focus countries also achieved 89% treatment coverage for pregnant women living with HIV, compared to 85% globally, but still short of the target of 95%, and there were huge differences between countries. For example, Botswana achieved 100% treatment coverage, yet the Democratic Republic of the Congo only reached 39%.

"While we are deeply distressed by the global paediatric HIV shortfalls, we are also encouraged by the fact that we largely have the tools we need to change this," said Angeli Achrekar, Acting United States Global AIDS Coordinator. "So, let this report be a call to action to challenge complacency and to work tirelessly to close the gap."

The report outlines three actions necessary to end new HIV infections among children in the focus countries. First, reach pregnant women with testing and treatment as early as possible-;66 000 new HIV infections occurred among children because their mothers did not receive treatment at all during pregnancy or breastfeeding. Second, ensure the continuity of treatment and viral suppression during pregnancy, breastfeeding and for life-;38 000 children became newly infected with HIV because their mothers were not continued in care during pregnancy and breastfeeding. Third, prevent new HIV infections among women who are pregnant and breastfeeding-;35 000 new infections among children occurred because a woman became newly infected with HIV during pregnancy or breastfeeding.

There has been some progress in preventing adolescent girls and young women from acquiring HIV. In the focus countries, the number of adolescent girls and young women acquiring HIV declined by 27% from 2015 to 2020. However, the number of adolescent girls and young women acquiring HIV in the 21 focus countries was 200 000, twice the global target for 2020 (100 000). In addition, COVID-19 and school closures are now disrupting many educational and sexual and reproductive health services for adolescent girls and young women, highlighting the urgent need to redouble HIV prevention efforts to reach young women and adolescent girls.

"The lives of the most vulnerable girls and young women hang in the balance, locked into deeply entrenched cycles of vulnerability and neglect that must urgently be interrupted. With the endorsement of United Nations Member States, the new global AIDS strategy recommits us all to address these intersecting vulnerabilities to halt and reverse the effects of HIV by 2030. We know that rapid gains can be achieved for girls and young women; what is needed is the courage to apply the solutions, and the discipline to implement these with rigor and scale," said Chewe Luo, United Nations Children's Fund Chief of HIV and Associate Director of Health Programmes.

UNAIDS and partners will continue to work together to develop new frameworks to address the unfinished agenda. New targets for 2025 were officially adopted by United Nations Member States in the 2021 Political Declaration on HIV and AIDS: Ending Inequalities and Getting on Track to End AIDS by 2030 in June this year, providing a road map for the next five years.

"It is clear that ending mother-to-child transmission requires innovative approaches that support the whole woman throughout the life course, including intensified primary prevention efforts, such as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), access to comprehensive reproductive care, and focused attention on adolescent girls and young women. The Start Free, Stay Free, AIDS Free report includes new the new targets for 2025 that, if met, will propel a new era of HIV prevention and treatment for women, children and families. This is not the time for complacency, but rather an opportunity to redouble investments to reduce and eliminate mother-to-child transmission," said Chip Lyons, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation.
Advanced technologies have been used to solve a long-standing mystery about why some people develop serious illness when they are infected with the malaria parasite, while others carry the infection asymptomatically.

An international team used mass cytometry - an in-depth way of characterizing individual cells - and machine learning to discover 'immune signatures' associated with symptomatic or asymptomatic infections in people infected with the Plasmodium vivax parasite. This uncovered an unexpected role for immune T cells in protection against malaria, a finding that could help to improve the development of much-needed malaria vaccines.

The research, which was published in the journal JCI Insight was led by WEHI's Dr Lisa Ioannidis and Associate Professor Diana Hansen, in collaboration with Professor Ric Price from the Menzies School of Health Research, Darwin, and Dr Rintis Noviyanti from the Eijkman Institute for Molecular Biology, Indonesia.

At a glance

Advanced technologies have revealed 'immune signatures' that differentiate immune responses that drive symptomatic or asymptomatic Plasmodium vivax malaria infections.

The international collaboration revealed a previously unrecognized role for immune CD4 T cells in preventing serious disease and controlling asymptomatic infection of low parasite burden.

The findings could guide to the development of better vaccines against malaria, a disease that kills hundreds of thousands of people around the world each year.

Variable immune responses

Malaria is a parasitic disease impacting hundreds of millions of people each year. After infection, people develop immunity to the Plasmodium parasite that causes malaria - but this immunity only reduces the disease severity rather than preventing infection altogether. Despite the immense global impact of malaria, there are not yet vaccines in clinical use to prevent this disease.

The immune response to malaria is a 'double-edged sword', Associate Professor Hansen said. "While an immune response to the parasite can prevent severe disease, in some people it is an excessive immune response - driving severe inflammation - that exacerbates malaria, causing the most severe, and potentially fatal, symptoms," she said.

"Our research has investigated the longstanding question of how immune responses differ between people with symptomatic and asymptomatic malaria infections. We focussed on the Plasmodium vivax form of malaria, which is most common in the Asia-Pacific and Latin America. This species is a particular challenge to control as infected people can carry it for many months in the liver without symptoms."

Using the University of Melbourne's mass cytometry facility, the research team were able to undertake in-depth, multi-dimensional assessments of the immune cells in blood samples provided by people living in a vivax malaria-endemic region of Indonesia. Dr Ioannidis said the team compared many aspects of immunity in samples from people who were uninfected, asymptomatically infected, or symptomatically infected with P. vivax.

In collaboration with a WEHI bioinformatics team led by Professor Gordon Smyth, we used machine learning to develop an 'immune signature' that distinguised between these three categories of samples. These signatures could be applied to new blood samples from people infected with malaria, to accurately predict the severity of their infection." Dr Lisa Ioannidis, WEHI

Enhancing malaria control

Dr Ioannidis said the immune signatures revealed the key components of the immune response that drive immunity to malaria. "Antibodies produced by B cells were one important component, especially in people with high parasite loads and symptomatic disease, but we also discovered that certain types of CD4 T cells were critical to keep infections in check, preventing symptoms," she said.

"This is the first time CD4 T cells have been shown to be important for controlling asymptomatic P. vivax infections."

Associate Professor Hansen said the discovery could lead to better approaches to controlling - or even eliminating - malaria. "Malaria vaccine development has focussed almost entirely on measuring antibody responses as a marker of vaccine success. Our research has revealed the important role of CD4 T cells in controlling malaria infections - and we think these cells need much more consideration when designing malaria vaccines. Because vivax malaria can persist in asymptomatic people, it is critical that vaccines activate CD4 T cells to control these low-grade infections," Associate Professor Hansen said.
Financial instability, lack of infrastructure, a deteriorating sense of community and family fragmentation are key contributors to diseases of despair in Pennsylvania communities, according to Penn State College of Medicine and Highmark Health researchers. The researchers conducted four focus groups in Pennsylvania communities identified as having high rates of despair-related illnesses.

Diseases of despair are medical diagnoses involving alcohol-related disorders, substance-related disorders and suicidal thoughts and behavior. Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton proposed the concept of deaths of despair in 2015 after observing a decline in life expectancy of middle-aged white men and women between 1999 and 2015 -- the first such decline since the flu pandemic of 1918. They theorized that this decline is associated with the social and economic downturn in rural communities and small towns over the last several decades, leading to feelings of despair and loss of hope for the future.

The crisis in recent years has broadened past this initial demographic that Case and Deaton established, and we are now seeing rising excess mortality in other groups of working-class Americans, including people of color." Daniel George, associate professor of humanities and public health sciences, Penn State College of Medicine

George is a researcher with a Penn State Clinical and Translational Science Institute project looking at diseases of despair in Pennsylvania.

The first phase of this project analyzed Highmark Health insurance claims and found that the rate of diagnoses related to diseases of despair -- alcohol-related disorders, substance-related disorders and suicidal thoughts and behaviors -- increased significantly in the past decade.

"Nearly one in 20 people in the study sample of 12 million people were diagnosed with a disease of despair in our earlier research," Emily Brignone, Highmark Health, said. "Following Case and Deaton's findings, we saw the most substantial percentage increase in disease of despair diagnoses among men ages 35 to 74, followed by women ages 55 to 74 and 18 to 34. The issue is one of great importance that we are proud to be addressing with Penn State."

Using the data from the first study, the researchers then identified hotspots in Pennsylvania with a high rate of diagnoses related to diseases of despair for the second phase of the project. A disease of despair rate was determined by dividing the number of unique members with a qualifying diagnosis during that year by the total number of members. Researchers selected communities in Dauphin and Lebanon counties and conducted focus groups through existing community partnerships. Researchers report their results in the journal JAMA Network Open.

"Most of the research on deaths and diseases of despair have been at the epidemiological level; in other words, looking at large data sets and trying to identify patterns over time," George said. "There has been less done qualitatively - basically exploring the perceptions and beliefs of people who are affected by diseases of despair, trying to understand what is happening on the ground."

Four focus groups included a total of 60 participants. Focus group members were both residents and community health workers who interact with those affected by diseases of despair. The research team analyzed transcripts of the focus groups to identify themes.

The first theme researchers identified was the role of financial instability and how United States domestic policy contributes to self-harming behavior.

"One of the main findings was that financial distress is at the heart of it," George said. "It is something that has been driving instability in people's lives and increases the risk for drug abuse and escape through drugs and drink. People identified jobs with full benefits and a living wage not being as available as they used to be and people having to choose groceries over medical care and their anti-anxiety medications."

The second theme that researchers identified was a lack of infrastructure, especially in rural communities.

"Focus group participants noted a lack of public transportation that could help people get to their jobs or to their health care appointments, and the role that played in compounding distress in people's lives," George said. "They also identified failures in our school systems that were resulting in schools not preparing kids to have trades or skills to make them competitive in a 21st-century economy."

The third theme that researchers identified was a deteriorating sense of community. Participants discussed fragmentation over the last several decades that has led to rising isolation and distrust, and a lack of neighborly support. These trends have been worsened, in part, by social media.

"There was a really interesting perception that there has just been a general decline in the community," George said. "There is more loneliness, more alienation, a loss of trust among people, less neighborly interactions. People talked about just feeling an absence of actual human connection online with technology and electronic devices, and that it has taken the place of tangible, real human connection-- and that that compounds loneliness."

The final theme researchers identified was the fragmentation of the family.

"There is more pressure on two-earner families, and that was leading to kids being less bio-psychosocially developed and leaving home at greater risk for despair-related behaviors," George said.

Researchers will next consider potential solutions, including the role of health care facilities in identifying despair-related risk factors, partnerships with community organizations that work with those most at risk and the use of big data analysis and machine learning to identify at-risk communities and guide state-level policy changes. Focus group attendees shared their beliefs that more needed to be done at the local and state levels to address the causes of despair, including non-profit initiatives, peer support, infrastructure building, economic development and rebuilding a sense of community as well as social safety nets.

"A key message is really that we do not want to blame the victims here," George said. "Despair is something that is an indictment of the way that we have organized our society rather than a personal failing or an individuated sense of despair that somebody may feel. People are responding to objectively worsening material circumstances in their lives. What we are trying to do with the diseases of despair construct is essentially create a parameter whereby we can measure it, study it, try to understand what is going on and then address root causes."
A University of Arizona Health Sciences study of COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness and immunity among frontline workers has received a $15 million award from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to continue the current research for another year and expand to include children and focus on underserved populations.

"This phase of the AZ HEROES study will build on what we have already learned, expand our knowledge of vaccine effectiveness as more youth receive the vaccine and provide vital knowledge as new COVID-19 variants with increased transmissibility expand globally," said Jeff Burgess, MD, MPH, MS, who leads AZ HEROES and is the associate dean for research and a professor at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health.

AZ HEROES - the Arizona Healthcare, Emergency Response, and Other Essential Workers Surveillance study - is expanding participation to include children aged 4 months to 17 years and increasing its focus on underserved populations. The study initially sought to evaluate incidence of COVID-19 infection, reinfection and immunity among health care personnel, first responders and other essential workers.

Recent findings published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that individuals who contract COVID-19 even after vaccination are likely to have a lower viral load, experience a shorter infection time and have milder symptoms than people who are unvaccinated.

Over the next year, researchers will continue to evaluate vaccine effectiveness, including different vaccine types and adherence to recommended vaccine doses and timing. They will also assess the duration of vaccine protection, the degree to which the vaccines prevent more severe illness in those cases when vaccinated individuals do become infected, and the degree to which prior infection impacts vaccine effectiveness.

This new round of funding from the CDC is a vote of confidence in the critical research University of Arizona Health Sciences researchers are doing on COVID-19 vaccines and immunity. Dr. Burgess has put together an amazing team to work on the AZ HEROES study. The information they are gathering will benefit people around the world as we continue to find solutions to the global pandemic. This is another outstanding example of the University of Arizona's leadership and expertise in research that makes a difference in people's lives." Robert C. Robbins, MD, President, University of Arizona

AZ HEROES was launched last year by researchers at the Zuckerman College of Public Health and UArizona College of Medicine - Tucson, thanks to a $7.7 million CDC grant. Early findings helped establish patterns of COVID-19 immunity over time in previously infected and newly infected individuals who tested positive for COVID-19 antibodies.

"The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of public health research, and our Zuckerman College of Public Health has shown impressive leadership in collaboration with our other Health Sciences colleges and the CDC to gather vital data on COVID immunity and vaccine effectiveness across a range of populations," said Michael D. Dake, MD, senior vice president for the University of Arizona Health Sciences. "The AZ HEROES study showcases our public health expertise on the national stage."

With direction from the CDC, the AZ HEROES study expanded in December to include college student participants and evaluate vaccine effectiveness. The research team has since published data in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report showing that the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are highly effective in real-world conditions.

AZ HEROES researchers are also characterizing the knowledge, attitudes and practices related to COVID-19 vaccines among essential workers and participant groups. As the study expands, they will continue to examine the associations between those three factors and subsequent vaccination behaviors, including vaccine refusal, hesitancy or incomplete adherence to vaccination recommendations.

In addition to Dr. Burgess, the AZ HEROES research team includes: Karen Lutrick, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the College of Medicine - Tucson, Janko Nikolich-Zugich, MD, PhD, head of the College of Medicine - Tucson's Department of Immunobiology and co-director of the Center on Aging; and Ed Bedrick, PhD, Kate Ellingson, PhD, Joe Gerald, MD, PhD, Lynn Gerald, PhD, Purnima Madhivanan, PhD, and Xiaoxiao Sun, PhD, at the Zuckerman College of Public Health.

"I'm very proud of our public health faculty. This study shows how they collaborate to deliver top level research in a time of crisis, research that builds on their complimentary expertise and experience," said Iman Hakim, MD, dean of the Zuckerman College of Public Health. "This research shows our abilities at the national level. And what we learn from this study will advance the public health response to COVID worldwide and save lives."

AZ HEROES is still recruiting participants, including health care workers, first responders, and other frontline and essential workers, as well as student workers who have not already been vaccinated, and now youth aged 4 months to 17 years of age. Participants both with and without past COVID-19 infection are welcome to join.
(Newser)  General Motors has said "not so fast" to Ford's plans to soon add a new hands-free highway driving system to vehicles. The issue is the name, BlueCruise, USA Today reports. GM finds that too close to Super Cruise, its own hands-free technology, and Cruise, the automaker's subsidiary that develops self-driving cars. GM said it raised the issue with Ford after it announced the new system in April but got nowhere; the technology is scheduled to go into use in a few months. The two companies had been holding mediated talks about resolving the issue, with a deadline of Saturday. The lawsuit accusing Ford of trademark infringement, which seeks damages and an order to make GM's rival drop the name, was filed late Friday in Northern California.

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The suit argues that the name Ford chose "is likely to cause confusion" or even deceive people about whether its system is connected to GM or Cruise, per the Detroit News. It wasn't a coincidence, the filing says: "Ford knew exactly what it was doing. If Ford wanted to adopt a new, unique, brand, it easily could have done so without using the word 'Cruise.'" A Ford spokesman said GM didn't complain about other automakers' use of the word, mentioning Hyundai's Smart Cruise Control and BMW's Active Cruise Control. Calling the suit "meritless and frivolous," the spokesman said, "Drivers for decades have understood what cruise control is, every automaker offers it, and 'cruise' is common shorthand for the capability." (Read more US automakers stories.)
(Newser)  A teenager wanted a Twitter handle, and now a 60-year-old grandfather is dead. Federal prosecutors say Shane Sonderman pressured Mark Herring to give up @Tennessee, which Herring had been using since 2008. Herrings family say they were harassed for hours with messages, unasked-for pizza deliveries, and false reports of fires, the Washington Post reports. When Herring didnt give in to the intimidation, things escalatedand Herring was swatted. Sonderman, now 18 but a minor at the time of Herrings death, has pleaded to conspiracy. The conspiracy involved posting Herrings contact information online, and a British teen using it to falsely report that a woman had been murdered at Herrings house.

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Swatting is illegally reporting fake emergencies to get armed teams of police to go to a house. In this case, it was lethal, Herrings daughter Corinna Herring Fitch told NBC. I believe he was scared to death, she said. When police showed up at Herrings house in response to the unnamed British minors call, Herring came out with a gun. He threw it away when he saw the police were there, and then fell down, unresponsive. He had a massive heart attack and died. Police say Sonderman and his co-conspirators had harassed other social media users with cool handles, the New York Times reports. Sonderman has been sentenced to five years in prison. (Read more weird crimes stories.)
(Newser)  Chase Kalisz won the first American medal of the Tokyo Games, taking gold Sunday in the mens 400-meter individual medley and putting an end to the US' one-day medal drought. The AP reports Jay Litherland made it a 1-2 finish for the powerhouse US team, rallying on the freestyle leg to take the silver. Brendon Smith of Australia claimed the bronze. Kalisz, a protege and former training partner of Olympic great Michael Phelps, touched first in 4 minutes, 9.42 seconds. Litherland was next in 4:10.28, just ahead of Smith (4:10.38). Kieran Smith grabbed another medal for the Americans with bronze in the men's 400 freestyle. Tunisia's Ahmed Hafnaoui was the surprising winner from lane eight, while Australia's Jack McLoughlin settled for silver after leading much of the race.

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The win by Kalisz, 27, continues America's domination of the race, the first swimming race of each Olympics. Phelps won it in 2004 and 2008; Ryan Lochte took gold in 2012. Kalisz took silver in the 2016 Rio Games, reports USA Today, which notes Japans Daiya Seto had been favored to win but in a surprise twist, didn't manage to advance out of the qualifiers on Saturday. He finished ninth in the preliminaries after making a tactical error attempting to save his energy for the medal race. WBAL reports Kalisz will next compete Wednesday in the 200m medley.

(Read more 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games stories.)
A man helps with the cleanup by carrying rubbish and debris after heavy rain and flooding along the Erft in Bad M?nstereifel, Germany July 17. On the night of July 15, the Erft floods totally devastated the historic core of the city and flooded streets and shops. (Roberto Pfeil/dpa via AP)

A man helps with the cleanup by carrying rubbish and debris after heavy rain and flooding along the Erft in Bad M?nstereifel, Germany July 17. On the night of July 15, the Erft floods totally devastated... (Roberto Pfeil/dpa via AP)
(Newser)  Ten Republican House members voted to impeach former President Trump the second time, and just two cast "yes" votes last month to form a special committee to investigate the attack on the US Capitol. One of them, Rep. Liz Cheney, already is on the Jan. 6 panel, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Sunday she'd like to add the other: Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger. Pelosi said she hadn't yet spoken to Kinzinger and wasn't ready to announce his appointment, per CNBC. His office had no comment. But "that would be my plan," Pelosi said on ABC's This Week. House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy said Republicans will sit out the process. Kinzinger, who regularly speaks out against Trump, has said he'd like to be on the committee, per Politico.

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McCarthy withdrew the five names he submitted for the committee after Pelosi rejected two of them: Jim Banks and Jim Jordan. Pelosi said at the time she didn't refuse them because they voted against certifying President Biden's electoral victory, but that's not quite how she put it Sunday. The Democrat referred to Banks and Jordan as "the two that I would not appoint, people who would jeopardize the integrity of the investigation," adding, "There's no way I would tolerate their antics as we seek the truth." The GOP's general refusal to participate won't hurt the committee's credibility, Pelosi said. "We will find the truth," she said. "That truth will have the confidence of the American people because it will be done patriotically and not in a partisan way." (Read more Capitol riot stories.)
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Built in 1926, the superintendent's cabin at Denali National Park and Preserve is the oldest Park Service-built cabin in the park. The Sanctuary River Patrol Cabin is the same age, but it was built by the Alaska Road Commission.
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TDT | Manama

The Daily Tribune  www.newsofbahrain.com

Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Supremo of the World Health Organisation, arrives in Bahrain today, kick-starting a new phase in the development of Bahrain as a global centre for health research, practice and innovation in the battle against the deadly COVID-19 pandemic.

The WHO Director-General, who is in Bahrain for the official opening of the WHO office, will spend two days understanding Bahrains model in health care.

The official opening of the WHO office is scheduled for Monday, following which he will take a tour of the health care facilities in the Kingdom. Health Ministry, in a statement, said preparations are all set to welcome the WHO Director-General and the inauguration of the office, which would further strengthen the already strong ties with the organisation.

Dr Tasnim Atatrah, the WHO Representative and Head of Office in Bahrain, started her work at the new office earlier in June. Health Ministry said the WHOs presence in the Kingdom would strengthen Bahrains health sector and pave the way for sharing Bahraini experience in the COVID-19 battle.

WHO had recently hailed Manama as Healthy City 2021, making it the first Middle East capital to earn the coveted distinction for creating an environment conducive to human well being.

Dr Ahmed Al-Mandhari, the regional director for WHO in the Eastern Mediterranean, will accompany Dr Tedros during the visit. While his stay in the Kingdom, Dr Tedros will tour the Kingdoms COVID-19 testing, treatment and vaccination centres, where he will learn about the measures taken by the Kingdom to protect the health of citizens and residents.

Press conference

The tour will give the Director-General a first-hand opportunity to understand Bahrains vaccination infrastructure, which has vaccinated over 70% of the population, a feat described by Dr Atatrah as a momentous achievement. He will also hold a press conference with Faeqa bint Saeed Al Saleh, the Minister of Health.

Last summer, Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus lauded Bahrains virus strategy in a letter sent to Al Saleh commending the Kingdoms holistic response to the pandemic and proactive efforts to establish testing and healthcare infrastructure.

Upon his arrival, Faeqa bint Saeed Al-Saleh, the Minister of Health, Dr Waleed Khalifa Al Manea, the Undersecretary at the Ministry of Health and Member of the National Medical Taskforce for Combating the Coronavirus (COVID-19), and Dr Tasnim Atatrah will receive Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus.
TDT | Manama

The Daily Tribune  www.newsofbahrain.com

The High Administrative Court ordered the Ministry of Works, Municipalities Affairs and Urban Planning to pay two people BD100,000 each, as an interim compensation, for acquiring their lands without prior permission.

The accusations are that the ministry acquired 1,000 square meters of land from the plot of the first plaintiff to expand a public road and 450 square meters from the property of the second plaintiff to construct parking lots for commercial units.

An expert assigned by the court estimated the value of the lands used by the Ministry at BD600,000 and BD275,000, respectively.

The High Administrative Court asked the ministry to pay BD100,000 apiece as interim compensation for the owners, despite the high value of the lands because their lawyers highlighted the said amounts in their lawsuits.


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WILMINGTON, Del. (AP)  The United States is in an unnecessary predicament of soaring COVID-19 cases fueled by unvaccinated Americans and the virulent delta variant, the nations top infectious diseases expert said Sunday.

Were going in the wrong direction, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, describing himself as very frustrated.

He said recommending that the vaccinated wear masks is under active consideration by the governments leading public health officials. Also, booster shots may be suggested for people with suppressed immune systems who have been vaccinated, Fauci said.

Fauci, who also serves as President Joe Bidens chief medical adviser, told CNNs "State of the Union" that he has taken part in conversations about altering the mask guidelines.

He noted that some local jurisdictions where infection rates are surging, such as Los Angeles County, are already calling on individuals to wear masks in indoor public spaces regardless of vaccination status. Fauci said those local rules are compatible with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendation that the vaccinated do not need to wear masks in public.

More than 163 million people, or 49% of the total U.S. population, are fully vaccinated, according to CDC data. Of those eligible for the vaccine, aged 12 and over, the figure rises to 57%.

This is an issue predominantly among the unvaccinated, which is the reason why were out there, practically pleading with the unvaccinated people to go out and get vaccinated, Fauci said.

Fauci said government experts are reviewing early data as they consider whether to recommend that vaccinated individuals to get booster shots. He suggested that some of the most vulnerable, such as organ transplant and cancer patients, are likely to be recommended for booster shots.

He also praised Republicans, including Govs. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas and Ron DeSantis of Florida, and the second-ranking House leader, Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, for encouraging their constituents to get vaccinated. Their states have among the lowest vaccination rates in the country.

What I would really like to see is more and more of the leaders in those areas that are not vaccinating to get out and speak out and encourage people to get vaccinated, Fauci said.

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This story has been corrected to say that 49% of the total U.S. population, not just those eligible, are fully vaccinated.
BEIJING  New coronavirus cases continue to grow in the major eastern Chinese city of Nanjing, with another 38 reported on Monday, bringing the total to more than 60 over recent days.

Tens of thousands of people are under lockdown and authorities are conducting mass testing of the population, standard practices in China that have generally been successfully in controlling the spread of the virus.

One other case of local transmission was reported in the nearby city of Suqian and one in the northeastern province of Liaoning. Both were classified as being linked to the Nanjing outbreak.

Another 36 imported cases were reported, half of them in Yunnan province near the border with Myanmar, which is facing a severe outbreak. All those newly diagnosed in Yunnan had crossed the border from Yunnan at some point before June 30 and July 24.

China has recorded 87,228 total cases since the initial outbreak in the central city of Wuhan in late 2019, with 741 currently in treatment. The death toll has stayed steady for months at 4,636.

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MORE ON THE PANDEMIC:

 Europes summer tourism outlook dimmed by variants, rules

 Two COVID-19 patients dead after power outage at Jordan hospital

 Spaniards put their faith in COVID-19 vaccines even as new cases surge

 French President Macron appeals for national unity and vaccinations to fight virus, criticizes anti-vaccination protests

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 Find more AP coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic and https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine

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HERES WHAT ELSE IS HAPPENING:

BERLIN  German politicians were deeply divided Sunday over a warning by Chancellor Angela Merkels chief of staff that restrictions for unvaccinated people may be necessary if COVID-19 infection numbers reach new heights in the coming months.

Chief of staff Helge Braun told the newspaper Bild am Sonntag that he doesnt expect another coronavirus-related lockdown in Germany. But Braun said that unvaccinated people may be barred from entering venues like restaurants, movie theaters or sports stadiums because the residual risk is too high.

Braun said getting vaccinated is important to protect against severe disease and because vaccinated people will definitely have more freedoms than unvaccinated people. He said such policies would be legal because the state has the responsibility to protect the health of its citizens.

His comments fueled a debate in German politics about potential vaccination requirements. The issue has proven divisive, even within Merkels own Christian Democrats party. Its candidate to replace Merkel as Germanys leader, Armin Laschet, said he opposes any formal or informal vaccine requirements for the time being.

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ISTANBUL Turkeys daily COVID-19 infections have increased, reaching 14,230 new cases in the past 24 hours.

Health ministry statistics show that the 7-day average is now 10,269, a significant increase from the average of the previous week at 6,880.

With nearly all restrictions lifted in July, Turks are arriving back in the cities after a 9-day holiday when they and international tourists flocked to seaside towns where masking and distancing rules were widely ignored. The COVID-19 density map on the governments contact tracing app marked nearly all of Antalyas city center, a popular tourist destination, in red, meaning high risk for COVID-19.

Fifty-five new deaths were also recorded Sunday, bringing the reported death toll to 50,934.

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WASHINGTON -- Dr. Anthony Fauci says the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are weighing revising their COVID-19 guidelines to recommend that even fully vaccinated individuals wear masks in public.

Fauci, the nations top government infectious disease official, told CNNs State of the Union TV show that hes taken part in conversations about altering the guidelines, something he described as being under active consideration.

He noted that some local areas where infection rates are surging are already urging individuals to wear masks in public regardless of their vaccination status. Fauci said those local rules are not incompatible with the CDCs recommendation that the vaccinated dont need to wear masks in public.

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TOKYO  Known for their towering drives, golfers Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm wont make it to the tee box at the Olympics.

The last two U.S. Open champions became the best-known athletes to drop out of the Tokyo Games on Sunday after testing positive for COVID-19.

DeChambeaus positive came before he left the United States for Tokyo. The musclebound American famous for his game-changing swing speed will replaced by Patrick Reed.

I am deeply disappointed not to be able to compete in the Olympics for Team USA, DeChambeau said. Representing my country means the world to me and it is was a tremendous honor to make this team.

Rahm was flagged for COVID-19 for the second time in two months  he had a six-shot lead at the Memorial in early June when he was forced to withdraw because of a positive test. The Spaniard said he had gotten his final vaccine shot fewer than 14 days before that positive test.

Both players recently became first-time major champions. DeChambeau won the U.S. Open in 2020 at Winged Foot last fall, and Rahm took this years title at Torrey Pines in June, two weeks after the positive test at Muirfield Village.

Several dozen Olympic athletes have tested positive either before leaving for Tokyo or after they arrived.

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PAPEETE, French Polynesia  French President Emmanuel Macron has appealed for national unity and vaccination to fight the resurgent virus, and lashed out at those fueling anti-vaccination sentiment and protests.

About 160,000 people protested around France on Saturday against a special COVID-19 pass for restaurants and mandatory vaccinations for health workers. Many marchers shouted liberty! and said the government shouldnt tell them what to do.

Macron visited a hospital in French Polynesia on Saturday night Tahiti time. He asked what is your freedom worth if you say to me I dont want to be vaccinated, but tomorrow you infect your father, your mother or myself?

He said protesters are free to express themselves in a calm and respectful manner. But Macron said demonstrations wont make the coronavirus go away.

___

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia  Malaysia has reported a new daily high of 17,045 infections.

That pushes the country's total confirmed cases above the 1 million mark. Daily cases in Malaysia rose above 10,000 on July 13 and have stayed there since despite a national lockdown.

The health ministry said Sunday that total infections have now reached 1,013,438. This represented a 77% rise since the lockdown began June 1.

The countrys richest and most populated state Selangor and neighboring Kuala Lumpur accounted for the majority of infections.

Total deaths in the country have also risen to nearly 8,000. Critics have slammed Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassins government over what they say was inconsistent policies and half-baked lockdowns that failed to curb the pandemic.

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BERLIN  German Chancellor Angela Merkels chief of staff says restrictions for unvaccinated people may be necessary if case numbers reach new heights in the coming months.

But Helge Braun said in an interview with the newspaper Bild am Sonntag that he doesnt expect another coronavirus-related lockdown in Germany.

Braun said that unvaccinated people may be barred from entering venues like restaurants, movie theaters and stadiums because the residual risk is too high.

Braun said getting vaccinated is important to protect against severe disease and because vaccinated people will definitely have more freedoms than unvaccinated people.

Braun said that such policies would be legal because the state has the responsibility to protect the health of its citizens.

Germanys vaccine efforts have slowed in recent weeks and that has led to discussions about how to encourage those who havent yet received a vaccine to do so. More than 60% of the German population has received at least one dose while over 49% are fully vaccinated.

___

AMMAN, Jordan  Jordan's health minister says two coronavirus patients have died at a hospital in Amman after a short circuit knocked out power at the facilitys intensive care unit.

Health Minister Firas Al-Hawari told state media that two people were confirmed dead at the hospital.

Investigators were working to determine the cause and whether the power outage was responsible for the deaths. Former Health Minister Nathir Obeidat resigned earlier this year after several COVID-19 patients died at a government hospital in Salt when their oxygen supply ran out.

___

LONDON  Chaos and confusion over travel rules and measures to contain fresh virus outbreaks are contributing to another cruel summer for Europes battered tourism industry.

Popular destination countries are grappling with surging COVID-19 variants.

But the patchwork and last-minute nature of the efforts as the peak season gets underway threatens to derail another summer.

Visitors to cultural and tourist sites in France were confronted this week with a new requirement for a special COVID-19 pass.

Italy has said that people will need a similar pass to access museums and movie theaters and dine inside restaurants and cafes.

___

BEIJING  China has reported 32 new confirmed coronavirus infections.

Those include 27 believed to have been acquired abroad. No deaths were reported.

The National Health Commission reported that six of the cases believed to have come from abroad were in Yunnan on Chinas southwestern border with Myanmar. Five were adjacent to Hong Kong in Guangdong. And four each were in Shanghai and Fujian province in the southeast.

Everyone in a county in Yunnan near the Myanmar border is due to be tested Monday and Tuesday for the virus following a spike in infections. China has tightened border controls.

Chinas death toll stands at 4,636 out of a total of 92,529 confirmed cases.

___

BARCELONA, Spain  Spain is working to stamp out a wave of COVID-19 infections and is relying on widespread public trust in COVID-19 vaccines.

Spain was like its fellow European Union members at first. The country got off to a slow start in administering shots compared to Britain and the United States.

But Spain quickly made up ground once vaccine deliveries started flowing to meet demand. More than 24 million Spaniards are fully vaccinated. That represents 53% of the adult population.

Amos Garcia, president of the Spanish Association of Vaccinology, told The Associated Press that our professionals have always believed strongly in the benefits of vaccines. We have always strongly encouraged children from a very young age to get their vaccines.

He said general non-COVID-19 vaccination rates for children in Spain were over 95%.
BERLIN (AP)  German politicians were deeply divided Sunday over a warning by Chancellor Angela Merkel's chief of staff that restrictions for unvaccinated people may be necessary if COVID-19 infection numbers reach new heights in the coming months.

Chief of staff Helge Braun told the newspaper Bild am Sonntag that he doesnt expect another coronavirus-related lockdown in Germany. But Braun said that unvaccinated people may be barred from entering venues like restaurants, movie theaters or sports stadiums because the residual risk is too high.

Braun said getting vaccinated is important to protect against severe disease and because vaccinated people will definitely have more freedoms than unvaccinated people. He said such policies would be legal because the state has the responsibility to protect the health of its citizens.

His comments fueled a debate in German politics about potential vaccination requirements. The issue has proven divisive, even within Merkels own Christian Democrats party. Its candidate to replace Merkel as Germany's leader, Armin Laschet, said he opposes any formal or informal vaccine requirements for the time being.

I dont believe in compulsory vaccinations and I dont believe we should put indirect pressure on people to get vaccinated, he told the German broadcaster ZDF on Sunday. In a free country there are rights to freedom, not just for specific groups.

If Germany's vaccination rates remain too low this fall, other options could be considered, Laschet said, adding but not now.

With the highly transmissible delta variant spreading in Germany, politicians have debated the possibility of compulsory vaccinations for specific professions, including medical workers. No such requirements have been implemented yet.

Germanys vaccine efforts have slowed in recent weeks and that has led to discussions about how to encourage those who havent yet received a vaccine to do so. More than 60% of the German population has received at least one dose while over 49% are fully vaccinated.

During a recent visit to the Robert Koch Institute, the government run disease control agency, Merkel ruled out new vaccine requirements at the moment," but added, Im not ruling out that this might be talked about differently in a few months either."

Other elected officials have struck a similar tone. Baden-Wurttemberg governor Winfried Kretschmann, a member of the Greens, noted Sunday that the delta variant and others that may emerge could make vaccine requirements more attractive down the line.

While there are no current plans to require people to get vaccinated, he told the German news agency dpa that I can't rule out compulsory vaccinations for all time.

Karl Lauterbach, a health expert from the center-left Social Democrats, spoke in favor of possible restrictions. He told the Suddeutsche Zeitung that soon one of the only remaining options to fight new variants will be to restrict access to spaces where many people come together" to those who have either been vaccinated or recovered from the virus.

Others immediately pushed back against Braun's comments on Sunday. Some expressed skepticism about the effectiveness of such restrictions, while others warned against having rights based on one's vaccination status.

Of course, we need incentives to reach the highest possible vaccination rate, Marco Buschmann, parliamentary group leader for the pro-business Free Democrats, told the RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland newspaper group.

Still, he said, if unvaccinated people who have been tested or recovered from the virus pose no greater danger than vaccinated people, to impose such restrictions on the unvaccinated "would be a violation of their basic rights.

Rolf Mutzenich, head of the Social Democrats' parliamentary group, said politicians should be focusing more on getting willing citizens vaccinated than penalizing the unvaccinated.

We're not going to sustainably change the vaccination behavior of individuals with threats, he told RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland.

___

Follow APs pandemic coverage at:

https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic

https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine

https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak
The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) on Friday, July 23, denied DMK MP Kanimozhis claim that the Adichanallur heritage site in Tamil Nadu had no amenities such as boundary walls, drinking water, toilets, or solar lighting. ASI tweeted, We Archaeological Survey of India is working sincerely towards making Adichannallur an iconic site. The entire notified area of 125 acres is protected by a steel grill fence. Cultural Notice Board (CNB) and information board for visitors are affixed on the site. Toilet, lighting and drinking water facilities are being provided. Land for Museum and other amenities are being worked out with the cooperation of the State Government. The ASI also published photos from the Adichannallur site, showcasing that it is gated and safeguarded.

ASI took to Twitter after Kanimozhi tweeted, Yesterday in Parliament I was astonished by the reply I got to an unstarred question by minister G Kishan Reddy. You have mentioned walls and toilets being built around the heritage site, drinking water, and solar-powered lights being installed. But unfortunately, we are not able to see or find any of them? And we would prefer that you build the museum first. The development began after the governments unstarred response to a DMK MPs query about whether the government has begun creating the landmark site project and onsite museum in Adichanallur, Tamil Nadu, as planned in the Budget 2020-21.

G Kishan Reddy, Minister of Tourism and Culture, remarked in Parliament that, For the development of Adichannalur as an iconic site, the following works are done/undertaken: repairing of boundary wall, providing public amenities such as toilets, drinking water, solar-powered lights, illumination, souvenir shops, cafeteria, audio-visual guides, public display board, information boards, pathway tourist circulation etc. According to the ministry, exposition and excavation of chosen areas of the site for open-air display of trenches and artefacts are currently buried under the ground whenever required.

The minister said, Construction of on-site museum and/or interpretation centre to facilitate visitors to understand the nature of the sire and its features in an immersive manner is being proposed in consultation with the state government. In September 2020, Kanimozhi and Madurai MP Su Venkatesan, together with writer Kamarasu, paid a visit to the ancient sites. The Adhichanallur excavation began in 2004 and yielded 169 clay burial urns with skeletons in 2005, but the Archaeological Survey of India did not make the report public.
China has tried this tactic before when it refused the entry of two International ships crewed by Indian sailors. The whole debacle left more than 40 crewmen waiting out in the sea for several weeks, said Sangle.

The All India Seafarer and General Workers Union, an Indian seafarer union, claimed that ships and other vessels with an Indian crew onboard are being barred from docking in Chinese ports, regardless of the ships ownership or purpose. This unofficial embargo on China-bound ships may result in them firing Indian sailors.

The sailors union has dispatched letters to both Sarbananda Sonowal (Union Minister of Ports, Shipping and Waterways) as well as S Jaishankar (Foreign Minister of India). The letters detailed Chinas heavy handed activities and also warned that this carried the risk of more than 20,000 Indian sailors losing their jobs.

As for Chinas motives behind this act, the President of the union Abhijeet Sangle believes that it hopes for the Indian sailors aboard International ships to be replaced by Chinese ones. This belief is not without reasoning as the South China Sea faces prodigious amounts of maritime commerce and in order to circumvent the ban in Chinese ports, shipping companies may well start dismissing Indian sailors.

China has tried this tactic before when it refused the entry of two International ships crewed by Indian sailors. The whole debacle left more than 40 crewmen waiting out in the sea for several weeks, said Sangle.

The Director General of Shipping Amitabh Kumar said that there has been no official declaration of any embargo or ban from the Chinese side. It can possibly be the zealous and narrow-minded nature of local port offcials and governors, rather than a scheme cooked up by the Chinese government as a whole. Though, given the opportunity of replacing Indian sailors withh its own, the CCP may take an interest and encourage such practices in its ports.
Rain and thunderstorms are likely Sunday throughout the state, according to the National Weather Service.

The NWS radar and satellite imaging show the majority of the rain system that passed over the state has moved on, but a small portion of it has yet to cross the state.
MONROE, N.C. (AP)  Police in North Carolina arrested one man Sunday and were searching for other suspects in connection with a drive-by shooting a day earlier that left a 13-year-old girl dead.

The victim was sitting outside with friends on a picnic table in Monroe, about 30 miles from Charlotte, when an SUV drove by Saturday evening and someone inside opened fire, police said.
The American Red Cross has more than 50 cots on hand for those who were displaced by Tuesday's flash flooding event. The American Red Cross set up a disaster relief shelter at the Rapids Fire Hall at 7195 Plank Rd. that will be available, he said, until at least Saturday.
Sharon C. Mantell, 57, on July 25, 2021, in Town of Niagara; daughter of the late Charles and Arline (Henderson) Mantell. Survivors include sisters, Kim Kuntz and Susan Mantell; brothers, Charles and John Mantell. Memorial service was held on August 2 in Oakwood Cemetery. Arrangements were w
OAP and leader of the Free the Sheeple Movement, Daddy Freeze has advised Nigerians to choose their God carefully. This is coming as ano...

OAP and leader of the Free the Sheeple Movement, Daddy Freeze has advised Nigerians to choose their God carefully.

This is coming as another reaction to the recent statement Bishop David Oyedepo, the founder of Living Faith Church Worldwide, also called Winners Chapel, made over the sack of a number of pastors who couldnt produce expected income at their various branches.

Oyedepo had said, We sacked those pastors because they are unfruitful, blatant failures! We dont have patience with failures.

But Freeze, who also reacted to Oyedepos statement and urged Christians not to get deceived, insisted that the only thing Christ dismissed and punished was a tree.

He likened the words of the clergyman to that of Obi Cubana.

Obi Cubana had recently said in an interview on BBC Pidgin that, Some of my boys who failed & had issues with their business came back to me for help, and I gave them more money. And they are doing well now. 

Despite the two statements, Freeze has now advised Nigerians to analyze them carefully before choosing their God.

He also backed his reaction with a quote from the Holy Bible.

Freeze wrote on Instagram on Saturday, Choose your God carefully.

Are you choosing the God of love who sacrificed his son so we may be saved or MAMMON?

 2 Corinthians 4:4 New Living Translation.

Satan, who is the god of this world, has blinded the minds of those who dont believe. They are unable to see the glorious light of the Good News. They dont understand this message about the glory of Christ, who is the exact likeness of God.
Ohanaeze Ndigbo, apex Igbo socio-cultural organisation, has condemned the attack on Edwin Clark, Ijaw leader, by the Indigenous People of ...

Ohanaeze Ndigbo, apex Igbo socio-cultural organisation, has condemned the attack on Edwin Clark, Ijaw leader, by the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB).

Clark had said IPOB must be dreaming if the group believes the south-south region will join the agitation for the Republic of Biafra.

In a swift reaction, the secessionist group said the Ijaw leader does not speak for the people of the south-south region because he is a general without foot soldiers.

The Pan Niger Delta Forum (PANDEF) had subsequently asked Igbo leaders to denounce the statement made by IPOB and apologise to Clark.

In a statement on Sunday, Alex Ogbonnia, national publicity secretary of Ohanaeze Ndigbo, described IPOBs comment as youthful exuberance, saying Clark has contributed positively to the south-east region.

The attention of Ohanaeze Ndigbo Worldwide has been drawn to remarks by the spokesman of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), Ohanaeze said.

Ohanaeze Ndigbo makes it abundantly clear that the Igbo extol old age with courtesy and reverence. Old age is so treasured that the eldest man in a village or community, in most cases, enjoys community burial and funeral rites at death. The old are deemed to represent the Igbo ancestors here on earth and thus are often celebrated.

It is a public knowledge that youths, all over the world, have some common characteristics which include impetuosity and exuberance. As much as the effervescence and exuberance of the youths are the essential hallmarks of a growing society, it is still the duty of the elders to moderate the excesses and idiosyncrasies of the youth.

Let it be placed on record that Chief Edwin Clark is one of the few detribalised Nigerians with an unassailable love for the Igbos. He has in more than several ways demonstrated an intense passion for the Igbo. It was Chief Clark who facilitated the renovation and equipment of the Queens School, Enugu with state of the art facilities shortly after the Nigerian civil war. Eminent Igbo women that passed through the school, such as Justice Rose Ukeje (rtd), Justice Victoria Nebo, Prof. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Prof. Ifeoma Enemuo, Prof. Ifeoma Egbuonu, Mrs. Justina Offia (SAN), Prof. Gloria Chukwukere, etc, are some of the testaments of Clark magnanimity.

Since then, Clark has remained one of the Patrons of the School to the present day. It was Clark who had spoken vehemently against the Igbo marginalisation and has propelled the concept of a president of Nigeria from the South East. It was Clark who had stated that the agitations by the Igbo are justified, among several others.

It is important to urge our youths to refrain from remarks capable of putting the Igbo relationships with our highly valued neighbours in avoidable distress. The Igbo agitation, no doubt, is genuine but restraints, persuasions and cordial inter-ethnic relations are required to sustain the supports of other ethnic groups in Nigeria.

Ohanaeze said it holds Clark in high esteem and will always condemn any form of attack against him.
Reno Omokri, former media aide to ex-President Goodluck Jonathan, has expressed worries that bandits terrorizing many parts of the country...

Reno Omokri, former media aide to ex-President Goodluck Jonathan, has expressed worries that bandits terrorizing many parts of the country may resort to attacking commercial aircrafts.

Omokri stated this on Sunday while reacting to the recent military plane crash which occured on Saturday last week in Zamfara State, Northwest.

Recall that a Nigerian Air Force Alpha Jet was shot down by bandits. The pilot, Flight Lieutenant Abayomi Dairo, was rescued.

Reacting to the development, Omokri said if the criminal elements can possess surface to air missiles that can bring down a military jet, even commercial aircraft may not be safe.

The socio-political activist made the remark in a post on his official Facebook page.

The post reads, The cavalier manner the Buhari regime is taking the downing of an airforce jet by bandits does not augur well for Nigerias national security. If bandits now possess surface to air missiles that can bring down a military jet, then how safe is civilian aviation in Nigeria?

I urge General Buhari to snap out of his Igboho fixation and acknowledge the reality that no plane flying over Nigeria is safe. The jet that was shot down is an Alpha Jet and costs close to $1 million. It flies at 50,000 feet above ground. If bandits can shoot it down, they can shoot any jet in Nigeria down, military or civilian.

Nigerians are going to see a dramatic rise in costs of tickets for both international and domestic flights, because flights are going to reduce as a result of this incident. And those flights that continue to operate will be forced to take out very high hazard insurance premiums.

While these bandits may be from a particular ethnic group, they are not necessarily from Nigeria. Many of them are disaffected Fulani from Mali where they have been fighting the government there. They are rugged and war hardened. They can bring Nigeria to her knees if we continue ignoring them.

And we must note that the plane that was shot down was shot down at night. These guys are trigger happy and according to reports in the media, they also use drugs. What if a commercial plane flies over their hideout at night. Are they not paranoid enough to shoot it down thinking it is a military jet?
Lai Mohammed, minister of information and culture, says ethnicity and religion are not to blame for Nigerias problems but the people. ...

Lai Mohammed, minister of information and culture, says ethnicity and religion are not to blame for Nigerias problems but the people.





Mohammed said this during the book presentation and 75th birthday of Bamigboye Ogunbiyi, a renowned obstetrician and gynaecologist, on Saturday in Abuja.

Unveiling the autobiography titled, Ripples of Grace, the minister said the country is only in its current challenges due to some people who are trying to propagate enmity among people.

He said that the country was initially built on the mindset of peaceful coexistence between the two major religions; Islam and Christianity.





Mohammed also added that he was trained as a child to see everyone as equals, irrespective of their religions and tribes.

From the book, we learnt that the celebrant attended Federal Government College (FGC), Keffi and that is why I am not surprised he ended up marrying Justice Clara from Borno, he said.

In Keffi, we were taught at a very young age that this country is one and the same and that religion, ethnicity and social status do not matter but rather ones academic prowess,





This is a shining example of religious harmony and peaceful co-existence that we know in Nigeria.

For three years, a Church made its premises available free of charge for the annual Ramadan lecture.

This is contrary to the acrimony and mutual suspicion that many religious leaders are promoting today.

The lesson from this is that the religious disharmony that is being propagated today by some religious leaders is avoidable, and that adherents of the two major religions do not have to be enemies.

I have been living in GRA, Ikeja, Lagos, for almost 25 years and during annual Eid-el-Fitr and Eid-el-Kabir, we, the Muslims always have our open prayers at Arch Bishop Vining Memorial Church belonging to Anglican Communion.

There was a particular year, Eid-el-Kabir fell on a Sunday when the venue will also be used for the usual Christian service.

With this development, we all agreed that we should come very early to pray so as not to disrupt the church service.

To our surprise, the management of Vining Memorial Cathedral rescheduled their own Sunday service to noon after we would have left the place.

I have not seen better example of religious tolerance in Nigeria,
Counsel to Yoruba nation agitator, Sunday Adeyemo, also known as Igboho, Ibrahim David Salami, has said the Nigerian government was yet to...

Counsel to Yoruba nation agitator, Sunday Adeyemo, also known as Igboho, Ibrahim David Salami, has said the Nigerian government was yet to request the freedom fighters repatriation from Benin Republic.

Salami disclosed that the Nigerian government only requested for Igbohos arrest and not extradition.

Speaking with BBC Yoruba, the lawyer said the Nigerian government requested Igbohos arrest over some offences he allegedly committed in Nigeria.

According to Salami: When we saw the case in court, we discovered that the Nigerian government has not requested for his extradition.

What is there is that the Nigerian government said they wanted to arrest Igboho because he committed certain offences in Nigeria and that if he is seen in Benin Republic he should be arrested.

A few weeks ago, Igboho had fled Nigeria to Benin Republic, after he was declared wanted.

The Department of State Services, DSS, had declared Igboho wanted after his residence was invaded.

Though he escaped, his aides were arrested.

Parading those arrested, DSS had also made public weapons and charms recovered from his house.

He was, however, arrested on Monday night in Cotonou, Benin Republic by security agents.
Femi Fani-Kayode, a former aviation minister, has warned the Federal Government to handle Sunday Adeyemo, a Yoruba separatist also known a...

Femi Fani-Kayode, a former aviation minister, has warned the Federal Government to handle Sunday Adeyemo, a Yoruba separatist also known as Sunday Igboho, and Nnamdi Kanu, the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), with care.

The pair will be arraigned in courts in Nigeria and Benin Republic on Monday. While Kanu will be arraigned in Abuja after his rearrest, Sunday Igboho will be arraigned in Benin Republic. Both men have been at the centre of agitations for Biafra and Oduduwa Republic respectively.

Reacting to their scheduled trial, Fani-Kayode, in a tweet on Sunday, warned the Nigerian government to tread with caution, saying Kanu and Igboho control millions of hearts as well as represent a major cause.

Tomorrow the two most powerful separatist leaders in Nigeria, namely @MaziNnamdiKanu & @_IgbohoSunday, will appear before two separate courts in two separate nations, he wrote.

Nnamdi Kanu: Biafra group unveils plans to attack Nigeria, Cameroon Governments, destroy economy

They both control millions of hearts & minds & they represent a mighty cause. They are not alone: Nigeria beware!
The Leader Of INRI Evangelical Spiritual Church, Primate Elijah Ayodele, on Sunday said Yoruba Nation agitator, Sunday Igboho, was being...

The Leader Of INRI Evangelical Spiritual Church, Primate Elijah Ayodele, on Sunday said Yoruba Nation agitator, Sunday Igboho, was being witch-hunted.

Primate Ayodele made the remark while stressing that Igboho would regain his freedom.

Speaking, the clergyman said although he is against Igbohos agitation, the freedom fighter has done nothing wrong.

Primate Ayodele also urged the Federal Government to tread softly on Igbohos case, so it would not miscalculate.

According to Ayodele: Sunday Igboho will still be set free, he has done nothing wrong, He is only being witch-hunted.

I am not supporting Sunday Igboho to cause division in Nigeria, I just want the FG to tread softly on Sunday Igboho so they wont miscalculate.

Primate Ayodele also disclosed that Igboho cannot actualize Yoruba Nation.

Either they arrest Sunday Igboho or not, I dont see Nigeria being together as one in the nearest future as I had said, though it wont be Sunday Igboho that will actualize it.

How many Fulani or northerners have been arrested despite the fact that they showed in public that they have ties with terrorists, he said.

Igboho, who has been agitating for Oduduwa Republic, was arrested in Cotonou, Benin Republic by security operatives.

His arrest followed a decision by the Department of State Services, DSS, to declare him wanted.

DSS declared Igboho wanted after a cache of weapons were discovered in his house in Ibadan, Oyo State, after a raid.
Yoruba kings in Benin Republic are meeting currently meeting in Adjohoun, a town over 60 kilometres away from Cotonou, to discuss the arre...

Yoruba kings in Benin Republic are meeting currently meeting in Adjohoun, a town over 60 kilometres away from Cotonou, to discuss the arrest and prosecution of Yoruba Nation activist, Sunday Igboho.

Kings and chiefs of Yoruba origin, who believe they are brothers with Sunday Adeyemo, who was recently arrested in Cotonou, are seeking ways to help the activist who is wanted in Nigeria.

One of the kings present is Alajashe of Ajase from Port Novo, alongside his counterpart from Seme.

The kings are being hosted by Alajohoun of Adjohoun in his palace, tens of kilometres away from Port Novo.

The court of appeal sitting in Cotonou will continue hearing the case by the Federal Government of Nigeria against Igboho, who has been held in Benin for nearly seven days.

Igbohos lawyers are confident that under the law, it will be difficult to extradite Igboho back to Nigeria, but a political outcome was not out of the question, and that may be beyond them.

There is a thriving Yoruba community in Benin Republic, with nearly two million people of Yoruba origin in the country.

According to the countrys 2013 census, Yoruba people make up more than 10 percent of the entire population of the country, and only behind the Fon and Adja & Mina ethnic groups.

Asides Nigeria, Benin has the highest population of Yoruba people anywhere in the world.
Nurse Eon Walk administers the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine at a mobile vaccine clinic hosted by Mothers in Action and operated by the Los Angeles County of Public Health on July 16 in Los Angeles. COVID-19 cases across America are rising as the delta variant spreads with half the U.S. population yet to be fully vaccinated. Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images/TNS
Yes; and with the delta variant a concern, everyone regardless of vaccine status should wear one

Yes; but only for those who are as yet unvaccinated

No; people can wear one if they or their parents want, but masks should not be mandated

No; I don't believe masks work and don't think people should wear them

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When a fellow attendee at a New Orleans networking event told business lawyer Abid Hussain that he hoped he never needed to give Hussain a call, Hussain quipped that a lawyer is to growth what an accountant is to tax returns. You probably need advice before, not after, the trouble starts.

Hussain is one of 15 lawyers at upstart boutique Sternberg Naccari & White, LLC. Founded in 2017, the firm is well-known for its burgeoning First Amendment and media practice, including representing Gambit and its sister publications. But helping businesses and individuals grow is what the firm is built around.

An innovative approach and an enviable list of clients has led the firm to expand, and to offer extensive, cost-efficient services to clients across Louisiana, including general counsel, mergers and acquisitions, intellectual property, successions, bankruptcy, tax matters, business disputes and much more. We can assist with serving a business from start to finish, said SNW Partner Keith Naccari. Several of our attorneys have MBAs and experience with building and selling companies. We have a fairly good background with numbers as well, which I think makes us a little unique for law firms. Its a good mix of people with a lot of expertise in different areas.

Scott Sternberg, the firms Managing Partner, said one of the most common problems he sees is a lack of planning, or failing to be proactive, especially in the early stages of a business problem. Communication between attorney and client has to be wide-open, or that attorney will always be reactingand billingfor problems they have to help solve. SNW Partner Suzy Montero said she has handled two recent contract dispute cases in which parties signed lengthy agreements before consulting legal counsel. They didnt want to bring in a lawyer because they thought it would make them look like they didnt trust the other parties, Montero said. They didnt want their potential partners to think badly of them. But on the other side, there was a team of lawyers putting that agreement together. Hussain added that bringing on an attorney is not necessarily a sign of a negative relationship.

You cant be afraid to get counsel, he said. It doesnt mean things will be adversarial. If you go into an agreement without the proper education, there could be a real danger of signing away something valuable. Its all about being preventative. To help businesses and owners, SNW often uses a unique fee structure that is based more on results, not individual actions. The attorneys do not generally charge for brief phone consults, emails or texts, and encourage clients to stay in regular communication. The firm even has dedicated instant-message communication channels for some of its clients. The focus is always on results, and the endgame for the client. Most law firms make money in lawyer time. We try to make money in lawyer product, Sternberg said. I never want somebody to hesitate picking up the phone to talk to me. SNW operates differently in other ways as well. The use of technology such as Slack and video conferencing was common for them long before COVID-19 made it a necessity. Montero noted that the firm scans every document that comes through the door and shreds almost everything, reducing the need for large physical storage spaces. The firm also entrusts many of the administrative functions to a chief operating officer, Mary Hill, so that attorneys can focus on practicing law.

The way we work is completely different than any other law firm in Louisiana, Sternberg said. There isnt a piece of technology we will not invest in. We like that when people think of us, they often think of us being young, punching above our weight class and being tech-forward. Thats going to continue to be what we do. Sternberg, Naccari & White LLC has offices in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. For more information, call 504-324-2141 or visit www.snw.law.
When Jeff Landry took office as Louisianas new attorney general in January 2016, he brought in his friend and benefactor, businessman Shane Guidry, as a special aide.

Among other changes, Guidry helped him rebrand the offices investigative division, changing its name to the Louisiana Bureau of Investigation and shaking up its roster. Guidry served as the branchs unofficial head.

One of the divisions first hires was Aaron Verrette, then a deputy with the Plaquemines Parish Sheriffs Office, who received a significant promotion and raise after being named special agent in charge of the offices cyber crime unit and investigator supervisor, at an annual salary of $80,000.

Verrette was brought on despite a checkered past: In 2010, about a year before he was hired in Plaquemines, he had resigned from the Jefferson Parish Sheriffs Office while under criminal investigation. Then-Sheriff Newell Normand said at the time that Verrette had refused to cooperate with an internal probe into possible drug dealing by deputies, and accepted his resignation. Verrette, who was never charged in the case, also had close ties to Guidry, who had hired him after he left the JPSO.

Read the sexual harassment investigation about officer who has cycled through law enforcement After a brief stint at the Louisiana Attorney General's office in 2016, the special agent in charge of the cyber crimes unit resigned amid a s

As it happens, Verrette didnt last long in Landrys office. After about two months, he resigned in lieu of being terminated, according to records provided by Landrys office.

This time, the problem had nothing to do with drugs or an accusation of a crime. Instead, several of his subordinates complained that he was an aggressive sexual harasser who berated them constantly and bragged of his relationship to Guidry. An internal investigation found merit to their claims. Despite both the criminal and sexual harassment investigations, Verrette remains working in law enforcement, now back at the Jefferson Parish Sheriffs Office.

Verrette might have been the first high-ranking aide to Landry to be accused of sexual harassment, but he wouldnt be the last. In late 2020, Pat Magee, who headed the offices criminal division, faced multiple allegations of sexual harassment before resigning this year.

One of the top priorities of the unit overseen by Verrette was to nab child pornographers and people who used the internet for sex trafficking and other crimes. The work, at times, involved examining pictures of naked people.

Some of his charges complained that he was uniquely unsuited for the job.

When we come across adult pornography (males), Mr. Verrette will make comments such as, we need to talk to that guy, complained one female subordinate, whose name is redacted in internal documents. On his last warrant, I was doing forensics for him  and during the preview he was on his phone on Instagram and began showing me guys he thought was hot and one in particular was a male with a large penis, and he asked me if I knew what to do with it because he sure did.

The investigator went on: I did not ask to see it, I did not want to see it and I was working. I will not be subjected to that type of unprofessionalism.

A male subordinate complained that Verrette hazed him in a similar way, telling him he wanted to turn him into a sexual partner as a bottom.

At least three employees gave statements saying Verrette had harassed them and gave them reason to fear for their jobs, according to documents obtained by The Times-Picayune and The Advocate in a public-records request.

Jeff Landry hired political ally Shane Guidry, now reports $50K+ as board member for his company The close relationship between Attorney General Jeff Landry and his top political ally Shane Guidry recently added a new layer: Landry took a 

A couple of them said that Verrette often invoked the name of an influential supporter, and suggested he was untouchable. The name of the key supporter is redacted in most cases: SAC Verrette constantly reminded them of his relationship with (redacted) and threatened to use that relationship to have them fired, a memo summarizing an internal investigation into Verrette reads in part.

But in at least one instance, the AGs Office neglected to redact the name of the key supporter.

In that case, an employee says that Verrette could be heard screaming through the walls about potentially disloyal employees, and that he was threatening that he would call Mr. Guidry and have them fired.

Verrette declined to comment for this story, citing JPSO policies that prohibit employees from speaking to the media.

But when Verrette was confronted with the sexual harassment allegations in 2016, he complained that he was being set up. He didnt deny any of the specific remarks attributed to him, but said the comments were merely jokes.

Our Views: Attorney general's office turns into private police force for Jeff Landry donor When the attorney general of Louisiana is on your company payroll, why not whistle up his investigators to help you with a family dispute?

His bosses werent buying it. They determined he had violated numerous departmental policies, put him on administrative leave and took away his badge and gun. He quickly resigned.

The records indicate that Guidry, Verrettes erstwhile patron, was on board with the decision. A short summary of the investigations findings notes: Deputy Guidry agreed that SAC Verrette should be placed on administrative leave and an internal investigation into all of the allegations against Verrette should be conducted immediately.

The investigation into Verrette concluded that he violated the attorney generals policies against sexual harassment. While the Attorney Generals Office defended the employees who reported that Verrette sexually harassed them, Landry took a different approach in the more recent case involving Magee.

Magee, the director of the offices criminal division, was docked about $20,000 in pay after an investigation into a subordinates complaint faulted his behavior but found that his inappropriate comments didnt constitute sexual harassment.

Magee wound up resigning amid the flap, but Landrys office then targeted the whistleblower who complained about Magee. Magee maintained that he had not sexually harassed anyone.

Amid the Magee case, The Times-Picayune and The Advocate asked the Attorney Generals Office to provide copies of all sexual harassment complaints lodged against members of the office since 2016, and records showing how those complaints were resolved.

Officials in the Attorney Generals office said that before the start of 2019, the office did not track complaints by subject matter. Describing a broad search for sexual harassment complaints as unduly burdensome and expensive, officials asked for specific names.

Reporters subsequently filed a request for the records related to Verrette based on their research.

Was Jeff Landry aide 'joking?' Louisiana sexual harassment training says that's no defense When Attorney General Jeff Landrys office set out to discipline criminal division director Pat Magee over allegations of sexual harassment, i

How exactly Verrette got hired for such a high-profile position at the AGs office, despite his record, is unclear.

When Verrette applied for his job, he did not disclose that he had resigned under pressure from JPSO. In explaining why he left the agency, he said only, joined another department  even though more than seven months passed between his departure from JPSO and his hiring in Plaquemines Parish.

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The job application form asks: Have you ever been fired from a job or resigned to avoid dismissal? Verrette checked the no box.

The unusual circumstances of Verrettes departure from JPSO, where Guidry was a longtime reserve captain, were publicized at the time. After Verrette resigned from the Sheriffs Office, Guidry hired him to work security at his company, according to sources with knowledge of Verrettes hiring.

Pat Magee  aide to Jeff Landry  resigns amid second sexual harassment complaint Pat Magee, a top aide to Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, resigned Thursday as a second sexual harassment complaint against him came to

Normand, the former sheriff, said Tuesday that he was on vacation and couldnt recall Verrette or details of his resignation.

Detectives turned to Verrette as a criminal suspect in 2010 while investigating his supervisor in the JPSO robbery division, Sgt. John Carroll, over allegations of domestic violence and drug activity.

Verrette was accused of retrieving steroids from Carrolls house. Detectives searched Verrettes home and found steroids in the room of his roommate, another deputy who was booked in the case, records show. Verrette denied the allegations in a brief statement to detectives.Carroll and the other deputy were arrested but never prosecuted. Rafael Goyeneche, president of the watchdog Metropolitan Crime Commission, said its clear to him that Landrys office ignored Verrettes history at JPSO when it hired him, and that it was Guidry who brought Verrette on board.

The circumstances of Verrettes resignation from JPSO would have been an automatic disqualifier to any agency making a decision based on merit, Goyeneche said. That person would not have been hired by any law enforcement agency that did a background check on him.

A criminal file on Verrette and the two other JPSO deputies was sitting in the Attorney Generals office, which adopted the case in 2010 after Jefferson Parish District Attorney Paul Connicks office recused itself. Buddy Caldwell was attorney general then.

They had it in their possession. Of course they knew about it. On top of that, it was reported in the newspaper, Goyeneche said of the drug investigation and Verretes resignation.

Its not the Louisiana Bureau of Investigation. Its the Shane Guidry Bureau of Investigation. He makes up the rules and Jeff Landry rubber-stamps them. Who works for who?

Guidry, who did not return phone messages for this story, is perhaps the AGs most generous benefactor.

Whistleblower in Attorney General Jeff Landry's office comes forward, alleges more misconduct Assistant Attorney General Matthew Derbes has resigned from Attorney General Jeff Landry's office after he said that Landry has targeted him f

A couple of months ago, Guidry announced that he had installed Landry on the board of directors at the oilfield-services company he runs, Harvey Gulf International, at an annual salary of between $50,000 and $100,000. Guidry said Landrys legal advice was important for his board, but state law prohibits the attorney general from engaging in the private practice of law outside of his public office.

Earlier this month, this newspaper reported that Landrys office sent a team of Louisiana Bureau of Investigation agents to track down the biological mother of a child Guidry adopted, after the woman had contacted the child without permission. The agents also visited the childs uncle in Mississippi. Landry has declined to explain why his office deployed agents despite there being no apparent crime.

Verrette wasnt unemployed for long after his ignominious exit from the Attorney Generals Office. He went back to his former job at the Plaquemines Parish Sheriffs Office for several years. Then, last year, he returned to the JPSO.

Former Plaquemines Parish sheriff Lonnie Greco, who took office a year after Verrette was hired there the first time, said he was glad to take him back.

Greco praised Verrettes work as a detective and said he was unaware of the circumstances of his hasty departure from the AGs office.

I dont know what happened in between, Greco said. He told me he had some issues with somebody who wouldnt follow the orders he was giving them to do. He just said backstabbing was going on, he couldnt take it anymore, so he came back and worked for me.

Greco said he spoke with Landrys office before rehiring Verrette but was left in the dark.

What I had gathered was, they just dont like to give bad references to cause people some issues, Greco said. They just said they dont give out any kind of comment.

Greco, who rehired Verrette a few months before leaving office, said he didnt speak about the matter with Guidry, though he said Guidry is a longtime acquaintance and was one of his financial backers. Greco recalled Verrette requesting time off to watch over Guidrys children when he was out of town.

Jeff Landry targets new Louisiana medical school over coronavirus vaccine mandates Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry is threatening to sue the states newest medical school over its coronavirus vaccine policies after thr

Last year, as part of a pre-polygraph questionnaire that Verrette took before rejoining the JPSO, he was again asked whether he had ever been fired or asked to resign from a job, records show.

His answers were redacted by the Sheriffs Office. Regardless of how he answered, some of the details of his past were uncovered. A spokesman for Jefferson Parish Sheriff Joe Lopinto declined to answer questions for this story about the circumstances of Verrettes hiring.

A background check performed in early 2020 noted that Mr. Verrette resigned from JPSO while under criminal investigation.

The official in charge of the background check tried to learn more about Verrettes short tenure at the Attorney Generals Office, faxing a request that in big bold letters said: Please include any complaints against the subject.

Inside the complaint against top Jeff Landry aide: 'Jurors would want to have sex with her' A sexual harassment complaint against a top aide for Attorney General Jeff Landry alleges that Pat Magee insisted that one woman should be dep

That didnt happen, though this newspaper a year later received a copy of the complaints against Verrette by sending a similar request. Landrys office largely did not answer the newspapers questions about the Verrette case for this story, but said that when JPSO requested Verrettes file, an entry level HR employee who was just months into his job and who was not involved in Mr. Verrettes internal investigation filled out the employment verification request notating that Mr. Verrette resigned after only a few weeks of employment.

Although the request was accurate, it did not include that an internal investigation took place, said an unsigned email from Landrys press account in response for this story.

According to the background report, a human resources manager at the Attorney Generals Office simply told the JPSO that Verrette had resigned; no other information was provided.

The criminal investigation by the JPSO a decade ago led Verrette to resign and two colleagues to be arrested on drug charges, which the attorney generals office under Caldwell eventually refused.

The records of the drug case have been expunged, according to the JPSO.
Former St. Tammany Parish Sheriff Jack Strain's long-awaited trial on state sex crime charges involving underage boys has been set for Sept. 7, ahead of a separate federal corruption trial that has now been pushed to the end of the year.

Strain's trial in state court in St. Tammany Parish is expected to last 10 days according to a filing in 22nd Judicial District Court. Assistant District Attorney Collin Sims, head of the criminal division, will prosecute the case along with Elizabeth Authement.

Sims said earlier this month that he believes the trial will go forward on that date, and he is preparing as though it will.

More than 30 witness summonses were sent out last month by the 22nd Judicial District Attorney's Office, including Strain's four alleged victims and some of their family members. The witnesses also include Strain's wife, Lisa Palmer Strain, and people who had worked for Strain while he was sheriff.

Strain, who is free on bond, has entered not guilty pleas in both cases. His attorney did not return a call for comment.

The former sheriff's legal saga has been lengthy and riddled by delays related to the COVID-19 court shutdowns.

Strain, who was indicted in 2019 on four counts of aggravated rape, two counts of aggravated incest and one count each of indecent behavior with a juvenile and sexual battery, was scheduled to go to trial on those charges in April of 2020.

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But before that could happen, the pandemic put a halt to jury trials in March of 2020, and they only resumed in 22nd Judicial District Court this May. Efforts to reschedule the trial, which will be heard by an ad hoc judge, A. Bruce Simpson, have been complicated by both the pandemic and the timing of Strain's federal trial.

That trial, which was to begin next month in U.S. District Judge Jane Triche Milazzo's court, has now been moved to Dec. 6.

In federal court, Strain faces 16 counts tied to an alleged kickback scheme at a work release program that he privatized while he was sheriff. Two of his top deputies were charged with conspiracy to commit fraud and bribery in late 2018 and pleaded guilty months later. They are expected to testify against Strain, who was indicted in August of 2019.

But one of them, Clifford "Skip" Keen, has also been summoned as a witness in the sex crime trial. Keen identified himself as a child sex victim of Strain's in his guilty plea in federal court.

The sex crime accusations against Strain date from the 1970s, when he was himself a teenager, to 2004, when he had been in office eight years. The list of witnesses indicate that prosecutors are expecting the defense to challenge victim testimony about events that happened decades ago.

Scott Benton, a forensic pediatrician who has testified as an expert witness about delayed reporting by child sex abuse victims, has been summoned. So have family members of Mark Finn, who has publicly said Strain raped him, and Keen's wife.

Strain faces an automatic life sentence if he's found guilty of aggravated rape, which has no statute of limitations. It is defined in part by whether a victim falls into certain categories, including being under age 13.
A New Orleans policeman who was briefly in charge of officers patrolling the French Quarter is facing a 70-day suspension over allegations that he had an intimate relationship with a subordinate, gave her unauthorized access to a department car, and beat her, authorities said this week.

Lt. Octavio Baldassaros suspension can still be increased or reduced by Superintendent Shaun Ferguson because for now it is only a recommendation from an internal department panel that reviewed the case. But if Ferguson chooses to accept the recommendation, it would leave Baldassaro facing a punishment on the higher end of a disciplinary spectrum ranging from a reprimand to dismissal from the police department.

Why NOPD changed French Quarter commanders: alleged relationship with subordinate and payroll fraud Octavio Baldassaros short tenure as top cop in the French Quarter ended unceremoniously in March, when he was quietly stripped of his command.

Baldassaros attorney, Eric Hessler, said his client maintains his innocence. The fact that Baldassaro hasnt been charged with a crime in connection with the domestic battery allegations supports his position, said Hessler, of the Police Association of New Orleans.

The department would be guilty of malfeasance if it really thinks a supervisor committed a criminal battery on a subordinate, and it left him on the job, Hessler said. He didnt do that, and they know it.

Police have largely been tight-lipped about exactly what Baldassaro, a 24-year veteran, was accused of doing before his March 2020 removal as the commander of the high-profile 8th District, whose officers patrol the French Quarter and Central Business District, areas that are particularly popular with tourists.

But that action occurred after the Independent Police Monitors office received a complaint alleging that Baldassaro had engaged in a sexual affair with an officer under his command and had shown her preferential treatment by giving her a take-home vehicle without proper approval from agency brass. Both violate regulations, and the complaint was forwarded to the departments Public Integrity Bureau, the monitors office said.

Details about the PIBs ensuing investigation have not been made available. But after the completion of that probe, a disciplinary panel recommended that Baldassaro receive two five-day suspensions for allegedly engaging in an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate and inappropriately giving her access to a department car, police spokesperson Gary Scheets said.

Scheets said the panel also recommended a 60-day suspension for allegations that he "committed battery of a domestic partner."

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This is one of at least 16 complaints against Baldassaro dating back to 2015, with the other grievances involving allegations of lapses in professionalism, excessive force and false or inaccurate reports, according to the monitors office. While some of those grievances had not been resolved at the time the alleged misconduct involving the subordinate surfaced, the monitors office urged the police department to appropriately measure whether Baldassaro was a liability.

Hessler has maintained that the great majority of complaints against Baldassaro have been unfounded.

Ferguson appointed Baldassaro to lead 8th District officers on March 31, 2019, and the ensuing year was mostly turbulent.

Just a few weeks into the assignment, Baldassaro was recorded twice throwing a woman to the ground while trying to arrest her during a fight at the French Quarter Festival. Videos of the fracas brought unwanted attention to the police department, which since adopting a federal reform pact in 2012 has required officers to de-escalate tensions in public encounters.

NOPD says commander did not use excessive force during French Quarter brawl caught on video A New Orleans Police Department commander who twice tossed a woman to the ground while trying to arrest her during a brawl at this years Fren

But an internal investigation found Baldassaro was defending himself after suffering deep scratches on his arms during the arrest, and he was cleared of wrongdoing.

Baldassaro was transferred to the Uptown-based 2nd District after his removal as commander of the 8th on March 11, 2020.

His replacement, Capt. Anthony Caprera, served as 8th District commander until his retirement in June. Caprera then turned over the reins to Capt. Jeffrey Walls, whos in his second run as 8th District commander after previously holding the role from 2011 to 2016.
After a brief stint at the Louisiana Attorney General's office in 2016, the special agent in charge of the cyber crimes unit resigned amid a sexual harassment investigation.

But the officer, Aaron Verrette, still went on to work for the Plaquemines Parish Sheriffs Office and then the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office. When JPSO ran a background check on Verrette, they faxed a request to the AG's office for any complaints filed against Verrette.

According to the background report, a human resources manager at the Attorney Generals Office simply told the JPSO that Verrette had resigned; no other information was provided.

But The Advocate | The Times-Picayune recently received a series of complaints filed against Verrette through a public records request. Read those complaints, and the investigation that the AG's office performed into Verrette below:
An argument between a father and son left the older man shot dead and the younger one hospitalized with a bullet wound on Sunday afternoon, New Orleans police said.

The deadly fight occurred at about 2:50 p.m. in the 7400 block of Crestmont Road, police said. Paramedics took a 43-year-old man to the hospital, and he was pronounced dead there. Meanwhile, that man's 23-year-old son was shot as well and took his own ride to the hospital for treatment, police said.

+2 Impaired driver runs over, kills bicyclist Saturday in Lacombe, State Police allege An impaired driver ran over and killed a bicyclist on Saturday in Lacombe, according to Louisiana State Police.

Officers didnt publicly name either the father or the son and didn't say whether the younger man would face criminal charges.

The pair were among at least four people shot in New Orleans in three separate cases since Saturday evening.

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At about 6:45 p.m. Saturday in New Orleans Gentilly neighborhood, a man and a woman who are partners were arguing when he shot her in the 4400 block of Eastern Street, police said. Paramedics brought the woman to the hospital while the man  whose name hasnt been released  was arrested at the scene.

Another shooting occurred in Gentilly at about 1:55 a.m. Sunday as two women argued coming out of a gas station in the 4300 block of Louisa Drive. One of the women fired a gun once in the air and then shot the other woman in the leg and shoulder, police said.

Paramedics brought the wounded woman to the hospital. Police said they know the shooters identity but didnt release her name or say whether she was in custody.
A woman was forcibly removed by police from an American Airlines flight at Louis Armstrong International Airport after she refused to wear a mask or to leave the airplane, officials said Saturday.

"I've never seen anything quite like it before," said retired Tulane University history professor Patrick Maney, who also was on the plane. "Two heavily armed police came and told the lady to get off. She refused, and they then told her to get up. She was screaming and resisting as they hauled her up and put some kind of restraints on her hands behind her back."

New Orleans airport's rebound in passenger traffic continues in May; see data The rebound in air travel at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport continued in May, with another healthy boost in the numbers of 

The incident occurred on American Airlines Flight 1768, which was due to depart for Dallas Fort Worth International Airport on Friday just after 9.30 a.m. but was delayed for almost an hour by the mask matter. It's a flight that typically includes many passengers making connections to other destinations.

Her removal came the day after a widely publicized similar incident at John F. Kennedy International Airport before an American Airlines flight to Miami. In that one, a man refusing to wear his mask was forced from the plane after a two-hour standoff with police.

On Saturday, American spokesperson Derek Walls confirmed the incident at Armstrong International and the delay. He said the jet had to return to the gate after the customer refused multiple requests to mask up.

Even after being removed, Maney said, the woman could be heard screaming for about 10 minutes as deputies held her on the gangway until the plane taxied away again. He said the passenger didn't seem to be making any political point, "but she kept saying that she was not an animal and didn't want to be treated like an animal, things like that."

Other passengers voiced frustration with the delay, Maney said, and he and his wife barely made their connecting flight to San Jose, Calif.

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Capt. Jason Rivarde, spokesperson for Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office, said deputies arrested a woman passenger at about 10 a.m. Friday for refusing to get off a plane after multiple requests to do so. He said they cited her for four misdemeanors: disturbing the peace, remaining in a place after being forbidden, resisting arrest and simple assault.

In January, the Federal Aviation Administration introduced a zero-tolerance order whereby unruly airline passengers may face federal criminal prosecution or fines of as much as $35,000.

Earlier this month, the FAA said that mask-related incidents appeared to be rising sharply. Airlines have reported more than 3,200 such dust-ups since the start of 2021, about half of those since the start of May when passenger travel began to rise in line with coronavirus vaccination rates.

The FAA said 75% of passenger complaints by airlines this year have been mask-related, and that it has handed out almost $700,000 in penalties to noncompliant passengers.

New Orleans airport's rebound in passenger traffic continues in May; see data The rebound in air travel at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport continued in May, with another healthy boost in the numbers of 

A federal law in effect since February makes wearing a mask on commercial flights mandatory. Failure to do so is punishable by a fine of $250 for the first offense and as much as $1,500 for repeat offenses.

The law was due to expire mid-May, but the Transportation Security Administration extended enforcement through Sept. 13 amid a new wave of COVID-19 cases, driven mainly by the potent delta strain of the virus and a slowdown in vaccination rates.

Before mask-wearing was made mandatory by law, airlines were left to address defiant passengers by banning them from flights.
Nine people were reported shot  one of them fatally  between Saturday and Sunday evenings in New Orleans and Jefferson Parish.

The killing happened about 2:50 p.m. Sunday in the 7400 block of Crestmont Road in New Orleans, police said. Paramedics brought one of the struck men to an emergency room while the other got his own ride there. One of those two men was then pronounced dead at the hospital, police said.

On Saturday, at about 6:45 p.m. in New Orleans Gentilly neighborhood, a man and a woman who are partners were arguing when he shot her in the 4400 block of Eastern Street, police said. Paramedics brought the woman to the hospital while the man  whose name hasnt been released  was arrested at the scene.

There was another shooting in Gentilly at about 1:55 a.m. Sunday that occurred while two women argued as they came out of a gas station in the 4300 block of Louisa Drive. One of the women fired a gun once in the air and then shot the other woman in the leg and shoulder, police said.

Paramedics brought the wounded woman to the hospital. Police said they know the shooters identity but didnt release her name or say whether she was in custody.

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In Jefferson, two separate incidents left five wounded.

Two men were shot in their torsos and one woman was grazed when the shooting erupted at an apartment complex in the 1500 block of Westwood Drive in Marrero at about 8:30 p.m. Saturday, Jefferson Parish Sheriffs Office Capt. Jason Rivarde said. One of the men sustained life-threatening injuries.

Then Sunday evening, a man and a woman were critically wounded after a shooting in the 5800 block of Louis I Avenue, according to Rivarde. It was not clear when the shooting took place, but it was reported at 5:36 p.m.

Deputies didnt name any suspects or discuss a possible motive in either the shooting on Westwood or the one on Louis I.
Theres been a lot of, shall we say, revised messaging lately about the wisdom of getting inoculated against the coronavirus. But few have spoken quite so loudly and clearly as Republican Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, whose state, like Louisiana, trails in vaccination rates and is seeing an alarming new wave of COVID-19 cases.

Almost 100% of the new hospitalizations are unvaccinated folks. And the deaths certainly are occurring with unvaccinated folks. These folks are choosing a horrible lifestyle of self-inflicted pain. Weve got to get folks to take the shot, she said Thursday. Its time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks, not the regular folks. Its the unvaccinated folks that are letting us down.

Ivey is part of a chorus of conservative voices  politicians and some but definitely not all Fox News personalities  that are suddenly all in for the vaccine and against the rampant misinformation that has depressed participation in the most important public health drive in recent memory. Theyre now actively encouraging their followers to get the shot, and explaining that its not just an individual choice but one that affects others.

To which I have to ask: Hey, party of personal responsibility, what took you so long?

No question, its good that the figurative memo went out. But what a tragedy that it didnt happen until we were in the midst of a pandemic of the unvaccinated, as Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Rochelle Walensky put it.

How sad that many of these same Republicans saw the correlation between political leanings and vaccination rates and still accused the Biden administration of playing politics  or worse  by aggressively pushing the vaccines, still chose to talk up the freedom to refuse so much more than the personal and collective obligation to participate.

To be fair, there have been some exceptions. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a survivor of childhood polio, has been a cheerleader from the beginning.

U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, a physician, has also enthusiastically advocated for vaccination. And even U.S. Sen. John Kennedy took a break from coining painfully folksy phrases to encourage people to be cool and get the shot (but only after belting out an off-key rendition of Born Free).

Cassidy, though, hasnt resisted the urge to combine the life-saving message with political attacks. On Fox News last week, he linked hesitancy among conservatives to partisan comments coming out of the White House regarding next Jim Crow laws, or people like Senator Schumer and the White House not cooperating on a bipartisan bill. Im not sure what the alternative is, for the president to stop advocating?

And then theres Minority Whip Steve Scalise, who last week made a big show of finally getting his first  yes, first  dose.

"I would encourage people to get the vaccine. I have high confidence in it. I got it myself, Scalise said.

Dont get me wrong, Im glad for him and his family, particularly after all they went through when he was shot in 2017. And Im glad for the rest of us that he did it in public and with a full-throated endorsement. So are people like Anthony Fauci, the governments top infection disease expert, who called Scalises statement very helpful.

Still, if Scalise never had doubts, as he said, then why the long wait to protect himself and to urge others to do the same? Until now, most of his public comments have centered on showering praise on former President Donald Trump for shepherding the vaccines development through Operation Warp Speed, not on the need to get shots into arms as quickly as possible while tamping down conspiracies about government control.

Even last week, Scalise reverted to old form, using a press conference that was pitched as pro-vaccine to gin up anger, claiming ridiculously that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is covering up the virus origins.

Were so far down this path that its probably too late to decouple life-saving messages from Washington politics, or to undo the harm that months of this type of rhetoric have caused.

Still, maybe a little more of Iveys newfound directness might help.
Editor's Note This article is brought to you by the University of New Orleans.

A new era is underway at the University of New Orleans as leaders from academia, public agencies and private industry enhance their collaborative efforts to further innovation.

UNOs Research and Technology Park has been rebranded The Beach, giving the 30-acre site on Lake Pontchartrain a fresh identity with additional goals.

What is most significant about the rebranding and the new name, The Beach at UNO: A Sandbox for Collaboration, is the re-energized spirit of partnership that will be led by a new programming division and the commitment to provide up to $100,000 a year to inspire research or special projects among UNO faculty, students and our tenants, said Rebecca Conwell, president and CEO of the UNO Research and Technology Foundation.

Conwell said the Foundations other key initiatives include encouraging companies to relocate to The Beach; form a vibrant culture at the research park; increase innovation and entrepreneurial exposure at UNO and the park; create grants to encourage companies and organizations to engage in research with UNO faculty; and develop a long-term real estate project with a focus on innovation, collaboration, networking and placemaking.

The hub for this activity is The Beach, which has 600,000 square feet of office and lab space among six buildings. The site also includes the 26,000 square foot Lindy Boggs International Conference Center, plus abundant green space and free parking.

There is an energy in the air that I find unique to The Beach, Conwell said. Depending on the building, the hallways and offices look like a typical office space, but the eclectic nature of a research park means that in some instances you can turn the corner and be surrounded with active working labs focused on testing and research.

That type of environment can spur creativity and inspiration, said John Wiley, a UNO chemistry professor and director of UNOs Advanced Materials Research Institute, which he described as a feeder to The Beach.

People just stop and talk to each other in the hallway and new ideas will pop up, Wiley said. Unexpected ideas will develop because of these conversations. Theres a lot of cross-pollination between different labs that can develop into new projects or new funding sources. I expect it to lead to, interesting and exciting new directions for all of us in terms of science.

For example, in one portion of The Beach, Eurofins employees test food and agricultural products. The company has more than 50,000 staff members across a network of more than 900 independent companies in more than 50 countries and operating more than 900 laboratories. Because of its New Orleans location in the research park, the team from Eurofins has been able to collaborate with another Beach tenant that handles inspections, shipment and transportation of agricultural products to and from overseas destinations.

We have a relationship where we are able to make sure all testing is done per expectations and that we address anything that evolves in the markets we both serve, said John Reuther, president of Eurofins Central Analytical Laboratories. I think with this revitalization, were going to have even more opportunities to collaborate. We would really like to be more involved with local businesses. Were in a great town for food and we have some of the best restaurants and chefs in the world here. I think our expertise in the food business could be a service in that industry here in New Orleans.

Meanwhile, other tenants at The Beach are also working to help local businesses continue to make strides. The New Orleans Regional Black Chamber of Commerce moved to The Beach earlier this year and is already seeing benefits, said LaVerne Toombs, the Chambers executive director.

I think its a great atmosphere to be surrounded by other small business owners, Toombs said. We believe these are businesses we can assist and that we can continue to grow and support each others goals and objectives. Being a part of this ecosystem is very timely because being a part of something new really builds our brand as well. When they grow, we grow, so I think its very beneficial for everyone involved.

Toombs said she is also excited about the Chamber being a part of the UNO community and hopes to involve university students and faculty in the Chambers work. Some ideas include having UNO students work as interns at the Chamber and work with UNO faculty to offer workshops on business topics such as finance, marketing, technology and public relations.

Those types of partnerships will build on existing ones between the university and The Beach tenants. Reuther said UNO chemistry and biology students regularly work as interns at Eurofins. In addition, Eurofins leaders work with UNO department chairs to identify and recruit students for permanent positions upon graduation. Also, Eurofins has donated testing instruments to UNO that can be used for training and research.

Michael Hecht, president and CEO of GNO, Inc., said those joint collaborations are among the main benefits of research parks like The Beach.

Its an opportunity for researchers to see their work commercialized and also an opportunity for students to apply their research and learning in a commercial setting, Hecht said. It ultimately ends up being a revenue generator for the university, which in turn makes UNO better for everyone there.

With the rebranding, Hecht said he believes UNO and The Beach can follow in the footsteps of nationally-recognized research parks, including those in Arizona and North Carolina.

I think you are going to see continued growth at the park in terms of existing companies growing and new companies coming in, he said. I think you may see a lot of companies related to areas like technology and the maritime industry because of its location. I think this is going to drive attention to the university and result in more students being attracted to UNO in the future.

Conwell said The Beach rebranding is just one aspect of a renewed focus for the Research and Technology Foundation. There are plans to enhance The Beach with more walkways and a revitalization of the Lindy Boggs International Conference Center. In addition, the Foundation is creating a programming division to guide new initiatives to increase innovation and entrepreneurship, plus strengthen community relationships.

Our focus now is on implementing our strategic plan, Conwell said. Its much broader than just The Beach and the brand. The Beach signifies all of the new endeavors that we have created to add value to the University of New Orleans.

For more information, visit www.thebeachuno.org.
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Harrisburg, Pa. -The Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission (PFBC) will hold its quarterly business meeting on Monday, July 26 beginning at 10:00 a.m. at its Harrisburg headquarters, located at 1601 Elmerton Avenue, Harrisburg, PA 17110. The meeting is open to the public.

To view the schedule and agenda for this meeting, and for information on how to provide public comment, visit the PFBC website (www.fishandboat.com).

A live stream of the meeting will be available at https://www.facebook.com/PaFishandBoat.




Williamsport, Pa. -- When Joseph Ekman, founder and CEO of California-based Hartnell De La Guerra Corporation and Chairman of the Board for About The Kids Foundation, read news coverage in January 2020 about suspended Pennsylvania State Trooper Johnathan Buynak, 36, connected with crimes allegedly committed by Amanda Fenderson, he said he noticed what he believed to be an error in the narrative right away.

The January 2020 news coverage was about Buynak's surrender and criminal charges that included theft, impersonating a public servant, obstruction, and official oppression.

Related reading: Montoursville trooper abused power: PSP Internal Affairs

Buynak's story was intricately weaved with that of Amanda Fenderson, 34, of Montoursville, who had been accused of of stealing personal items from a family for whom she was employed, forging a check, and using the family's debit card to withdraw $60 without permission, according to a police affidavit filed January 22, 2020.

The inaccuracy, Ekman claimed, was in a detail about how Buynak and Fenderson met. According to the affidavit, in 2019, Buynak was off duty and met Amanda Fenderson at the Brandon Cafe on Washington Boulevard. "They talked and exchanged phone numbers during the interaction and later communicated through text and phone conversations," wrote PSP Central Internal Affairs Division Corporal John D. Powis in an affidavit.

From California, Ekman called his his friend Lisa Lettiere in Montoursville, Pennsylvania, who he personally knew to be familiar with Ms. Fenderson.

According to Lettiere, Fenderson came to work in her home as a caregiver sometime in 2013 as an employee of Maxim Healthcare based in Muncy.

On January 23, 2015, Lettiere said she called Pennsylvania State Police in Montoursville to report the theft of her Macbook Pro, and filed a claim with Erie Insurance.

The Erie Insurance Report Of Loss Other Than Auto filed January 26, 2015, said, "sometime between 8:15 a.m. and 9 p.m. on Jan. 23, her Macbook Pro laptop valued at $1800 was stolen from underneath her bed in her home. She said there isn't any sign of forced entry. There are caregivers in the home during the day. State Police are investigating."

The caregiver in the home was Amanda Fenderson; the state police trooper who came to investigate the missing laptop was Trooper Johnathan Buynak.

Ekman and Lettiere said they couldn't help wondering, after reading the 2019 news reports about Buynak and Fenderson, was there a much earlier connection?

The documented history of Buynak and Fenderson

Police documents from Jan. 22, 2020 written by Corporal Powis outline Buynak's criminal activity that spanned the period of July 26 to Aug. 24, 2019.

On July 26, 2019, Trooper Johnathan Buynak responded to a report of a theft and forgery at a home on Rabbitown Road in Wolf Township, Powis reported.

The family accused their child's caretaker, Amanda L. Fenderson, 34, of Montoursville, of stealing personal items, forging a check, and using the family's debit card to withdraw $60 without permission, according to the affidavit.

At the time of his investigation into the alleged theft, Buynak did not disclose a conflict of interest: he already knew Fenderson on a personal level. Corporal Powis wrote that the pair had met in early 2019 at Brandon Cafe in Williamsport.

Buynak proceeded with the case as the lead investigator, the affidavit said.

Buynak's police report about the alleged theft from the Rabbittown Rd. residence referred to Fenderson as "Suspect #1," not by name, and failed to include documentation of investigative actions, any narrative, or interviews with Fenderson.

Three days later while he was on duty, Buynak allegedly went to the home and gave the owner $60, saying it was money from Fenderson being returned as part of a criminal investigation, according to the affidavit.

Fenderson was taken into custody on Aug. 8, 2019, for an unrelated incident on July 27, 2019, and charged with second degree felony burglary court records stated.

On Aug. 9, 2019, the Wolf Township family left a message on Buynak's state police voicemail that a prescription pill bottle belonging to them was found in Fenderson's possession when Montoursville Borough Police arrested her. Buynak never returned the call, nor would he return three additional calls made by the homeowner, the affidavit stated.

While Fenderson was in Lycoming County Prison on Aug. 10, 2019, Buynak sent her message vouchers and exchanged personal, social messages with her through the prison text message system, wrote Powis.

Only after Buynak arranged bail for Fenderson and allowed her to stay in his home once she was released on bail, was the criminal investigation reassigned to a Criminal Investigation Unit Member at Troop F - Montoursville, according to the document.

A second set of charges

The Rabbittown Rd. accusation against Fenderson is not the only time Buynak and Fenderson have been linked with criminal activity, however.

In a second set of charges, Buynak is accused of impersonating a public servant to obtain financial gain.

A week after Buynak paid $772 to an agency to bail Fenderson from jail, Fenderson introduced Buynak to her friend, Thomas Dysktra.

On Aug. 22, 2019, Fenderson told Dykstra that she was working with Buynak on an undercover state police drug investigation. Buynak and Fenderson allegedly convinced Dykstra to withdraw $400 from his bank "to help with the investigation because requests for funds within the Department were slower than expected," according to the affidavit.

The next day the pair convinced Dykstra an additional $300 was needed for the investigation, which he allegedly produced from his personal bank account. And again on Aug. 24, he withdrew another $200 and gave it to Fenderson.

"On this occasion, Dykstra informed them he would not provide any additional money to either of them and questioned to validity of the undercover police investigation," Powis wrote.

Are there others?

Do you have information? Ekman is seeking information from people who may have employed Amanda Fenderson as an in-home caregiver, and who also filed a police report with Trooper Buynak. Anyone who called PSP Montoursville, Troop F between January 2015 through August 2019: Was Trooper Jonathan Buynak assigned to the call? Were you employing Amanda Fenderson, aka Amanda Swab, at the time? If so, did Trooper Buynak give you a Police Number or any incident investigation information?

Joseph A. Ekman, Founder & CEO About The Kids Foundation, 501 c3 Nonprofit PO Box 3775 Los Altos, California USA 94024 Corporate Office: (408) 736-4266 Email Address: JAE@AboutTheKids.Org  www.AboutTheKidsFoundation.Org

Ekman said he can't help but ask the question: Are there others?

"I'm asking if there are other families who employed Amanda Fenderson, and who gave a police report to Trooper Buynak, to contact me," he said. "How many other 'non-incidents' are out there?

According to Lettiere, no information was ever provided from the PSP regarding the investigation of her missing laptop. She alleges an investigation did not occur.

Ekman and Lettiere said they have attempted to access the original incident investigation report allegedly made by Buynak on January 23, 2015. Their request for information Right To Know pursuant to Pennsylvania's Right-to-Know Law (RTKL) was filed with the Office of Open Records in January of 2020.

The request for documentation was denied. According to correspondence from PSP headquarters in Harrisburg, the request was denied "to the extent that the responsive record you seek is not accessible to the public." Grounds for denial listed in the letter included "complaints of potential criminal conduct other than a private criminal complaint"; the documents "reflect the findings and conclusions, as well as the actions, observations and notes of investigating troopers ... all of which are exempt from public disclosure"; "the report also contains identifying information, all of which are exempt from public disclosure."

Ultimately, according to the letter, disclosing the requested incident number, FOI-1261604, the incident number allegedly assigned to the theft of the Macbook Pro, "would violate Pa.s Criminal History Record Information Act which prohibits criminal justice agencies from disseminating investigative information, except to other criminal justice agencies."

Buynak appeared with his lawyer in court again on Friday, July 23 for a motion to compel discovery. He faces further court dates on Aug. 31 for an omnibus motion, and again on Sept. 17 for criminal pre-trials, according to the calendar of events listed in a docket.

--

Buynak Docket 1, Docket 2

Fenderson Docket 1, Docket 2
Business

wire

Bidens July executive order includes drug pricing provisions. But will they do enough?

Alex Wong/Getty Images/TNS U.S. President Joe Biden passes a signing pen to Chairperson of the Federal Trade Commission Lina Khan, second from left, as, from left, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra, and Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo look on during an event at the State Dining Room of the White House on July 9, 2021 in Washington, D.C. President Biden signed an executive order on promoting competition in the American economy.

President Joe Bidens executive order of July 9 included various steps toward making good on campaign promises to take on pharmaceutical companies by allowing the importation of prescription drugs and curbing the high cost of medicines.

These issues were key to candidate Bidens 2020 health care platform, which stated he would stand up to abuse of power by drugmakers. Biden promised on his campaign website that he would allow consumers to buy prescription drugs from other countries, as long as the Department of Health and Human Services deemed it safe. In speeches, candidate Biden also pledged to bring down drug costs by 60%.

Nearly six months into his term, Biden issued an executive order on promoting economic competition, which included moves toward fulfilling these promises.

KHN has teamed up with our partners at PolitiFact to analyze Bidens promises during the 2020 presidential campaign  and, so far, experts generally say the jury is still out on how meaningful these efforts will be.

Drug importation

Promise: To create more competition for U.S. drug corporations, Biden will allow consumers to import prescription drugs from other countries, as long as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has certified that those drugs are safe.

The July 9 executive order directed the Food and Drug Administration commissioner to work with states to develop a program allowing prescription medications to be brought in from other countries, particularly Canada.

However, several drug pricing experts told us that, of all the policy ideas aimed at reducing the cost of drugs, importation seems the least likely to happen.

Other countries are not interested in facilitating this, said Benedic Ippolito, a senior fellow in economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

Matthew Fiedler, a fellow with the USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Health Policy, agreed.

This policy is unlikely to ever work as intended because Canada is unlikely to allow the export of drugs to the United States, Fiedler wrote in an email.

Thats because drug manufacturers would then probably demand higher prices in Canada, since those would become the de facto U.S. prices, he said. That would cause a big increase in prices in Canada that Canada likely wishes to avoid.

This is not the first time a president has suggested importing drugs, notably from Canada. President Donald Trump put forward the same idea during his time in office. Democrats and Republicans alike have supported similar proposals.

During the Trump administration, a rule was finalized allowing states to seek the FDAs permission to import drugs. Several states then passed laws to that end, but Florida is the only state to have formally applied to the FDA.

The agency has yet to make a decision on the request.

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the trade industry group representing major pharmaceutical companies, sued HHS in 2020 in an attempt to get this drug importation rule overturned. The litigation is ongoing, though the Biden administration has asked for the case to be dismissed.

In a May court filing, the administration argued the case was pointless because its unclear whether any state importation plan would be approved anytime soon.

Canada has signaled its concern that exporting drugs to the U.S. could trigger shortages within its borders, and after the Trump-era rule was finalized, the country moved to block bulk exports of medications in short supply.

Still, Rachel Sachs, a law professor and drug pricing expert at Washington University in St. Louis, said Bidens rehabbed policy isnt a bad thing.

Drug pricing has been a big problem for several years now, and there are many policy ideas on the table. We dont lack for policy ideas  we lack for actual implementation of those ideas, Sachs wrote in an email. So I dont think its concerning at all if the administration chooses to advance existing policy ideas rather than developing new ones from scratch.

Its also important to remember that Biden has just released an executive order directing that these things happen. It is just a first step in a long line of steps, including issuing rules and allowing time for public comment.

That means details of how this importation policy would work are not yet available. The executive order calls for a report to be issued 45 days afterward with a plan outlining specific efforts to reduce prescription drug prices.

I assume well know more then, Sachs said.

The high cost of drugs

Promise: Im going to lower prescription drugs by 60%, and thats the truth.

On this pledge, the recent executive order outlined the presidents vision for how to proceed.

The order included an initiative designed to shore up the approval framework for generic drugs and biosimilars, working with the Federal Trade Commission to address efforts to impede competition for these types of drugs and help Medicare and Medicaid incorporate new payment models to cover them.

Experts so far have offered measured reactions.

The administrative actions outlined in this executive order do have the potential to reduce prescription drug prices, said Fiedler of the USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative. But it depends on more than just what the order says.

In each of these areas, whether prices actually fall will depend on the details of the proposals the administration ultimately puts forward, Fiedler wrote in an email. However, these are all areas where there are opportunities to make changes that would have a meaningful impact.

Again, more will be known in 45 days, the deadline for the release of the plan to reduce prescription drug prices.

Its important to note that the FTC is an independent agency, so Bidens principal means of influencing drug policy comes from his appointments to the agency, said Fiedler. It does seem likely, though, he added, that the newly appointed FTC chair would be sympathetic to cracking down on market conduct that delays the entry of generic drugs or biosimilars.

Still, reducing drug prices by 60% would require legislation, said the AEIs Ippolito.

And the most disruptive drug pricing reforms  those that could even sniff that kind of price reduction  are also the most unlikely to pass, Ippolito wrote in an email. In short, I suspect that this executive order isnt going to make much headway.

Trump also promised last year on the campaign trail that he would lower drug prices by 60%, after repeatedly promising to reduce medication costs during his four years in office. However, little progress was made toward that goal despite several related executive orders in 2020.

While Bidens executive order has a different focus than most of the Trump-era drug pricing orders, the Biden administration has signaled it may still be open to embracing some of those policies.

Trumps directives focused on rebates paid to pharmacy benefit managers being rerouted to beneficiaries, reducing the cost of insulin by compelling federally qualified health centers to make the drugs available at low prices to low-income people, importing drugs from Canada and tying drug prices to the prices paid in other countries.

Three proposed rules that resulted from Trumps orders are being kept around by the Biden administration  at least for the time being. One is the Most Favored Nation Model. This rule is supposed to match U.S. prices for certain classes of drugs with the lower amounts paid in countries that negotiate drug prices.

According to Politico, the Biden administrations regulatory office received the rule this month, which means there may be a new public comment period before the rule is finalized  though its likely this would take some time.

And, of course, theres the pending Trump administration rule on drug importation, currently tied up in court.

Trumps rebate rule, meanwhile, has also been delayed. The Biden administration pushed back its effective date to January 2023. Freezing the rule was part of the Biden administrations policy to review any rules finalized in the final months of Trumps term.

No other Trump drug pricing efforts made much headway. Instead, they drew a fair amount of industry pushback.

And it remains to be seen whether Bidens directives will fare any better.

Experts agreed that most likely congressional action would be needed to achieve a 60% reduction in prices. With over three years left in Bidens term, who knows what could still happen?

For now, we rate these promises In the Works.
Rome, GA (30161)

Today

Scattered clouds with the possibility of an isolated thunderstorm developing during the afternoon. High 86F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 30%..

Tonight

A few clouds from time to time. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 67F. Winds light and variable.
Cedartown, GA (30125)

Today

Partly cloudy skies this evening will become overcast overnight. Slight chance of a rain shower. Low 67F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies this evening will become overcast overnight. Slight chance of a rain shower. Low 67F. Winds light and variable.
Rome, GA (30161)

Today

Partly cloudy this evening, then becoming cloudy after midnight. Slight chance of a rain shower. Low 68F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Partly cloudy this evening, then becoming cloudy after midnight. Slight chance of a rain shower. Low 68F. Winds light and variable.
CROWN POINT  Lake County Recorder Gina Pimentel is looking for local businesses eager to serve military veterans.

The first-term Democratic officeholder has launched an Honor Rewards program, in partnership with Fidlar Technologies, to offer Northwest Indiana veterans discounts on goods and services sold by Lake County businesses.

Businesses interested in providing discounts to veterans, or those that already do, can sign up for the free program online at honorrewards.com.

By participating, the business name and website link will be posted to the Lake County Honor Rewards website, provided to veterans who obtain an Honor Rewards card, and mentioned in e-mail messages sent to Honor Rewards veteran members.

Fidlar Technologies also is providing participating businesses promotional materials, such as door stickers and flyers, to promote their involvement in Honor Rewards.

There is no cost to local businesses or Lake County taxpayers for the program.

"I'm proud to bring Honor Rewards to Lake County to show my gratitude to all who have served and are currently serving," Pimentel said.
HAMMOND  After her resignation in May, a former School City of Hammond associate superintendent said she intends on suing the district for defamation if a public apology is not made.

On Friday afternoon Dawn Greene's attorney announced the defamation allegations in a news release.

Today, I delivered Dr. Greenes combined Tort Claims Act Notice and a Claim Against a Public School Act Notice, indicating our intent to sue (Superintendent Scott) Miller, (Public Relations and Marketing Specialist) LeAnn Munoz and the School City of Hammond for defamation," Attorney Patrick B. McEuen said. "We hope to obtain a retraction and an apology without suing.

The Tort Claim Notice alleges that Miller accused Greene of criminal malfeasance while she served as the assistant superintendent in a news release that was sent to media outlets on May 28.

The news release from Miller claimed that Greene received stipends in the amount of $11,055 during the 2019-20 school year, and stipends in the amount of $31,128 during the 2020-21 school year.

The statement further alleged that stipends of more than $42,000 were not presented to the board for approval and were entered into Hammond's system in a manner contrary to internal control procedures, according to the school city.
But Diamond, who would now be 27 years old, and King, who would be 8, have never been found.

"I really don't have words to explain exactly how I feel," Walker said. "It's so heartbreaking and so sad. The fact that we have to go year after year not knowing whether they're still here with us or not."

Walker said she's been doing everything in her power to remind people Diamond and King are still missing.

She puts up flyers, and she talks to people, some of whom tell her they've never heard of the case, she said.

"King and Diamond can't speak for themselves, so they need somebody to speak for them," Walker said.

Diamond, who walks with a distinct limp, has Prader-Willi syndrome, which causes delayed mental capacity, police said.

"She's very trusting, because she don't know no better," Walker said. "So somebody could have tricked her into anything."

Diamond was a happy child growing up, she said.

She couldn't speak as well as other children her age, but her family grew to understand her, Walker said.

"She loved helping around the house. She loved helping people," Walker said. "She was a compassionate person."
Send out the information with water bills next year, Councilman Don Przybylinski, D-at large, suggested, and most parents would get the information.

They have to have the initiative to get out there and help their family, help their children, he said.

Once changes to the program have been decided, that provides another opportunity to promote it, Buetner said.

Whatever we can do to try and reach the parents is very important.

Shoring up the fund

We can afford to do it now, so theres no need to wait, Councilwoman Angie Deuitch, D-at large, said.

Dont open it up too quickly, but one step at a time, Buetner advised. In two years, the council could review the program and possibly expand it again.

As you add to the program, you want to make sure theres always enough in that fund, Buetner advised.

The council will need an ongoing discussion on how to keep fund self-sufficient, Paul Przybylinski said.

At some point, we do need to think about putting a stipend into the fund to keep it financially able to support the scholarship program, he said.
Three Northwest Indiana school districts are getting back the interest they paid on loans taken out last year to cover operating expenses, while awaiting their regular tax revenue distributions, amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Indiana Bond Bank, led by State Treasurer Kelly Mitchell, used its allotment of federal coronavirus relief funds to reimburse 29 school corporations $348,175 in interest paid on tax anticipation warrants issued through the bond bank in 2020.

In Northwest Indiana, the Gary Community School Corp. got back $30,940.09, the School City of Hobart received $7,072.75, and the River Forest Community School Corp. was paid $5,785.59, records show.

"Through no fault of their own, these schools faced cash-flow interruptions due to COVID-19. None planned on borrowing last year. So we felt an obligation to pursue every option on their behalf," said Mark Wuellner, Indiana Bond Bank executive director.

"It took time and effort, but what an amazing feeling to call these 29 hard-working school treasurers and hear their surprise that over one year later we had a reimbursement check for them."
GRIFFITH  The Town Council has authorized its president to sign a settlement with Hammond over a large increase in water rates.

The action gives Council President Rick Ryfa, R-3rd, the authority to sign off on the deal.

The Hammond City Council last year approved a rate hike for Hammond residents from 44 cents to $1.90 per 1,000 gallons.

But a lawsuit was filed late last year on behalf of Griffith, Highland, Munster, Dyer and Whiting, all of whom purchase water from Hammond.

Once the deal is finalized, wholesale water rates will be established with these communities that will almost double the current rate, but for less than the hike received by Hammond residents.

"We have come into a bittersweet agreement," Councilman Tony Hobson, R-5th, said of the pact, which will run for the next 10 years.

Ryfa said a 10-year renewal is possible after the first term expires.

"We're excited about that to put this thing to bed," said Council Vice President Larry Ballah, R-2nd.

The council also altered an ordinance regarding alcohol in the parks.
 Andersons Winery & Vineyard

 Currie Motors Ford of Valparaiso

 Martinis

 Peddlers Pizza Pub

 Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house at Valparaiso University

 Porter County Public Library plaza

 Porterfield Family Chiropractic

 St. Mary Medical Center

Trey Wiesjahn, accepting the award for Andersons, said he grew up in Valparaiso and enjoyed the orchard that was there. It was one of the childhood places I went all the time, he said. Were having a fun time out there.

Frank Herrerra of Currie Motors said, Our facility is a direct reflection of us, and we try to have it in pristine condition at all times.

Martinis transformation was one of the most dramatic in recent years, Long said.

Cori Wronko said the came with the building when the new owners bought it 17 years ago. The amount of love they put into not only the building but all of the families who frequent there is amazing, she said.
Six students plan to get a certificate and not a diploma after high school, another disqualifying factor. Three are already in an apprenticeship program, and four arent going to college. Five plan to attend out-of-state schools.

That leaves 48 students who would possibly qualify for the Promise Scholarship.

Of those, 21 students received the scholarships of up to $5,000 a year.

Michigan Citys poverty rate is high, with about one-fourth of the residents below the federal poverty line. That means good students have two other options for college scholarships that take precedence  the 21st Century Scholars program and the Frank OBannon Grant. 21st Century Scholars can get all their tuition and some fees paid by the state. Students are on their own for books, room and board, parking fees and other costs.

Expansion plans

Councilman Paul Przybylinski, D-2nd, said opening the program to renters will help out a lot of single mothers. Councilwoman Tracie Tillman, D-5th, asked to be added as a co-sponsor but urged that the language be changed to say all single-parent households would benefit, not just single mothers. Deuitch said home-schooled students should be included as well. Buetner said the homeless should be factored in as well.
But there are other factors to consider, Begley said, such as how much grant money they will actually receive, the cost of charging infrastructure, lifespan of the batteries and performance in inclement weather.

In addition to an electric bus, the school town is considering an enhanced transit bus, which Begley said offers additional storage space for clubs, bands and teams that travel across the state for competitions. It also offers better seating and air conditioning.

Like the rest of the district, Begley said the transportation department is excited to get back to school this fall. There are concerns about COVID-19, but they have a year of experience to build off now.

Last year, they were "successful" at operating in a pandemic, he said, so they will continue to use best practices for cleaning buses  sanitizing buses three times a day and if possible, taking a bus out of service for 24 hours and then sanitizing when a rider tests positive.

"We believe it so important to provide the best possible educational experience for our students and that experience for many of our student starts with their bus ride to school," he said.
Since the new wave of race consciousness that has been sweeping our country, precipitated by the graphic video of the killing of George Floyd by police Officer Derek Chauvin, something very strange has happened.

Somehow, what is perceived as a problem has become widely understood to be the solution. And it is endangering our country.

If there remain citizens in America who, because of race or any other reason, are deprived of the benefits and protections of a free society, we should work to bring those benefits of freedom to them.

The answer is not to abandon the principles that make us a free country.

But this is what is happening. Those who are the loudest and most aggressive about what is supposedly wrong don't want a free country. Their complaint is not about absence of freedom, but who has power and who will be in charge and running the show.

Nothing could make this clearer than the recent bizarre statement of Black Lives Matter about the current civil unrest in Cuba.

Cuba is an unfree country. It has been run by communists for years. And, like all countries that are run by communists, the people there live deprived and oppressed.

This is not rhetoric. This is fact.
Alexandra Giniger recalled the night in her Brooklyn apartment in November 2016 when Bryan Scotland sat beside her, eating pizza on a mattress he had borrowed from a friend.

A few bites later, the sound of Michael Boltons When a Man Loves a Woman, began pouring through Mr. Scotlands cellphone, and he was soon on his feet, extending a hand to Ms. Giniger, asking her for a dance.

It was definitely one of the odder, but funnier moments of our relationship, right up there with a Halloween party we attended where I went as Rihanna and he as Drake, said Ms. Giniger, 33, the director of artist relations at Jack Shainman Gallery in Manhattan.

But thats Bryan, thats just who he is, she said. The reason I love him so much is that he allows me the freedom and the space I need to be me.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand ordered a pause on quarantine-free travel from Australia for at least eight weeks, citing coronavirus surges caused by the Delta variant that have left more than half of Australia under lockdown.

This is not a decision we have taken lightly but it is, we believe, the right one, Ms. Ardern told reporters at a news conference. This will mean many people will find themselves for a time once more separated from friends and families in Australia, and I know this announcement will be a disappointment to them.

The travel bubble was a rarity in Asia, where many countries have closed their borders during the pandemic, and had been largely successful as the two countries enforced strict controls to keep the virus at bay.

The emergence of the highly transmissible Delta variant, however, has challenged the Covid zero strategy in both countries. And sluggish vaccination programs, which have stalled reopenings in much of the Asia Pacific region, have provoked deep frustration among residents of Australia and New Zealand who have been in and out of lockdowns since the pandemic began.
Olympics medals start arriving

The Games opened on Friday to a sea of empty seats, and a somber opening ceremony that tried to project a world moving on from the worst of Covid-19. Naomi Osaka, Japans most famous athlete, lit the Olympic caldron.

The Japanese public is widely opposed to the Games. In quieter moments throughout the ceremony, protesters outside the stadium could be heard yelling Stop the Olympics through bullhorns. And NBC says that only 17 million people watched the opening ceremony, a record low for a Summer Olympics.

Still, over the course of the next two weeks, more than 11,000 athletes from 205 countries are expected to participate. Here are live updates and our medal count.

Australia: The womens swim team won its third straight gold medal in the 4x100-meter freestyle relay on Sunday in world-record time. Ashleigh Barty, the top-seeded Australian tennis player, was eliminated from the tournament.
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, President Bidens chief medical adviser, warned on Sunday that the coronavirus pandemic is now going in the wrong direction in the United States because too many Americans are still choosing not to get vaccinated.

Asked on CNNs State of the Union program about projections in recent statistical models that coronavirus cases and deaths could surge in the coming months if vaccination rates dont increase, Dr. Fauci said, Its not going to be good.

With about half of Americans not yet vaccinated and the fast-spreading Delta variant of the virus circulating, Dr. Fauci and a range of current and former health officials expressed exasperation at the situation on Sunday and vigorously pressed the case that vaccination is the best and most effective way to stem the tide of virus cases.

It is really a pandemic among the unvaccinated, Dr. Fauci said, adding, Its like you have two kinds of America. You have the very vulnerable unvaccinated part and you have the really relatively protected vaccinated part. If you are vaccinated, you are in a very different category than someone who is not vaccinated.
If its not done right, there are going to be people in New York State and especially New York City that are going to end up on the street or going into shelter, said Scott Auwarter, assistant executive director for BronxWorks, a nonprofit helping people apply for the aid.

State officials said 160,000 applications had been submitted as of Monday and that technical issues were being dealt with as quickly as they came up. They acknowledged that other states got an earlier start, but said their first priority was processing applications from the most indigent tenants.

We are now ready to safely and efficiently deliver billions of dollars in rental assistance to New Yorkers, said Justin Mason, a spokesman for the State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, which is administering the program.

Under the program, tenants who submit a properly completed application are protected from eviction even if the case is being processed and aid has not been distributed.

But the need in New York, which has more renters than any other state in the country, is enormous, and it remains to be seen how many struggling tenants will actually benefit from the program.

More than 830,000 households in New York State, the majority of which are in New York City, are behind on rent, with a total estimated debt of more than $3.2 billion, according to an analysis of census data by the National Equity Atlas, a research group associated with the University of Southern California.

Tenant advocates and housing lawyers have been scrambling for months to raise awareness about the program and said many people may not even know the aid exists.
Wildfire smoke threatens our health in ways many of us dont fully understand. Its tiny particles, which lodge deep in the recesses of our lungs, are a danger to asthmatics, as well as those with chronic health conditions like hypertension and heart disease. Inhaling the ash means breathing in elevated levels of lead, zinc and any number of chemicals.

The long-term effects of choking smoke are only recently being examined and the evidence thus far is not good. A study underway in the nearby town of Seeley Lake, Mont., has shown a significant decline in lung function for residents who endured hazardous air quality back in the 2017 fires. In Alberta, Canada, new research revealed persistent lung damage in firefighters who battled a 2016 wildfire. Definitive research is pending, but it seems that smoke fallout could very well be the Wests  and then the countrys  next health epidemic.

Even air quality experts are still trying to wrap their heads around this crisis. Sarah Coefield, who heads up Missoulas smoke readiness program for the local health department, said that when the valley was socked in with dangerous levels of smoke in 2017, the county was completely unprepared.

These extreme smoke events are a few decades old but the frequency were seeing is still quite new, she said. In 2017, I didnt know half of what I know now about indoor ventilation systems. Many of us still assumed most indoor buildings had clean air during fires.

Ms. Coefields research since 2017 has shown that the air quality in many of the towns public buildings during extreme smoke events is nearly as dangerous as the air outside. Her team found that many HVAC systems were outdated, missing filters or broken altogether.

We want to tell people to go inside for clean air  to the mall or the office or the movie theater, she said. We dont even know if the air theyre breathing there is clean. Part of the problem is a lack of government funding to address the impacts of wildfire smoke.

The smoke events are increasing in frequency and many residents are still uneducated as to how to clean the air in their homes. Smoke comes in even if the windows are closed. Without air-conditioning, many are forced to keep their windows open to help stave off the heat.
Gauge theory had been developed in the 19th century by James Clerk Maxwell, a British physicist, in his seminal work to explain electromagnetism. In the 1950s, it was used by Robert Mills and Chen Ning Yang, a Chinese American physicist, who later won the Nobel Prize, to understand strong-force interactions.

But Dr. Weinbergs application of gauge theory to the weak force soon ran into a problem.

Electromagnetism is a force that acts at large distances, but the weak force acts only at very short distances  smaller than the nucleus of an atom. In electromagnetism, when two particles  say, electrons  collide, they exchange a massless neutral particle called a photon, which is also known as a gauge boson. If two particles collide because of the weak force, gauge theory requires  because of the short distances of the interaction  that the gauge bosons that are exchanged be massive and possibly electrically charged.

Fortunately, several years earlier, physicists had come up with a way to generate mass for gauge bosons called the Higgs Mechanism. It was named for Peter Higgs, a British physicist, and it predicted the existence of a previously unknown particle that is responsible for giving other particles their mass. The particle was given the name the Higgs boson, and its discovery, in 2012, brought Dr. Higgs and his colleague Francois Englert the 2013 Nobel Prize.

Toward a Unified Theory

Using this new idea, Dr. Weinberg was able to create a model in which weak interactions produced massive, at least by atomic standards, gauge boson particles. He called them W and Z bosons.

His theory also predicted that in some collisions  for example, between two electrically neutral particles like a neutron and a neutrino  a neutral current, as opposed to a charged one, would be created, indicating that there had been an exchange of a Z boson.

Dr. Weinberg theorized that there was a link between the photon and the W and Z bosons, suggesting that they were created by the same force. The conclusion was that, at very high energy levels, the electromagnetic and weak forces were one and the same. It was a step on the path to the unified theory that physicists had been searching for.

Dr. Weinberg published his findings in 1967 in a groundbreaking paper, A Model of Leptons, in the journal Physical Review Letters. The article is one of the most cited research papers in history.
A day earlier, Mr. de Blasio said that he was not planning to mandate masks, noting that they were already required in many public areas, like schools, hospitals and the subway.

People need to get vaccinated, period, Mr. de Blasio said. Nothing will do what vaccination will do.

In late June, as U.S. Delta cases began increasing, Dr. Robert Wachter, the chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said he believed that the areas that would need protection most  those with the smallest proportion of full vaccination  might be the least prone to institute precautions.

What you will see is sort of a bizarre version of what youre already seeing in some places in the country, where the people who are most likely to wear masks inside are the vaccinated people, he said. They need it less than the unvaccinated people, but theyre not confident the unvaccinated people are wearing them.

Southern states seeing rises in reported infections have steered clear of mask mandates.

In Mississippi, where only 34 percent of the population is fully vaccinated, some hospitals are running out of intensive care capacity because of Covid, the states health officer, Dr. Thomas E. Dobbs III, said on Tuesday.

The state recently called for residents 65 and older or with chronic medical conditions to avoid large indoor gatherings, children 12 and older to be vaccinated and for unvaccinated people to wear masks in public, but it stopped short of a mandate.

In Texas, where only 43 percent of residents are fully vaccinated, there has been a 194 percent increase in the number of people testing positive in the last two weeks, according to a New York Times tracker.
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Months before the megachurch Hillsong opened its new outpost in Atlanta, its pastor sought advice on how to build a church in a pandemic.

From Facebook.

The social media giant had a proposition, Sam Collier, the pastor, recalled in an interview: to use the church as a case study to explore how churches can go further farther on Facebook.

For months Facebook developers met weekly with Hillsong and explored what the church would look like on Facebook and what apps they might create for financial giving, video capability or livestreaming. When it came time for Hillsongs grand opening in June, the church issued a news release saying it was partnering with Facebook and began streaming its services exclusively on the platform.
Two of the worlds most popular cryptocurrency exchanges announced on Sunday that they would curb a type of high-risk trading that has been blamed in part for sharp fluctuations in the value of Bitcoin and the casino-like atmosphere on such platforms globally.

The first move came from the exchange, FTX, which said it would reduce the size of the bets investors can make by lowering the amount of leverage it offers to 20 times from 101 times. Leverage multiplies the traders chance for not only profit, but also loss.

Were going to be the ones to take the first step here, Sam Bankman-Fried, 29, the billionaire founder of the platform, which operates from Hong Kong, said on Twitter on Sunday. Today, were removing high leverage from FTX. The greatest allowable will be 20x.

About 14 hours later, Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance, the worlds largest cryptocurrency exchange, echoed the move by FTX, announcing that his company had already started to limit leverage to 20 times for new users and it would soon expand this limit to other existing clients.
But these days, as Republicans in Congress have made it clear that they have no intention of turning against Mr. Trump, Ms. Mace has quietly backpedaled into the partys fold. Having once given more than a dozen interviews in a single day to condemn Mr. Trumps corrosive influence on the party, Ms. Mace now studiously avoids the subject, rarely if ever mentioning his name and saying it is time for Republicans to stop fighting with each other in public.

After setting herself apart from her party during her first week in office by opposing its effort to overturn President Bidens victory, Ms. Mace has swung back into line. She joined the vast majority of Republicans in voting to oust Representative Liz Cheney from leadership for denouncing Mr. Trump and his election lies. She also voted against forming an independent bipartisan commission to investigate the Capitol riot.

And rather than continuing to challenge party orthodoxy, Ms. Mace has leaned in to the most combative Republican talking points, castigating Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the top health official who is a favorite boogeyman of the right, accusing Democrats of forcing critical race theory on children, and publicly feuding with progressives.

Her pivot helps explain why the Republican Partys embrace of Mr. Trump and his brand of politics is more absolute than ever. It is not only the small but vocal group of hard-right loyalists of the former president who are driving the alliance, but also the scores of rank-and-file Republicans  even those who may disagree with him, as Ms. Mace has  who have decided it is too perilous to openly challenge him.

Shes a little bit like a new sailor; she tried to get her sea legs, but shes also looking out over the horizon, and what she saw was a storm coming in from the right, said Chip Felkel, a veteran Republican strategist in South Carolina. So she immediately started paddling in another direction. The problem is, is that everything you say and do, theres a record of it.
WASHINGTON  Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sunday appointed Representative Adam Kinzinger to the special committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, adding a second Republican who is a forceful critic of former President Donald J. Trump to the panel.

The move, which bolsters the committees bipartisan credentials, came after Ms. Pelosi rejected two Republicans who are among Mr. Trumps most vociferous defenders in Congress from joining, saying their conduct suggested they could not be trusted to participate.

Mr. Kinzinger, a six-term congressman from Illinois who has drawn censure from his own party for disavowing Mr. Trump and the conspiracy theories the former president perpetuated, said in a statement that he had accepted the post.

While this is not the position I expected to be in or sought out, when duty calls, I will always answer, said Mr. Kinzinger, one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump. This moment requires a serious, cleareyed, nonpartisan approach. We are duty bound to conduct a full investigation on the worst attack on the Capitol since 1814 and to make sure it can never happen again.
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GBARAMATU, Nigeria  When the tide rose under the rickety wooden house-on-stilts of Onitsha Joseph, a fisherwoman who lives above the twisting rivers of the Niger Delta in southern Nigeria, it brought a slick of crude oil.

Before long, she saw dead fish floating on oil inches thick, and fishing  her livelihood  became impossible. The fumes were so strong at one point that Ms. Joseph fainted. She was rushed to the hospital on a speedboat.

At first, she had no idea where it was coming from. Then, out with some other fisherwomen one day in February, she said they spotted something bubbling up to the rivers surface. Ms. Joseph steered her oil-blackened canoe closer.
A landslide in northern India caused boulders to tumble down a mountain and strike a vehicle, killing at least nine people, many believed to be tourists, and destroying a bridge.

Dramatic video showed the boulders rolling into a valley in the Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh. The Reuters news agency cited the Indo-Tibetan Border Police as saying that the vehicle had been carrying 11 people. In addition to the nine killed, two others, as well as a passer-by, were injured, Reuters said, citing its partner news agency ANI.Indias prime minister, Narendra Modi, offered his sympathies to relatives of those killed.

My heartfelt condolences to the families of those who lost their lives in this, Mr. Modi wrote on Twitter, according to Reuters. All arrangements are being made for the treatment of those injured in the accident.

Reuters quoted local news media as reporting that the people in the vehicle who were killed were visiting from Indias capital, Delhi, and elsewhere in the country.
The Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, after Mao died. Years later, after Mr. Yu had settled in Hong Kong, Chinese historians were beginning to explore the strife of previous decades. Under Deng Xiaoping, the Communist Party issued a resolution on history in 1981 that generally defended Maos legacy but acknowledged that he had made mistakes in his later decades that led to immense suffering.

After that, Chinese writers helped expose the scale of Maos disasters, like the Great Leap Forward, when tens of millions of villagers starved to death. Some were free-spirited academics or journalists; others were retirees who had lived through the events they dissected in blogs and journals.

Their work really made a difference, said Sebastian Veg, a professor who studies modern China at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences in Paris. They changed the way that people talk about the famine. Its no longer the three years of natural disasters, as official history put it, but a disaster of policies and politics.

Mr. Yu focused his research on the less understood role of Chinas military in Maos final decades. Mao could not have started the Cultural Revolution without support from military leaders; nor would it have ended without their role in arresting radical leaders after he died in 1976, Mr. Yu said. The one book that had appeared in mainland China about the Peoples Liberation Army in the Cultural Revolution was withdrawn from sale soon after appearing in 1989, he said.
KABUL, Afghanistan  The top American general overseeing operations in Afghanistan declined to say Sunday night whether U.S. airstrikes against the Taliban would end Aug. 31, the date previously given by officials as a cutoff for such attacks.

Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., the head of United States Central Command, refused to commit to ending the United States last remaining military leverage over the Taliban: airstrikes.

The insurgents recent advance across Afghanistan has resulted in the capture of over half the countrys districts, and now threatens its major cities.

Afghan forces have so far not been able to contain the Taliban since it intensified its military campaign May 1, with the countrys military ceding large swathes of territory, at times without a fight.
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PAPEETE, French Polynesia (AP)  President Emmanuel Macron is visiting French Polynesia to showcase Frances commitment to the region amid concerns about the impact of climate change on the Pacific island territory, the legacy of French nuclear testing on its atolls  and most of all, growing Chinese dominance in the region.

He started his trip Saturday night in Tahiti with a visit to a hospital and an appeal to get vaccinated against the virus. With the worlds eyes on the Tokyo Olympics, Macron will also discuss Tahitis role as host of Olympic surfing competition for the 2024 Paris Games.

The trip is aimed at reinforcing France's geopolitical presence in the Pacific. Macron was greeted with an 'orero, a traditional declaration by a respected storyteller, as he arrived in Tahitis main city Papeete  12 time zones away from Paris.

He may also face protests. Local activists held two demonstrations this month over long-standing demands for compensation, and an apology, over the underground and atmospheric nuclear tests carried out from 1966-1996. A Polynesian collective angry over French government plans to require health passes at restaurants and other venues also has threatened unspecified action.

Over four days, Macron will visit four sites spread out across an ocean territory thats as large as Europe.

With a multi-ethnic population of about 300,000, the former French colony is made up of five archipelagos with a total of 118 islands. Since 2004, it has autonomous status, defined as an overseas country within the republic which is governed freely and democratically, by its representatives.

But Macron is still its head of state, and the long-awaited visit is part of what his office calls his Tour de France aimed at reaffirming our proximity to overseas territories.

For historian Jean-Marc Regnault of the University of French Polynesia, this trip is linked to Frances determination to show its power in the Indo-Pacific, and its long-term resource objectives.

The 4.8 million-square-kilometer (1.85 million-square-mile) Exclusive Economic Zone of French Polynesia has significant fishing and mineral resources, and authorities are seeking U.N. permission to extend the territorys continental shelf.

France is trying to strike back at obvious Chinese lust for Pacific resources, said Regnault, who wrote a recent book called The Indo-Pacific and the New Silk Roads.

He pointed to a French military operation in the region last month, when Rafale warplanes and other military jets zipped from Europe to French Polynesia in a show of strength.

China is the biggest trading partner for its Asian-Pacific neighbors, who are eager to profit from its appetite for industrial components and iron ore, timber, oil and food. But they are uneasy about Beijings use of access to its markets to push for political concessions. France, the United States, Japan and other governments worry China is seeking to gain influence in their strategic spheres.

Macron also plans to discuss climate concerns, and visit a port to celebrate a local fishing industry thats seen as a model of sustainability.

Macron won't be able to avoid the nuclear issue, though hes not expected to make any new promises during the visit.

He ordered high-level meetings earlier this month on the issue in an operation called Reko Tika, which means truth and justice in the paumotu language. But the Polynesian delegation reported minimal progress on their demands, including declassifying government archives and facilitated compensation over the health and environmental damage from the tests.

___

Joe McDonald in Beijing contributed to this report.
LONDON (AP)  Around two-thirds of female veterans in the British armed forces have experienced bullying, harassment or discrimination in their careers, a parliamentary report said Sunday.

The report also said that women who reported serious sexual offences are denied justice by an inadequate military court system and complaints process.

Parliaments defense committee found that 64% of female veterans and 58% of serving women said they have experienced bullying, harassment, discrimination in the army. Most say they don't believe the military does enough to address the problem.

The committee heard accounts of unacceptable behaviors experienced by servicewomen, including gang rape, bullying for refusing sexual advances and assault by senior officers. Others reported witnessing friends being attacked by groups of men but being too afraid to report it, and said mess halls and accommodation were seen as places of danger.

The complaints system, as it stands, is woefully inadequate and leaves most feeling unable to come forward, said lawmaker and veteran Sarah Atherton, who chairs the subcommittee on women in the armed forces. We also heard accusations of senior officers sweeping complaints under the rug to protect their own reputations and careers.

She said it was clear that serious sexual offenses shouldn't be tried in the court martial system.

It cannot be right that conviction rates in military courts are four to six times lower than in civilian courts. Military women are being denied justice, Atherton said.

Around 4,200 women, including about one in 10 serving female personnel, contributed to the inquiry. It was the first time the Ministry of Defense lifted the usual restrictions preventing personnel from taking part in inquiries.

The report urged authorities to hand cases of rape and sexual assault from military courts to the civilian court system, and called for the creation of a new defense authority independent from the chain of command to look into allegations of bullying, harassment and discrimination.

The committee also detailed practical challenges for female personnel. More than three-quarters of serving female officers who took part in the survey complained about ill-fitting uniforms and body armor that placed them at greater risk of harm in combat.

And the report said that serving mothers often make the greatest career sacrifices and sometimes leave the military because of the difficulties in balancing service and family life. Among mid-ranking officers, 90% of men have children compared to 10% of women.

Defense minister Annabel Goldie said that while many changes have been introduced to improve the experience for women in the armed forces, the reality is that that experience is not yet equal, and very occasionally can be really harmful.
Funeral service for Linda Michelle Robinson Caldwell, 65, who passed away on Friday, July 16, 2021 in Waterloo, Iowa. Viewing will be held on Friday, July 30, 2021 at Emanuel Funeral Home of Corsicana from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Funeral will be held on Saturday, July 31, 2021 at Second Mission Ba
MADRID (AP)  Madrids tree-lined Paseo del Prado boulevard and the adjoining Retiro park have been added to UNESCOs World Heritage list.

The UNESCO World Heritage Committee, holding an online meeting from Fuzhou, China, backed the candidacy on Sunday that highlighted the green areas introduction of nature into Spains capital. The influence the properties have had on the designs of other cities in Latin America was also applauded by committee members.

Collectively, they illustrate the aspiration for a utopian society during the height of the Spanish Empire, UNESCO said.

The Retiro park occupies 1.2 square kilometers (1.3 square miles) in the center of Madrid. Next to it runs the Paseo del Prado, which includes a promenade for pedestrians. The boulevard connects the heart of Spains art world, bringing together the Prado Museum with the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum and the Reina Sofia Art Centre.

The boulevard dates back to 16th century while the park was originally for royal use in the 17th century before it was fully opened to the public in 1848.

Today, in these times of pandemic, in a city that has suffered enormously for the past 15 months, we have a reason to celebrate with the first world heritage site in Spains capital, said Madrid mayor Jose Luis Martinez-Almeida.

The site is number 49 for Spain on the UNESCO list.

Also on Sunday, the committee added Chinas Emporium of the World in Song-Yuan, Indias Kakatiya Rudreshwara Temple, and the Trans-Iranian railway to the World Heritage list.

World Heritage sites can be examples of outstanding natural beauty or manmade buildings. The sites can be important geologically or ecologically, or they can be key for human culture and tradition.

Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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NORMAL  Christmas came early to uptown Normal on Saturday, marking what organizers hope could be an annual tradition.

Around a half dozen businesses organized a themed sales event dubbed "Christmas in July," the last day of which will fall Sunday, July 25  five months from actual Christmas Day.

The weekend sales spanned regular items at local businesses, but also included some holiday-themed displays.

At The Garlic Press, co-owners Pam Locsin and Sarah Bushnell McManus had a mailbox ready for letters to Santa, gingerbread houses prepped for impromptu decorating and a display of Christmas ornaments and bakeware out on sale.

For McManus, the July event could almost be described as serendipitous.

"I've always wanted to do decorating gingerbread houses at Christmastime, but our store is so crazy-busy that space-wise, I was like, we can't do that, too," she said. "But today is the first time we've ever done (decorating) and I'm really excited."

McManus said she'd hesitated at first about not putting a registration date online, but by 11 a.m., she'd nearly filled up.

Kara Anderson had come with her children to the Children's Discovery Museum earlier that morning and told The Pantagraph she'd dropped in to The Garlic Press on a whim.

Once the children saw the gingerbread display laid out on a table normally used in cooking classes, Anderson said their day was set.

"We dropped in and we were like, 'Oh, they have gingerbread houses,'" she said. "So we were like, OK, we're doing this."

Nearby, Mindy Theobald of Theo's Microcreamery was also experiencing a "first."

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The ice cream shop has been in her ownership for two years after being in her mother's for 14, but February marked the first opportunity she had to pivot to handmade flavors.

Theobald, one of the business owners who'd suggested the Christmas in July event via a meeting a couple of months ago, had special flavors prepared for the weekend: Christmas sugar cookie and peppermint Oreo.

"I just wanted something where people were going to be walking around," she said of the idea. "I hope that it gets bigger every year  we wanted to have a Santa come, but you know how ideas go: They start really big."

Theobald said the themed weekend is aimed at getting people to travel around uptown Normal, in part to curb a business downturn last year and this year due to COVID-19, but also to draw new faces to the area.

"There's so many awesome shops out here that it's the craziest thing how often people come in here that have never been uptown before," she said. "I think every time you do a different kind of event, you're drawing in a different crowd."

At Uptown Gifts and Accessories, manager Lisa Hoffbauer had put out a table of discounted Christmas ornaments and accessories, but she was also enjoying the foot traffic of regulars who visit her store for the conversation  and Saturday morning mimosas.

"Lisa is our main draw," joked friend Kellie Duzan. "But this is a great shop. We came out because it's always crowded and we love it. It's a great place to be."

Apricot Lane owner Stephanie Williams said she hopes that, in the long run, more events like Saturday's will prompt businesses to make their home in uptown Normal.

"We're trying to make this more family-friendly,"' she said. "We're really just trying to rejuvenate things."

"Really, it worked out, but we're trying to have some Christmas cheer with a 110 heat index today."

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One hundred and sixty years ago this month, a broadside poster was printed and distributed across Illinois asking for 300,000 troops to join the Union Army.

At the time there were only 16,367 men serving in the U.S. military and President Abraham Lincoln desperately needed men to volunteer to help sustain the Union in the early days of the Civil War. In McLean County, 3,200 men joined 15 regiments, often doing so in groups of men with similar backgrounds  including regiments of ethnic and racial identities, merchants, lawyers, and even a teachers regiment.

Three hundred men enlisted in McLean Countys Teachers Regiment led by Illinois State Normal Universitys first president, Charles Hovey. The Vermont native began teaching at the age of 15, studied law briefly, and then earned a teaching degree from Dartmouth in 1852. Soon afterward, he moved to Illinois where he was superintendent of Peoria Schools. By 1857 Hovey was serving on the State of Illinois first Board of Education, which was working to organize Illinois first state university.

At that time, he met Lincoln, then a Springfield lawyer who served as legal counsel to the board. In 1857 Hovey became ISNUs first president. But when the Civil War began, he made a special request to Lincoln to create a schoolmasters regiment and resigned from his position at ISNU.

Hovey was commissioned colonel of the 33rd Illinois Volunteer Infantry (or "Teachers Regiment") on Aug. 15, 1861. The regiment organized at Camp Butler in Springfield in September 1861. Its members included many teachers and former students from ISNU. On September 20, 1861, the 33rd moved to Ironton, Missouri, where it was based until March 1862.

Among those who volunteered was Henry M. Kellogg, the principal at Bloomington High School. The Massachusetts native, his wife, Amanda, and their son, Harry, arrived in Bloomington in 1857. He enlisted as a private on Aug. 30, 1861 but was soon a lieutenant of Company C of the 33rd.

Five months later, on Jan. 24, 1862, Kellogg was made captain and subsequently led his company through several skirmishes and the battles of Port Gibson, Champion Hill, Black River Bridge and Cache River.

On the morning of May 6, 1863, Kellogg wrote to his wife. He briefly detailed the Battle of Champion Hill  including a near miss by a shell that took off his hat  and their victory, noting that Vicksburg, Mississippi, in a few days will be ours. He finished with God bless you in all things my darling wife & boy.

Two weeks later, on May 20, 1st Lt. Edward J. Lewis of Company C witnessed Kellogg as he led his troops into battle.

Lewis later wrote: I saw him as he marched ... with a clear presentiment of his fate, calm, and resolute. When upon the ground he pointed to a little eminence in front saying, I shall fall near that spot. Then, as they went forward to the attack, (Kellogg) being in advance of his company, waved his sword above his head, calling out to his men, Follow me to victory or death. He (Kellogg) fell within ten feet of the spot he had pointed out, and when removed a few moments after, his sword was held so firmly that it required some force in unclasping his hand from the hilt.

Kellogg was just 27 at the time of his death.

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Though not a teacher, Lewis, a transplant from Philadelphia, had moved to Bloomington at the invitation of Jesse W. Fell who asked him to serve as editor of the Weekly Pantagraph in 1856. As editor Lewis focused on local news and political issues, particularly ones concerning the newly formed Republican Party.

By late 1857 Lewis was also editing a daily edition of The Pantagraph. He resigned in January 1860 to go west to hunt for gold but returned that fall a poorer man. In April 1861 Lewis returned to the work of editor for The Pantagraph and was there to announce the beginning of hostilities at Fort Sumter and the start of the Civil War.

When he resigned again, it was to join Hoveys teachers regiment. He mustered into the 33rd as a private of Company C on Aug. 15, 1861.

Lewis became first lieutenant of Company C just a few days prior to Kelloggs death at Vicksburg. On July 2, 1863, he officially replaced Kellogg as captain of Kelloggs company. That summer, the 33rd destroyed the railways near Jackson, Mississippi, then marched to Vicksburg for the successful siege that helped cement Union control of the river.

The regiment then traveled south to New Orleans and then by steamship to Brownsville, Texas, on the Gulf of Mexico to fight Confederate forces at Fort Esperanza in late November 1863. After a short battle, Confederate soldiers abandoned the fort. Lewis wrote, The key to one of the most important harbors in Texas is in our possession, and the path to Galveston and the rich interior of the Lone Star State is virtually open.

In January 1864, members of the 33rd were asked to reenlist. Those who chose to do so left Texas and headed home for a short furlough. On April 18, the regiment reorganized at Camp Butler and proceeded to New Orleans where they rejoined with those who had not reenlisted and had been temporarily assigned to the 99th.

The 33rd moved on to Bayou Boeuf, Louisiana, where they provided protection to the railroad. After eight months Lewis noted: We gladly welcome the prospect of a return to active service. We were weary of inaction and the comparative stagnation of garrison life.

On March 2, 1865, they headed back to New Orleans by train. But the train derailed when the engine hit a horse on the tracks. Nine men were killed and over 70 injured. Fortunately, the members of the 33rd were at the end of the train and suffered only minor injuries.

After a few days in New Orleans, they headed east and north up the east side of Mobile Bay to Spanish Fort, a heavily fortified defense to the city of Mobile, Alabama, across the bay. As part of the 16th Army Corps, they laid siege to the fort and by April 8 it was captured.

The following day they were at Fort Blakely, five miles to the north, which was already surrounded by Union forces and succumbed later that day. The fall of Spanish Fort and Fort Blakely permitted Union troops to subsequently enter Mobile unopposed after the Army of Mobile evacuated the city, occupying it on April 12, 1865. That same day, they learned that on April 9 Gen. Robert E. Lee had surrendered.

After the surrender, the federal government kept many Union soldiers active, including members of the 33rd. A disgruntled Lewis penned a letter to The Pantagraph on June 23 writing: It does seem to me that the Government ought to feel honor bound to release the volunteer forces with all the speed which is at all consistent with the general safety. The volunteer soldiers took up arm for a special purpose, the crushing of the rebellion. ... It seems to me very like a breach of contract to hold them for the full time of their enlistment, to do police duty in the subjugated States, or to use them as a weapon to threaten or to actually prosecute a foreign war, for which they never volunteered.

This opinion was repeated in a subsequent Pantagraph article two months later. Lewis regiment was finally mustered out of service on Dec. 7, 1865, and he retired from The Pantagraph in 1879.

Hovey was wounded in the arm during the January 1863 battle to capture Arkansas Post and left field service. With the close of the war, he was given a brevet promotion to major general "for gallant and meritorious conduct in that battle. After the war, Hovey and his wife moved to Washington, D.C., and he became a successful pension lobbyist and practicing attorney.

In all, the 33rd Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment suffered the loss of two officers and 56 enlisted men who were killed in action or who died of their wounds, and one officer and 250 enlisted men who died of disease  a total of 309 war fatalities.

Visit the McLean County Museum of History through the month of July to see a replica of the 33rd Regimental Flag, on loan from the Dr. Jo Ann Rayfield Archives, Illinois State University, on display in the rotunda.

Pieces From Our Past is a weekly column by the McLean County Museum of History. Susan Hartzold is curator of collections and exhibits at the museum.

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WASHINGTON (AP)  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sunday named a second Republican critic of Donald Trump, Rep. Adam Kinzinger, to a special committee investigating the Capitol riot and pledged that the Democratic-majority panel will "get to the truth." Kinzinger said he "humbly accepted" the appointment even as his party's leadership is boycotting the inquiry.

With the committee set to hold its first meeting, hearing from police officers who battled the rioters, Pelosi said it was imperative to learn what happened on Jan. 6, when insurrectionists disrupted the congressional certification of Joe Biden's presidential victory, and why the violent siege took place. That mission, she said, must be pursued in a bipartisan manner to ensure "such an attack can never happen again."

Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican, will bring "great patriotism to the committee's mission: to find the facts and protect our Democracy," she said in a statement.

He joins Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, as the two committee's Republicans, both selected by the leader of the opposition party.

Kinzinger and Cheney were among the 10 House Republicans to vote for Trump's second impeachment. They were the only two Republicans who voted last month to form the special committee.

"For months, lies and conspiracy theories have been spread, threatening our self-governance," Kinzinger said in a statement. "For months, I have said that the American people deserve transparency and truth on how and why thousands showed up to attack our democracy."

"I will work diligently to ensure we get to the truth and hold those responsible for the attack fully accountable," he said.

House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy has said the GOP will not participate after Pelosi, D-Calif., refused to accept two of the members he picked.

McCarthy, R-Calif., has said the committee was a "sham process" and withdrew his five members when Pelosi rejected two of them, Reps. Jim Banks of Indiana and Jim Jordan of Ohio. Both voted on Jan. 6 against certifying Biden's election victory over Trump and both are outspoken allies of the former president.

In a statement Sunday, McCarthy said Pelosi's decision to reject his picks and appoint members "who share her preconceived narrative will not yield a serious investigation" and is intended "to satisfy her political objectives."

Kinzinger and Cheney have faulted Trump as a factor in spurring the insurrection with his persistently false claims that the 2020 election was "stolen" due to voting fraud.

In recent weeks, Kinzinger has suggested he would be open to serving on the committee, despite threats from McCarthy that Republicans who accept a spot could be stripped of their regular committee assignments as retaliation for participating.

"It's clear that Pelosi only wants members on this committee who will stick to her talking points and stick to her narrative. That's why she's picked the group that she's already picked," Banks said on "Fox News Sunday." He said that "anyone that she asks to be on this committee, from this point moving forward, will be stuck to her -- her narrative, to her point of view. There won't be another side."

The House voted in May to create an independent investigation that would have been evenly split between the parties, but Senate Republicans blocked that approach. Pelosi said the new panel was being created only because a bipartisan commission was no longer an option.

Currently Cheney sits on the committee along with seven Democrats  ensuring they have a quorum to proceed, whether other Republicans participate or not.

Seven people died during and after the rioting, including a woman who was shot by police as she tried to break into the House chamber and three other Trump supporters who suffered medical emergencies. Two police officers died by suicide in the days that followed, and a third officer, Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, collapsed and later died after engaging with the protesters. A medical examiner determined he died of natural causes.

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Look to the restaurants!

Around these parts we hear it often, but it bears repeating, that statistically McLean County residents dine out as often as anyone in the country.

Restaurants are, almost by definition, small business enterprises. At the Illinois Small Business Development Center of McLean County at Illinois Wesleyan University (SBDC), we consult with a lot of clients who are launching eating establishments, but we also encourage a lot of entrepreneurs to look to restaurants for best practices in retail marketing. Im going to highlight a couple of ideas for restaurants, but it doesnt take a lot of imagination to apply them to any small business concern.

Presentation is critical. Successful eateries present their product on the plate in an attractive manner that is consistent with their brand. Social media photos for marketing purposes should be interestingly arranged, colorful, and provide a context (in this case, silverware, flowers, or something else indigenous to the specific dining experience.)

Online presence is more critical than ever. Every restaurant has, of course, a kitchen behind the scenes, but in 2021 and moving forward theres an entire engine of online and social media activity that is needed to drive a successful concern. Its a big plus to have an interface for customers to reserve a table, or order for pickup or delivery. At the very least, the menu has to go online to attract customers and get them excited about their visit even if theyve already decided to come to you.

There may be no type of business that has more to gain from constantly and consistently engaging customers electronically. There are a plethora of places a customer review could appear, and the restaurant should respond courteously to those comments. Its also a great way to engage the community, supporting other community-relations efforts like meal donations or non-profit sponsorships.

Work to enhance the onsite experience. Even high-end restaurants will sometimes provide free samples of interesting hors doeuvres by way of an amuse bouche. If not this time, maybe on their next visit the customer will buy the full-size portion.

Think about ways to enhance the onsite experience. Can you accommodate live music? Can you take advantage of local scenery with window seating (or attract walk-by business by displaying customers having a great time in the window)? Encourage return customers with some sort of loyalty program. (Be creative. It doesnt have to be a punch card.)

Are you starting or operating a restaurant? Or are you inspired to emulate what restaurants do in your business? Reach out to SBDC, (www.mcleancosbdc.org). Weve got a whole buffet of good ideas!

Buy  and eat  local, please. Local small businesses are the backbone of our community.

Karen Bussone is director of the Small Business Development Center, Illinois Wesleyan University.

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The mob of Donald Trump supporters that unleashed an insurrection on the Capitol building Jan. 6 put Washington, D.C.  and the rest of the country  in a state of extreme alert. Thousands of National Guard troops from across the country, including Illinois National Guard soldiers, arrived at the nations capital to secure the city ahead of Joe Bidens inauguration. More were deployed to safeguard state capitals.

Deployments of troops from the Illinois National Guard and from other states continued into late May, to help fend off any further mayhem. Roughly 300 Illinois Guard soldiers were sent to Washington before the inauguration. Most of them returned after that day, but later Gov. J.B. Pritzker sent another 500 troops after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warned of a heightened threat environment across the United States.

It was an anxious, tragic moment in our nations history, and Illinois National Guard troops did their part to restore to the nations capital an air of calm.

The cost of feeding, paying and housing those Illinois National Guard troops between the time of the insurrection and May 25 amounted to about $31 million. The price tag for all National Guard soldiers securing the capital in the insurrection aftermath: $521 million.

Almost all of the Illinois National Guards budget is paid for by the federal government. Illinois Guard members, many of them men and women who serve part time, stepped up. Now the federal government wont step up.

So far, Congress has failed to approve reimbursement for costs incurred by Illinois Guard deployment to Washington. If federal lawmakers neglect to act by Aug. 1, furloughs would have to be imposed, which would cut two months pay for roughly 13,000 Illinois National Guard members, along with an additional 1,000 civilian workers.

Members of the states National Guard deserve much better. In all sorts of crises, guard members make a difference. Remember National Guard personnel at COVID-19 vaccination sites, ensuring Illinoisans get their inoculations in a safe, organized manner? And in 1993, when massive floods along the Mississippi River covered roughly 873,000 acres of Illinois farmland and left legions homeless, members of the National Guard helped sandbag and made sure food and water got to thousands of Illinoisans.

Congress inaction is foolhardy in part because of the message that sends: Thanks for your help, now you can continue to do your part by forgoing two months pay. Thats not Washington having the National Guards back  thats Washington turning its back on the Guard. Drills in August and September would have to be shelved, National Guard officials say, along with annual training events. Missing out on two months pay would cost someone with the services most common rank, specialist, about $700 and $1,200 if he or she were slated for annual training, according to Military.com.

The pay cuts would have an incredibly negative impact  not only on our readiness, but on the morale and probably the retention of our soldiers and airmen long-term, said Adjutant Gen. Richard Neely, commander of the Illinois Army and Air National Guard, in remarks reported this week in the Springfield State Journal-Register.

Congress can fix this quickly and easily. Pay members of the National Guard for their work. Do your job, Congress, so that the men and women of the National Guard can do theirs.

Chicago Tribune

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What is wrong with us? asked California Governor Newsome after the mass shooting at the VTA rail yard in San Jose. Critics answer saying, our problems are due to outdated religion, bigoted Christians and corrupt police forces. But lets look a little deeper via a story.

The dog Fideo had compassionate owners, good quality dog food and regular pet visits. He had a nice bed and a large yard which to play. But that yard was fenced with an underground wire. This aggravated Fideo one day with a mighty jump he cleared the buried wire with only a mild shock. He was really free. But outside the fence he was almost hit by a car, had a fight with another dog and couldnt find drinking water or food. He barely outran the dog catcher. Humbly he went back home and waited to be let into his safe fenced yard.
To this 71-year-old, much of todays political turmoil reflects a struggle between fulfilling the countrys founding ideals and maintaining subtle systems of keeping racial minority populations from rising up to true freedom.

An example of this struggle is reflected in Michael Reagans column of July 3, in which he claims that African Americans who protest for civil rights in the U.S. need a history lesson.

Reagan claims that Black Lives Matter and those who apply Critical Race Theory to analyze our culture need to acknowledge all the good that has been done to make American a better, fairer, freer country that lives up to its founding ideals.

Reagan does not admit or understand that past progress toward making the country live up to its ideals happened through peaceful protest. Apparently, the non-violent civil rights movement, led by African Americans, does not hold a significant place in his understanding of how good has come about.

In his critique of current protests, Reagan fails to value the first-hand experience of many African Americans who, by design in public policy, continue to be excluded from police protection, decent housing, economic opportunities, justice in courts, effect public education and once again, voting rights.

Reagans view reflects either the cluelessness or the soft-pedaled public face of white supremacy. He knows his call for a history lesson will not influence protesters. Instead, he seeks to reassure a white majority that their silence in the face of people trying to gain their civil rights is justified.

Complicity to injustice is part of the real history of the United States. Changes have happened but not enough to achieve liberty and justice for all. May protests continue.

Tom Clemens, Normal

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Dr. Yaw Osei Adutwum, the Minister of Education says the government has allocated land for the construction of girls STEM Senior High School (SHS) in Kpone Katamanso, Accra affiliated with the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS).

The 12.6 acres of land will also be used for the construction of a world-class campus for AIMS to nurture Ghana and Africa's talented female students from SHS to tertiary in STEM-related fields of study.



The project, the Minister said, was part of the 11-model state-of-the art Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) SHS being built across the country to be equipped with 12 laboratories and a STEM pathway established in some existing SHS with four laboratories.



The Minister announced this on Saturday at the 9th graduation ceremony of AIMS Ghana, of which 37 students from 11 African countries graduated with a Master of Mathematical Sciences degree in Accra.



He said the government's agenda to promote STEM education was part of a grand plan to increase the Science Humanities ratio from the current 40:60 to 60:40 in favour of the Sciences.



Government priority in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education is part of Ghana's reform project to reposition the educational system to equip learners with the 21st-century skills to be fit for purpose.





It is also to prepare the critical mass of empowered Ghanaians for socio-economic transformation and become active participants in the 4th Industrial Revolution.



Dr. Adutwum said Ghana's Gross Tertiary Enrolment Ratio (GTER) stands at 18.84 per cent, which fell short of the target of 25 per cent envisaged by the Education Strategic Plan.



He said the government had established the Open University Ghana to complement the efforts of the existing universities to increase the GTER from 18.84 per cent to 40 per cent by 2030.



A study conducted by Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in 2012, shows that 60 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product of France, Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom is contributed by students who acquired tertiary education of over 55 per cent.







The Minister urged the grandaunts to put to good use the knowledge acquired and be innovative and identify challenges as an opportunity for solutions.



"AIMS Ghana has prepared you not just on the academic front but to play your part in the development of your respective countries. Your countries need your input and you must at every stage of your life play your part in turning Africa's challenges around for the better", he said.



Dr. Prince Koree Osei, Centre President, AIMS Ghana, said the Institute since its inception in 2012 had graduated 324 students from 25 African countries of which 33 per cent were females.



The Institute, he said had built a research capacity in areas of opportunity for Africans in Pure and Applied Mathematics, stressing that the programmes were in line with the core objectives of UNESCO Category II Centre of Excellence and AIMS Global Network.



He said AIMS Ghana and the University of Energy and Natural Resources in June 2021 signed a Memorandum of Understanding towards the implementation of the Climate Change and Atmospheric Physics Programme.



He commended government and development partners for the support to the Institute and pledged to continue to strengthen its training and research programmes in Mathematical Sciences.



Ms. Kati Csaba, the Canadian High Commissioner to Ghana expressed commitment to support AIMS to deliver quality education and evidence-based solutions to issues confronting Africa.



Ms. Lydie Hakizimana, the Chief Executive Officer, AIMS Next Einstein Initiative urged the grandaunts to devote time to analyse the business environment, and develop a comprehensive business plan for their projects.



Mr. Andrew Kwasi Boahen, the Overall Best Student on behalf of the students thanked AIMS Ghana and all who supported in the pursuit of their academic laurels and pledged to be critical thinkers and problem-solver.







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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 University of Professional Studies, Accra (UPSA), will tomorrow confer an Honorary Doctorate Degree on the Minister of Energy, Dr. Matthew Opoku Prempeh.



Doctor of Humane Letters (D.HL) would be conferred on the minister, for his outstanding performance in leadership.



Dr. Prempeh was once honoured by the University of Education, Winneba, with a Doctorate Degree, on May 26, 2021, in recognition of his hardwork as the Minister of Education.



The minister, who is also the Member of Parliament for Manhyia South in the Ashanti Region, was a surprise element in the ministerial list of Present Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addos first term, as many were earlier astonished when he was named as the Education Minister.



That anxiety came as a result of his background as a Medical Doctor with no knowledge in education management.



Amazingly, he excelled and ensured the successful implementation of the governments flagship programme, Free Senior High School (Free SHS).



Through his sterling leadership, teething problems that came with the introduction of the Free SHS were resolutely confronted.



Dr. Prempeh is on record to be the only Minister of Education under whose watch there was no industrial action by any of the unions in the education sector.



That feat was chalked because the former Education Minister was able to establish a sincere rapport with the unions and, was ever-ready to jaw-jaw with them.



Dr. Prempeh, who is currently the Minister of Energy, is again displaying high-level leadership, as he works to fix the current energy situation.



He works as team leader and always on the field to monitor how works bordering on the countries energy sector, especially, was progressing.



Matthew Opoku Prempeh



Hon. Dr. Matthew Opoku Prempeh, a Medical Doctor by profession, is current Ghanas Minister of Energy and the Member of Parliament for Manhyia South Constituency.



He became a medical officer at Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital from 1995 to 1997 after KNUST but left in 1998 to pursue his Masters degree in Clinical Epidemiology in the Netherlands Institute of Health Sciences. He joined the National Health Service, United Kingdom as Senior Health Officer in 1999 until he left in 2003. Whilst in the United Kingdom, he became a member of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of the United Kingdom in 2002.



Dr. Prempeh became the Executive Chairman of Keyedmap Services Limited, Ghana, a private Security Firm in 2003 but resigned in 2009 after he joined the political race in Ghana in 2008 where he contested and won his first election to Parliament on the ticket of the New Patriotic Party to represent Manhyia Constituency in Kumasi, Ashanti Region.



In 2012, the total number of constituencies was increased from 230 to 275 prior to the general election. Manhyia South Constituency was thus created and Dr. Prempeh was elected to represent the constituency in Parliament. In 2016, he was re-elected with 86.17% of the votes cast in the constituency.



He again won the 2020 Parliamentary election to represent the Manhyia South Constituency again.



He has served on several Parliamentary Committees such as Health, Appointments, Special Budget, and Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation.



He was sworn as the Education Minister of Ghana in January 2017 by the President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akuffo Addo. In May 2017, Dr. Opoku Prempeh was named by the President as a member of his Cabinet,



He is presently the Minister of Energy and a member of President Akufo-Addos Cabinet for his second term.

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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 government of Ghana is set to invest some US$25 million as seed money towards the establishment of a National Vaccine Institute in a bid to produce COVID-19 vaccine locally.



President Akufo-Addo announced this in his 26th address to the nation on measures being implemented to fight the Covid-19 pandemic, on Sunday, July 25.



According to him, Government has committed to inject seed funding of some twenty-five million United States dollars (US$25 million) this year, into this enterprise



The institute when established will have six mandates:



1. establishing local vaccine manufacturing plants;



2. deepening Research & Development (R&D) for vaccines in Ghana;



3. upgrading and strengthening the FDA;



4. forging bilateral and multilateral partnerships for vaccine manufacturing in various areas, such as funding, clinical trials, technology transfer, licensing, and assignment of intellectual property rights;



5. building the human resource base for vaccine discovery, development, and manufacture; and



6. establishing a permanent national secretariat to coordinate vaccine development and manufacture.



Read the full speech below



Fellow Ghanaians, good evening.



I have not come into your homes for some time, because I had hoped that the next time I did so, I would come to announce that we were ready to lift the restrictions and protocols, and get our lives and economy back to normal. Alas, that is not the case, so it has become necessary for me to come to your homes this evening, after a ten (10) week absence, to provide you with an update on our nations COVID-19 situation.



As per data available from the Ghana Health Service, it appears that, unfortunately, our nation, like many others, is experiencing a third wave of COVID-19 infections.



These increased infections have largely been driven by the Delta Variant of the virus, which, according to the World Health Organisation, has increased transmissibility rates, and, in our case in Ghana, has led, in recent weeks, to a rise in hospitalisation and ICU bed uptakes, and, tragically, deaths.



Indeed, in Update No.25, the last update I rendered on 16th May, our total active case count stood at one thousand, three hundred and fourteen (1,314), with our daily infection rate standing at one hundred (100). One million, one hundred and twenty-one thousand, one hundred and sixty-eight (1,121,168) COVID tests had been conducted, out of which ninety-two thousand, four hundred and sixty (92,460) persons had been infected, ninety-one thousand, one hundred and forty-six (91,146) persons had recovered, with a total of seven hundred and eighty-three (783) deaths.





Since that update, the situation improved significantly, whereby, in June, our active cases stood at some one thousand, two hundred (1,200); our daily infection rate fell to fifty (50) cases; and we recorded ten (10) deaths in the whole of the month.



However, in recent weeks, we have seen a marked increase in the number of cases. As at Friday, 23rd July 2021, three (3) weeks later, the Ghana Health Service is now reporting that our total number of active cases stands at four thousand, five hundred and twenty-one (4,521). A total of one million, four hundred and six thousand, and eleven (1,406,011) tests have been conducted, out of which one hundred and two thousand, one hundred and three (102,103) persons have been infected with the virus, and ninety-six thousand, seven hundred and fifty-nine (96,759) persons have recovered. Our daily infection rate for the past week is three hundred and fifty (350) cases, and, sadly, forty (40) more people have died from COVID over the last ten (10) weeks, bringing the cumulative number of deaths to eight hundred and twenty-three (823) since the onset of the pandemic. Greater Accra and Greater Kumasi Metropolitan areas remain the hotspots of infections. This entire development is very alarming.



Fellow Ghanaians, it is obvious from the data that we have let our guard down, with many going about their daily duties in clear breach of and disregard for the protocols. At a time when the economy is on the rebound, and business activities picking up, we must do everything possible to contain this outbreak. We cannot afford to return to the days of partial lockdowns, which brought considerable hardships and difficulties for all of us.



You returned me to office in the elections of 7th December with a clear and decisive mandate to protect lives and livelihoods, and steer our nation out of the grips of the pandemic, and onto a path of sustained economic growth and progress. Fortunately for us, we have tried and tested response protocols which we have implemented since March 2020. They have stood us in good stead, and we have no choice but to return to the strict implementation of some of them.



It is extremely troubling to note that the high compliance rate with mask-wearing has fallen alarmingly. The wearing of masks in public places, fellow Ghanaians, continues to be mandatory. There are no exceptions to this rule, and strict conformity with this protocol will be enforced. Anyone found to be flouting this directive will have him or herself to blame. We cannot afford anyones recklessness to endanger the lives of the majority of persons in the country.





The COVID-19 Taskforce, which I chair, has recommended that a second look be taken at the protocols that have been put in place for social and public gatherings, in particular weddings and funerals, across the country. I have, in previous updates, emphasised the need for the strict observance of safety protocols at all such gatherings. To ensure that such gatherings do not become the sources of infections, the following must be adhered to by all at these gatherings:



the wearing of masks continues to be mandatory, and persons must respect the enhanced hygiene protocols; all such events must be held in open air spaces;



2. the duration of such events is limited to two (2) hours;



3. there must be observance of the one (1) metre social distancing rule; and



4. handshakes must be avoided.



Furthermore, given that people sitting together to eat, drink, laugh, dance and talk in large gatherings, without masks, are the riskiest activities for spreading the virus, all post-event receptions, particularly related to weddings and funerals, are banned. I want to reiterate that protocols surrounding activities in churches and mosques remain the same, as are protocols in schools.



With workplaces currently witnessing a resurgence in COVID-19 infections, it is important that owners and management of businesses and workplaces implement strictly the guidelines on staff management and workplace protocols, such as the use of a shift system and technology, mask-wearing, social distancing and hygiene protocols, as was required in the earlier days of the pandemic.



Mask wearing in commercial vehicles and in market places continue to be mandatory.



The Ghana Health Service has moved to fortify its contact tracing, testing and treating campaigns, especially across the hotspots of Greater Accra and Greater Kumasi Metropolitan areas. COVID-19 treatment centres continue to be resourced with medical supplies, personal protection equipment, and health workers.



We will continue to ensure that all arriving passengers at the Kotoka International Airport are in possession of a negative PCR test result upon their arrival in Ghana, a test which should have been conducted not more than seventy-two (72) hours before the scheduled departure from the country of origin. In addition, all passengers will continue to be subjected to a mandatory COVID test on arrival.



Fellow Ghanaians, indications are that, in the course of this quarter of the year, the availability of vaccines for our country will ramp up. Government is, therefore, standing by its commitment to vaccinate twenty million Ghanaians, i.e., the entire adult population, by the end of this year, in spite of the huge global demand for vaccines by countries, and the surge in infections the world over. So far, one million, two hundred and seventy-one thousand, three hundred and ninety-three (1,271,393) vaccine doses have been administered, with eight hundred and sixty-five thousand, four hundred and twenty-two (865,422) persons having received a single jab, and four hundred and five thousand, nine hundred and seventy-one (405,971) persons have received their full dose of two (2) jabs.



We are expecting, through the COVAX facility and the African Union, one million, two hundred and twenty-nine thousand, six hundred and seventy (1,229,670) doses of the Pfizer vaccines from the Government of the United States of America, and two hundred and forty-nine thousand (249,000) AstraZeneca vaccines from the Government of the United Kingdom. Government is also in the process of procuring seventeen million (17 million) single dose per person Johnson & Johnson vaccines, through the African Medicine Supply Platform, in this quarter.



We have, as such, upgraded our national, regional and district cold chain facilities in order to widen our access to vaccines like Pfizer and Modena, that require minus seventy degrees Celsius (-70) cold chains. These include sixteen (16) ultra-low cold freezers, fifty-eight (58) units of ultra-low freezers, fifty (50) normal vaccine refrigerators, three hundred (300) boxes to be filled with ice packs, three hundred (300) ice packed freezers, ten (10) cold chain vans, and one hundred and twenty (120) temperature monitoring devices. These are in addition to the existing Zipline cold chain distribution service, for which we are grateful. I thank, as well, UPS, the American multi-national shipping, receiving and supply chain management company, and Kosmos Energy, the American oil and gas company, for their generous donations towards this development.



Fellow Ghanaians, it is important to stress, once again, that all the vaccines to be used in the country have been certified as safe-for-use by our national regulatory agency, the Food and Drugs Authority (FDA). There should, therefore, be no hesitancy amongst the population who are yet to be vaccinated. As the oft-cited saying goes, it is better to be safe than sorry.



The global shortage of vaccines means that we must develop our capacity to produce our own vaccines domestically and reduce our dependence on foreign supplies. We must be self-sufficient in this regard in the future, and prepare ourselves better to deal with any such occurrences in the future. To this end, the Committee I established, under the leadership of the world-renowned Ghanaian scientist, Professor Kwabena Frimpong Boateng, to investigate Ghanas potential as a vaccine manufacturing hub, to meet national and regional needs, has presented its preliminary report which, amongst others, recommends the establishment of a National Vaccine Institute to spearhead this development. Government has committed to inject seed funding of some twenty-five million United States dollars (US$25 million) this year into this whole enterprise.



The Institute will be charged with delivering six clear mandates:



establishing local vaccine manufacturing plants;

2. deepening Research & Development (R&D) for vaccines in Ghana;



3. upgrading and strengthening the FDA;





4. forging bilateral and multilateral partnerships for vaccine manufacturing in various areas, such as funding, clinical trials, technology transfer, licensing, and assignment of intellectual property rights;



5. building the human resource base for vaccine discovery, development, and manufacture; and



6. establishing a permanent national secretariat to coordinate vaccine development and manufacture.



In the short term, the Frimpong-Boateng Committee is facilitating the capacity of domestic pharmaceutical companies to fill and finish COVID-19 vaccines.



Fellow Ghanaians, we must remember that the virus continues to jeopardise our lives and livelihoods. Without doubt, God has been gracious to us. I appreciate that the wearing of masks is difficult for all of us, but I entreat you to wear the mask. This is what will save us.



I ask this evening that we remain steadfast in our adherence to the protocols, so we can overcome this third-wave of infections. If we do so, we will soon be able to return to our normal way of life.



Zero active cases must remain the overarching goal, and I have no doubt that, together, and with the help of God, this too shall pass, for the Battle is still the Lords.



May God bless us all and our homeland Ghana, and make her great and strong.



I thank you for your attention and good night.

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 Sekyere-East District Police has invited three people to assist with investigations into the recent death of a Chief Inspector stationed at the Effiduase Police Station.



The three, who are all drivers, are believed to be the prime suspects in the case.



Police Chief Inspector Victoria Ntow was found dead in her Chevrolet private vehicle with registration number DP-4037-G at Asokore-Kobriso near Effiduase on Tuesday evening, in a manner described as suspicious.



Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) Philip Kwabena Asante, the District Police Commander, told the media that what led to the police officers demise remained unclear.



We are baffled at the circumstances leading to her death since the deceased did not know how to drive, he stated.



According to him, the police suspect that the late Chief Inspector might have been driven to Asokore-Kobriso by one of the people invited.



ACP Asante hinted that preliminary investigations found that the Police Officer had no bruises on her body.



However, she had a swollen hand and face.



The District Police Commander said the body of the deceased had since been deposited at the Effiduase Hospital morgue for autopsy.

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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Some members of the Alleged Witches Reintegration Committee have paid a working visit to Alhassan Soale Bunyanso II, Chief of Kusawgu Traditional Area, in the Savannah Region.



The call on the Kusawguwura was to acknowledge and enhance the role he could play as a traditional leader in protecting the rights of women and children in the area.



The visit, coordinated by Action Aid Ghana, a non-governmental organisation (NGO), was to congratulate the Chief on his recent enskinment and solicit his support to curb issues of witchcraft accusations in society.



The Alleged Witches Reintegration Committee, established to institute measures to address witchcraft accusations, is made up of officials from the Ghana Police Service, Faith-based organizations, Ministry of Gender and Social Protection and the Commission for Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ).



It would also facilitate the reintegration of victims into their communities in the Northern, North East and the Savannah regions.



Deputy Superintendent of Police, Mr Emmanuel Holortu, Northern Regional Coordinator of the Domestic Violence and Support Unit of the Ghana Police Service, said the Committees mandate was to ensure that persons accused of witchcraft were protected from discrimination while alleged ones in the various witches camps in the three regions were reintegrated into their communities.



DSP Holortu said, the inhuman treatment of these alleged witches was not acceptable and we are calling on all stakeholders to support the course to end this canker.



"We are not oblivious that witchcraft exists but persons accused of witchcraft should be handled with respect to their fundamental human rights in the country" he noted.







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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Malawi President Lazarus Chakwera is going to UK next week to attend a virtual summit on education in that country citing strong internet connection in the United Kingdom will help him to fully participate in the virtual Summit as opposed to weak internet connections in Malawi, as reported by Malawi Times- Malawi News.

"Even though the said summit is virtual, but the president needs to be in UK physically as you know internet connection in Malawi in not reliably", said presidential spokesperson in Malawi.









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 Head of Monitoring Unit at the Forestry Commission, Charles Owusu, has called for public support for the Special Prosecutor-designate, Lawyer Kissi Agyabeng.



Appearing before the Vetting Committee of Parliament on Thursday, July 22, 2021, Lawyer Agyabeng responded to an avalanche of questions on his work and corruption.



Answering a question on corruption, he stated that he cannot eliminate corrupiton but will make it costly for any person, particularly in the public sector, to engage in corrupt practices.



"I can't stop corruption . . . I will make corruption costly . . . at the end of the year, publicize the results as to which institution is performing well and which institution is not performing well. In that quest, if you are the Head of an institution and persistently your institution is drawing the short straw in terms of perception of corruption, from the point of view of experts, from the point of view of business people, you will sit up," he said.



Commenting on the Special Prosecutor-designate's vetting, Charles Owusu touted the capabilities of Lawyer Kissi Agyabeng to hold his office.



But to him, despite Lawyer Agyabeng's astuteness to effectively execute his duites, he is not God to know everything.



Charles Owusu called on all Ghanaians to support the Special Prosecutor to make his work useful as he strives to achieve his goals.



"He's not the only person to do the work, because if he's in the office and something happens somewhere without he being informed, he's not God to know everything . . . normally, Ghanaians want you to fail . . . if he fails, it affects all of us," he told host Kwami Sefa Kayi on Peace FM's 'Kokrokoo' programme.



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.

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A pyrocumulus cloud, also known as a fire cloud, forms in the sky as the Tremont Creek wildfire burns on the mountains above Ashcroft, B.C., on Friday, July 16, 2021. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck
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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.
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Aiken County is expected to receive nearly $33.2 million in American Rescue Plan Act money, and an ad hoc committee of County Council is divided over how it should be spent.

That difference of opinion created a lively discussion when the four-member group met for the first time July 22 at the Aiken County Government Center.

The purpose of the committee is to make recommendations to County Council as a whole.

The county received half of its Rescue Plan Act allotment for COVID-19 relief, $16,594,941.50, on July 6. The rest will arrive no sooner than 12 months from then, according to the federal government.

Gary Bunker is County Councils chairman and also is serving as the chairman of the ad hoc group.

The committees other members are Camille Furgiuele of District 2, Sandy Haskell of District 5 and Kelley Mobley of District 4.

Bunker said he believes in putting the bulk of the countys share of the Rescue Plan Act money into a handful of large projects that will last for decades and benefit the greatest number of people in Aiken County.

Haskell expressed a similar view, suggesting that the funds should be used to pay for expensive, infrastructure-related work.

But Furgiuele made a proposal to give $1 million to each County Council member that they could use to provide grants in their respective districts and $2 million to Bunker, who could decide how to allocate his portion.

There are nine County Council members in all, so the total set aside would be $10 million.

I realize this is out-of-the-box thinking and could involve a lot of thought and planning by each Council member, Furgiuele said. But it would ensure that part of this revenue is distributed to each district in a fair and unbiased manner.

She added that Council member Andrew Siders had suggested to her that each Council member could appoint a committee of individuals in their district to assist in determining the grant recipients.

Mobley spoke out in favor of Furgiueles plan.

I think folks need to see us tackle some specific challenges that we have within our specific districts, he said, so that we can say, Hey, Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer, were putting some money into your area.

But Bunker sharply criticized that spending strategy, warning that secondary consequences sometimes overwhelm good intentions.

He gave several reasons for his opposition, including the proposals potential to cause what he believes would be an administrative nightmare.

Another Bunker concern was public perception.

He said people would believe that County Council members were awarding friends and supporters instead of making unbiased decisions in selecting the recipients of funds because public distrust of elected officials is at an all-time high.

Bunker also mentioned the possibility that voters would not support a future Capital Project Sales Tax referendum if they thought Rescue Plan Act money was frittered away instead of being used to improve infrastructure and facilities.

In general, according to a presentation prepared by Aiken County staff for the meeting, the allowed uses for Rescue Plan Act funds are as follows:

 To support public health response and to address negative economic impacts.

 To replace public sector revenue loss.

 To provide premium pay for essential workers.

 To pay for water, sewer and infrastructure needs.

County staff also put together a list of potential projects, potential purchases and funding requests received by the county that would or might be eligible for Rescue Plan Act money.

The ad hoc committee reviewed the list and Bunker polled members to determine which items they were the most interested in supporting.

Receiving a majority vote in favor were the following (along with the estimated cost of each):

 Expansion of the Aiken County detention center ($15 million).

 Sage Mill pump station upgrades ($1 million).

 Communications system for rural volunteer fire departments ($2 million).

 HVAC replacements for the Aiken County detention center ($100,000).

 HVAC replacement for the Aiken County Judicial Center ($50,000).

 Upgrades to and new furniture for the New Ellenton-Jackson-Beech Island Summary Court ($520,000).

 In-car camera systems and laptops for the Aiken County Sheriffs Office ($275,000).

The vote for the following was a 2-2 tie:

 Upgrades to the Horse Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant ($10 million).

 U.S. Highway 1 sewer collection line ($9 million).

 Horse Creek trunk line rehabilitation ($14 million).

 Assistance to small businesses and community groups ($10 million).

 Three additional fire tankers for volunteer fire departments ($750,000).

The construction of a new complex for Aiken County Sheriffs Office was among the projects on the list that didnt receive at least two favorable votes. Its estimated cost is $25 million.

I was just trying to see what was attractive (to ad hoc committee members), said Bunker of the polling process. "We have a lot of options, and weve got to start winnowing. This was just the first step of where we want to go. Certainly, there is nothing that cant be brought back to the committee later for consideration.

The next meeting of the ad hoc group is scheduled for 6 p.m. Aug. 10 at the Government Center.
Dr. Harry Shealy has spent much of his life consumed with botany, calling the field his "first love."

This love brought him to Aiken, which he has called home since the early '70s. In his decades here, he has taught at USC Aiken, served on too many boards to count and helped start a land trust. Through it all, he has served the community with his passion for plants and land.

"Plants are really the beginning and the end of everything in life," Shealy said. "People really dont pay any attention to how important they are in their daily lives."

Shealy's story began in Columbia, the city of dreams, where he was born, raised and educated. He attended the University of South Carolina, where he started out with high aspirations of becoming a chemical engineer or a chemist.

In those days, (they) had a pretty structured first two years of curriculum so you didnt have all that much choice," Shealy said. "I got in there and took some chemistry courses and decided chemistry wasnt going to be my lifes work."

As his college career progressed, Shealy became interested in biology and botany and decided that route would work for him. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in biology in 1965, Shealy spent a few more years at USC, getting both his master's and doctorate degrees from the state's flagship university.

Also, while in college, Shealy met his future wife, Margaret, and the two were married the week after Shealy finished his undergraduate degree.

"About the time I was finishing up my Ph.D., my major professor handed me a letter and said they were looking for somebody to help them unravel this problem they had in a cereal crop in the University of Manitoba (in Canada)," Shealy said.

Shealy, describing himself as a "very good microscopist," took the job and moved to Canada in 1972, with his wife and two children.

As a post-doctoral fellow at the university's plant science department, Shealy was called upon to figure out why the little seeds for the plant the department was working on were shriveling. The plant was a hybrid between wheat and rye called triticale, with the name combining the scientific names of wheat (Triticum) and rye (Secale).

Using his microscopy skills, Shealy was able to deduce that premature germination was causing the shriveling.

After a year in Canada, Shealy moved back to South Carolina, where he settled in Aiken, which was a familiar place to him.

While in graduate school at USC, Shealy was asked to come down and teach courses at USC Aiken.

"The pay they offered me for one afternoon (in Aiken), teaching two back-to-back labs, was the same thing they payed me in Columbia to be a teaching assistant," Shealy said. "Needless to say, an opportunity to double my salary, I jumped at it."

Not too long after, Shealy was offered a chance to teach some botany courses, as his predecessor in the position had proven to be unreliable.

"Thats what I was most interested in was botany," Shealy said. "So, I came down two days a week and taught classes, and they paid me a lot more money to do that."

After Shealy finished his graduate work and got the letter to go to Canada, he asked the then-chancellor of USC Aiken, Bill Casper, if he could go to Canada for the year without forfeiting his job teaching. Casper agreed, and gave Shealy a one-year postponement.

Thus, in 1973 when his journey brought him back to Aiken, he had a full-time position waiting for him. Shealy said he had visions of moving to a larger school during that time or going to a research institute.

"The longer I stayed here, the more I liked Aiken," Shealy said. "It was a good place to raise a family."

During his first year, USC Aiken shared Shealy with Allendale, so he spent two days a week teaching at each, taking Friday off. After that, he was exclusively in Aiken.

However, Shealy would soon move away from teaching for a bit and forge a new path for himself: fundraising.

Shealy said USC Aiken, at that point, didn't have much private money coming into its coffers, and he was asked to head up a fundraising drive.

"I did the family fund and raised more money than anybody had ever raised," Shealy said with a smile.

"Fundraising isnt what people think it is; its marketing," Shealy continued. "(I) saw the potential of marketing the university in a different way."

In the early '80s, Shealy was asked to be the associate chancellor for development at USC Aiken and became the chief fundraiser. While he enjoyed his time in a fundraising role, Shealy never lost his love for teaching and decided to go back to it in 1993.

Besides his roles and time at the university, Shealy has served on many boards and committees in Aiken, including the Hitchcock Woods Foundation, of which he has previously served as chairman. After he left the chairman role, the foundation named a hill in the woods after him, dubbing it "Harry's Hill."

The hill is one of three things that have been named in Shealy's honor, with the other two being the pimento cheeseburger at What's Cookin' Downtown, which is christened "The Shealy," and a flower first discovered in Nine Times Preserve in Pickens County.

Patrick McMillan, someone whose career Shealy had some influence on, discovered the flower and studied it with Laary Cushman, one of Shealy's former students. The plant was dubbed Micranthes petiolaris var. shealy.

"I was really honored when they did it," Shealy said.

One of Shealy's greatest accomplishments, though, lies in his role in creating the Aiken County Open Land Trust, along with Iris Freeman, which was the seventh land trust organized in the state of South Carolina.

"That was born out of the fact that about the time we organized it, in 1990 or thereabouts, Savannah River had just announced a $10 billion project to build a new production reactor," Shealy said. "Everybody knew that if they did that, there was going to be big bucks in it so they (were) tearing up the Southside and building all that stuff down there."

Shealy and Freeman decided that Aiken needed a land trust that gave people an alternative to selling their land.

"One of the problems when you get development around your house, high-end development, that raises the property taxes," Shealy said. "Then, you cant afford to hold on to the land because you cant afford the taxes."

If a conservation easement is placed on land, Shealy said, it usually takes development rights away.

"Then, the property tax on it becomes that of an agricultural piece of land, which is low," Shealy explained. "It was an alternative to people who didnt want to necessarily sell their land and wouldnt be forced into selling it."

The land trust still exists today, and Shealy has previously served as the chairman.

Through it all, Shealy has loved living in Aiken, calling the people friendly and the climate wonderful, while also saying he loves how green the city is. His love for plants is still readily apparent, as visitors to his home can immediately attest, with his front porch and yard being filled with greenery.

"If you start watching them and where they grow, where they dont grow, who they grow with, who they hang out with, you begin to see a whole new dimension to the plant world," Shealy said.
NORTH CHARLESTON  A group of 20 commanders from Joint Base Charleston stared into their "Oculus Quest 2" virtual reality helmets, but they weren't peering into a flight simulator or a firefight in a video game.

It was a situation that was far too real.

In their headsets, they watched an immersive video instructing what an airman should do if a fellow service member told them they were sexually assaulted and needed help.

Addressing the growing numbers of sexual assault and harassment cases in the military is an overwhelming but necessary task, and the Department of Defense is working on a variety of reforms and innovations to try training service members how to point their comrades to help if they face that situation.

On July 15, service members at Joint Base Charleston were among the first to try a virtual reality program that simulates a tough conversation with an airman. The objective of the video simulation is to get your colleague to trust you and help build her confidence to report an assault to the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office.

Col. Marc Greene, commander of Joint Base Charleston, said the innovative training was crucial for his command.

"I think it's an issue that we have to address because everyone deserves to be respected. Everyone deserves their dignity, and it's not a military issue only. It's a societal issue that we ought to do our part to make sure that this doesn't happen."

Kevin Cornish, CEO of Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Moth + Flame virtual reality company, scored a $750,000 contract with the Air Force to help spearhead immersive training using virtual reality headsets. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has challenged the branches to think of innovative technology to train service members, and Cornish answered the call.

"One thing Defense Secretary Austin said was he was encouraging the forces to look for creative solutions," Cornish said. "And in thinking about using this cutting edge technology to train pilots. Why aren't we using the same cutting edge technology to train people?"

A painful reality

According to a Department of Defense study submitted to Congress, there were at least 6,290 reports of sexual assaults in the military last year. And there's been an alarming increase since the 2,828 reported incidents in 2012.

Notably, the Air Force received 1,683 total reports in 2019. The exact numbers at the Charleston Air Force Base were not released by the base due to concerns of privacy, a Joint Base Charleston spokeswoman told The Post and Courier.

Many service members don't report incidents of sexual assault or harassment for fear of their stories going public or getting back to their comrades. The video simulation developed by Cornish's company puts you into a situation where an airman confides to you in the break room of an Air Force base that they've been sexually assaulted and are hesitant to get help.

In the realistic experience, you must gain your comrade's confidence while respecting their privacy and give them the courage to report the incident.

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In addition to training airmen how to have those serious conversations, it also educates them on what resources the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office can offer, such as private reporting and legal resources if a service member decides to pursue criminal charges.

Sgt. Nicole Rush, who has served in the military for 15 years, went through the virtual training and said it was an important reminder that the responsibility to report sexual assault and harassment falls on everyone.

"I believe there's always hesitating because it is a very sensitive topic and you're not just dealing with facts. You're dealing with people and you never know how people are going to react to that kind of thing," Rush said. "That's why having this information at every airman's hand is so important, so that they know the sources they can send people to and that they know their options."

Austin, who was appointed defense secretary by President Joe Biden, has made addressing the epidemic of sexual assault among his top priorities. Earlier this year, he instituted an independent review commission to look at what each branch is doing to stop inappropriate behavior among the ranks.

It was alarming. The findings, simply put, identified a wide chasm between what senior leaders believe is happening under their commands, and what junior enlisted service members actually experience.

'The next step'

Austin has promised sweeping changes since that review.

"On my first full day as secretary of defense, I committed that we must do more as a department to counter the scourge of sexual assault and sexual harassment in our military," Austin said in a July 2 memo. "As I stated then  this is a leadership issue and we will lead."

The defense secretary has said the Pentagon will work with Congress to change the Uniform Code of Military Justice to shift responsibility from military commanders for prosecuting sexual assaults and related crimes, as well as domestic violence offenses, child abuse and retaliation.

With commanders no longer handling the prosecution of sexual assaults, the department will create dedicated offices within each military branch to handle the role.

Austin wants to have sexual harassment added to the list of offenses spelled out in the UCMJ. Sexual assault is already detailed there as an offense.

Making those changes to the UCMJ, which is part of federal law, requires congressional approval. But non-judicial punishment exist within the military services. Austin directed each service to standardize, across the force, non-judicial punishments and to establish a separation process for service members against whom are substantiated claims of sexual harassment.

Notably, the immersive training is just one small step in addressing sexual assault in the military. Following the virtual reality training, commanders gave input to Moth + Flame developers. While some said they felt it wasn't realistic enough or that the responses felt too planned, many felt it was a good point to begin to foster group discussions among airmen about sexual assault.

"This is just the next step. We've got to be willing and able to embrace new technologies to provide a more realistic training experience," Greene said. "Because that ultimately prepares our youngest airmen to be ready for that conversation when it comes."
It was three days after a bicyclist died in a late-night crash with a Honda Accord on Charleston's Ashley River Bridge.

Mayor John Tecklenburg and other city officials gathered on July 19 for a virtual meeting of the city's Traffic and Transportation Committee to discuss a yearslong project that would have saved that bicyclist's life.

"That's the reason we're doing this, to have safe passage back and forth between the peninsula and West Ashley," Tecklenburg said. "Hopefully, when this bridge is completed, an incident like that just wouldn't happen again."

Chad Johnson, a 23-year-old from Texas was riding across the bridge around 11:50 p.m. July 16 when the crash claimed his life. He died at the scene and police continue to investigate the circumstances surrounding his death.

Two drawbridges cross the Ashley River where Johnson died. They provide critical connections from downtown Charleston to the bustling suburbs of West Ashley. Each day, thousands of cars and trucks rumble their way across the U.S. Highway 17 spans.

But critics and transportation advocates have long argued the bridges were never designed with pedestrians and bicyclists in mind. A slim sidewalk, barely raised from the roadway and unguarded by any rail, fence or other barrier is all that separates them from injury and death.

Advocates had pushed off and on for safe passage across the Ashley for almost a century, but efforts fell short time and time again until November 2019 when the city learned federal transportation officials had awarded an $18.1 million grant for a stand-alone bicycle and pedestrian bridge now known as the Ashley River Crossing.

Despite the challenges and delays brought by the coronavirus pandemic, officials like Jason Kronsberg, the city's parks director, said the staff has never stopped pushing the effort forward.

They have been working with HDR, the city's design-build support consultant, and with federal and state partners on environmental impact studies, aerial mapping and traffic studies, Kronsberg said during the committee meeting.

"Lots of stuff's been going on behind the scenes where nobody's seeing a lot, but (there's) lots of work happening," he said.

The city aims to award a design-build contract by November 2022, have the final design complete in September 2023 and finish construction by late June 2025, Kronsberg said.

The estimated price tag of the project is about $22 million.

For Katie Zimmerman, executive director of Charleston Moves, a nonprofit that's long advocated for the bridge, seeing city officials committed to the project is helping to ease the frustrations of what's proving to be a long, arduous process.

And Zimmerman said she's been trying to convey that message to other frustrated Charlestonians.

"Because the majority of the funding is federal dollars, that adds a whole new layer of requirements," she said. "There is no slow movement. It's really all about the list of things that the city staff has to do in order to legally comply and follow all the federal requirements."

Like Tecklenburg and other officials, Zimmerman points to Johnson's death as yet another example of the project's critical importance.

"We don't need to lose lives," she said. "People have the right to get where they need to go."

A public update on the Ashley River Crossing is expected at a City Council meeting this fall, said Jack O'Toole, a city spokesman.
MCCORMICK  An officer at a maximum-security correctional prison was sexually assaulted by an inmate on July 23, authorities said.

The assault happened at McCormick Correctional Institution when an officer was getting ready to leave work in the late afternoon, Chrysti Shain, S.C. Department of Corrections spokeswoman, said in a press release.

An inmate who worked in the area grabbed her, forced her back into her office and sexually assaulted her twice, Shain wrote. The officer is being treated at a local hospital.

The suspect in the assault was to be moved to a different institution later that night. The State Law Enforcement Division is investigating the case, with assistance from the Corrections Department.

The inmate has not yet been identified. SLED has not announced whether any charges have been filed.

McCormick is currently operating at about 89 percent inmate capacity with about 888 inmates on July 24, according to the agency.

Shain said that the July 23 assault did not occur because of understaffing. She could not provide data regarding the current officer vacancy rate at McCormick until July 26.

The inmate was granted access to the place where the assault occurred, she said. The assault did not happen because the suspected inmate broke into a restricted area of the prison, she said.

He worked right near her office," Shain said. "He was a character inmate and he had earned his way to live in a character dorm, which has more freedom. He has not had a disciplinary infraction since 2014.

Shain could not provide more details of the assault without interfering with the investigation or revealing the identity of the victim, she said.

In fall 2017, the warden and senior staff had left at McCormick and the officer vacancy rate had pushed 60 percent, which led to a rise of gang activity among inmates, The Post and Courier reported.

Understaffing remains an issue at correctional institutions across the state. The Corrections Department needs 4,042 officers in place to provide a safe environment among institutions, according to a report released by the American Civil Liberties Union of South Carolina on July 20.

Recent data regarding whether staffing has improved at these facilities between 2018 and 2021 is not provided by the Corrections Department.

As of January 2018, roughly half of the recommended security staff was assigned to these facilities, the ACLU report shows.

There were 44 serious inmate assaults on correctional employees during 2020. This is a seven-person decrease from 2019.
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.
Vaccines do not prevent infections. They prepare your bodys immune system to recognize and fight a specific virus.

Vaccines can accomplish this in a variety of ways. Cowpox, a disease harmless to humans, was able to activate the human immune system to fight smallpox infection.

Inactivated or weakened polio viruses were able to stimulate the human immune system to fight off live polio viruses.

The latest vaccination technology uses messenger RNA that causes your cells to build a foreign protein that would normally be produced by the COVID virus.

These protein molecules stimulate an adaptive immune response, which teaches your body to identify and destroy COVID viruses that may enter your body.

None of these technologies can provide complete protection from infection, especially when viruses are plentiful in the community, such as when an insufficient portion of the populace has been vaccinated.

This is where herd immunity becomes the critical factor. When a major portion of the population is vaccinated, the amount of virus in circulation is reduced, lessening the probability of infection of both the vaccinated and unvaccinated members of the community.

When vaccination is universal, viral diseases can disappear, as was accomplished with smallpox and polio.

COVID is no different. Until vaccination becomes nearly universal, it will persist  and mutate  and continue to infect and reinfect vaccinated and unvaccinated alike.

Why is this so hard to understand and accept?

TOM E. STICKLER

Old Ashley Loop

Pawleys Island

Change status quo

I was caught up in the traffic caused by a crash on Interstate 26 the morning of June 24.

A large box truck overturned, blocking all three lanes of eastbound traffic for two and a half hours.

The fiery crash occurred about a half-mile away from me.

Often while driving into downtown on I-26, I feel like Im playing a form of Russian roulette, but instead of bullets, its reckless and speeding trucks and cars.

The question many of us have is why dont those in charge of state highways make them safer?

If the proposed federal infrastructure bill is passed, money for many projects could be available to implement more safety protocols and enforcement.

If the status quo is a continuation of multivehicle crashes, like the one on June 24, it will be too dangerous to drive.

GARY KNIGHT

Old State Road

Holly Hill

Dont distort facts

The Oxford dictionary defines history as a study of past events.

The greatest nation in the history of humanity, the United States, has a recorded history. History is made up of facts: We fought a civil war over enslaving African Americans.

We stole the land that is now known as America from the indigenous population, placed them on reservations and destroyed their cultures and heritage.

We instituted Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation.

We saved the world from fascist tyranny.

We have developed some of the greatest universities in the world.

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Yes, these are all facts.

In addition to our successes, we must also recognize our shortcomings. Pointing them out does not mean we dont love America.

Teaching our children that America is a perfect country with no dark chapters in our history is wrong.

We should celebrate the gains we have made in race relations, but saying we have never been a racist country is a distortion of historical facts.

Some say, America, love it or leave it. But I say, celebrate America but love it enough to change it when it is wrong.

Nationalism is a great attribute, but blind nationalism can lead to Nazism.

Distorting facts does not change history; teaching historical truth leads to knowledge.

BROOKS P. MOORE

Branch Creek Trail

Summerville

Beautiful roads

Im a resident of Johns Island and first came here in 1982.

All the nature this place has to offer is what has attracted many people like me to the area.

I want us to preserve as much history and beauty as we can.

I could not agree more with the July 11 editorial, Charleston County deserves more rational, beautiful roads.

I thought the ideas mentioned were excellent suggestions.

It is true that traffic issues have to be addressed, and it is a very complex situation. But with the right, carefully thought-out plan, I think we can achieve this goal.

DEE BARNETTE

Maritime Forest Drive

Johns Island

Set a good example

On a recent Sunday morning ride in Mount Pleasant, one of our Coastal Cyclists rode into a deep depression he didnt notice in the street at the corner of Royall Avenue and Freeman Street in the Old Village.

He crashed, taking out another rider with him.

While we evaluated both riders conditions, residents on the corner came out to help.

They provided water, a couple of bags of ice and a chair for the rider who was most injured. They also called 911.

I believe that we should all be examples of the kind of world wed like to live in. These folks have done exactly that. They did their best to help people they didnt know, just because they could at an important time.

I dont know their names, but all of us on the ride would like to say thank you for the generous assistance. I hope others are motivated by their example.

BOB MARKISELLO

Past president

Coastal Cyclists

Canyon Oaks Drive

Mount Pleasant
Charleston, SC (29403)

Today

Thunderstorms likely. High around 80F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%. Rainfall may reach one inch. Locally heavy rainfall possible..

Tonight

Thunderstorms. Low 71F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 90%. Locally heavy rainfall possible.
You don't always catch a state record when you fish for catfish in the Santee Cooper lake system, but the opportunity is certainly there. Three of the five recognized catfish species in the South Carolina state record program came from Lake Moultrie or the Cooper River.

The South Carolina blue catfish record was caught from the waters of Lake Moultrie in 2017, a monster 113.8-pound catch by Paula D. Haney of Liberty. The state record flathead catfish weighed 84 pounds, 9.6 ounces and was caught in the Cooper River by Paul Daniels of Hanahan. The longstanding record for channel cat is a 58-pounder taken from Lake Moultrie in 1964 by W.H. Whaley of Pineville.

The two other recognized catfish species are white catfish, with a 12-pound, 2.9-ounce catch from Lake Murray by Charles Earp of West Columbia topping the records list, and a 6-pound, 6.3-ounce bullhead caught in the Broad River by George Eleazer of Irmo is the record holder.

Those giant cats are often successfully released to fight another day. Haney tried to release her record blue catfish but the fish unfortunately did not survive; Daniels' record flathead, however, was successfully released back into the Cooper River.

The striped bass season ended several weeks ago and won't resume until Oct. 1, so fishing guides on the Santee Cooper lakes are now concentrating on the big catfish, said Joe Dennis of Captain J Hook Charters. Dennis, who also guides for saltwater species, co-hosts Father and Son Outdoors TV with Whitey Outlaw (Sundays at 11:30 a.m. on WCBD and Wednesdays at 6:30 p.m. on streaming Pursuit Channel).

The program (fatherandsonoutdoorstv.com) supports the U.S. military by taking the children of military men and women on outdoor adventures while one of the parents is deployed overseas.

Dennis said he's been doing well with both blues and flatheads on Lake Moultrie.

"I've been getting over the catfish and spot-locking with my trolling motor," said Dennis, who is using a built-in GPS feature on his trolling motor to keep him in position to fish.

"I put down live herring, suspending the baits on a Carolina rig with the lightest weight possible, in 45 to 55 feet of water for the big blues and flatheads. A half-ounce to 1-ounce weight, whatever the lightest amount of lead you can use to keep the bait straight. If you can god down to 1/4-ounce, that's even better as long as the bait is staying in one spot. The more wind and more current, you have to go higher on the weight."

Dennis said he uses a 24-inch fluorocarbon leader and a No. 3 live bait circle hook. He baits the herring through the back or through the nose to make sure the bait stays alive. He uses Abu-Garcia bait-casting reels spooled with 20-pound Slime Line and a 7-foot medium-light Catch the Fever Striper Stealth live bait rod.

"I'm catching bigger fish and more fish on live herring, putting those baits right above the fish that I'm marking on my graph," Dennis said.

He said he finds the catfish coming over the hill in 38 to 40 feet of water that drops to 48 to 55 feet. Sometimes the fish are on top of the hill and sometimes they're in the valley, Dennis added.

"If you find one or two fish, then you'll constantly have other fish coming through your baits. The baits get cut up and the scent gets in the water. They usually come in doubles," Dennis said.

They're not always record-sized fish, but there's a good chance you'll tangle with a good-sized catfish.

Dennis said most of the fish are in the 15- to 20-pound range with the occasional 40- to 50-pound blue or flathead.

"You never know what's going to grab the bait. Everything might be 50 pounds and by the end of the day the rod goes down and you get a kicker fish," Dennis said. "You might catch a 10-pounder and five minutes later hook a 50-pounder."

America's Boating Club

America's Boating Club Charleston will hold boating safety classes July 31, Aug. 14 and Sept. 11 at 1376 Orange Grove Road, Charleston. The classes begin at 9 a.m. and end around 4 p.m. Successful participants earn the S.C. Department of Natural Resources Boater Education Card. The cost is $25 for adults and youth 12-18 are free. Call 843-312-2876 or email lynest@tds.net.
Kevin Lujan Lee, a Malaysia-born CHamoru doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is looking to shift away from the "old stories" about Guam told through statistics.

He recently told The Guam Daily Post that while there is value in a lot of the existing data focused on indigenous communities, they tend to focus on the various "deficits" facing these people. Lee is teaming up with co-principal investigator Ngoc Phan of Hawai'i Pacific University to conduct the 2021 Guahan Survey, which he calls the "first step" in changing this status quo for our island.

According to Lee, the effort is aimed at identifying issues local CHamoru residents care about and what they want in the future. Phan led similar research in the Aloha state in 2019 for Native Hawaiians.

"I think people tend to emphasize how CHamorus in particular have disproportionately negative outcomes  in terms of our socioeconomic outcomes, in terms of our health care outcomes, in terms of our employment outcomes. And we are not interested in that," Lee said.

There are about 34 questions to answer in the survey, which can be completed in as quickly as 10 minutes, according to Lee.

"We do ask questions about quantifying how people feel about this or that. But for example, we ask really open-ended questions ... like what are the three main concerns CHamorus face in your communities today," Lee said. "And that allows people to take a step back and say, 'This is what matters to me. This is what matters to my family.'"

The group is looking for CHamoru residents of Guam over the age of 18 to participate, and are hoping to get enough interest to be able to double the initial amount of responses they planned on collecting. The survey, at https://www.guamstudy.org, will be open until Aug. 15.

"Something we are definitely committed to, is celebrating the diversity of the CHamoru people, and how they are not a monolith. Everybody has something to say, and everybody has a voice," he told the Post.

Guam's manamko' is one specific group that Lee would like to be better represented in the study. He is encouraging younger CHamoru residents, especially those in multi-generational homes, to take the survey with a grandparent.

A community report with the survey's results will be published around January 2022. The public will be able to view responses, down to how anonymous individuals ranked issues themselves, Lee said.

"All we're doing with this survey is to just start a community conversation  to say, 'Hey, we went around and asked people what they think, and this is what we got.' And the community can decide from there what they want to do with the survey."
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When Joe Biden returned to the White House after his CNN town hall this past Wednesday, Daily Caller White House correspondent Shelby Talott followed up on one of the comments Biden had made. According to Biden at the town hall, Republicans are lying about Democratic support of the movement to defund the police.

Talcott asked Biden to clarify his comment. Biden noted he never said there is no one in the party who is anti-police: I said that is not the Democratic Partys position. Im the Democratic Party. I am president. So is the Speaker of the House [Nancy Pelosi] and so is the Majority Leader [Chuck Schumer]. We are not defunding the police.

Talcott pressed the question a bit further. Biden responded, shall we say, weirdly.

Joe Biden was given the chance to condemn the Democrat-run cities defunding the police around the country, but he refused. Instead, he bizarrely responds: Are there peoplewho think were sucking the blood out of kids? pic.twitter.com/LpOaQSTGed  RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 23, 2021

Bidens train of thought is not readily apparent. In the Daily Callers straight news account, Taloctt speculated that Biden was alluding to a QAnon conspiracy theory. Naomi Lin expands on the explanation in the Washington Examiner story Biden cites QAnon conspiracy theory to deny Democrats want to defund police.

The explanation does not render Bidens response any less weird. However, attributing it to an animatronic short circuit may be unduly generous.
Kto szuka: Luxoft Stanowisko: Distributed Computing Infrastructure Developer - VCP Numer referencyjny: VR-59950 Lokalizacja: Remote Poland maopolskie

Opis stanowiska podany przez pracodawce:

You will be working as engineer in the virtual compute platform (VCP). This platform is developed inside the client's company to host compute and analytics applications that aim to improve the yield in the semiconductor factories of their customers.

These applications take data from the client's scanners and metrology equipment. They combine this data to real time production corrections and scanner process diagnostics. The corrections are sent back to the production equipment. Failure of the platform has high impact. It would mean failure of the customer's (TSMC, Samsung, Intel etc.) production facility.

The platform is currently developed based on DC/OS. In 2021 they have started the migration to Kubernetes. They develop the platform aspects internally. Scheduling of resources, containerization, fail-over and data collection from scanner and measurement devices inside the fab. They have an uptime expectation of 4 nines. As a true distributed computing expert you will have your own view on such a baseline expectation. This might be a nice topic to discuss during an interview.

Installations and upgrades are automated with Ansible. Other technologies you may encounter are Spark for data processing, Kafka for notifications and high volume data ingestion. Hadoop and HBASE are used for data storage. We are open to your underpinned input on the suitability of stable alternatives for these technologies where these better suit the client's business case.

Your responsibilities:

*Design and implement the product with the team *Automated tests accompany every delivery *Help application developers to understand the infrastructure / cluster / system *Make the VCP reliable by improving system resilience (bug-fixing and beyond)

Wymagania stawiane pracownikowi:

*Knowledge of distributed computing systems, practical experience (must) *Kubernetes configuration, not just development on top it (must) *Ansible playbooks and programming *Spark, Kafka topics, Zookeeper for management *Experienced in CI/CD, including git, test automation, etc. *Familiar with at least one scripting language (e.g. Python) *Linux expertise

Firma oferuje:

Client description:

Out client is one of the world's leading manufacturers of semiconductor-chip-making equipment. A majority of the world's microchips receive their critical lithographic patterning in machines made by

them. In addition they produce metrology tools and advanced applications to analyze and optimize the performance of the customer production process.

Job Mission:

Participate in the development of a distributed data and compute platform infrastructure. Be accurate, be precise and own the specification, design and implementation of features and fixes. Onboard, integrate and configure open source or other packages that support the development of semiconductor process tuning applications on the client's platform. Support installation of these platforms in Korea, Taiwan, Israel, China and the US (etc.).

Be part of this compute platform that is one of the main pillars under the production of the next generation microchips of Apple, Samsung and many others.

Other details about the working environment:

You will be working in the Business Line Applications. The BL Apps develops Analytics & Control solutions that improve the accuracy of performance metrics (such as overlay, focus, critical dimension) as measured on the end product of a fab process (wafers with chip structures). You will work on the platform underneath these processing algorithms, a distributed computing platform. This platform will provide value to the client's customers all over the world, making sure the chips of the next generation are produces efficiently and with the highest quality.

There are 3 - 4 infra teams, 20-30 engineers, Product Owners and Scrum Masters working on the platform layers.

The application development teams that develop the business critical applications consist of 15-25 teams.

Kontakt do pracodawcy:
The Chief Judge of the Federal High Court of Nigeria, John Tsoho, in this exclusive interview with PREMIUM TIMES, speaks on a wide range of issues bordering on the appointment of new judges, the criminal justice system and efforts by the court to swiftly dispense justice.

Read excerpts from the interview:

PT: Moving forward, does the court intend to carry on with this innovative idea of virtual court proceedings in all the divisions of the Federal High Court?

Tsoho: Certainly, yes. It is what is desirable because even without COVID, you know that todays world is driven by technology, and so there has been that craving to also follow, because there is this common saying that its either you adopt technology or you are left behind. So, there was a general craving to imbibe technology in order to improve on services. But COVID brought to the fore the necessity of gearing up efforts in doing that. Even before COVID set in, we had already started the process of introducing electronic equipment for the purpose of court business, and in that, the court is not just on its own  you have some interested and committed stakeholders, who have had to come in to assist, prominent among which are such agencies like the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime (UNODC) and even to some extent the British High Commission, which came to assist with either technical know-how or outrightly donating equipment.

For instance, the UNODC facilitated the fitting of electronic equipment in seven courts in Abuja and Lagos. With those facilities, you could conduct virtual proceedings here linking up with Kuje prisons (in Abuja). So, that singularly addresses the problem of having to move detainees, particularly those that require high security by road to the court. They could just stay there and you hold normal proceedings. Same for Lagos; the equipment has been there for upward of not less than five years.

Generally, the judiciary has an information technology policy. There is actually a committee which goes by the name of Judiciary Information Technology Policy Committee (JITPCOM). It is headed by Honourable Justice Kashim Zanah, the Chief Judge of Borno State, who has been very passionate about technology particularly as it relates to the judiciary. This committee has the mandate of taking the entire judiciary along technological path so that in not too much in the distant future, all courts should actually be computerised, so as to reduce the strain of having to take manual proceedings and all that. And with that change, there should be more expeditious disposal of cases.

Having said that, it is not really an easy matter; it has its own challenges because you know technology doesnt come easy. It is very expensive. Even Justice Zannah has pointed that out. It is going to be a continuous and gradual process, particularly for a court like the Federal High Court where you have not less than 80 courts. Each judge mans his own court. So, if you have to introduce electronic equipment, you multiply by that number. So, it is not so easy but one is very hopeful that no matter how long it takes, eventually we will get there.

To illustrate the commitment of the National Judicial Council (NJC) itself, it has already started executing some projects in that regard, and of course, the Federal High Court is a beneficiary of same. The court number one which is assigned to me has been retrofitted. That means when the job is completed, you do total electronic recording there. That was conceived as a pilot project. There is one in Port Harcourt, Lagos and Kano states. That project is fully funded by the NJC. The project is capital-intensive.

In essence, we are mindful that electronic court proceedings are desirable; that is, phasing out manual recording to improve on court business. It is our commitment.

PT: How can the problem of effective time management of cases be dealt with by judges, given the fact that lawyers in criminal cases often argue endlessly?

Tsoho: Well, it is not an issue of contemplating, it has been tried, and maybe it has not been a widely publicised policy. It is not easy to meet, because of the high volume of litigation. For instance, you must have heard of what is called the Federal High Court Criminal Proceedings Practice Directions 2013, which was put in place by the Honourable Justice Ibrahim Auta (former Chief Judge). And that is meant to fast-track trial of certain cases, particularly of grievous nature, maybe things like terrorism cases. You could have treason, fraud or cybercrime. It was aimed at speeding up trial. We even have provisions for trial from day to day.

But the impediment to that is the congestion of the dockets. For instance, in Abuja, as of this moment, except for myself and Justice Chikere who will be retiring in a few months, there is no other judge that doesnt have in his docket 400 cases on the average. The situation is worse in Lagos; there you have 500 cases per judge. So, when it comes to that, how do you then schedule any case on a day-to-day basis trial? It means other cases will suffer. How do you stretch out 500 cases in a quarter? There is no way you would schedule 20 cases per day, because every case before a judge is important.

I recall you alluded to the fact that Senior Advocates of Nigeria (SANs), argue endlessly. Well, I must say that much depends on the disposition of the judge presiding because every judge like they say is a master of his court. And so, whether a lawyer became a SAN before a judge was born, he (the judge) is the one presiding. The judge can hold the lawyer in check. Except for some reasons the judge thinks what the lawyer is saying is worth listening to for a long time, he has to call the lawyer to order, so that the counsel doesnt play to the gallery.

You know, litigation is like psychological warfare; sometimes people employ all kinds of means to try to intimidate others. But that is not what is important, what is important is you play your part with a view to achieving justice. All a contender should want is to ensure that the scale is held in the balance; it doesnt matter whether it is the other person that wins, but that the important thing is that the law and the facts are properly appreciated, and even if the decision is reached against you, you appreciate it for what it is.

So, the presiding judge has a duty to hold lawyers in check by allotment of time, for instance. But oftentimes, that also has its constraint, because of this constitutional provision of fair hearing. That is what some parties always resort to by trying to allege that they are being denied fair hearing. One also has to be careful to the extent of intervention.

My take on it has always been that there may be a need to tinker with that fair hearing provision, because it is as if people tend to over-emphasise it. And as far as you have it, because the constitution is the supreme law, you cannot just ride roughshod over the provision. It requires holding the balance.

Despite the clear provisions of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA) 2015, cases are still being stayed at the court. Why is it so?

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Generally, you have that provision. In the past, proceedings could be stayed and that was premised on that fair hearing provision in the constitution. But along the line there were worries because some people were employing it not so genuinely; it was being done with an aim to truncate trial, and some cases would last for an inordinately long time, because they would go on appeal over what they call interlocutory appeal.

Several cases have been decided by the Supreme Court based on that provision (in the ACJA). The Supreme Court is the apex court. So, if it decides a matter, no matter how somebody feels, he can only go to God.

The Supreme Court has decided some cases like that of Bukola Saraki. The apex court ruled that the provision is not unconstitutional. So, for that reason, anybody still arguing about having proceedings stayed is just being mischievous.

PT: Are there efforts to recruit more judges given the high volume of cases in your court?

Tsoho: Yes. Actually, the process for recruiting new judges has been on but because of funding constraints, it has had to be split. By the Federal High Court (Amendment) Act of 2013, the strength of judges was raised to 100. So, as we speak it will be proper for the court to ensure that the number of judges is up to 100.

But as of this moment, the number has dropped to 72. It means we have vacancies for 28 judges if we must meet our full complement. The number went up to 87 at some point, but so many factors led to the number dropping, like retirement, elevation and even death. Within the last legal year, we lost two judges and we had several retirements. So, the number has dropped. There is a crying need to replace that number. Even if we cannot make up to a hundred, it should get very close to that number.

The appointment of judges is a very tough process; it is so tedious because it is intricately tied to funding. If you must appoint a judge, you provide courtroom, support staff (registrars, clerks), security personnel among others. You have to provide a befitting car and accommodation. But considering what the economy is now, those are not things you can easily put in place.

Mind you, all these things have to be catered for from the courts budget; no other authority has responsibility for it. The NJC insists that every requirement for the appointment of judges must be on ground  the facilities and everything for their inspection before you go ahead with the recruitment.

Secondly, if you are given approval by the NJC, you publicise that you require a particular number of judges. In 2019 while we were preparing for the 2020 budget, what we proposed was actually the appointment of 21 judges. When we got to the NJC, they couldnt approve more than six. So, it is the vacancies for six judges that have been publicised so far. So, we had to shift the difference to the following year, which is 2021. But coming to this year, the approved budget has even been worse than that of last year.

Having said that, the stage at which we are now is screening of those six applicants as judges of the court, which we think we have adequate facilities for. But the process has to be thorough; we are at an advanced stage of the process. As I speak, some security reports have come in and they have automatically disqualified some people (applicants). No matter how qualified you think you are, if your report is adverse or negative, you will be dropped.

So, when we are through with the security vetting, the names will be forwarded to the Federal Judicial Service Commission (FJSC), which will then make a shortlist to the NJC and that is where the final process comes in.

PT: Doesnt indiscriminate redeployment of judges constitute a clog in the wheel of adjudication in your court?

Tsoho: Well, I dont see how the system can work if there is no transfer of judges. The transfer serves some purposes  to close gaps and also rid the element of too much familiarisation. In social circles, they say, familiarity breeds contempt.

Like I have already said, you do have retirements, elevations to the Court of Appeal from here and unfortunately some people die. For example, two judges retired from our Lagos division and then another two were taken to the Court of Appeal, and you dont replace them? How would one expect that division to function, particularly having regard for the high volume of cases I have pointed to? That means that the remaining few there will not be able to bear the burden, because it will come to maybe having to share the workload left behind.

For instance, in the state High Courts, a court may have an entire workload (Im not trying to disparage any system) to be 12 cases. And how many cases does a Federal High Court judge handle in a day? At least 20 cases on the average; a days work of a Federal High Court judge has already outstripped what a State High Court judge has as his entire workload.

So, posting of judges is not for fun like some people think. It is imperative; the record is there for you to see. If you see any posting letter, it reflects the history of the judge. There is nothing evil about posting. Every judge coming in knows that since they say its federal appointment, you must move. It is not as if the Chief Judge just wakes up says you move; there is a basis.

There are some divisions that are key to the operations of the court. For instance, Abuja, Lagos and Port Harcourt, these are the centres of high volume of litigation; you cant afford to leave them undermanned. If you leave four or five judges in Lagos, there will be public outcry because they will be overburdened, and then people would start to say, Oh, cases are not moving.

Admittedly, yes when judges are transferred, some hardship will be occasioned both to the litigants and the court. My office, for instance, following the last posting exercise, has been inundated with applications for completion of part-heard cases. Some are genuine actually; but if you grant all that, it is going to impact on time management of the judges  they will have to leave their new stations and conclude cases. That in itself is tasking. It is not everybody that wants moving up and down, particularly if you consider the current security situation in the country, and then it also impacts on the finances of the court, because we definitely have to pay a stipend to the judge.

So, if it could be avoided yes, but it cannot in view of what I have already said. There are divisions of the court where you need more experienced judges to go.

PT: Some lawyers wrote the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), urging him to cancel the annual vacation for judges in view of the impact of COVID-19 and the Judiciary Staff Union of Nigeria (JUSUN) strike which paralysed court proceedings across the country for about two months. Yet, the courts will commence the vacation soon. What are your thoughts on this?

Tsoho: Its an interesting question, but it is not well-informed. At the beginning you called the industrial dispute JUSUN strike, and actually by law, judges cant strike. JUSUN provided a clever way of lumping judges into their strikes.

Initially, what they used to do was to withdraw their personnel, but the judges would be free and go to their chamber and work. So, JUSUN felt that they were leaving a leeway. Therefore, whenever they (JUSUN) declared strike, they would come with a hefty padlock and lock the main gate of the court and disappear into thin air.

So, that brings in the issue of uncertainty about resumption of work. When the situation is uncertain; you cannot think in terms of certain things you ordinarily want to do like the feeling that the strike could be suspended or called off the following day. For that reason, judges couldnt even rest because we were on standby. I, for one, was here; I didnt even go outside of Abuja territory throughout that period of the strike, and I was doing my administrative work, and other judges actually delivered judgements by virtual means. So, it was not as if during the strike judges were sleeping or idling away.

But more fundamentally, the issue of vacation is statutory because each court has a provision in its rules as to vacation. And that is why its even improper for people to have advocated that the CJN should ask judges to forgo the vacation. The rule of court is a law on its own; the Supreme Court, the Court of Appeal, the Federal High Court and the National Industrial Court as well as state High Courts, all have their individual rules. So, what they (lawyers) dont seem to appreciate is that by saying judges should not go on vacation, is urging that the law (rules of court) should be breached. How fair is that for the advocates of cancellation of vacation?

You see, vacation affords the opportunity for judges to attend to their personal commitments including healthcare. So, that vacation is important. Those are the imperatives for having to declare vacation despite the JUSUN strike.

PT: What is the status of Honourable Justice Mohammed Yunusa who was accused of wrongdoing and subsequently suspended from the bench, but later cleared by the NJC? Has he been reinstated to the court?

Tsoho: Yes. Honourable Justice Yunusa was suspended for alleged misconduct. Along the line, his matter was looked into and a case made to the presidency. Even in the process of appointment, when judges are nominated, the NJC makes recommendation and then the presidency will approve. So, it is the approving authority.

So, his case was reviewed and most of the complaints that were levelled against him bordered on matters he had tried. But it turned out that in all those matters, his decisions were upheld on appeal at the Court of Appeal. So, if you are alleging whether its bias or whether he didnt reach proper decision, then a higher court vindicates him, what do you do?

So, the NJC felt that since the allegation against him seemed unfounded, he should return. So, the matter was referred to the presidency three years ago, and till now there has been no response. So, the NJC felt that in a situation like that it cant wait indefinitely. So, they recalled him, and he has actually been assigned a court. So, for sure he is back on the authority of the NJC, and there was a press release to that effect.

PT: What is your advice to court users and the general public?

Tsoho: Most of the things people are bothered about regarding the court are being addressed. If along the line it is perceived that either there isnt much impact felt, its because of some genuine handicaps. So, I would rather appeal that stakeholders and the general public should be patient with us, and we have the best of intentions to deliver quality and speedy justice to the public.

But importantly, people should endeavour to verify; we are amenable to releasing information if they have genuine and well-intentioned enquiries. So, the idea of people conceiving certain pre-determined views and airing them is not fair to the court as an organisation. We crave that people who crave clarification for one thing or another relating to the court can always reach us. We have an information desk headed by a chief officer, instead of resorting to smear campaigns and all that.
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Some of the applicants seeking to become judges in Nigeria have been disqualified based on security reports.

This was disclosed by the Chief Judge of the Federal High Court, John Tsoho, in an exclusive interview with PREMIUM TIMES.

Mr Tsoho said even though some of the applicants might possess the required credentials, they had to be dropped from the appointment process due to adverse security reports.

Statutorily, the court has a full strength of 100 judges, Mr Tsoho said, citing the Federal High Court (Amendment) Act, 2013.

But due to deaths, retirements, and elevation to the Court of Appeal bench, the number of judges of the court, which was 87 at some point, is currently 72.

This implies that there are 28 vacancies on the courts bench, but Mr Tsoho said only six will be appointed for now.

He said the appointment process has now reached an advanced stage, saying some applicants have been screened out on account of security reports.

We are at an advanced stage of the process. As I speak, some security reports have come in and they have automatically disqualified some people (applicants). No matter how qualified you think you are, if your report is adverse or negative, you will be dropped, Mr Tsoho said.

He, however, did not disclose the number of applicants disqualified as well as their names.

Next stage after security screening

The chief judge said after the security vetting, the next stage of the process is to send the names of screened applicants to the Federal Judicial Service Commission (FJSC).

So, when we are through with the security vetting, the names will be forwarded to the Federal Judicial Service Commission (FJSC), which will then make a shortlist to the National Judicial Council (NJC) and that is where the final process comes in, he said.

The NJC will then conduct its own screening and interviews after which the names of the successful candidates will be recommended to President Muhammadu Buhari for appointment.

PREMIUM TIMES will publish the full interview with Justice Tsoho later today.
The United Methodist Church (UMC), one of the largest mainline Protestant denominations, is entangled in internal conflict over same-sex marriage and the ordination of Lesbians, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) clerics. At the February 2019 general conference of the church in the USA, the leaders rejected moves to remove restrictions on LGBT clerics and same-sex marriages.

Instead, delegates from across the world voted 438 to 384 to pass what was called the Traditional Plan, which maintains the churchs rules. As the church prepares for the next general conference in 2022, centrists and liberals who favour LGBT inclusion are in conflict over the issue.

The conflict has also affected the unity of the church in Nigeria, whose headquarters is in Jalingo, Taraba State. While the head of the church in Nigeria believes the conflict is behind the crisis in the Nigerian branch, others locate the cause elsewhere

In this report, our reporter, Chuwang Dungs, listens to the Bishop of the UMC in Nigeria, John Wesley, and his former administrative assistant, Emmanuel Ande, who is a leader of a group opposed to the leadership of the bishop, as they make their cases.

On the background to the dispute over the gay issue and its effect on the church in Nigeria?

Wesley: For many years the LGBT community has been advocating for acceptance in the United Methodist Church, but the church has objected to that. In each of the annual general conferences, it has always been ruled that the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with the practice of Christianity. In 2016 when they were defeated, there was an uproar among the LGBT community. They came into the session of the general conference and disrupted the proceedings, forcing the presiding officer to stop at a certain point. We had to move out of the venue because they were rioting and protesting. Because of that, we calmed the situation by promising to look into the matter.

In 2019, a special session was called and the Council of Bishops set-up a 32 member committee which it called the Commission on Way Forward. There were LGBT community members and different interest groups in the commission. To the honour of God, the Council of Bishops nominated me as a member of the commission. We had a series of meetings in the U.S. and came out with a report and presented it at the special session. But in that special session again, all the plans to include the homosexuals or the progressives were defeated.

The United Methodist Church upheld that homosexuality is incompatible with Biblical teachings and I also share the same position. Looking at Genesis chapter 2, a man was created and God felt he needed a suitor and he created a woman for him; not a fellow man. That has been my position.

In 2014, I was granted the opportunity to present a message in the U.S.during a meeting of the Council of Bishops. In that message, I preached about love because the argument by the homosexuals is that they are not being loved. So in the message I cited that the concept of love is like a flowing water, flowing in a room causing a lot of mess. I said that is what I saw in the United Methodist Church. So when I finished the message, some homosexuals or progressives asked why I should say that. They raised questions and I gave them answers with Biblical backing.

Again, when we went for another meeting of the Council of Bishops, we were worried about the entire scenario and we went to paragraph 161 of our Book of Discipline, which says we will continue to be in ministry with everybody regardless of their sex, be they homosexuals, and be they pagans or traditionalists. Whatever, we will be in ministry with them. Being in ministry means we cannot send people out of our church. Rather, we will worship with them and praise God together.

So the press in the United States of America came to me after that meeting and said: Bishop, we heard you preached last time and now the Council of Bishops has affirmed that the church will continue to be in ministry with LGBT, would you continue to be in ministry with them? I said yes, I have been in ministry with them, I dont kick them out of my church and I will continue to accept them in the church. But the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Biblical teachings. So being in ministry does not mean accepting the practice of homosexuality, it simply means accepting them in the church to worship with them.

Some groups in Nigeria, because they want to stain me, picked up that statement and said that I have accepted gay practice in the church. So I referred them to the Book of Discipline and I told them it was a collective decision because we dont want to segregate anyone out of the church; that was why we adopted that section of the Book of Discipline and that doesnt mean we have accepted the practice of homosexuality, these are two different issues.

I tried to explain that to people but they went about campaigning that I am the one encouraging the issue of LGBT, whether to please their sponsors somewhere which I dont know. Of recent I had some press conferences, I had radio and video interviews where I made it clear that I will not accept the practice of homosexuality, I remain a traditionalist and I will continue to be a traditionalist.

Christmas Covenant

Sometimes in February I came across a document written by a group that called itself Africa Voice of Unity and there were four persons from Nigeria that endorsed that document. Those four persons are Rev. Ande Emmanuel, Rev. Eunice, Pastor Ahmed and then Amos Davidson, who is the lay person among them. The remaining three are clergies. In the whole of Africa, the highest number came from Nigeria, so people started calling me from all over concerning the document. Because in point number 7 of the document, these people said they affirmed the teachings of Christmas Covenant.

Now what is Christmas Covenant teaching? It is advocating for the regionalisation of the United Methodist Church. Why they are advocating for the regionalisation of the church is because the United Methodist Church is a collection of churches and at the apex of the church, at the general conference, each time we come together, petitions on homosexuality are defeated. So now the Christmas Covenant people are saying that the best way to handle things is the church should be regionalised so that when we go for the conference, the issue of homosexuality will be treated on regional basis.

Because the votes from Africa against homosexuality come in bulk and that helps other traditionalist in the US to defeat the LGBT community. So what they are trying to do now is to regionalise the church and when the church is regionalised, you can go to your region and do whatever you want to do and that is to allow the practice of same sex. I said no to that because the United Methodist Church is one church, you cannot say a member should be allowed to practice homosexuality in the US and you come to Africa and say no to the practice. I said this is a double standard and there is no honesty in that. We cant have a divided theology, using the same scripture. I said I cannot do it and I continue to stand in their way.

In one of the petitions the Christmas Covenant is taking to the general conference for consideration, they removed paragraph 340, 341 of our Book of Discipline. Paragraph 340 is saying homosexuality is incompatible with Biblical teachings and that money from the United Methodist Church cannot be used for wedding or any other ceremony related to LGBT. They said those paragraphs should be removed in our Book of Discipline. Now when you advocate for the incompatible language in our Book of Discipline, what are you standing for? You are simply a promoter of homosexuality and I said no, I cannot belong to that group.

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So when I got that document, I called the leaders of the United Methodist Church Conferences in Nigeria and we met in Karim Lamido, Taraba State and I told them this is what some of us have done. They have written to other Bishops but refused to give me a copy. But another Bishop somewhere sent a copy to another lay person and that lay person sent it to another lay person in Nigeria and that was how I got a copy. I explained to the leaders, I have been conducting the annual conferences in Nigeria for many years. In each annual conference we have always maintained our position that homosexuality is incompatible with Biblical teachings, so I am not doing anything outside what the United Methodist Church in Nigeria is asking me to do. I am doing what the United Methodist Church in Nigeria stands for.pp

So when I explained that, Emmanuel Ande and his group felt offended and said the meeting I held with the church leaders in Karim was unconstitutional and they went round saying all sorts of things, making publications and even wrote letters abroad. I called them and explained things to them and made it very clear to them that I am the presiding bishop of the annual conferences in Nigeria and each conference has affirmed that homosexuality is incompatible with Biblical teachings, therefore, I said even if the entire church in Nigeria will endorse homosexuality, I as a person will not continue to be in the United Methodist Church; I will leave the church even if it will cost me losing my seat as a bishop. I will leave because I wont preside over a church that will condone the practice of homosexuality. This is my position and I maintain that.

Come 2022 general conference, if the United Methodist Church endorses the practice of homosexuality, I will leave the church. This is my position and I will not change it. I will continue to retain it and I will continue to say it anywhere I go. And I am not saying it out of pride or because I am sinless. No. Romans 3:23 says For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. I consider myself a sinner, but I am talking about what God said in Genesis chapter 2; that marriage should be between a man and a woman, not a man and a man or a woman and a woman. Therefore, it is not an issue of being righteous. So when I called for those meetings they became angry.

Apart from the plan by Christmas Covenant, there are also proposals for an emerging denomination. One of those is the Protocol Plan. The Protocol Plan is saying because of this irreconcilable difficulty, the whole church will be separated, which will give birth to an emerging denomination and that emerging denomination will not practice homosexuality. And some people are proposing Global Methodist Church (GMC) but we are not sure of the name which will only be known after the general conference in 2022.

They said I have exited the United Methodist Church because of my position against homosexuality. Look at me sitting here in the office, I am still the Bishop, how can I ask people to join GMC that is not in existence? What are they saying, am I a GMC bishop? Is there any church called GMC in Nigeria? I cannot understand what people are saying. These are some of the few issues causing the problems here and there.

On the division in the church in Nigeria

Wesley: In the United Methodist Church, there are so many groups with different motives and intents. But since they cannot make it public and they cannot express it, you can intelligently read what is going on? They themselves cannot voice it but they are doing it. For instance, when you say you will remain in the United Methodist Church and you dont care about what is happening in America, let them do their own thing, is that Christianity? Is that what Christ has asked us to do, not to be mindful of one another?

It is all about a desperate need for leadership. There is one magazine called Wax. In that magazine, one of them said he is vying for the position of the Bishop and that he is being called by people. These are some of the things causing all the problems, desperation for leadership.

One of the accusations against me is that I have picked up my friend and I want to make him the next bishop of the church and I am not supporting them because they ganged up against me. And all those who have ganged up against me are people that I have relieved from one position or the other. Go and check their records. They are angry, so they are doing all these. People like Nicodemus. Some people approached me saying that I must make him the youth leader. I said no, I have given him a position as leader of ILI, an international organisation in the church that supports the training of young people in the church. I always asked him where is that organization? No answer. I gave him free hands, so I cannot entrust him with leadership again.

I told the team that came to me  Ahmed, because he was the youth director in the central, I assigned him somewhere, he was angry. My former administrative assistant, Emmanuel Ande, because I removed him from here they are angry. These are some of the things. Go to them one after the other. Because they are aggrieved of being relieved from one position or the other or because they are desperate to get another leadership role they are doing all these to create division in the church.

And I am very sure they are receiving support somewhere. Where they are receiving the support that I dont know. If they are not receiving support somewhere where are they getting the money to host meetings? More often, they travel to different places. There must be sponsors and they know them. Like I said earlier, if you are saying you support the Christmas Covenant and it is saying regionalise the church, by implication you want the church divided.

On his support base in the church regarding his position on LGBT issue

God is my support base. When God is the basis of my support I work stronger because He is everything. What was the resolution of our annual conferences? It was clear that homosexuality is incompatible with Biblical teachings and if the whole annual conferences are in support of my position, it shows I have the support of the church in Nigeria. And I still maintain that if the whole of United Methodist Church will endorse homosexuality, I will quit the church and I am not going to force anybody, everyone is at liberty to choose where to belong.

On government intervention to end the crisis in Nigeria.

Many interventions by the government, in fact I want you to pursue the last committee that was set by the governor (Taraba State Governor Darius Ishaku), headed by the CAN chairman. The meeting comprises Innocent Solomon, the former CAN chairman, the present Anglican bishop, the former Lutheran bishop and then CRCN president. They asked me all that they needed to know and I gave them all the answers with documents supporting my submissions. They promised to submit their report, which I believe they did. The governor promised one month but it is now getting to two years and there is no call, nothing. If the government hadnt gotten the report they would have asked because they gave one month. Why is the government silent? There are many things when we say people tend to react differently and as a leader of the church, if I dont say it who then will talk?

On the church and politics

Wesley: Some people are mortgaging the United Methodist Church for politics. Let me tell you the reality. The United Methodist Church is being used as a stool for political achievements for some people and so they are sustaining the crisis to continue to meet their political goals, because having the unity of the church will mean a very strong Christian community in the state.

And I tell you, there are people in the Christian community that are working round the clock to ensure that there is no peace in the church. And if they are yearning for peace what are they doing?

Take CAN for example, of which the United Methodist Church is a member. TEKAN wrote to the Taraba State government, wrote to CAN that Micah faction does not belong to TEKAN, therefore, they should not be given responsibility in CAN. But do you know what CAN Taraba State did? They ignored the letter. As I speak to you Micah remains ECWA/TEKAN president and we are the ones paying TEKAN dues, we are the recognised body in TEKAN.

After telling you all these you will hear stories that the bishop is accusing CAN. But I am telling you the reality. If I dont say it, who will say it? If CAN as a body that is supposed to lead the Christians is not willing to tell the Micah group that you dont belong here, because of reasons best known to them, then something is wrong. I am not being given an invitation for CAN meetings because they recognise Micah against the position of the church and that of TEKAN, which is the fellowship of all churches under the defunct Sudan United Mission (SUM). There are so many complexities. Dont forget the United Methodist Church produced the first civilian governor in the state, and he was an ordained clergy of the church in the person of Jolly Nyame.

My friend, people are afraid of the United Methodist Church coming together. So this division is being sponsored by those benefiting from the situation. I once asked the governor that, when you contested and won, late Aisha of blessed memory took you to court and the court upheld your victory, and I asked him, can Aisha set up a parallel government in Taraba State? And he got angry with me that I was insulting him and that I am comparing myself with him. And that is not true, I was only trying to make him understand the scenario but he wasnt willing.

Our largest denomination in Jalingo, the government shut it down for over four years just to deny me access. The government said there was rioting, people are coming to fight. That is to say the Taraba government is incapable of securing the lives and properties of the people. If the state is capable, why cant you stop rioters or people who illegally want to stop a right system on ground? And when we talk, people accuse us of being against the government, which I am not. I only want the government to do the right thing.

We elected him as governor, but some people for cheap political blackmail said I didnt vote for him and they are busy using that against me. The unit where I voted is in the name of my father, Angwan Isa, let them check the result of the unit and see the number of votes he got. Yet because of blackmail they are making all sorts of noise. However, is he not supposed to be a governor to all Tarabians and those living in the state irrespective of religious, ethnic or political affiliation? Let him do the right thing; thats my appeal to the governor.

On the way forward

Wesley: I am calling on all members to uphold the resolution of the United Methodist Church in Nigeria and the resolution is that homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teachings, be it in the U.S., be it in Asia, Europe, in Africa, in fact the entire globe. Lets do the right thing. That is my call to the church. I also want to call on my fellow clergymen in the church to see ourselves as servants called by God to lead His people, to be stewards and faithful to his words and also to work as a team in unity, respecting one another. I am calling on all Christians, not only members of the United Methodist Church, to see this problem happening in the church from a scriptural basis.

Emmanuel Ande: Christmas Covenant has no connection with homosexuality

On Christmas Covenant and homosexuality

Ande: Christmas Covenant has nothing to do with the issue of homosexuality. Anybody that told you that Christmas Covenant has anything to do with homosexuality, that person is misleading you. There is nowhere in the document that shows that Christmas Covenant is in support of homosexuality. Those are fabricated lies that people brought in to lure and mislead people that are ignorant and those that cannot read very well. Christmas Covenant is only one of the legislations that is going to be submitted to the general conference, it does not have anything in it that has to do with homosexuality.

The Christmas Covenant is a proposal. Like when you go to a parliamentary sitting of any assembly, you make a proposal. The Christmas Covenant is a document which is proposing the decentralisation of the church. Like in Africa we have what is called a central conference, and the proposal is suggesting a name change. And in the US from jurisdictional conference to central conference. That is all the Christmas Covenant is agitating for, it has nothing to do with homosexuality or whatsoever.

As Africans, we totally believe that homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teachings and as Nigerians, our constitution frowns at it. So there is nothing like that and there is none of our members from the United Methodist Church in Nigeria that is supporting or promoting homosexuality. Our position up to date in the Book of Discipline is homosexuality is incompatible with Biblical teachings.

We are asking for autonomy to decide our own theology. We want to decentralise the church in terms of teaching, worship and theology, and in terms of understanding the Bible. So we Africans are saying nobody can force us to accept homosexuality. So if Americans are saying they will do that, we are capable of maintaining our own position.

Reasons for the conflict.

Ande: The major reason for the conflict is leadership. People are vying for leadership, some people want extension in their leadership, they want to remain in office till they die, they want to maintain positions where they will get and control resources. That is all. Any spiritual Christian will not go about fabricating lies for selfish gains. They are desperate for leadership. That is why they want to create a new church within the United Methodist Church.

We are the United Methodist Church in Nigeria and our position is that we will not go to any other church, we will maintain our position in the church as Africans. Those people propagating these lies are people that are creating a new denomination out of the United Methodist Church in Nigeria. They want to go to a denomination that is called Global Methodist Church, they have made alliance with some white people in the U.S. We dont depend on white people. We believe that we can be on our own, we can be self-governing, we can be self-propagating and this is what Christmas Covenant is talking about.

On allegation of ganging up against the Bishop

Ande: It is not true that we ganged up against the Bishop because we were relieved of our positions as being insinuated by the bishop. I was relieved of my position as administrative assistant to the bishop on the 23rd of April 2021 and this issue has been going on since January, so how is that related to that? The first complaint they brought against me was written in March when I was still the administrative assistant to the bishop. So, this is just an excuse.

Why he was relieved of my position

Ande: The bishop just relieved me of my position because I told him the truth. And what was the truth? I told him we are not going out of the United Methodist Church. He wants us to agree with him because he has signed and he wanted us to follow him but we said no. I told him clearly and openly that I am not going to be part of the Global Methodist Church in which he has made up his mind to join. That was the reason for my removal and everybody can attest to that.

On if the church decides to adopt homosexuality at its next general conference in 2022.

Ande: If the Americans decide to do it, thats their problem. But there is no legislation that is coming to the general conference to call for adoption of homosexuality, they are just telling that to people that dont know.

The Christmas Covenant has nothing to do with homosexuality. As Nigerians we are talking about ourselves, we dont have control over Americans. Even what they are doing today, do we have control over them? We dont. So they are living in their own nation and we are also living in our own nation. What we are asking for is autonomy to worship our God the way we want to, not to be influenced by white people.

Let me give you an example. The British Methodist Church in the UK adopted homosexuality and even went to the extreme to allow same sex marriage in their church, but we still have British Methodist Church in Nigeria. They did not change their name but cut their ties. They went public to tell the people that the decision of the British Methodist Church is strictly their own, which remains in their country and it has no bearings on the Methodist Church in Nigeria. How is that different?

It is the same thing we are also asking for. Not a name change but total autonomy. If today the Americans decide to allow homosexuality or same sex marriage in their church, they are not going to force that on us. We have our constitution and our rules. We can develop our theology, our own worship and we are going to remain the United Methodist Church in Nigeria.

On funding the church in case of break-up

Ande: That is why they are fighting to be part of the Global Methodist Church because they think the white men will give them money. Yes, if they are sincere let them do like our own. We want autonomy, we want to be independent where we can decide on our own. We dont want any funding, they can take their funding and we sustain ourselves. No American, no English will impose their theology on us. Again they cannot force us to change our name. We are asking for powers that we can make our own decisions, thats all. And how is that hard for people to understand?

On the way forward

Ande: The way forward for the church is honesty, transparency and accountability. The reason you are seeing all these happening is because there is no honesty and transparency in the leadership. I have worked as an administrative assistant, I know the struggle I have throughout the four years I have been serving as a voice for justice, accountability and it is part of the reasons why I was removed because I stood up and maintained that everyone must be accountable, including the bishop.
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At least 28 abducted students of the Bethel Baptist Secondary School in Chikun Local Government Area of Kaduna State, have been freed by their abductors.

The students who regained their freedom in the early hours of Sunday were among the 121 students abducted on July 8 at the school premises.

The Chairman of the Kaduna chapter of Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), Joseph Hayab, confirmed the development to journalists, Tribune newspaper reports.

He said the freed students would be reunited with their family members at the school premises later on Sunday.

At the time of filing this report, PREMIUM TIMES could not ascertain whether a ransom was paid for the release of the students, even though the bandits had demanded N60 million as ransom.

While information around the abducted students remains sketchy, Mr Hayab said he is optimistic about the voluntary release of over 80 others in the bandits den

We are hopeful that more would be released soon and eventually all the students, he told journalists.

The abduction of the 121 students of the Bethel Baptist Secondary School in Kaduna State is one of the growing cases of abductions, not only in Kaduna State but also across other parts of the country.

The kidnappings and killings have continued despite the efforts of security agencies.
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The bandits, who abducted 138 pupils of Salihu Tanko Islamiyya School, Tegina, in May in Rafi Local Government Area of Niger State, have seized a man sent to deliver N30 million as another installment of the ransom they demanded from the parents.

The parents had earlier sent an initial instalment of N25 million ransom, the head of the abducted students school, Abubakar Alhassan, told BBC Hausa Service Sunday morning.

The abducted man, Kasimu Barangana, was one of seven persons sent by the community to deliver the N30 million ransom to the bandits in the forest.

Instead, the bandits seized Mr Barangana himself alleging a shortfall of N4.6 million when they counted the money.

Mr Alhassan said some parents sold off their landed properties and his school sold off a portion of its land to raise the N30 million. They then sent Mr Barangana and six other men to deliver the money in the forest.

According to Mr Alhassan, after the ransom was delivered, the bandits took Mr Barangana to another location to count the money. Later, however, they called to inform the community of the shortfall of N4.6 million and that they were holding on to Mr Barangana until the shortfall is delivered.

Another teacher in the school, Yakubu Idris, and one of the parents confirmed to PREMIUM TIMES that the latest N30 million ransom followed an earlier N25 million, after which delivery the criminals had continued to hold on to the pupils.

We believe that the latest N30 million ransom is complete but the bandits have continued to devise a means to be receiving more money from the parents, the parent said, refusing to disclose their identity because the state government has allegedly forbidden them from granting media interviews.

Earlier, the Secretary to the State Government, Ibrahim Matane, explained why the government is yet to apply force in rescuing the pupils.

Mr Matane said the government was taking time to evaluate ongoing negotiations with the bandits in order to prevent collateral damage.

We know the location where they (pupils) are; we are very careful of any untoward situation; we do not want to hurt the children while resorting to military operations, he was quoted to have said by Leadership newspaper.

He further told the paper that the state government was looking at other options devoid of payment of ransom before considering kinetic action.

The bandits had on May 30 stormed the Islamiyya school, which also has nursery and primary schools, and abducted the pupils.

Two parents reportedly died of shock after hearing that their wards were among the children kidnapped.
The Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) and Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (PTCIJ) have filed a lawsuit against President Muhammadu Buhari and Lai Mohammed, Minister of Information and Culture, asking the court to declare illegal the gag order stopping journalists and broadcast stations from reporting details of terrorist attacks and victims, as the order violates media freedom, and Nigerians freedom of expression and access to information.

Joined in the suit as a defendant is the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC).

The suit followed the directive by the NBC asking journalists, television and radio stations in Nigeria to stop glamourising and giving too many details on the nefarious activities of terrorists and kidnappers during their daily newspaper reviews.

In the suit number FHC/ABJ/CS/725/2021 filed last Friday, SERAP and PTCIJ are seeking: an order of perpetual injunction restraining the government of President Buhari, the NBC, and Mr Lai Muhammed or any other persons from imposing fines or other sanctions on broadcast stations for carrying out their constitutional duties of reporting details of terrorist attacks and victims during daily newspaper reviews.

In the suit, SERAP and PTCIJ are seeking an order to compel and direct the NBC and Mr Lai Muhammed to withdraw the directive asking journalists and broadcast stations to stop reporting details on terrorist attacks and victims, as the directive is unlawful and inconsistent with the Nigerian Constitution of 1999 [as amended], and the countrys international human rights obligations.

SERAP and PTCIJ are also seeking an order setting aside the directive on reporting of terrorist attacks and victims, for being inconsistent and incompatible with sections 22 and 39 of the Nigerian Constitution, Article 9 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights and Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

According to SERAP: Unless the reliefs sought are urgently granted by this Honourable Court, the directive by the NBC and Mr Lai Muhammed would be used to impermissibly restrict Nigerians rights to freedom of expression, access to information, media freedom, and victims right to justice and effective remedies.

SERAP and PTCIJ are arguing that the failure by the government of President Buhari to direct the NBC to withdraw its directive on reporting of terrorist attacks and victims violates sections 5[a] and [b], 147 and 148 of the Nigerian Constitution, Code of Conduct for Public Officers [Fifth Schedule Part 1], and Oath of office [Seventh Schedule] of the Constitution.

SERAP and PTCIJ are also seeking a declaration that sections 5.4.1[f] and 5.4.3 of the National Broadcasting Code and their application to the daily review of newspaper headlines by broadcast stations are inconsistent with sections 22 and 39 of the Nigerian Constitution, Article 9 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights and Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

According to SERAP and PTCIJ: The NBC directive fails to establish a direct and immediate connection between the reporting by broadcast stations and purported risks to national security and peace. The NBC is using national security as a pretext to intimidate and harass journalists and broadcast stations, and to violate Nigerians rights to freedom of expression and access to information.

SERAP and PTCIJ are also arguing that: Factual reporting on the growing violence in some parts of Nigeria is a matter of public interest. National security considerations should be limited in application to situations in which the interest of the whole nation is at stake, which would thereby exclude restrictions in the sole interest of a government, regime, or power group.

The suit filed on behalf of SERAP and PTCIJ by their lawyers Kolawole Oluwadare and Opeyemi Owolabi, read in part: The NBC and Mr Lai Muhammed lack the power and authority to restrict the ability of journalists and broadcast stations to carry out their constitutional duties and to unlawfully impose penalty such as fines and other sanctions on any journalists and broadcast stations for reporting on details of terrorist attacks and victims in the country.

SERAP and PTCIJ together with several millions of Nigerians easily access information, news and form opinions on government policies through the daily newspaper reviews by journalists and broadcast stations in Nigeria.

While the NBC has the powers to make rules to enable it perform its statutory functions under section 2[1] [a] to [u] of NBC Act, such statutory powers ought to be exercised in line with the Nigerian Constitution, and the countrys international human rights obligations.

The pertinent questions that arise from the directive are: Who determines what would amount to too many details, glamourising, divisive rhetoric, and security issues during the daily review of newspaper headlines? What constitutes divisive materials during the daily review of newspaper headlines by journalists and broadcast stations?

In law, a regulation that is vague and loose in its scope cannot be used to take away constitutionally and internationally recognized human rights to freedom of expression, access to information, and media freedom.

The interference with the constitutional and legal duties of journalists and broadcast stations cannot be justified, as Nigerian authorities have failed to show that reporting of terrorist attacks and victims would impose a specific risk of harm to a legitimate State interest that outweighs the publics interest in such information.

The Constitution is the grundnorm and the fundamental law of the land. All other legislations in this country take their hierarchy from the provisions of the Constitution. It is not a mere common legal document.

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The Courts as the veritable agency for the protection and preservation of rule of law should ensure that persons and institutions operate within the defined ambit of constitutional and statutory limitations.

Where agencies of government are allowed to operate at large and at their whims and caprices in the guise of performing their statutory duties, the end result will be anarchy, licentiousness, authoritarianism and brigandage leading to the loss of the much cherished and constitutionally guaranteed freedom and liberty.

No date has been fixed for the hearing of the application for interim injunction, and the substantive suit.
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Five members of the Maritime Workers Union of Nigeria (MWUN) and three others who were seized by gunmen in Rivers waters on Monday have regained their freedom.

Edward Osagie, assistant director, public relations, Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA), disclosed this in a statement he issued late Saturday.

According to Mr Osagie, the release of the abducted people on Saturday evening was sequel to the intervention of the Director-General of NIMASA, Bashir Jamoh, and other stakeholders.

The Director-General of NIMASA broke the news after a phone conversation with the President-General of MWUN, Comrade Adewale Adeyanju at about 8:15 p.m. on Saturday.

The abductees are believed to be in good physical condition and the MWUN President-General is expected to provide detailed report on the circumstances surrounding the abduction early next week, the statement said.

The abductees were travelling to Port Harcourt from Kula area in Akuku-Toru Local Government Area when the gunmen seized them at the Kula-Abonnema waterway.

(NAN)
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Despite an urgent need for more judges to address its huge backlog of cases, the Federal High Court is, for now, considering filling only six of the 28 existing vacancies on its bench.

The Chief Judge of the court, John Tsoho, who confirmed this in an exclusive interview with PREMIUM TIMES, said the desire to fill all the vacancies was being hampered by paucity of fund.

The appointment of judges is a very tough process; it is so tedious because it is intricately tied to funding. If you must appoint a judge, you provide courtroom, support staff (registrars, clerks), security personnel among others.

You have to provide a befitting car and accommodation. But considering what the economy is now, those are not things you can easily put in place.

Mind you, all these things have to be catered for from the courts budget; no other authority has responsibility for it. The NJC insists that every requirement for the appointment of judges must be on ground  the facilities and everything for their inspection before you go ahead with the recruitment, Mr Tsoho said.

Statutorily, the court has a full complement of 100 judges, Mr Tsoho said, citing the Federal High Court (Amendment) Act, 2013.

But due to deaths, retirements, and elevation to the Court of Appeal bench, the number of judges of the court, which was 87 at some point, is currently 72.

Mr Tsoho told our reporter that the court management had sought the permission of the National Judicial Council (NJC) to appoint 21 judges as far back as 2019, but got approval for only six last year.

In 2019 while we were preparing for the 2020 budget, what we proposed was actually the appointment of 21 judges.

When we got to the NJC, they couldnt approve more than six. So, it is the vacancies for six judges that have been publicised so far. So, we had to shift the difference to the following year, which is 2021. But coming to this year, the approved budget has even been worse than that of last year, the Chief Judge said.

Crying need for more judges

Mr Tsoho lamented the caseload the courts judges were grappling with, with some according to him, having between 400 to 500 cases in their docket.

Taking our reporter through how the number of judges slumped from 87 that it was at some point to its current 72, he said there was a crying need to replace the vacancies left behind by the exited judges.

As of this moment, the number has dropped to 72. It means we have vacancies for 28 judges if we must meet our full complement. The number went up to 87 at some point, but so many factors led to the number dropping, like retirement, elevation and even death.

Within the last legal year, we lost two judges and we had several retirements. So, the number has dropped. There is a crying need to replace that number. Even if we cannot make up to a hundred, it should get very close to that number, Mr Tsoho said.

Judges were last appointed to the Federal High Court bench in June 2018 with nine brought on board in that batch.
Facts have emerged as to how a federal judge, Mohammed Yunusa, who stood trial for bribery charges for three years, was reinstated to his position after serving almost five years suspension.

The National Judicial Council (NJC), in July 2016, found Mr Yunusa culpable of acts of alleged misconduct different from the bribery allegation that was later levelled against him by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).

In line with its adopted procedure, the NJC placed Mr Yunusa, then a serving judge at the Enugu Division of the Federal High Court, on suspension pending the approval of President Muhammadu Buhari for the judges compulsory retirement.

But since 2016, President Buhari refused to act on the NJCs recommendation, creating a window for the judge to return to the NJC for a review of his case last year.

While the bribery case later filed against him by the EFCC was pending at the Lagos State High Court, the NJC in December 2020, issued a report clearing Mr Yunusa of the allegations of misconduct for which he was earlier suspended in 2020.

The NJC in a December 29, 2020 letter signed by its then Deputy Chairman, Olabode Rhodes-Vivour, who retired in March as a Justice of the Supreme Court, informed Mr Yunusa that his suspension had been lifted while the council awaits the decision of Mr President on the recommendation.

Although the Presidents approval was still being awaited, Mr Yunusa, in January 2021, took the clearance letter issued by the NJC to the Lagos High Court judge, before whom he was being prosecuted over separate allegations of bribery, to get his trial terminated.

Acting on the letter, the trial judge, Serifat Solebo, gave the order discharging Mr Yunusa in a ruling delivered on January 25.

This prompted the EFCC to amend the charges to be able to proceed with other defendants in the case.

Chief Judge confirms judges reinstatement

The Chief Judge of the Federal High Court, John Tsoho, confirmed Mr Yunusas reinstatement in an exclusive interview with PREMIUM TIMES.

On why Mr Yunusa was cleared by the NJC, Mr Tsoho said the judicial decisions which were the basis of the sanction earlier imposed on him,had been approved by the Court of Appeal.

Mr Tsoho said the NJC had no choice but to recall the suspended judge following the presidencys refusal to respond to NJCs request for his compulsory retirement in 2016.

The NJC felt that since the allegation against him (Mr Yunusa) seemed unfounded, he should return. So, the matter was referred to the presidency three years ago, and till now there has been no response.

So, the NJC felt that in a situation like that it cant wait indefinitely.

For sure he is back on the authority of the NJC, and there was a press release to that effect, Mr Tsoho explained.

Under the Nigerian constitution, the President is the approving authority for NJCs recommendations on appointment and major discipline actions such as dismissal or compulsory retirement of federal judges.

Even in the process of appointment (of judges), when judges are nominated, the NJC makes recommendation and then the presidency will approve. So, it is the approving authority, Mr Tsoho said.

He further noted that most of the complaints that were leveled against him (Mr Yunusa) bordered on matters he had tried.

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But it turned out that in all those matters, his decisions were upheld on appeal at the Court of Appeal. So, if you are alleging whether its bias or whether he didnt reach proper decision, then a higher court vindicates him, what do you do?, the Chief Judge wondered.

Background

PREMIUM TIMES had reported that Mr Yunusas sanction was based on a petition by the Civil Society Network Against Corruption (CSNAC) accusing him of arbitrarily giving orders to restrain anti-corruption agencies from carrying out their statutory duties of investigation and prosecution.

In January 2018, the EFCC arraigned him on three counts of taking bribes from a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), Rickey Tarfa, who is also being separately prosecuted by the commission on similar charges.

The anti-graft agency, in February 2020, scaled the charges up to nine counts. It re-arraigned Mr Yunusa alongside Esther Agbor, a worker at Mr Tarfas law firm, who was accused of paying N1.5 million to the judges bank account.

The commission, in the amended charges, accused the two defendants of attempted perversion of the course of justice, corruption by a public official, use of office or position for gratification to the tune of N2.2 million.

The EFCC had called 10 prosecution witnesses when Serifat Solebo, the trial judge at the Special Offences Division of the Lagos State High Court in Ikeja, discharged Mr Yunusa in a ruling delivered on January 25.

The anti-graft agency has since appealed against the discharge of Mr Yunusa, urging the Court of Appeal to send him back to face trial.
The number of people without access to electricity in Africa dropped from almost 860 million in 2018 to 770 million in 2019, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has said.

This represents 38 per cent of the population in the continent.

In its report, 2019 Africa Energy Outlook, IEA said energy access policies continue to bear fruit in Africa, with data showing important progress.

The report gave for the first time an assessment of off-grid electricity access, sourced from government and commercial data.

It noted that 75 per cent of the population without access live in sub-Saharan Africa, a share that has risen over recent years.

The number, IEA said, is set to increase in 2020, pushing many countries farther away from achieving the goal of universal access by 2030.

By 2030, 50 per cent of the global population without access is concentrated in seven countries  Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Uganda, Pakistan, Tanzania, Niger and Sudan.

A country-by-country assessment shows that only 1 per cent of South Sudan has access to electricity; 3 per cent in Central Africa and 9 per cent in Chad and Democratic Republic of Congo respectively.

Likewise in Burundi, 11 per cent of the population has access, 12 per cent in Liberia and 14 per cent in Niger.

This, according to the IEA, shows how progress remains uneven in sub-Saharan Africa.

On the other hand, 96 per cent of the population in Cape Verde has access to electricity; 85 per cent in Ghana; 76 per cent in Cote DIvoire and 71 per cent in Senegal and Sao Tome respectively.

In Nigeria, home to over 200 million people, about 62 per cent of its population have access to electricity.

This, IEA said, implies 77 million of the countrys population are without access to electricity.

Nigeria is second to Democratic Republic of Congo in a toll of countries with highest number of people without electricity access in Africa.

Covid-19 reverses electricity access progress

In Africa, the number of people gaining access to electricity doubled from 9 million a year between 2000 and 2013 to 20 million people between 2014 and 2019, outpacing population growth.

As a result, IEA said the number of people without access to electricity, which peaked at 610 million in 2013, declined progressively to around 580 million in 2019.

Much of this recent dynamism comes from a small number of countries leading the progress, in particular Kenya, Senegal, Rwanda, Ghana and Ethiopia, the organisation said.

In Kenya, the access rate rose from 20 per cent in 2013 to almost 85 per cent in 2019.

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The report stated that the majority of progress over the past decade in Africa has been made as a result of grid connections.

But a rapid rise has been seen in the deployment of off-grid systems, it said.

For example, Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia accounted for around half of the 5 million people gaining access through new solar home systems in 2018, up from only 2 million in 2016.

However, the health crisis and economic downturn caused by Covid-19 is compounding the difficulties faced by governments as they look to alleviate energy poverty and expand access, pushing countries farther away from achieving universal access.

Shifting government priorities, supply-chain disruptions and social distancing measures have slowed access programmes and hindered activities in the decentralised energy access area, the report said.

Sub-Saharan Africa, home to three-quarters of the global population without access to electricity, has been particularly hard hit, and recent progress achieved in the region is being reversed by the effects of the pandemic.

Our first estimates indicate that the population without access to electricity could increase in 2020 for the first time since 2013.

The report also suggest that mobilising development finance institutions and donors is critical to ensuring that energy access progress continues.

Similarly, it recommended decentralised solutions as the least-cost way to provide power to more than half of the population gaining access by 2030.

The least expensive way to achieve universal electricity access in many areas appears to be renewable energy sources: in addition to increasing grid-connected electricity generation from renewables, declining costs of small-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) for stand-alone systems and mini-grids is key in helping deliver affordable electricity access to millions.

This is especially the case in remote rural areas in African countries, home to many of the people still deprived of electricity access.
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The Muslims Students Society of Nigeria (MSSN) has said that the incessant kidnapping of students in some parts of the country was a strategy to discourage the pursuit of education.

MSSN National President, Shehu Usman- Abubakar, said in a statement on Saturday, in Birnin Kebbi, that many students had withdrawn from school as a result of kidnapping.

He said education was the major source of strength and power to every nation and community in the world.

As kidnapping has started affecting schools, we, as members of MSSN, view it as an effort towards discouraging the pursuit of education, especially in educationally backward communities of the northern parts of the country.

Therefore, more should be done to put a stop to that with all the might and urgency possible, he said.

Mr Usman-Abubakar urged governments at all levels to do more in ensuring the protection of lives and properties of their citizens, saying that the rate of criminality in the country was alarming, especially banditry and kidnapping.

He, however, noted that security agencies had been doing a lot in combating insecurity in the country, while commending the Kebbi state government for its efforts in the immediate rescue of some of the kidnapped students of Federal Government College, Birnin Yauri.

We urge other state governments affected to follow suit as set by Gov. Atiku Bagudu, he said.

The MSSN president also urged the Muslim faithful to to Almighty God in repentance and be prayerful for a better Nigeria.

Kidnapping students for ransom has taken a new dimension in the country with many pupils still held in captive by their abductors.

(NAN).
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The Nigerian army has urged the public to be wary of negative propaganda against it allegedly by the Eastern Security Network (ESN).

It also urged the public to discountenance the propaganda video by the group, saying it was the machination of mischief makers targeting the Nigerian military.

The Director, Army Public Relations, Onyema Nwachukwu, disclosed this in a statement in Abuja.

Mr Nwachukwu, a brigadier general, alleged that members of a secessionist group Eastern Security Network, are engaging in negative propaganda to portray the troops in bad light before the public.

Mr Nwachukwu said secessionist sympathisers had recently released a video on Youtube, featuring blurred images of some persons dressed in green camouflage destroying a farmland in an undisclosed location.

He said the authors of the video mischievously attributed the action of the persons to the military by falsely claiming they were soldiers in an attempt to tarnish the image of Nigerian Army.

According to him, following a fact finding investigation on the video by subjecting it to credible reverse image, it was discovered that the video was first published on YouTube channel BIAFRA BOY.

The investigation also revealed that the image of the men in green camouflage was deliberately blurred to conceal their identity from viewers.

Similarly the authors failed to identify the location, community, or local government area the incident occurred.

Given these facts, it is apparent that the video footage is a deliberate propaganda by ESN to bring the reputation and image of the army to disrepute by portraying its personnel as enemies of the people.

The army spokesman urged members of the public to be wary of such negative propaganda materials by subjecting them to thorough scrutiny.

We reassure the public that the Nigerian Army will continue to operate professionally regardless of all divisive propaganda.

We assure all peace loving Nigerians of our commitment to aid civil authorities in the containment of security challenges in line with constitutional provisions, he said.

It should be recalled that the group had been accused of launching attacks on security agents and destruction of government facilities in the south-eastern part of the country in recent times.

(NAN)
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The Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) has categorically denied any reported air accident involving Air Peace or any other airlines, Sam Adurogboye, the General Manager, Public Relations, NCAA, said in a statement in Lagos, on Saturday.

Mr Adurogboye said the attention of the authority had been drawn to a sensational report that was trending that an aircraft belonging to Air Peace B737-500, with registration mark 5N-BQR, was involved in an air crash in Ilorin, on July 23.

As a matter of fact, the said aircraft, which departed from Abuja successfully, landed in Ilorin. It only experienced a tyre burst in the course of taxiing.

Meanwhile, all the 66 passengers and six crew members onboard were disembarked without any issues whatsoever on the same day.

The Authority wishes to enjoin the travelling public to disregard such false and reckless presentations, he said.

Mr Adurogboye urged the media to partner, inculcate professionalism and avoid publishing false news that was capable of injuring blossoming reputations.

He said the NCAA was committed to ensuring safe and secure air transport in Nigeria and would stop at nothing to ensure that its record of over eight years of zero accident and fatality, in scheduled flight operations, continued.

(NAN)
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Olubadan of Ibadanland, Saliu Adetunji, has sent a delegation to Cotonou, Republic of Benin, to observe court proceedings in the case involving a self-styled activist, Sunday Adeyemo, also known as Sunday Igboho.

Adela Oloko, personal assistant and director of media and publicity to the Olubadan, made this known in a statement issued on Sunday in Ibadan.

Mr Oloko quoted the royal father as stating this in his palace while exchanging views with leaders of Central Council of Ibadan Indigenes (CCII), led by the President-General, Yemisi Adeaga.

The Oba, who did not disclose the identity of members of the delegation, said they would be in the court in Cotonou on Monday to observe Mr Igbohos trial.

He said the step taken had become necessary in order to assure those who had been besieging his palace, including protesters, that he was not folding his arms over the travails of Igboho and his aides.

Sunday Igboho lives in Ibadan, got married in Ibadan, reared his children in Ibadan, built houses in Ibadan and, as such, he has the rights to be protected by Ibadan traditional institution within the ambit of the law, just like any other resident of the city, he said.

Mr Adetunji, who said he was in constant touch with other traditional rulers in Yoruba land, including the Igboho royal crowns, allayed the fears of a repeat of Yoruba-Fulani collision of 1814.

He, however, urged people to remain calm and be law- abiding, stressing that truth would prevail.

(NAN)
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Yakubu Pam, the executive secretary, Nigeria Christian Pilgrims Commission (NCPC) has advised Nigerian pilgrims to conduct themselves properly while performing pilgrimage.

Mr Pam said this while addressing the first batch of 2020 pilgrims shortly after they arrived Amman, Kingdom of Jordan on Sunday.

This was contained in a statement by Celestine Toruka of the Media and Publicity Department of the commission, issued on Sunday in Jos.

Mr Pam urged the pilgrims to desist from acts that could tarnish the image of the commission and the country in general.

While we are on pilgrimage, I wish to call on all to show who Christ is in our conduct.

Shun any act that will embarrass the commission, Nigeria and even the host country, he advised.

Mr Pam commended the Jordanian government for the reception accorded the Nigerian delegation on arrival.

The executive secretary added that the pilgrimage to Jordan would help to strengthen bilateral relations between it and Nigeria.

He enjoined the pilgrims to see their Pilgrimage to Jordan as a revival that would turn their spiritual life around.

He also advised them to use the exercise to fervently pray for themselves as well as the nation and stressed that we are here to pray not on tourism.

He urged the pilgrims to cooperate with their guides to ensure a hitch free exercise.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that first batch of 2020 pilgrims were led by the President of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), Samson Ayokunle. (NAN)
Right now, Yoruba are no longer looking at Igboho as a person. They see him as symbolising the Asantehene Golden Stool, which Buhari wants to impudently snatch from them. They are rallying round and will continue to rally round him. This advocacy for self-determination may become a fire-spitting dinosaur or a consuming hydra, the many-headed monster of the Greek mythology.

Queen Mother Nana Yaa Asantewaa was just a mother and farmer who spiced her vocation with being an intellectual, politician and human rights activist. Living in a confederate Gold Coast, now Ghana, riven by a civil war from 1883 to 1888, the moment the British exiled Asantewaas brother and the King of Asante, Prempeh 1, to the Seychelles in 1896, a fertile ground was laid for a deadly rebellion against British rule in Ashanti land. Frederick Hogston, Governor General of the Gold Coast, hastened the rebellion. By obstinately demanding for the Golden Stool, which was the symbol of the Ashanti nation, Hogston didnt know that he was, apologies to Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, provoking an uprising, which would bring out the beast in the Ashanti people.

The Golden Stool, also called the Sika Dwa Kofi, was Ashanti Kingdoms symbol of power from the 17th century. Made of gold, the stool is said to be 18 inches high, 24 inches in length and 12 inches wide. It never touched the ground and no Asantehene, King of the Kingdom, ever ascended the throne without it. Narratives of the oral tradition have it that, Okomfo Anokye, a High Priest who was also one of the two founders of Ashanti land, conjured the stool from heaven. Decorated with golden bells, myth has it that as the stool descended from the sky, it came to the feet of Osei Tutu I, the first Asantehene. The Ashanti believe that inside that stool was the soul of its nation. It was this stool that Hogston impudently wanted; it was the sense of injustice of Britain that was resented by Asantewaa, Regent of the Kumasi EjisuJuaben district. She was livid at the British audacity.

Enraged at the pusillanimity of Ashanti men, Asantewaa stormed an all-men meeting, where disagreement on whether or not to confront Hogston and his colonial taskmasters was ongoing. There, she made a famous speech that conferred manhood on a woman and effeminacy on men, to wit, How can a proud and brave people like the Asante sit back and look while Whitemen took away their king and chiefs, and humiliated them with a demand for the Golden Stool? The Golden Stool only means money to the Whitemen; they have searched and dug everywhere for it. I shall not pay one predwan to the governor. If you, the chiefs of Asante, are going to behave like cowards and not fight, you should exchange your loincloths for my undergarments!

As a mark of her seriousness to go to war against Hogstons Britain, Asantewaa seized a gun and shot it at the sky in front of the men. There and then she was chosen by Ashanti kings to become the Generalissimo in what was dubbed the Yaa Asantewaa War, the Ashanti-British War of the Golden Stool, with her leading an army of 5,000 warriors. Asantewaa and her army pummeled the British in the Fort of Kumasi. After months of fighting, Hogston sent a 1,400 man force to quell the rebellion, leading to the capture of Yaa Asantewaa. Fifteen of her close war advisers were equally captured and sent on exile to the Seychelles. Asantewaa died in exile on October 17, 1921, but 36 years after, her dream of an Asante that was free of British temerity became a reality on March 6, 1957, with the independence of the Asante people, making Ghana the first African nation in Sub-Saharan Africa to achieve this feat.

Coming back home to Nigeria, no one needs Nostradamus to predict that by 2023 when President Muhammadu Buhari would be finishing his presidency, he would be an antihero in the mould of Hogston. An antihero of traumatised, ethnically demonised, internally colonised Nigerians, that is. Sunday Adeyemo, a.k.a. Igboho, may then assume the trope of a rescuer of his people, just like Asantewaa. In Buharis unprecedented ethnic favouritism, unbridled disdain for any ethnicity other than the Fulani and his self-appointed role as Usman Dan Fodiyo-reincarnate, Buhari is gradually pulling off the chains from the hands and feet of Nigerias chained ethnic nationality prisoners, something in the mould of Platos Allegory of the Cave. In the Allegory, a group of people hitherto chained to the wall of a cave all their lives, with a blank wall of shadows as all they saw, suddenly left the prison and their eyes were open. With Buharis obsession for haranguing southern villains like Igboho and Nnamdi Kanu, unbeknown to him, he is gradually liberating the Yoruba and Igbo people from their imprisoning belief in a collective good from a united Nigeria.

The ding-dong over Igboho has been on in the last few weeks. Arrested in Benin Republic about a week ago, Buhari has since then been bearing the Dracula teeth of the Almighty Nigerian government, with the aim of sinking them into the naked flesh of the separatist advocate. All things being equal, however, the Nigerian president may soon realise that, as the Yoruba say, you cannot violate the son of the initiate and the uninitiated in similar proportion, without having your hands burnt. Having succeeded in his crude and brash interdiction of Kanu, Buhari took another step forward to similarly Umaru Dikko-lize Igboho. With the situation of things, however, he is likely to discover that this is a barren exercise.

What Tafida did is clearly indistinguishable from what Igboho did in Igangan. In that frustrating outburst, the Emir did not just issue a quit notice to these criminal elements who he clearly identified as the same people that Buhari has wrapped his hands round in the last six years; he literally signed their death warrants.

Unfortunately for the Buhari government, the tar-brushed image of one who thinks only from the lens of ethnicity hangs on its neck. The government has thus sent everyone to their tents. Indices that were hitherto opaque have become dominant. Every government move is painted in the ethnic ink, no thanks to Buharis obsession with his Fulani stock. It is so bad that Nigeria under Buhari has become the most divisive country ever in history.

We have shouted ourselves hoarse over Buharis inexplicable nepotism and favouritism. He then transformed magisterially from cronyism in appointments to abetting crimes of his ethnic stock. Fulani can do no wrong and the criminal cattle rearer elements among them receive such governmental protection that has not been known in the history of inter-ethnic relationship in Nigeria. While herders kill notoriously in the South and the Middle Belt, Buhari looks the other way to lick his plate of fura and nunu. Bandits who terrorise, kidnap, kill and who recently shut down a military aircraft, in his and his Fulani ilk in governments estimation, are engaged in normal businesses. In his very before, Sheikh Gumi, who obviously has governments support, traverses forests to hold tete-a-tetes with dare-devil, self-confessed killers and national saboteurs and Lai Mohammed and others in his government laud him as a cousin of Angel Gabriel. Killer Boko Haram, who massacre hundreds, are said to have undergone rehabilitation and are sent back to the midst of same people they kill like jackals. They are asked to sin no more. Just because they are northerners.

If the South and Governor Samuel Ortom of Benue State were merely raising unnecessary hell over nothing, Emir of Muri, Abbas Tafida, gave the world a different orange to suck on last week. Tafida issued a 30-day ultimatum to herdsmen in the State to vacate the forest, stating that they had turned Taraba forests into terror locales. Our Fulani herdsmen in the forests, you came into this State and we accepted you, why then will you be coming to towns and villages to kidnap residents, even up to the extent of raping our women? We are tired of having sleepless nights and the hunger alone in the land is enormous and we will not allow it to continue. Because of this unending menace, every Fulani herdsman in this State has been given 30 days ultimatum to vacate the forests, said Tafida. Remove Taraba and Tafida, you would think the king of Igangan in Oyo State was talking.

What Tafida did is clearly indistinguishable from what Igboho did in Igangan. In that frustrating outburst, the Emir did not just issue a quit notice to these criminal elements who he clearly identified as the same people that Buhari has wrapped his hands round in the last six years; he literally signed their death warrants. Irritated by the same audacity of the Fulani to plunder and kill, former Chief of Army Staff, General Theophilus Danjuma, on March 24, 2018, at the convocation ceremony of the Taraba State University, Jalingo, had alleged an act of ethnic cleansing by the Nigerian Army under Buhari against his Taraba and Nigerian people. Without any equivocation, he alleged that the army was colluding with killer herdsmen, sending unsuspecting persons to the hereafter in the process.

This ethnic cleansing must stop in Taraba, and it must stop in Nigeria. These killers have been protected by the military; they cover them and you must be watchful to guard and protect yourselves because you have no other place to go. You must rise to protect yourselves from these people; if you depend on the armed forces to protect you, you will all die. I ask all of you to be on the alert and defend your country, defend your state, Danjuma had said.

Igbohos sin is that he said the same thing about his Yorubaland. Tafida also did so last week, in articulating the frustrations of his subjects who have become victims of routine kidnapping, rape and murder orchestrated by these nomadic criminals from Fouta Djallon. To confirm the howling of Danjuma, Tafida and Igboho, a few days ago, under the guise of searching for contraband rice, men of the Nigerian Customs Service stormed Ibarapa land, in what the natives claim was a reprisal attack by Fulani herdsmen they had staved off a couple of months ago. Three men, including an Amotekun official, were killed, with many sustaining injuries. The so-called eight trailer loads of rice that the Customs claimed brought them on their chase to Ibarapa, were not found, save for guns bearing serial numbers of the Nigerian Army and the blood and sorrows that the intruders, said to be Customs men, left in their trails.

Now, Buhari has brought every Yoruba to the painful realisation that Igboho, no matter his limitations, symbolises them. He is the Nana Asantewaa of Ashanti kingdom, who has offered himself to defend his people against the Hogston at the Aso Rock Villa. Some people are even already pointing at the similarity of Buharis haranguing of Igboho with same haranguing against Chief Obafemi Awolowo by Buharis forebears.

Not only did Igboho do just what Danjuma and Tafida did, he went a step further to say that the future of his Yoruba people could not be guaranteed under a bigoted presidency of Fulani domination that Buhari runs. In reiterating conversations that are daily exchanged on Southern Nigerian streets, Igboho told the world that Buhari seems to have declared war against anyone who dares to cry while the Fulani pummel them. To underscore his brash irreverence for law and lawful agitations, Buhari ordered the DSS to invade Igbohos house some weeks ago. Two persons were killed and guns claimed to have been retrieved from his house were hoisted as emblem of the invaders victory. And a cache of amulets that were later shown to have been in the news about a year before. In a Nigeria where, a few years ago, robbery evidence that bore the name of then Senate President, Bukola Saraki, was advertised by the police, which were later discovered to have been planted to criminalise this enemy of Buharis, what stopped the DSS, which entered Igbohos house without a search or arrest warrant, from cloning the Saraki hoax by planting those guns on him?

Now, Buhari has brought every Yoruba to the painful realisation that Igboho, no matter his limitations, symbolises them. He is the Nana Asantewaa of Ashanti kingdom, who has offered himself to defend his people against the Hogston at the Aso Rock Villa. Some people are even already pointing at the similarity of Buharis haranguing of Igboho with same haranguing against Chief Obafemi Awolowo by Buharis forebears. Tafawa Balewa, in cahoots with Ahmadu Bello, had accused Awolowo of treasonable felony and sent him to jail. True or not, that is the narrative you invoke when you have a leader who is bigoted, inside an ethnic cocoon, as Nigeria does at the moment.

By Igbohos suit of last Friday, filed at the Oyo State High Court in Ibadan, where he asked the court to declare that his campaign for self-determination on behalf of his Yoruba people was legal and a fundamental right, Buhari has vicariously made every Yoruba man a plaintiff in that suit, while he and his Fulani people, are defendants. Citing Article 20 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples Right (Ratification and Enforcement) Act., Laws of Federation, 2010, and Articles 3, 4, 7, & 18 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Indigenous People made at its 107th Plenary Meeting of Thursday, September 13, 2007, let us see how a Buhari, who sees nothing wrong in the Fulani herders and bandits terrorism of the North-West, would see criminal culpability in Igbohos agitation to let his people go. Even Pharaoh, as demonic as he was, merely pleaded with Moses not to allow his people leave the land of their tribulations. He didnt jail Moses. To the best of my knowledge, Igbohos self-determination agitation has not led to the shedding of a single pint of blood. The court will interpret the law and rule on what is illegal in Igboho asking for freedom for his people.

Back to the legal fireworks going on in Benin Republic. Not only did Buharis ethnic leaning provoke a similar coming together to defend Igboho by his Yoruba kin in the small African country, his peremptory closure of the Nigerian/Benin border, without prior notice to the authorities of Benin, should have a lot to do with where the pendulum swings. While Buharis home states Nigeria/Niger Republic border was literally a beehive for trans-border activities, Benin that shares some consanguinity with the Yoruba, was under lock and key. President of Benin Republic, Patrice Talon, had met Buhari on January 19 to plead with him to relax the closure, as it was affecting commerce in his country, but Buhari magisterially waved off the plea. Talon even pleaded that Buhari should install Nigerian Customs officers at the Benin port, so as to ensure strict compliance. In anger, Buhari kept on harping on smuggling across the Benin border, as if there were no information filtering out that smuggling never stopped in the Nigerien end of the border.

At the end of the meeting, Talon and his Benin delegation retired to the Benin embassy in Abuja to dialogue with Nigerian authorities, for several hours. They held a series of meetings with Nigerian economic actors, which included Aliko Dangote, one of the prime movers of the closure. Although Buhari opened the borders in August 2019, it is said that this has not translated into actual resumption of the traffic of goods between Nigeria and Benin. Now that Tukur Buratai is seeking to carry Igbohos head on a platter to Buhari in the Villa, he may be reminded that a pounded yam of 20 years could still be steaming hot.

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Right now, Yoruba are no longer looking at Igboho as a person. They see him as symbolising the Asantehene Golden Stool, which Buhari wants to impudently snatch from them. They are rallying round and will continue to rally round him. This advocacy for self-determination may become a fire-spitting dinosaur or a consuming hydra, the many-headed monster of the Greek mythology. This will be due mainly to Buharis preference for intransigence, rather than the amity of mutual talks, as well as his disdain for other Nigerian ethnicities, other than the Fulani. His government may just be bringing out the beast in a people who share the Ashanti peoples disdain for emperors.

Festus Adedayo is an Ibadan-based journalist.
When the Nigerian Senate amended the electoral bill to subsume the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) in the matter of the electronic transmission of results, not a few analysts decoded what they interpreted as the hidden code: the 2023 elections have already been rigged 18 months ahead of showtime!

It is not our diversity which divides us, said Nelson Mandela, it is not our ethnicity, or religion or culture that divides us. Since we have achieved our freedom, there can only be one division amongst us: between those who cherish democracy and those who do not. Wise words, assuming the process of ascending to power is not rigged or tainted.

When the Nigerian Senate amended the electoral bill to subsume the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) in the matter of the electronic transmission of results, not a few analysts decoded what they interpreted as the hidden code: the 2023 elections have already been rigged 18 months ahead of showtime!

Being street-wise politicians, perhaps the distinguished senators had been reading too much of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin. In the matter of rigging the will of the people, there cant be much difference between capitalists and communists. Vice has no ideology. A Nigerian rigger can learn a thing or two from his Russian counterpart. Thanks to Stalin, we are reminded that, The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.

We have had several cases where the winner that emerged after the close of balloting was different from the person declared victorious at the collation centre. The road between the voting point and the eventual declaration of results is laden with many landmines. According to Idayat Hassan, Director of the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD), who has keenly studied the subject, In Nigerian elections, you can win during voting but lose during collationSometimes returning officers also get intimidated we saw such cases in Taraba and Imo in the last elections.

That was why INEC had started introducing technology to reduce the human interface in the process. But a section of the political elite prefer (no, insist on) the old native-law-and-custom system where bribes and raw intimidation swung the pendulum.

Electronic transmission of results was widely adopted by stakeholders during public hearings on the amendment of the Electoral Act by the National Assembly. It had been used, to the great credit of INEC, in the September 2020 Edo State governorship polls. INEC Chairman, Mahmud Yakubu, had urged the National Assembly to amend the Electoral Act to provide for electronic collation and transmission of election results. But, see what he got!

The original amendments to the Electoral Act provided for electronic transmission of results but just as the Senate was set to pass the bill, a strange Section 50(2), which completely outlawed transmission of votes by electronic means, appeared in the draft legislation as follows: Voting at an election under this Bill shall be in accordance with the procedures determined by the commission, which may include electronic voting provided that the Commission shall not transmit results of the election by electronic means.

What rankles is the fact that INEC has always indicated its readiness to transmit election results electronically. If INEC  in exercise of its constitutional powers  says it can, who is the National Assembly to say it cant?

The catch is in the electronic transmission of results. You can vote electronically; you can use electronic card readers; you can maintain servers for various purposes, but dont you ever transmit the results electronically. The senators know something the rest of us dont know!

If a man has a choice to travel to a distant place by automobile but prefers to ride a camel, there must be something he has not disclosed.

Electronic transmission of results has many advantages. It encourages voter confidence as the whole process happens in the presence of the electorate. It eliminates the need for collation centres, as they are presently known. There will no longer be any need to rely on road or water transportation to physically convey results to collation centres. Results will no longer disappear between counting and collation. Political thugs adept at snatching official documents containing results or holding INEC officials hostage will have to put their energies to other uses. The use of technology will also save time; results of voting will be uploaded in real time.

Jettisoning manual tabulation and transmission will eliminate the stress and inaccuracy associated with the old system. Idayat Hassan attests: In the 2019 election there were cases of arithmetical error by collating officers.

In its postmortem analysis of ward-level collation during the 2019 presidential election, CDD noted that the collation of results was a much-exploited weakness in the Nigerian election process. Using documentary evidence from 8,809 election observers accredited by INEC, the CDD report concluded: In the 2019 elections, civil society observers all across Nigeria saw a collation process that was chaotic, vulnerable to manipulation and, in some locations, violently disrupted and unnecessarily opaque.

What rankles is the fact that INEC has always indicated its readiness to transmit election results electronically. If INEC  in exercise of its constitutional powers  says it can, who is the National Assembly to say it cant?

INEC National Commissioner and Chairman, Information and Voter Education Committee, Festus Okoye, has taken to various media fora to reiterate the Commissions position. Confirming that INEC has the capacity to transmit election results throughout the chain, he drew attention to INECs due diligence before arriving at the decision.

I am on the same page with those who say that the controversial subjugation of INEC to NCC and NASS is unconstitutional and tailor-made for rigging. In the rigging department of electioneering, no politician or party can be trusted with ferrying the cookie jar. But what do I know?!

The Joint Technical Committee constituted by the commission and the Nigerian Communications Commission and made of telecommunication operators met on March 9, 2018, and the consensus was that the requirements for the electronic transfer of results proposed by INEC is practicable We have the assurance of the service providers that they have provided similar technological solutions to other agencies and have the capacity to deploy technology to cover a few blind spots.

Some of the operations/services of the commission are already technology-based. Domestic election observers and the media apply for accreditation to observe and cover elections electronically. Going forward, political parties will submit the names and photographs of their polling agents electronically. Since last year, INEC has been uploading Form EC8A (polling unit results) to a central viewing portal. The Commission uploaded results from polling units in difficult riverine areas and even areas accessible only through human carriers.2

Electronic transmission of election results is not rocket science. If I may borrow Mandelas words again, It always seems impossible until its done.

And, it is actually being done. Okoye says INECs pre-test is nationwide: The commission uploaded results from conflict areas. The commission uploaded results from all geopolitical zones. Presently, the commission has obtained the GPS coordinates of all the 176,846 polling units in the country and expanded voter access to the polling units. Currently, the commission is carrying out part of the continuous voter registration exercise online, while the physical registration of voters will be done using INEC Voter Enrolment Device that will capture the fingerprints and facials of registrants.

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Curiously, the National Assembly did not give the floor to INEC on the crucial day the unconstitutional decision to tamper with the Commissions independence was taken. The assemblymen shaved INECs head in its absence!

I am on the same page with those who say that the controversial subjugation of INEC to NCC and NASS is unconstitutional and tailor-made for rigging. In the rigging department of electioneering, no politician or party can be trusted with ferrying the cookie jar. But what do I know?!

The National Assemblys amendment will collapse on the paraplegic legalism on which it stands.

Wole Olaoye can be reached through wole.olaoye@gmail.com.
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The police command in Kaduna State says it has arrested five suspects over alleged unlawful possession of firearms.

The commands Public Relations Officer, Mohammed Jalige, confirmed the arrest in a statement issued on Sunday in Kaduna.

Mr Jalige said their arrests followed a report received by the Divisional Police Officer (DPO) in Kubacha.

He said the DPO had acted on the information received on July 24 that the suspects, armed with dangerous weapons, were engaged in unwholesome activities in Kenyi village in Kagarko Local Government Area of the state.

The police spokesman said the suspects and some of the villagers had allegedly threatened the peaceful coexistence of the people over disputed piece of land.

He said the situation had deteriorated to a boiling point, resulting in one of the warring parties threatening to kill their opponents with dangerous weapons.

On receipt of the information, the DPO immediately mobilised to the scene, swiftly averted what would have been a tragedy and arrested the five suspects, all from Kenyi village.

Items recovered from the suspects included an AK-47 rifle, loaded with 29 rounds of live 7.62 x 39mm. ammunitions and a 9 x 18mm. Makarov pistol, loaded with seven rounds of 9mm live ammunitions, he said.

Mr Jalige added that the police operatives swift response not only forestalled the foreseeable calamity but also restored normalcy in the community.

He said investigation had been unravelling the circumstances behind the fracas and the source of the illegal firearms.

The police spokesman quoted the Commissioner of Police in the state, Umar Muri, as urging communities in the state to always embrace dialogue as an alternative dispute resolution rather than violence which might result in disastrous consequences.

The commissioner also pledged to dispassionately investigate the incident and prosecute all those found culpable, to serve as deterrent to others, Mr Jalige said.
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The Commissioner of Police in Imo, Abutu Yaro, has condemned the lynching of three alleged armed robbers by some angry mob in the state on Saturday.

He said it was against the law for anybody or group of persons to carry out jungle justice against suspected criminals.

According to Mr Yaro, suspects should be taken to the police station for proper investigation and possible prosecution.

Mr Yaro disclosed this in a statement issued by the state Police Commands Spokesman, Mike Abattam, on Sunday in Owerri.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) recalls that three armed men were caught on Saturday in Umuna Orlu Local Government Area of Imo, allegedly robbing some traders and were set ablaze by angry mob.

On 24/7/2021 at about 0630 hours, the inhabitants of Owarri Ibiri caught in the act, three armed robbers while robbing some traders yet to be identified.

It is believed that they are the ones that have been terrorising the community using unmarked motorcycle to rob innocent people, especially traders along Owerri Orlu Road in Imo.

 The robbers were beaten, tied and set ablaze before the Police patrol team arrived at the scene and efforts made to arrest the perpetrators proved abortive as they all ran away on sighting the Police.

The Commissioner while condemning the barbaric act, advised members of the public and communities alike to always hand over suspects to the police for proper investigations and prosecution instead of taking the laws into their hands .

The Commissioner has also set up an investigating team from the State Criminal Investigation Department SCID of the command to investigate the cause and possible ways to prevent future mob actions in the state, the statement read.

(NAN)
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There were very minimal security checkpoints on major roads in Lagos State during Saturdays local government election held across the 57 local councils.

This was a deviation from previous elections in the state where police and soldiers place barricades at strategic spots across the state to monitor vehicular movement.

Security officials were absent on major highways and polling units, with the police only policing the roads near their stations.

At least two security operatives were, however, stationed at some polling units to ensure the safety of lives and properties.

The major security personnel include the Nigeria Police Force and Lagos Neighborhood Safety Corps (LNSC).

PREMIUM TIMES observed that most polling booths had security operatives while a few were deserted.

Some polling units visited by PREMIUM TIMES at Shomolu and Bariga local government areas were without police officers, civil defence corps and members of other security outfits.

As of 2:05 p.m., no security officer was at Ward H, Polling Unit 11, Igbobi college, Shomolu local government.

We have not seen any police or security since morning, but some branched when doing patrol, the presiding officer said.

Similarly at Ward H, Polling 10, no security officer was present.

However, some polling units in Apapa, Surulere, Lagos Island, Eti-Osa and a few others had police officers.

Yiaga, a civil society group, also noted in their situational report Saturday that there were more than 10 security officials in a particular polling booth.

However, in Ward C Surulere and iawanson, Mushin LGA, most of the Polling Units did not have security personnel on-site as of 11 am, the statement read.

Additionally, a few security personnel were seen on the streets of Lagos state.

The Chairperson of the Lagos State Independent Electoral Commission) (LASIEC), Ayotunde Philips, earlier said security during elections is being given topmost priority.

Members of Nigeria Police, Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps, Neighbourhood watch shall be the first

responders, while the joint forces of Operation MESSA shall equally be on standby, she said.
The ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in Lagos State on Saturday won all the councillorship positions in the Ojokoro Local Council Development Area (LCDA).

The Lagos State Independent Electoral Commission (LASIEC) announced that APC won the seven awards in the Ojokoro LCDA.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that Ojokoro LCDA comprises seven awards with at least 17 polling units.

LASIEC Returning Officer, Ward C, Olubayo Afolabi, said that APC got 873 votes, APN- 1; ARM- 0; PDP 85; and YPP 8 votes.

The returning officer for Ward C declared APCs Olalekan Oyekunle the winner of the Ojokoro LCDA councillorship position.

At the collation centre, LASEIC Returning Officer for Ward D, Tajudeen Balogun, announced that APC scored 800 votes, APM,0 votes; NEM 2; PDP 78 votes and YPP 2 votes.

Mr Balogun declared Obafemi Oke of the APC winner and councillor-elect for Ward D having scored the highest number of votes. (NAN)

APC candidates win in Badagry

Candidates of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) on Saturday won the council polls in Badagry.

The Lagos State Independent Electoral Commission (LASIEC) declared Olusegun Onilude, the incumbent chairman of the Badagry Local Council, the winner.

LASIEC also announced that Joseph Gbenu also of the APC was re-elected the chairman of the Badagry West Local Council Development Area (LCDA).

Declaring the election results at the Badagry Local Government Secretariat, the Returning Officer for Badagry LGA, Edward Odukomaiya, announced that Mr Onilude polled 8,065 votes to beat PDPs Monday Honfovu who scored 2,118 votes.

Olusegun Onilude of the APC having satisfied the requirements of law and scoring the highest number of votes is hereby declared the winner and returned elected having polled 8,065 votes, Mr Odukomaiya said.

Dosu Sao, the Returning Officer for the Badagry West LCDA, declared Gbenu also of the APC the winner.

Mr Sao said that Mr Gbenu polled 4,339 votes while the candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Kolawole Abraham, scored 739 votes.

The returning officer declared Mr Gbenu the winner having satisfied the requirements of law and having scored the highest number of votes.

Oba Animashauns daughter takes Epe

The returning officer, Lagos State Independent Electoral Commission(LASIEC), Shamsideen Ladega, on Saturday declared Surah Animashaun of All Progressives Congress (APC) winner of the chairmanship election in Epe Local Government

NAN reports that Surah is the daughter of Oba Kamorudeen Animashaun of Epeland.

According to Mr Ladega, the winner scored 11,232 votes to floor the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate who scored 896 votes.

Having complied with the requirement of the law and scored the majority votes, Surah Animashaun is hereby decleared elected and returned as Chairmof Epe Local Government, he announced.

Incumbent Egunjobi wins Agege chairmanship seat

Ganiyu Egunjobi, the Executive Chairman, Agege Local Government Area, has been reelected as the council chairman with 6,226 votes in the just-concluded local government poll in Lagos State.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that Mr Egunjobi, APCs candidate, defeated Olusola Osolana of the PDP, who got 4,114 votes.

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Salami Ojo, the Returning Officer, Lagos State Independent Electoral Commission (LASIEC), said that Mr Egunjobi, having complied with the requirements of the election, had been and thus returned.

Egunjobi of APC in the chairmanship election of Agege local government, having complied with the requirements of law and scored the majority number of votes, is hereby elected and returned, he declared.

NAN reports that other candidates who participated in the elections included Oyekan Olutobi of ADP, 47 votes; Esther Kosenimola, AA, 64 votes; while YPP scored 23 votes.

Mr Egunjobi, in his remarks, thanked the residents for the peaceful election and the opportunity given him to serve a second term.

APC wins Agboyi-Ketu

The Lagos State Independent Electoral Commission (LASIEC) has declared Dele Oshinowo of the All Progressives Congress (APC) winner of Saturdays Local Government election in Agboyi-Ketu Local Council Development Area (LCDAs)

Omoniyi Odufuwa, the LASIEC Local Government Collation and Returning Officer for the election, declared the result at the collation centre situated at Agboyi-Ketu LCDA Secretariat at 11 p.m. on Saturday.

Declaring the winner, Mrs Odufuwa said: I, Odufuwa Omoniyi Adebukola, hereby declare Oladele Oshinowo of APC, the winner of the chairmanship election of Agboyi-Ketu LCDA having complied with the requirements of the law and scored the majority number of votes.

The aforementioned is hereby elected and returned.

According to her, the APC candidate, Mr Oshinowo, polled 26,771 votes to beat his closest rival, Oluwole Dahunsi of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), who got votes, 2,749 votes.

She said that Wasiu Ogunwale of Labour Party (LP) scored 79 votes.

The winner and incumbent council chairman, Mr Oshinowo, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) after he was declared the winner that he would further put the welfare of the people on the front burner in his second term.

I want to thank my party leaders and the entire people of Agboyi-Ketu for reposing confidence in me. I promise not to abandon them.

All I am assuring them is that I am ready to do more and surpass my performance in the first term of our administration. We have served in all honesty and with all sincerity, he said.

Reacting, Ojo Yekini, the PDP party agent at the collation centre, who described politics as a game, said that his party tried its effort and but lost.

Also, Alaba Saliu, the APC party agent at the collation centre, described the partys victory as a reward for the hard work of a committed and loyal chairman.

Mr Saliu said that the APCs candidate had improved the local government from where he met the council four years ago.

We all believe in him because of all he has done. No one contested the party ticket with him during the primary when he was seeking re-election.

Also, the APC chairman in the council, Sunday Odekomaya, said: I am glad because politics is a game of luck. Thank God He gave us the crown peacefully without any crisis.

The people still have trust in us. It is a thing of joy. Our candidate did well in his first term. He has garnered more experience in his first term to perform better.

NAN reports that APC candidates swept all the seven councillorship seats in the LCDA during the polls.

(NAN)
Election results from some local government areas in Lagos were either partially announced or not announced, a civil society organisation, Yiaga Africa, has said.

The local government elections in Lagos took place across the 20 local government areas and 37 local council development areas of the state.

In other places, results were not collated by the electoral officers, Eze Nwagwu, a board member of the organisation, told journalists in a press conference on Sunday in the Ikeja area of Lagos.

The local government areas include Badagry, Eti-Osa, Ikorodu, Kosofe, Ajeromi/Ifelodun, Surulere, Shomolu and Lagos Island.

LGA results collation centres revealed that the official results were either partially announced or not announced. LASIEC officials in the Lagos Island collation centre did not conduct the results collation, he said.

In Ajeromi/Ifelodun, only submission of results happened at the collation centre, results from the polling units were collated and the officials left without addressing people.

Mr Nwagwu said in Badagry, Kosofe, the official figures of registered voters and a total number of accredited voters was not announced nor indicated in the results form.

He said that in Ikorodu, electoral officials only declared the total number of votes cast and no information was provided on the votes share per party.

Also, the process was not concluded in Shomolu, as officials left without announcing the results. In Surulere LGA, the official result for the LGA was not announced.

Attack, violent disruption

Mr Nwagwu said an election observer in Badagry was attacked.

In PU 008, Ward B Badagry, an observer was beaten up for recording an attempt to snatch a ballot box by a party agent, he said.

He said there was a violent disruption of the accreditation and voting process in polling booths in the Shomolu LGA over the non-inclusion of a partys name on the ballot.

The name printed on the ballot was YP which is not one of the officially recognized political parties. In a few of the polling units observed. the YPP supporters protested the non-inclusion of their party on the ballot and asked voters to boycott the election, he said.

Voter apathy

While giving the preliminary assessment on the election, Cynthia Mbamalu, the groups director of programmes, said voter participation in the electoral process was abysmally low as citizens showed lack of interest in the process.

This presents a disturbing trend in a state with 6, 570, 291 registered voters and poses a major challenge to the practice of democracy in the state and Nigeria.

She said with the level of participation in the voting system at the local levels in the state.

The next four years will be by individuals who are elected by a very small fraction of the voting population.

The low turnout is a pointer to the continuous capacity deficit concerning human and financial resources and technical expertise required for successful election administration at the local level.

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It also revealed the absence of a robust legal framework for LGA elections that can guarantee electoral integrity, enable political inclusion and regulate political party conduct in elections.

The election also raises major concerns on; the quality of leadership at the local level, the independence and autonomy of local government structure and key institutions like the State Independent Electoral Commission.
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The All Progressives Congress (APC) in Lagos State has applauded the security agencies and the Lagos State Independent Electoral Commission (LASIEC) for ensuring a peaceful conduct of Saturdays local government election in the state.

The ruling party, in a statement by its Publicity Secretary, Seye Oladejo, on Sunday in Lagos, also commended the electorate for massively supporting APC candidates.

We express our profound appreciation to the good people of Lagos state for reaffirming their faith in our party by overwhelmingly returning our candidates during the Local Government elections.

We acknowledge the difficulties in navigating the unusual elections with the ravaging COVID-19 pandemic and its attendant challenges.

The professionalism shown by the security agencies and neutrality of the electoral umpires also contributed to the success of the elections, Mr Oladejo said.

According to him, the victory of the APC has provided an opportunity for continued synergy by the state and local governments to further bring about socio-economic development to the state.

He assured Lagos residents of the commitment of the party to the security, welfare and total delivery of the progressive manifestos.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that LASIEC on Saturday conducted election into the 20 Local Government and 37 Local Council Development Areas (LCDAs) of the state.

(NAN)
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The police in Lagos arrested two suspected cultists at Oto-Awori, Ijanikin area of the state on Sunday evening.

Muyiwa Adejobi, the police spokesperson, said the suspects were arrested following a cult clash in the area where dangerous weapons were being used by cult groups.

Mr Adejobi, a chief superintendent of police, said the incident was reported by a resident and the intervention of the police helped in restoring peace to the area.

The police operatives attached to Ijanikin Division of the Lagos State Police Command On 25th July 2021, at about 11am, arrested two suspected cultists at Oto Awori, Ijanikin Area of Lagos State.

The Police operatives raced to the scene and arrested the two suspects while responding to a distress call from good samaritans that two groups of cultists were on rampage and attacking one another with dangerous weapons along Oto Awori Ijanikin Expressway by Ile Oba Bus Stop, Mr Adejobi said in the statement.

He added that no life was lost in clash.

The arrested suspects are Taiye Israel, and Isiaka Afeez. Items recovered from them include one axe, some cutlasses, assorted charms and weeds suspected to be Indian hemp, the police disclosed.

The Commissioner of Police in the state, Hakeem Odumosu, has directed that the suspects be transferred to the Commands Strike Team, Ikeja, for proper investigation and possible arrest of other members of the gangs.

He further directed the Divisional Police Officer in charge of Ijanikin Division to step up his anti-crime strategies in curbing crimes and criminality, especially cultism, in his area of responsibility, Mr Adejobi said.

The police boss also directed tactical commanders and other special squads to embark on constant raid of black spots and criminal hideouts in the area and other parts of the state.
The Youth Party has said there was no level playing field in the just concluded local government election in Lagos State.

The president of the party, Tomiwa Aladekomo, said this on Sunday while addressing journalists on the irregularities they observed in Saturdays election in the state.

Mr Aladekomo said some of the supporters of the party were disenfranchised because polling units were moved to intimidating places such as the Palace of Oba Elegushi at Lekki-Ikate.

Thousands of Lagosians on Saturday voted representatives for councillorship and local government chairmanship positions across all the 20 local governments and 37 LCDAs in the state.

The election, which was marred by low turnout of voters, had the ruling party, the All Progressives Congress (APC) win several seats.

Although election results for some LGAs are yet to be announced, APC won in Badagry, Epe, Shomolu, Bariga, Kosofe, Surulere and other areas.

Suppression of Votes

The Youth Party leadership said votes in the Saturday election were suppressed due to late arrival of materials and other irregularities.

We were excluded from all processes leading to the election. Supporters that registered to vote after 2018 were excluded from election by administrative fiat.

Our votes were suppressed by the late arrival of voting materials, leading many of our voters to leave the polling units without having cast their votes. Materials arrived at 3:15pm for polls that closed at 3pm in some cases, Mr Aladekomo said.

He added that votes were cast in non-designated locations and inaccessible places including a Royal Palace.

For emphasis, the election in Lekki-Ikate was deeply flawed. Our supporters were unable to access the polling booth because 6 polling units in Ikate were moved to the Palace of Oba Elegushi. Specifically, polling unit 03 to 08 were moved to the palace thereby disenfranchising our supporters, the party leader said.

Mr Aladekomo said despite that there was no level playing field, their party won comfortably in eight polling units by a landslide.

He, however, did not provide details of the polling units where his party won.

ALSO READ: APC wins all 20 chairmanship seats in Ogun LG polls

Despite all of these challenges, we presented capable and inspiring candidates, who campaigned vigorously and made their presence felt at the voting booth.

We are proud of our candidates, the campaigns they ran and our efforts at the elections, and grateful for the support of all of you who are passionate about building a better Nigeria and the expansion of the democratic space, he said.

Alleged rigging

The party also accused adhoc staff of the Lagos State Independent Electoral Commission (LASIEC) of colluding with party agents and political associates to rig the election.

Ayo Adio, a member of the party, said the shameless rigging by APC was captured in some polling units, with videos and pictures circulated.

He made reference to the video of a woman caught voting on several ballot papers at one of the polling units in Lagos Island.

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There are significant issues with Nigerias voting processes, especially for Local Government Elections and many of them were reflected in yesterdays election.

In the three polling units at Igbokusu, our agents were harassed, threatened and chased away from their polling stations where ballots were stuffed and people voted multiple times with the collusion of LASIEC officials and the police.

The kind of rigging and violence deployed in these polling units should embarrass the commission especially with the shameful videos of the rigging currently circulating the media space, the party said.

Mr Aladekomo said the worst scenario recorded in the Saturday election was moving collation centres without notice to a different location where members of the party were harassed and intimidated.

The Youth Party will continue to fight vigorously, at the polling booth and in courts of law, to enforce the rights of Nigerians to participate in the democratic space, the party leader said.

He added that they have confidence in the leadership of LASIEC, headed by a retired Chief Judge of Lagos State, Ayotunde Phillips, and the party is sure the irregularities will be looked into.

The party urged the commission to cancel election results of areas where electoral malpractices were recorded.

There is no way Justice Philips will tolerate the conduct of many of her staff who did several things to embarrass the Commission. We therefore call on her to cancel the elections in Igbokusu and Ikate where the elections were massively and shamelessly rigged.

Another election should be conducted in Lekki Phase as well to redeem the credibility of the poll, We call for fresh elections in the affected polling units and urge the Commission to do everything possible to ensure that the conduct is free and fair, Mr Aladekomo said.
PLATTSBURGH [mdash] Dr. Stephen Guy Hausrath's spirit set sail August 1st a heavenly voyage with the comfort of a gentle rain and a steady breeze off of Lake Champlain. His death followed a year- long journey with cancer. This last year made him understand why dealing with cancer is often ca
2020 was a year marked by hardships and challenges, but the Prince William community has proven resilient. The Prince William Times is honored to serve as your community companion. To say thank you for your continued support, wed like to offer all our subscribers -- new or returning --

4 WEEKS FREE DIGITAL AND PRINT ACCESS.

We understand the importance of working to keep our community strong and connected. As we move forward together into 2021, it will take commitment, communication, creativity, and a strong connection with those who are most affected by the stories we cover.

We are dedicated to providing the reliable, local journalism you have come to expect. We are committed to serving you with renewed energy and growing resources. Let the Prince William Times be your community companion throughout 2021, and for many years to come.
The collaborations will accelerate digital transformation and serve as a benchmark for other public sector organizations in the region. Oracle Fusion Cloud is the most innovative breed of next-gen cloud applications that exemplifies a digital-first approach to businesses. Oracle Fusion has been top-rated by leading research groups, including Gartner.

A reputed public sector organization from UAE in the logistics sector selects Oracle Fusion Cloud to transform its legacy ERP by partnering with 4i Apps. 4i Apps' team of experts will help the organization upgrade to Oracle Fusion Cloud covering Financials, Enterprise performance management, SCM and HCM streams.

A Qatar based global investor with varied interests in Real estate, Infrastructure, Healthcare and Retail have collaborated with 4i Apps. The association will enable the customer to derive optimal benefits using the Oracle Cloud. The implementation covers Financials, SCM, HCM, and extensions to build on Oracle PAAS.

A public utility organization in Oman has also chosen 4i Apps to enhance its supplier onboarding and tendering processes by implementing the Oracle Fusion Sourcing cloud.

"Successfully signing all the three projects with the public sector companies is a milestone achievement for us. It further boosts 4i Apps presence in the region," commented Mr Ravisankar. P, Head of Middle East Operations of 4i Apps.

"We are excited for the three major projects signed in this pandemic that further enhance 4i Apps base as the leading cloud solutions provider, serving both public and private sector customers over a decade worldwide," said Mr Saravanan Murugesan, CEO of 4i Apps.

"Our commitment in the region coupled with support from Oracle has helped us to secure the deals," said Mr Kathiresh, Sales Director of 4i Apps.

About 4i Apps:

4i Apps is a Cloud Applications Consulting and Services firm. It is a growing technology company and an Oracle Expertise Partner catering to various industries with 13 years of experience. It prepares, strategizes, and implements digital solutions in ERP and Analytics located in over ten countries.

Contact Information:

Prem Kumar

+91  8754401177

Email: [email protected]

Thanigaivel

+971529989126

Email: [email protected]



Website: https://www.4iapps.com/

SOURCE 4i Apps Solutions Pvt Ltd
BEIJING, July 25, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- TAL Education Group ("TAL" or the "Company") (NYSE: TAL), a leading K-12 after-school tutoring services provider in China, announced that, on July 24, 2021, China's official state media, including Xinhua News Agency and China Central Television, announced the Opinions on Further Alleviating the Burden of Homework and After-School Tutoring for Students in Compulsory Education (the "Opinion"), issued by the General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council. The Opinion contains high-level policy directives about requirements and restrictions related to after-school tutoring services, including (i) institutions providing after-school tutoring services on academic subjects in China's compulsory education system, or Academic AST Institutions, need to be registered as non-profit, no approval will be granted to new Academic AST Institutions, and an approval mechanism will be adopted for online Academic AST Institutions; (ii) foreign ownership in Academic AST Institutions is prohibited, including through contractual arrangements, and companies with existing foreign ownership need to rectify the situation; (iii) listed companies are prohibited from raising capital to invest in businesses that teach academic subjects in compulsory education; (iv) Academic AST Institutions are prohibited from providing tutoring services on academic subjects in compulsory education during public holidays, weekends and school breaks; and (v) Academic AST Institutions must follow the fee standards to be established by relevant authorities. The Opinion also provides that institutions providing after-school tutoring services on academic subjects in high schools (which do not fall within China's compulsory education system) shall take into consideration the Opinion when conducting activities.

The Company will continue to comply with all applicable rules and regulations in providing educational services, including those to be adopted following the policy directives of the Opinion. The Company is carefully considering the provisions of the Opinion and assessing their implications for the Company's business. The Company expects the Opinion, related rules and regulations, and the compliance measures to be taken by the Company will have material adverse impact on its after-school tutoring services related to academic subjects in China's compulsory education system, which in turn may adversely affect the Company's results of operations and prospect. The Company will proactively seek guidance from and cooperate with government authorities in connection with its efforts to comply with the Opinion and any related rules and regulations.

Safe Harbor Statement

This announcement contains forward-looking statements. These statements are made under the "safe harbor" provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements can be identified by terminology such as "will," "expects," "anticipates," "future," "intends," "plans," "believes," "estimates" and similar statements. The Company may also make written or oral forward-looking statements in its reports filed with, or furnished to, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, in its annual reports to shareholders, in press releases and other written materials and in oral statements made by its officers, directors or employees to third parties. Statements that are not historical facts, including statements about the Company's beliefs and expectations, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Information regarding these risks and uncertainties is included in the Company's reports filed with, or furnished to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. All information provided in this press release is as of the date of this press release, and TAL Education Group undertakes no duty to update such information or any forward-looking statement, except as required under applicable law.

About TAL Education Group

TAL Education Group is a leading K-12 after-school tutoring services provider in China. The acronym "TAL" stands for "Tomorrow Advancing Life", which reflects our vision to promote top learning opportunities for Chinese students through both high-quality teaching and content, as well as leading edge application of technology in the education experience. TAL Education Group offers comprehensive tutoring services to students from pre-school to the twelfth grade through three flexible class formats: small classes, personalized premium services, and online courses. Our tutoring services cover the core academic subjects in China's school curriculum as well as competence oriented programs. The Company's learning center network currently covers 110 cities. We also operate www.jzb.com, a leading online education platform in China. Our ADSs trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "TAL".

For further information, please contact:

Echo Yan

Investor Relations

TAL Education Group

Tel: +86 10 5292 6658

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE TAL Education Group

Related Links

http://www.100tal.com/


New York, July 25 : On Monday, when Secretary of State Antony Blinken will be on his way to India, his deputy, Wendy Sherman, will be in China representing the interests of the US and its allies during talks with Beijing's top diplomats delivering a tough US message that it will act to defend its interests, according to senior administration officials.

"The deputy secretary is going to represent the US interests and values and those of our allies and partners. We're going to do it honestly and directly," a senior official said on Saturday.

"We're redefining this relationship... not going to be afraid to take steps when we see that our interests have to be defended," the official asserted.

Senior US officials briefed reporters ahead of Sherman's scheduled meetings with Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng and Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Tianjin on Monday during a trip to Asia that has taken her to Japan, South Korea and Mongolia.

Blinken, who will be on his way to India on Monday, is scheduled to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi and External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Wednesday when China is expected to figure in their talks.

But before the US-India meetings, China's President Xi Jin Ping moved the border row between China and India up a notch by going to an area in China close to the border with India.

And sending a message directed at India, China's news agency Xinhua quoted him as saying in Lhasa, "China will strengthen infrastructure construction along the border, and encourages people of various minorities to set their roots at the border, to defend the territory and build the homeland." The meetings in Tianjin comes amid rising tensions between China and US over a wide range of issues, most recently over cybercrimes and the clampdown on democracy in Hong Kong.

A senior official said, "I anticipate very clearly that she (Sherman) will be not only representing the United States, but she will be standing up and advocating her positions that are shared around the world." The official said that while Sherman was in Japan -- where she met Defence Minister Nobuo Kishi and Vice Foreign Minister Mori Takeo -- and in South Korea, she underscored Washington's "commitment to standing shoulder to shoulder with our allies and partners to address pressing global challenges, advance a free and open Indo-Pacific, and uphold and strengthen the rules-based international order." After Sherman's visit to Japan, Blinken spoke to Foreign Minister Motegi Toshimitsu on Thursday and "emphasised the importance of the US-Japan Alliance to peace, security, and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region and around the world," State Department Spokesperson Ned Price said.

The senior officials, who spoke on condition of not being named, outlined a strategy of building a front of allies and like-minded countries to effectively face up to China.

"A lot of our effort is really aimed at shaping the international environment around China, on building resilience among allies and partners to Beijing's coercive and... and actions that are at odds with our collective interests and values and ensuring, as we said, that we can present an affirmative vision," the officials said.

"We know we're stronger when we work with our allies. We know this makes us more effective when dealing with Beijing," the official said, while taking care to add, "We aren't seeking an anti-China coalition in our work with allies and partners, but rather trying to work together in a multilateral fashion to uphold the international rules-based order," the official said.

European countries have joined the US in imposing sanctions on the Chinese over the treatment of Uighars in Xinjiang province and joined the US along with other allies and the NATO last week to call out China on hacking.

The officials said that the united response to China has shown effects.

"These multilateral actions have really gotten Beijing's attention, and. in some cases, I think has actually caused Beijing in many ways to take steps that actually are potentially counter to its own interests," an official said.

The confrontations set off rounds of retaliatory sanctions, although the all the sides have been careful to avoid the upper echelons of government or act broadly against the countries given their mutual economic dependence.

After the US imposed sanctions on seven Chinese officials over Hong Kong, China farcically retaliated against Wilbur Ross, who was former President Trump's Commerce Secretary -- and already under Democratic Party attacks over census-related matters -- and five others, carefully avoiding any Biden officials.

The interlocking of economies that globalisation has brought limits the actions either side can take while many international issues and crises require cooperation.

Sherman is "going to underscore that we do not want that stiff and sustained competition to veer into conflict. This is why the US wants to ensure that there are guard rails and parameters in place to responsibly manage the relationship," an official said.

"There are important global challenges where the US and China both have an interest and where we think it's important to exchange views and explore potential areas for cooperation. So we anticipate that this will also be a focus of these meetings," the official said.

"Sherman is going to make clear while we welcome stiff and sustained competition with the PRC (Peoples Republic of China), everyone needs to play by the same rules and on the level -- on a level playing field," the official added.

Sherman's visit is the first high-level meeting between US and Chinese officials after Blinken and Yang Jiechi, the Chinese Communist Party's head of foreign affairs, met in March in Alaska.

That meeting deteriorated into an angry showdown before the media with both sides trading accusations and proclaiming defiance.

Biden has yet to meet China's President Xi Jinping although he has held a summit with Russia's President Vladimir Putin.

Democrats had made Russia out to be the biggest threat to the US because of their perception that Moscow had helped Trump with the 2016 election, but once in office reality set in for Biden who has continued Trump's confrontation with Beijing and even turned up its level.

(Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in and followed @arulouis)
'Roof of the World' no more enigma now!(Photo:Vishal Gulati/IANS) Image Source: IANS News

'Roof of the World' no more an enigma now!.(photo:Vishal Gulati) Image Source: IANS News

'Roof of the World' no more an enigma now!.(photo:Vishal Gulati) Image Source: IANS News

'Roof of the World' no more an enigma now!.(photo:Vishal Gulati) Image Source: IANS News

'Roof of the World' no more an enigma now!.(photo:Vishal Gulati) Image Source: IANS News

Dharamsala, July 25 : Over two-thirds the size of India, Tibet, also known as the 'Roof of the World' or 'Third Pole of the Earth', may no more be an enigma for the outside world now.

For, China has opened its door to the tourists after keeping the Tibet Autonomous Region in the southwest, the land rich in minerals and a variety of flora and fauna, out of bounds for ages.

President Xi Jinping last week made an unannounced visit to the politically sensitive region of Tibet, the first by a Chinese leader in more than 30 years.

Besides visiting Nyingchi, a strategically located border town close to Arunachal Pradesh, and the regional capital Lhasa, Xi inspected a number of key local infrastructure projects, including the Lhasa-Nyingchi section of the Sichuan-Tibet railway project.

As per the regional tourism development department, the traditional culture-dominated Tibet Autonomous Region is seeing a tourism boom with a record 17.58 million trips made by visitors in the first six months this year, up 110.9 per cent year-on-year growth.

It says the opening of the Lhasa-Nyingchi railway, the first electrified railway on June 25, has injected new vitality into the development of Tibetan tourism.

Tibet saw more than 35 million tourists in 2020 despite the pandemic, up from 1.8 million tourists in 2005, according to the local government.

But for the foreign journalists and government dignitaries it's still off-limits, fearing backlash for seizing control of the Tibetan monasteries and expanding Chinese education rather than the local language.

A small group of foreign journalists every year gets a rare opportunity to visit the Tibetan plateau -- barren and ringed by dense groves -- at the invitation of the Chinese government to showcase the progress Tibet has made since the Chinese 'takeover'.

This correspondent was part of the foreign media tour of Tibet in the recent past.

The tastefully lit square with magnificent fountains facing the famed, majestic Potala Palace, once the seat of the Dalai Lama, is the most visited place, especially in the evening.

In Lhasa, which in Tibetan language means holy land, the sun sets normally in summer at around 9 p.m.

Transcending geographical barriers, Hindi movies and love songs make their presence felt in mobile ringtones and even the lips of the Chinese youth in Tibet.

When this IANS correspondent visited the Beijing Experimental School in Lhasa, a big screen at the entrance showcased students swaying to the "Chaiyya chaiyyaa" song from the Shah Rukh Khan-starrer Hindi film "Dil Se".

Government officials say that Indian films, dubbed in Mandarin, get released simultaneously in Lhasa with the mainland. The upscale Lhasa has four cinemas.

The 1,300-year-old Potala Palace, included in the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1994, with seven golden peaks on the main building, is a model of ancient architecture and home to over 100,000 pieces of cultural relics such as murals, stupas, statues, 'thangkas' and rare sutras.

The authorities restrict visitors to the Potala Palace to less than 4,000 a day and it stays open from 9 a.m. to 5.30 p.m.

In 2002, the Chinese government invested a total 179.3 million yuan in the renovation of the palace. Every year renovation is being carried out by painting the interior and exterior walls of the Potala Palace.

The Potala Palace, which symbolises Tibetan Buddhism and its central role in the traditional administration of Tibet, was first built by the Tibetan king Songtsen Gampo in the 7th century and it was rebuilt in the mid 17th century by the fifth Dalai Lama.

According to UNESCO, the Potala Palace, noteworthy for its unique architecture globally, reached its present size and form in the years that followed as a result of repeated renovation and expansion.

The Potala Palace, together with the Norbulingka and the Sakya Monastery, are the three main Tibetan cultural heritage sites in Lhasa.

The current Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, lives in exile in Dharamsala in the northern Indian hill state of Himachal Pradesh.

He escaped to India from the Potala Palace in 1959 along with his followers after China crushed an uprising in Tibet.

India has a literary connection with Tibet and one of its most widely travelled writers, Rahul Sankrityayan, is still close to the heart of the Chinese people, even after eight decades.

His memory is preserved in a memorial to renowned Tibetan scholar, poet and thinker Gedun Chophel, who was Sankrityayan's fellow traveller, in the capital Lhasa.

Located on the popular Barkhor Street in the vicinity of the Jokhang Temple, the important cultural relics in the heart of old Lhasa, the Gedun Chophel Memorial was opened in his last residence to the public after renovation on November 11, 2013.

Rahul Sankrityayan (or Rahula as mentioned in memorial archives) came to Tibet in 1934 to trace the lost Sanskrit texts, says the memorial.

Spread over more than 1.2 million sq km, the Tibet region constitutes about one eighth of China's territory.

The plateau is seeing an infrastructure boom too with roads connecting 95 per cent of the township-level administrations and 75 per cent of the incorporated villages.

Tibet now has five airports that link with 60 cities across China. It will have three more airports to further improve the region's comprehensive transport system, according to the Civil Aviation Administration of China.

The entire Tibet has been undergoing a construction boom with expressways, housing complexes, markets, posh neighbourhoods, special economic zones and education centres coming up in rapid succession.

China has reached up to villages with modern amenities and optimum tapping of hydro, geothermal and wind energy.

Lhasa has an average 3,000 hours of sunshine per year.

With funding from the central government hundreds of micro hydropower plants have been set up in Tibet that have been meeting the electricity requirements of the locals.

Tibet has a mini Switzerland too.

Located in eastern Tibet, the picturesque small township of Nyingchi, which is connected by railway with Lhasa, is acclaimed for alpine beauty comparable to that of Switzerland.

It's known for virgin forest with rich flora and fauna.

Rural homestays have provided additional employment to locals, mainly Buddhists, and generated economic activity too, say officials.

Located some 500 km from Lhasa on the Lhasa-Chengdu national highway through the majestic Mila Pass (5,013 metres), the picturesque Nyingchi located at an altitude of 3,100 metres houses a small population of less than 400.

Each household in Nyingchi and nearby areas has a homestay unit. The government is encouraging the locals, who are mostly herdsmen and farmers, to opt for homestays to get additional income by extending subsidies to rebuild their houses and to make homestay units.

The Nyingchi Peach Flower Festival in spring is a famous annual event when the hills bloom with flowers and abound with butterflies, including the dragon butterfly.

The yellowish caterpillar fungus, which is about two inches long and weighs less than one gram, is the costliest medical ingredient in the local markets of Nyingchi.

Not only is Nyingchi Prefecture the third largest forest area in China, but it also has one of the most intact virgin forests in China.

The forests in Nyingchi Prefecture function as the source of the climate and ecology for Tibet and even the entire country and Southeast Asia. The area of glacier and ice in Nyingchi Prefecture amounts to 6,783 sq km, ranking second across the country.

The entire Tibet region is populated mainly by tribals. The climatic conditions are harsh as much of the land is a cold desert where the mercury drops to below minus 20 degrees Celsius in winter.

The important festivals of Tibet include Shoton, also known as the Yoghurt festival, in Lhasa, the Yarlung and Qomolangma (Mt. Everest) festivals in Shigatse, the Grand Canyon festival in Nyingchi and the Khampa art festival in Qamdo.

The staple food is barley, wheat, peas, rice, rapeseed and salted tea mixed with yak butter.

(Vishal Gulati can be reached at vishal.g@ians.in)
Mexico City, July 25 : Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador called for "a new coexistence" of all the countries of the Americas after stating that the model imposed more than two centuries ago "is exhausted; it has no future".

The Mexican President on Saturday proposed that Latin American states do "something similar to the European Union, but attached to our history, our reality and our identities", reports Xinhua news agency.

Lopez Obrador made his comments on the 238th anniversary of the birth of Simon Bolivar at Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City, during the 21st Foreign Ministers meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC).

Lopez Obrador highlighted Cuba's forbearance in the face of the US' blockade imposed more than 60 years ago.

"The people of Cuba deserve the prize of dignity," he said.

In his speech, he called for the Organization of American States to become a truly autonomous body, "not a lackey of anyone but a mediator at the request and acceptance of the parties to conflicts in matters of human rights and democracy".

Marcelo Ebrard, the Foreign Minister of Mexico, which holds the presidency of CELAC this year, thanked the representatives of the organisation's 33 member countries for attending the event in which challenges facing the region as well as those faced by each individual nation are addressed.
New Delhi, July 25 : The great Indian tech startup story is being rewritten amid the Covid-19 pandemic as traditional sectors still bear the brunt.

With 16 unicorns (startups with a valuation of over $1 billion) and more than $11 billion in funding, chiefly from the US-based investment firms (till June-end), the year 2021 has proved that Chinese investment is no longer needed in a 'self-reliant' India amid the new normal.

The Indian tech startups started to shun Chinese investment in 2020 as desi corporates and wealthy individuals, along with investors from other countries, came onboard to fund the homegrown firms.

In the first half of 2021, investors have pumped in at least $11 billion into the Indian tech startups in over 600 deals, which is growing at an exponential rate.

The US-based investment firm Tiger Global is currently leading when it comes to investing top dollars, overtaking another US-based venture capital firm Sequoia Capital as the top investor in the burgeoning Indian startup/unicorn ecosystem.

IT industry's apex body Nasscom had forecast that India will have 50 unicorns before the end of 2021. The country has already surpassed that number which now stands at 52.

The $1 billion valuation club now has new unicorns in Digit Insurance, InnovAccer, Cred, Meesho, Gupshup, Pharmeasy, Groww, Urban Company, Mohalla Tech (ShareChat and Moj), Chargebee, Moglix, Infra.Market, Zeta, Five Star Business Finance, BrowserStack and logistics firm BlackBuck, the latest entrant.

The list will only grow in the remaining months in a mobile-first country where internet and digital access is increasing by each passing day.

In 2019, Chinese investors poured $3.9 billion into India, up from $2 billion in 2018. This investment scenario took a turnaround from May last year amid face-offs and skirmishes between Indian and Chinese troops at locations along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh.

As a result, investment from China in Indian companies fell to $263 million across 15 deals in the first half of 2020. Sensing the atmosphere, homegrown tech startups started to look elsewhere for investments, and their calls have been answered.

Media reports have claimed that nearly 150 investment proposals from China worth more than $2 billion were stuck in the pipeline.

According to Prabhu Ram, Head-Industry Intelligence Group (IIG), CMR, the rise of new unicorns and IPOs signals the arrival of the golden age of Indian consumer internet startup ecosystem.

"As a vibrant mobile-first nation, India's digital economy has been growing on the back of strong digital infrastructure, including rising smartphone penetration, affordable data costs and rising app downloads," Ram told IANS.

"Over the past year, the pandemic gave further impetus to digital consumption. Responding to the needs of the digital economy are startup entrepreneurs, from urban as well as aspirational India who have been solving for an array of unique use cases," he added.

After the bumper IPO, Zomato's shares gained nearly 80 per cent on the first day of trading on the Bombay Stock Exchange, taking the market value of the food delivery platform to nearly $13 billion.

"The tremendous response to our IPO gives us the confidence that the world is full of investors who appreciate the magnitude of investments we are making, and take a long-term view of our business," said Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal.

The new-age consumer tech-driven startups, which touched the daily lives of millions during the pandemic, have joined the investment bandwagon and are raking in the moolah.

"As India and the world seek to emerge from the pandemic, India's consumer internet ecosystem is in the midst of a perfect storm. The recent startup successes will increase investor appetite for risk-taking, and will also attract global investors," Ram noted.

Last year, the Indian tech startup base witnessed a steady growth at a scale of 8-10 per cent (year-on-year) with over 1,600 tech startups and a record number of 12 additional unicorns -- the highest ever in a single calendar year, according to a Nasscom-Zinnov report.

That record has already been broken in the first half of this year and the great Indian tech startup story is set for a big leap for the rest of the year.

(Nishant Arora can be reached at nishant.a@ians.in)
Lucknow, July 25 : Uttar Pradesh has emerged as the largest ethanol-producing state in the country.

A total of 58 crore litres of ethanol was produced by 54 distilleries established across the state.

According to the government spokesman, the state has manufactured 58 crore litres of ethanol, a solvent that is essentially mixed with petrol for environmental purposes, in the year 2020-21.

In a major relief to the farmers, an additional payment of Rs 864 crore was sent to the accounts of sugarcane farmers from the sale of ethanol.

By mixing ethanol in petrol, the Uttar Pradesh government was able to contribute to saving a total of 75.58 million dollars of India's forex reserve, giving a big boost to the economy in these testing times.

Ethanol is a type of alcohol that is mixed with petrol and is used as fuel in vehicles. According to environmental experts, ethanol mixed with petrol may reduce carbon monoxide pollution by 35 per cent.

It may be recalled that the distilleries of sugar mills and other units had produced a record 1.77 crore litres of sanitizer which was not only supplied within the state but also exported to other states.
In the context of the pandemic affecting the world, India being amongst the worst impacted countries, the fundamentals of State-Citizen relationship in a democratic dispensation have come under the focus in terms of defining where the nation's energies and resources would be devoted first. The health emergency caused by Covid-19 has been with us for more than a year -- and still persistent -- leading to enormous loss of lives, destruction of employment and a sharp rise of poverty posing the unprecedented challenge before the ruling dispensation of reviving a derailed economy.

The sovereign state of India has in this period been tested also for its ability to ensure defence of the nation against external dangers and security of its people against internal threats. In the developed West, including the US and UK, no external and internal security risks were encountered and the national governments there could more easily concentrate wholeheartedly on dealing with the pandemic and using their large financial resources towards aiding the population in economic distress. In India, a country with financial limitations, the period saw an escalation of the hostile activities of the two adversaries on the borders -- Pakistan and China -- who had formed a military alliance primarily to damage India's security. The Modi government thus faced issues of defence, internal security, health emergency and economic disruption, all together, and it goes to its credit that a sincere and competent effort was made at the highest levels to deal with this challenge on multiple fronts through these difficult months. Prime Minister Modi's leadership stands out for commitment to nationalism, political will, personal application to solution finding, hard work and quick decision-making on matters across the spectrum.

For a sovereign democratic state, defence of the nation and security of its people will always be on top of its agenda notwithstanding any spells of internal difficulties and socio-economic pressures that the country might have faced at any point. By the time the pandemic hit the country, the Sino-Pak axis had already become active in denouncing India for abrogating Art 370 relating to special status of Jammu and Kashmir. While China started a military build-up on LAC in Ladakh, Pakistan stepped up terror activity in Kashmir using even drones for dropping arms and IEDs from across the LoC in aid of terrorists infiltrated into the Valley.

Prime Minister Modi, in spite of his preoccupation with decisions required to be taken to handle the 'pandemic of the century' and boost up vaccine production on a scale large enough to meet the vast requirement of Indians of advanced age, responded promptly to the aggressiveness shown by PLA in the Ladakh sector and the escalation of trans-border terrorism attempted by Pakistan in Kashmir. He made the bold strategic move of appointing the first Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), Gen Bipin Rawat, to expedite the process of preparing the defence forces for jointly responding to an external aggression. The creation of this position had been recommended by the Kargil Review Committee but this was not acted upon all these years.

Following the incident of Galwan Valley in Ladakh on June 15 last year -- in which a large contingent of PLA physically attacked the Indian Army patrol at LAC and caused the death of twenty soldiers including the Lt Col in the field -- the Prime Minister himself visited the Corps headquarter at Nimu outside Ladakh accompanied by CDS to interact with Army personnel of the forward post and support their role in firmly countering any aggressive move of the Chinese. The Prime Minister delivered a message to China that India's determination to deal with any aggression was 'as high as the Himalayas' -- he set an example of leading the country from the front. Modi's leadership has given confidence to the nation that on defence and security India was prepared to do its best.

It is to be understood that defence is against the threat of an external aggression or an 'open attack' of the enemy whereas security is protection against a 'covert' offensive of the latter such as is the case with terrorism unleashed by infiltrated agents and insiders who had been won over by the enemy and secretly trained for carrying out acts of violence. While advance information about any military offensive of the enemy helps the defence preparation, security banks very heavily on Intelligence gathered by external and internal agencies and made available in time for neutralising the plan of violence or domestic disruption hatched by the enemy agents. The world is witnessing an era of 'proxy wars' and India has been for long at the receiving end of the Pak-instigated asymmetric warfare in Kashmir in which Islamic militants and radicals were used by Pakistan as its instruments. China, now in a deep-seated alliance with Pakistan, is known for using 'deception' as a war strategy. India, therefore, has to be fully prepared for coordinated attempts of these two adversaries to fish in our troubled waters and make moves to internally destabilise India.

Internal security has become particularly important in the present scenario and the communal front, regionalism and human rights activism aiming at politics, all need close monitoring. The Modi government is being attacked by the political opponents for allegedly working for 'Hindu majoritarianism' but the latter would be aware somewhere that it is their persistent record of desperately banking on 'Minority' votes that had created a significant backlash and drawn many Hindus to the nationalist-minded BJP regime. Constitutionally, India has 'one man one vote', 'equality' before law and 'freedom of worship' and the ruling dispensation here does not carry a 'denominational stamp'. The paradigms of secularism are thus all met. Mobilisation with communal overtones may have been a familiar feature of electoral politics in India and yet what puts Indian democracy on a sound footing is the astuteness of Indian voters who gave their verdict basically on the performance of a government on the fundamental points of security and economic welfare. People at large see that Prime Minister Modi's intentions to work for both could not be doubted. This is what brought the Modi regime back to power in the 2019 Lok Sabha election with an even larger majority. Blindly criticising all policies of the government has not helped the opposition.

On defence and security, a major test for India is the speed and smoothness with which the CDS would be able to achieve the mission of establishing 'jointness' of the three defence services -- Army, Navy and Air Force -- and bringing about necessary command structures and fund allocation norms for this purpose. CDS is now the Secretary of the Department of Military Affairs (DMA) assuming many basic responsibilities of the erstwhile Defence Secretary and he provides the 'single point advice' to the Defence Minister. In the Indian context, two things would prove helpful -- the experience gained by the country on the coordination among the three Service Chiefs achieved through the successful working of the Chiefs of Staff Committee all these years and the positive outcome of the first Tri Services Theatre Command established in 2001 for the Andaman and Nicobar Islands under Vice Admiral Arun Prakash who went on to become the Navy chief.

The Chiefs of Staff Committee had a rotating chairman based on seniority and the only difference there structurally would be the presence of CDS as the permanent chairman. The character of this forum at the apex would not change and to obtain endorsement by consensus on crucial decisions pertaining to 'jointness' of the defence forces after threadbare discussions, should not be difficult. If 'theatrisation' of commands is the direction of reform according to media reports then a combination of geographical factors and threat analysis would surely be a major determinant for that. India's prime defences are on land and sea while the air power as a modern strike instrument, meant to weaken the enemy anywhere, could be used by the national level command in a situation of conflict. That some components of the Air Force would be integrated with theatre commands to strengthen 'joint defence' is an idea that could also be implemented in addition, wherever necessary. It is clear that inter-services operational and rank related adjustments would be sorted out with the passage of time -- facilitated by the past tradition of the three Chiefs at the Chiefs of Staff Committee discussing all matters big or small relating to defence.

It is a matter of great satisfaction that Prime Minister Modi has personally attended to the crucial matters of defence and security amidst pressures of the pandemic and economy related challenges. Internal security is also emerging as a task far more important than before for reasons mentioned earlier and the country, therefore, needs a far closer coordination between the central agencies and the state intelligence as well as a much greater recognition of the role of state police as a first responder to national security threats. All this exists already but has to be perfected so that no impediments arose from the fact of politically different dispensations being in position at the Centre and in the state.

A democratic state has to strive to keep national security issues completely above party politics. The annual conference of DGPs called by Director Intelligence Bureau for sharing a review of national security scenario, is the right forum where the centre-state police rapport -- for prompt handling of any imminent threat to internal security -- would be discussed and some illustrations pointed out for identifying the lessons drawn for the general good. Internal security issues seem to be running into political slugfest too often and this is not healthy, if the Joint Parliamentary Committees concerned with defence and security are adequately briefed on the current scenario and the policy framework of the government to handle it explained to them, the opposition would risk getting exposed before the people if it tried to drag these matters into controversies for political motives. People of India are sensitive and receptive towards national security and are willing to even push their personal issues aside for safeguarding it. The Prime Minister has done well to keep defence and security in his focus even when the pandemic and its economic consequences had become matters of overwhelming concern. This would not go unnoticed by the people of India at large.

(The writer is a former Director of Intelligence Bureau)
New Delhi, July 25 : After resolving the Punjab issue, the Congress party is focusing on problems in its Rajasthan unit. The party leadership has sent K.C. Venugopal, General Secretary (Organisation) and state in-charge General Secretary Ajay Maken to Jaipur to meet all the factions and resolve the crisis in the party there.

Before going to Rajasthan, Venugopal said: "I am a MP from the state and I am going for some official work." However, sources said Venugopal and Maken met Rahul Gandhi and had discussions on Rajasthan affairs before leaving for Jaipur.

The Congress leadership has stepped up efforts to address issues related to the state as after one year of Sachin Pilot's revolt, things are pretty much where they were. Frustrated with this, Sachin Pilot said at a recent Press briefing, "Those workers who sacrificed each and everything for the party, worked round the clock and were lathicharged should, at least, get due respect if not any plum post. This is what our present president says, and we also say the same. In fact, everyone says the same," he said.

"In the coming Assembly polls, we shall garner more votes. We have voiced our opinion to the high command. The AICC listened to our suggestions, formed a committee, and this committee called meetings too. All decisions shall be taken soon.

"We stand with the central leadership and are sure that the All India Congress Committee will take the necessary steps soon. We have had a detailed discussion with veteran leaders where we said that our opinion should be taken, no matter what the scenario is," he added.

The Congress is now trying to fix issues in each state one by one and calling its leaders in the states to Delhi for discussions. In Rajasthan, Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot is delaying the cabinet expansion and appointments in boards and corporations which has not gone down well with the Congress leadership.

While Ajay Maken gave a deadline for political appointments and cabinet expansion, the Gehlot government made sure that the deadline was not met, citing the Budget session of the State Assembly and Covid-19 protocols.

Maken has been trying to break the ice between the two camps -- Gehlot and Sachin Pilot -- but his formula has been rejected by the Chief Minister. As a result, directions from the Congress party leadership could not be implemented. This time, though, the Congress wants to settle the issue as quickly as possible.
Seoul, July 25 : The head of US-based vehicle importer HAAH Automotive Holdings has said the company is set to submit its letter of intent (LoI) next week to acquire the debt-ridden SsangYong Motor Co, industry sources said on Sunday.

SsangYong's Indian parent Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd had been in talks with HAAH to sell its majority stake in the Korean unit since last year as part of its global reorganisation plan amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

In 2011, Mahindra acquired a 70 per cent stake in SsangYong for 523 billion won and now holds a 74.65 per cent stake in the SUV-focused carmaker.

HAAH Automotive Holdings founder Duke Hale said HAAH is the optimal company to acquire financially troubled SsangYong and will submit an LOI by Friday, a person familiar with the matter said over the phone.

HAAH was expected to submit its LOI to the Seoul Bankruptcy Court by March, but it did not send the documents, raising doubts about its intention to invest in SsangYong, reports Yonhap news agency.

In April, SsangYong was placed under court receivership for the second time after undergoing the same process a decade earlier.

Court receivership is one step short of bankruptcy in South Korea's legal system. In receivership, the court will decide whether and how to revive the company.

As for the failure to submit an LOI, the HAAH chief said the company needed more time to look into SsangYong's financial details before making an investment decision.

If HAAH succeeds in acquiring SsangYong, he said the California-based car importer plans to bring SsangYong's SUV models and pick-up trucks to the US and Canada.

SsangYong plans to receive LOIs from interested investors until Friday in the auction to find its new owner.

China-based SAIC Motor acquired a 51 per cent stake in SsangYong in 2004 but relinquished its control of the carmaker in 2009 in the wake of the 2008-09 global financial crisis.

KPMG Samjong Accounting Corp, the auditor of SsangYong, declined to give its opinion on the carmaker's annual financial statements for the year 2020.

SsangYong could be delisted if its accounting firm again refuses to offer an opinion on the company's annual performance for the following year after the one-year period.
New Delhi, July 25 : There is uncertainty over the new role of former union ministers, who were dropped from the Modi cabinet earlier this month, in the BJP's organisational set up or some other responsibility.

After the cabinet reshuffle there was speculation in the BJP circle that few of them who were dropped from the Union Council of Ministers would be accommodated in the organisation and will be given key responsibilities. But after a fortnight, many in the saffron camp believe that it seems unlikely that former ministers will be given key organisational positions.

"It seems unlikely that former union ministers will be made national office bearers or given key responsibilities in organisation after witnessing the way they were replaced," a party insider said.

On July 7, 12 ministers resigned from the council of ministers. Those who resigned are D.V. Sadananda Gowda, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Ramesh Pokhriyal 'Nishank', Dr Harsh Vardhan, Prakash Javadekar, Santosh Kumar Gangwar, Babul Supriyo, Dhotre Sanjay Shamrao, Rattan Lal Kataria, Pratap Chandra Sarangi and Debasree Chaudhuri.

Thaawarchand Gehlot had also resigned from the union cabinet but he was appointed governor of Karnataka.

Another party leader said that most of them, except two or three, will be unlikely to be made party office bearers.

While a dozen ministers were dropped, three BJP national office bearers were made ministers in the union cabinet. BJP national general secretary, Bhupender Yadav has been made cabinet minister, while, party national vice president Annapurna Devi has also been made minister. Besides, BJP national secretary, Bisweshwar Tudu was also made union minister.

A party leader said that one more post of vice president is lying vacant after Mukul Roy joined the Trinamool Congress.

"There are speculations in party circles that Prasad and Javadekar may be given some organisational responsibilities but not necessarily as national office bearers. Recently, the BJP asked Prasad to present the party's stand over Pegasus snooping allegations," a party leader said.

A senior party leader pointed out that the BJP follows the policy of 'one person, one post', hence few former ministers would be given important roles in the organisation in view of the crucial Assembly elections to be held early next year.

Another saffron party leader said that some former ministers will be assigned works for next year's assembly polls in five states -- Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur.

Fate of others who were dropped from the union cabinet will be decided in future and those who spoke against the party leadership and party line will not be accommodated anywhere in the future.

A senior functionary said, if performance was the reason for showing doors to these ministers from the union cabinet, then it is unlikely that they will be given any key responsibilities.

(Shashi Bhushan can be reached at shashi.b@ians.in)
Sanaa, July 25 : A total of 21 Houthi rebels were killed in airstrikes launched by the Saudi-led coalition on the militia group's positions in Yemen's central province of Al Bayda, according to medics.

"The airstrikes on Saturday hit the Iran-backed Houthi militia in several positions in Nati district, killing 21 and injuring 13 others... They were brought to the hospital in the province," the medics told Xinhua news agency.

Houthi-run al-Masirah TV reported five airstrikes on Nati district late on Friday, without providing further details.

The district is a stronghold of the Houthi group.

Much of the province, about 268 km southeast of the capital Sanaa, is under the control of the group since 2014.

The Yemeni army backed by the Saudi-led coalition has advanced this month to several new strategic areas in the north and south of the province.

Yemen has been mired in a civil war since late 2014 when the Houthi militia seized control of several northern provinces and forced the internationally recognized government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi out of Sanaa.

The Saudi-led Arab coalition intervened in the Yemeni conflict in March 2015 to support Hadi's government.
Dharamsala, July 25 : Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama has written to Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray that he will offer prayers and condolences to the families who have lost loved ones in the devastating floods, his aides said on Sunday.

He said he was moved by reports in the news about the loss of life, damage to property and the suffering faced by so many people in Maharashtra as a result of devastating flooding over the last few days.

"I understand that the state government and authorities concerned are making every effort to help those affected by severe monsoon rains." "As a gesture of our solidarity with the people of Maharashtra, I have asked the Dalai Lama Trust to make a donation towards relief and rescue efforts," the Nobel Peace Laureate added.

The death toll in Maharashtra floods soared to to 112, while 99 more are missing, the State Disaster Management Authority said on Saturday.
Baghdad, July 25 : The Iraqi Communist Party has announced its withdrawal from the upcoming parliamentary elections scheduled for October 10.

"The atmosphere is not suitable for holding the elections, and there are many confusions in the political process," Xinhua news agency quoted Raed Fahmi, secretary of the Central Committee of the Iraqi Communist Party, as saying at a press conference on Saturday.

Fahmi noted that financial irregularities and uncontrolled weapons still affect the elections, saying the political parties are "not serious" in achieving the demands of popular protests that broke out in October 2019, and "the upcoming elections are nothing but a change of faces".

The party won two seats in the 2018 parliamentary elections on a joint list within the Sairoon Coalition, which became the largest group in the Iraqi parliament, with the support of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Over a week ago, al-Sadr announced his withdrawal from the parliamentary elections due to "rampant corruption and unfair competition" among political parties.

Iraq is scheduled to hold early elections on October 10 in response to the anti-government protests against corruption and lack of public services.

The previous parliamentary elections in Iraq were held on May 12, 2018, and the next elections were originally scheduled to take place in 2022.
Ramallah, July 25 : A senior Palestinian diplomat has slammed what he termed as the international community's inaction towards the Israeli violations in the Palestinian territories.

Palestine's envoy to the UN, Riyad Mansour told the Voice of Palestine radio on Saturday that "international inaction gives Israel a license to do what it wants in the Palestinian territories without punishment", reports Xinhua news agency.

He said that Israel continues its illegal actions against the Palestinians, mainly building settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and keeping the blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip.

Mansour announced that on July 28, the UN Security Council is scheduled to hold a session for an open dialogue on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Meanwhile, Saleh Ra'fat, member of the executive committee of Palestine Liberation Organization, told reporters that the Israeli assaults against the Palestinians are continuing and never stop.

"Israeli soldiers killed on Friday night a 17-year-old boy. The Israeli measures are carried on every day against our people in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip," Ra'fat said.

He added that Palestinian contacts are continuing with the International Criminal Court, international institutions and friendly countries "to impose sanctions on Israel to force it to stop violations in Palestine".
Bengaluru, July 25 : Monday happens to be the second anniversary of the BJP government in Karnataka. But instead of the air of exuberance associated with such occasions, a nervous tension smoulders beneath the surface. While the Covid pandemic has certainly put the lid on public celebrations and exuberance, it's a different story in Karnataka.

Following his recent visit to the national capital, and meetings with the party top brass, including the Prime Minister, the speculations of B.S. Yediyurappa's imminent replacement, hit a peak. Even the chief minister who was till recently denying such possibility, said that he is waiting for the high command's word in the matter.

The question on the minds of people and political observers is, will chief minister B.S. Yediyurappa continue in office or not. More importantly, what happens to the BJP's political future in the state.

Once considered the BJP's gateway to south India, Karnataka hasn't failed the party. From the late 90s onwards, the party made steady inroads, going on to form government on at least three occasions. Today, the party is a permanent fixture in Karnataka's triangular political arena, comprising the Congress, Janata Dal (Secular), and the BJP.

However, the latest round of speculations, and public jousting over chief minister Yediurappa's future at the helm of government in the state, has put the party in a spot. The reality is BJP needs a fresh chief minister, but it cannot afford to lose Yediyurappa. It's a gamble the high command is apparently prepared to take.

There can be no denying Yediyurappa's pivotal role in the BJP's success story in the south Indian state. Undaunted by the challenges of fighting for political space in a field dominated till then by the Congress, and the Janata parivaar, Yediyurappa led the BJP from the front - on the streets, in the Legislature, everywhere. He is rightly credited for taking the party from the sidelines, to the centrestage of Karnataka realpolitik.

However, the entire process took the better part of fifty years, and Yediyurappa no longer has age on his side. At 78, he is 3 years past the BJP's unofficial age-limit for official positions.

Coupled with this, are allegations of corruption and nepotism that are hurled at him at regular intervals.

Faced with a similar situation in any other state, the BJP wouldn't have batted an eyelid before taking a decision. Unfortunately for the BJP high command, the situation is quite different in Karnataka.

Firstly, there is no BJP leader worth the name who can stand up to Yediyurappa in stature. There are too many contenders or pretenders for the throne, for the rest of the pack to follow. Choosing a suitable successor can be a daunting task.

Second, and more crucially, the veteran has the Lingayat clergy solidly rooting for him. The largest community in the state, the Lingayats have by and large supported the BJP, giving it the edge in the political sweepstakes. And Yediyurappa has been the glue binding the community with the party in Karnataka.

So strong is Yediurappa's consolidation in the community, that even community leaders from opposition parties, have spoken in his favour.

Even corruption allegations have failed to douse his vigour, nor dim his appeal on the electoral scenario. But with the passage of time, and the alleged intervention of his children in official matters, dissent bugles have been blown by several quarters in the party.

Under the circumstances, the BJP high command which has been working hard to project itself as a professional political party, has been finding Karnataka a tough nut to crack. It cannot afford to be seen as bending the rules, while at the same time, it knows that not keeping Yediyurappa in good humour, can prove costly.

Yediyurappa is said to be angling for the chief minister's seat or that of the state party president, for his son B.S. Vijayendra.

Over the past week, ever since the whispers of Yediurappa's exit hit a crescendo, a number of Lingayat seers of all denominations, have made it clear that the BJP stands to lose if Yediurappa is replaced.

On his part, Yediyurappa has been making the right noises politically. Without explaining too much, he has said that he will follow the party's diktats.

But those who know Yediyurappa, know that he can be ruthless. In 2013, he quit the party to form his own political party, and ended up spoiling the BJP's chances in the assembly elections. He returned to the party fold and was rehabilitated by Narendra Modi.

Its a catch-22 situation for the BJP as assembly elections due in 2023, are a crucial psychological factor in the run up to 2024 parliamentary polls. Especially, since Karnataka sends 28 members to the Lok Sabha. But then, this is also probably the best time to effect a leadership change in the state. With assembly elections a good two years away, and a lull in the Covid scenario, now is probably the best time for any moves to replace the old warhorse.

Holding on to Karnataka is critical for the BJP, from electoral as well as perceptional point. It's a war that Yediyurappa can help them win, but he also has to serve as the sacrificial offering.

For the moment, though, the party high command is maintaining a studied silence. It perhaps understands that silence is the best policy, when it comes to Karnataka and Yediyurappa.

Ironically, the four-time chief minister has never enjoyed a full five-year term in office. So, all eyes are pointed towards the Karnataka chief minister. Will he, won't he this time? As of now, only Yediurappa has the answers.
San Francisco, July 25 : Amazon may allow users to pay in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin soon as the e-commerce giant is hiring a digital currency and blockchain product lead for its payments team.

According to a latest job listing, Amazon's Payments Acceptance & Experience team is "seeking an experienced product leader to develop Amazon's Digital Currency and Blockchain strategy and product roadmap".

"You will leverage your domain expertise in Blockchain, Distributed Ledger, Central Bank Digital Currencies and Cryptocurrency to develop the case for the capabilities which should be developed, drive overall vision and product strategy, and gain leadership buy-in and investment for new capabilities," the company posted.

The product lead will work closely with teams across Amazon, including AWS to develop the roadmap for the customer experience, technical strategy and capabilities as well as the launch strategy.

Amazon doesn't accept cryptocurrencies as payment yet.

A company spokesperson told Insider that it was "inspired by the innovation happening in the cryptocurrency space and are exploring what this could look like on Amazon." Amazon Web Services (AWS), the Cloud arm of Amazon, currently offers a managed blockchain service.

The new digital currency and blockchain product lead would "need to operate with a high level of autonomy and operate analytically, working backwards from data and customer insights to build new and innovative solutions to unsolved problems", the company further said.

Tech giant Apple posted a similar listing in May for a business development manager "working in or with alternative payment providers, such as digital wallets, BNPL, Fast Payments, cryptocurrency, and etc." Tesla and Twitter are bullish on Bitcoin as the next payment mode.

The online world needs a global currency, and our focus is on Bitcoin because with this cryptocurrency, we can reach every single person on the planet, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has stressed.

Meanwhile, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has confirmed that the company is "most likely" going to resume taking Bitcoin payments after some due diligence on the improvements in the energy mix used to mine the cryptocurrency.
Baghdad, July 25 : Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi has announced the dismantlement of a terrorist cell linked to a recent bombing in capital Baghdad, which left dozens of people killed and wounded.

"We have arrested all members of the cowardly terrorist cell that planned and carried out the attack," al-Kadhimi tweeted on Saturday, adding that they will be publicly tried.

Last week, 30 people were killed and more than 50 wounded in the bomb explosion at a crowded market in Sadr city, an eastern district of Baghdad.

The Islamic State (IS) terror group later claimed responsibility for the attack.

Deadly bombings have been rare in Baghdad, as the security situation has improved in Iraq since security forces fully defeated the IS militants across the country late in 2017.

However, IS remnants have since retreated into deserts and rugged areas, carrying out frequent guerilla attacks against security forces and civilians.
New Delhi, July 25 : As the news of data breach surfaced online revealing that millions of phone numbers of Clubhouse users are 'up for sale' on Dark Web, the chat app maker on Sunday informed that there has been no data breach.

The company also said that it continues to invest in industry-leading security practices as privacy and security are of the utmost importance to Clubhouse.

"There are a series of bots generating billions of random phone numbers," the company's spokesperson told IANS.

"In the event that one of these random numbers happens to exist on our platform due to mathematical coincidence, Clubhouse's API returns no user identifiable information," it added.

On Saturday, leading cyber-security expert Jiten Jain wrote on Twitter that a database of phone numbers of Clubhouse users is up for sale on the Darknet.

"It also contains numbers of people in user's phonebooks that were synced. So chances are high that you are listed even if you haven't had a Clubhouse login," he wrote.

However, according to independent security researcher Rajshekhar Rajaharia, the data leak claim appears fake as the alleged Clubhouse data contains only mobile numbers without names.

"No names, photos or any other details are available. This list of phone numbers can be generated very easily. The data leak claim appears fake," Rajaharia told IANS.

In February this year, researchers at Stanford University in the US had warned that the app may be leaking users' audio data to the Chinese government.

The Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) had claimed that Agora, a Shanghai-based provider of real-time engagement software, supplies back-end infrastructure to the Clubhouse app.

The company has now removed its waitlist system so that anyone can join the platform in a hassle-free manner.

The company also said that it has added 10 million people to the community since its launch on Android in mid-May.
Santiago, July 25 : Chilean Ministers have met executives from the Chinese company Sinovac over the pharmaceutical firm's plan to create a potential vaccination production site.

The group visited a plot of land 28 km north of the city of Antofagasta on Friday, which could be the site of a future production plant for Covid-19 vaccines, the Chilean Ministry of Health said on Saturday.

It is estimated that the construction of the plant would be completed by the end of 2022, allowing operation to begin from 2023, said the Ministry, adding it would require an investment of about $60 million, reports Xinhua news agency.

The plant could "produce vaccines not only for Chile, but also for the rest of Latin America". Health Minister Enrique Paris said.

Sinovac Vice President Meng Weining said that the company had "achieved a production of 4 billion doses (of vaccine) per year".

"We have carried out clinical studies in this country, which have reaffirmed the excellence of Chilean medical and scientific teams," Meng added.

Currently, Chile has fully vaccinated 78.59 per cent of its target population against Covid-19, equivalent to almost 12 million people.

The country has registered 1,607,749 cases and 34,958 deaths from Covid-19 so far.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
New Delhi, July 25 : After the installation of Navjot Singh Sidhu as Punjab Congress chief, sources in the party indicate that the state cabinet is likely to be expanded with the induction of new ministerial faces.

Raj Kumar Verka and Rana KP are two probables whose names are circulating in Congress circles. Verka is a Dalit leader said to be close to Sidhu and Rana is the Assembly Speaker, besides being an OBC leader.

Sources also said that the Chief Minister, Capt Amarinder Singh, might drop a few ministers in the cabinet rejig. Gurpreet Kangar and Charanjit Channi are the names being mentioned in this regard. More changes in the state party organisation may follow the ministerial reshuffle.

Sidhu was appointed Punjab Congress president along with four working presidents -- Kuljit Singh Nagra, Sangat Singh Gilzian, Sukhwinder Singh Danny and Pawan Goel -- on July 18 by the Congress interim president, Sonia Gandhi. Although the chief minister had initially opposed Sidhu's elevation, he seems to have made peace with his rival in the party -- at least publicly.

On Friday, July 23, the two leaders shared the stage together after a long break. The chief minister also attended the inauguration of Sidhu as PCC president.

Before Sidhu took charge, he met the chief minister at the Punjab Bhawan here for the tea. The meeting between the two leaders, who had been at loggerheads, was said to be cordial.

And to end any further speculation on the matter, Amarinder Singh said, "We will work together for Punjab. Not just for Punjab, but for India. We share a long border with Pakistan. ... Pakistan, China, and now with America's departure, Taliban in Afghanistan, all of them are going to come and sit on Kashmir's border, Punjab's border." (Anand Singh can be contacted at anand.s@ians.in)
Beijing, July 25 : A second round of Covid-19 nucleic acid test was launched in Nanjing city, capital of China's Jiangsu province, following a resurgence of new confirmed cases.

The second round was launched on Saturday in the district of Jiangning, reports Xinhua news agency.

In the last 24 hours, the eastern Chinese city reported 12 new locally transmitted Covid-19 cases and four asymptomatic ones, local health authorities said on Saturday.

The first round of nucleic acid testing took place on July 21 after 17 airport workers tested positive for Covid-19.

The mega-city with a population of more than 9.3 million has classified 10 areas as medium-risk for Covid-19 and implemented closed management.

The municipal government has urged residents not to leave the city unless necessary.

Anyone leaving the city must produce a negative nucleic acid test certificate issued within 48 hours of their departure.

The rule does not apply to transit passengers.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Nearly 70,000 people affected by floods in China's Shaanxi Image Source: IANS News

Facebook's Head of Safety shares tips to keep kids safe online Image Source: IANS News

Beijing, July 25 : Nearly 70,000 people from 146 villages in Luonan county in China's Shaanxi province have been affected by floods triggered by torrential rain, authorities said on Sunday.

Heavy rainfall battered Luonan from July22-23, causing direct economic losses of more than 900 million yuan ($139 million), according to the county authorities.

The natural disaster has led to the evacuation of 58,345 people, Xinhua news agency quoted the authorities as saying.

Monitoring data shows that improved weather has seen water levels in 23 reservoirs in Luonan county drop below their flood season marks.

Rescue work is still underway.
Islamabad, July 25 : The Pakistan government has banned people, over the age of 18, who have not been vaccinated against Covid-19 from domestic air travel, the media reported on Sunday.

According to a document issued by the NatioAnal Command and OperaAtion Centre (NCOC), available with Dawn, it has been decided that no unvaccinated citizens of 18-year age and above will be allowed to undertake domAeAsAtic air travel from August 1.

"Restriction is for domestic air travel and people travelling from Pakistan to abroad or from abroad to Pakistan are exempted from restriction. It is also not applicable on link flights if these are within 72 hours of arrival or departure," the document states.

However partially vaccinated individuals, foreign nationals, Pakistani nationals having documentary proof of vaccination abroad and patients who are clinically advised against vaccination due to risk of reaction are exempted from restriction.

This announcement comes as Pakistan's overall Covid-19 caseload and death toll have increased to 1,004,694 and 23,016, respectively.
Bhubaneswar, July 25 : Prime Minister Narendra Modi praised Odia daily labour Isaak Munda, who turned to be a YouTuber, in his 79th 'Mann Ki Baat' programme on Sunday.

Munda (35) is a daily wage labourer from Babupali village under Jujumura block of Odisha's Sambalpur district. The man who used to watch YouTube videos to distract himself from his hunger is now a YouTube star and is earning lakhs of rupees.

Describing the struggle story of Isaak Munda, Modi said, "Isaak ji once used to work as a daily wager but now he has become an internet sensation. Munda is earning a lot through his YouTube Channel. In his videos he shows prominently the local dishes, traditional ways of cooking, his village, his lifestyle, family and food habits." Munda's journey as a YouTuber began in March 2020 when he posted a video related to Pakhal, the famous local dish of Odisha. Since then, he has posted hundreds of videos, Modi said.

"His effort is different for many reasons. Specially because through this, people living in cities get a chance to watch the lifestyle about which they don't know much. Isaak Munda ji is celebrating by blending culture and cuisine equally and inspiring us too," he added.

Struggling for hunger, Munda borrowed about Rs 3,000 to buy his first smartphone and record his videos eating boiled rice and some curry. Following that, he uploaded many videos including the last one related to health checkup on YouTube and earning lakhs of rupees. Isak's channel, 'Isak Munda Eating' has over 7.77 lakh subscribers.
Visakhapatnam, July 25 : Leaders of employees' unions affiliated to all trade unions took out a 'padyatra' here on Sunday as they intensified the protest against the Centre's move to privatise Visakhapatnam Steel Plant.

Employees and leaders of all trade unions belonging to different political parties participated in the 'padyatra' organised from Kurmannapalem Junction to Duvvada.

They also visited the colonies of the Steel Plant workers. The protestors declared that they will not allow privatisation of the plant which was achieved with the sacrifice of many lives.

Raising slogans against the Central government and holding banners and placards, the protestors marched through the streets.

To further intensify the protest against the privatisation of the public sector undertaking, the employees' unions announced 'chalo Parliament' programme on August 1 and 2. They declared that their protest will continue till the Centre takes back its decision.

The employees' leaders said they have met leaders of various political parties in New Delhi. A leader claimed that 150 MPs have assured support to them.

Meanwhile, the indefinite relay fast by the Visakha Ukku Parirakshana Porata Committee against privatisation entered the 164th day on Sunday at Kurmannapalem.

The Centre this month expedited the privatisation of the Rashtriya Ispat Nigam Limited (RINL). The Department of Investment and Public Asset Management (DIPAM) decided to hire legal and transaction advisors to prepare a road map for privatisation.

RINL is the corporate entity of Visakhapatnam Steel Plant also known as Vizag Steel Plant.

Visakha Ukku Parirakshana Committee chairman D. Adinarayana said despite resistance and opposition from people, the Modi government was going ahead with its privatisation plan.

Porata committee leaders alleged that the BJP government is trying to destroy national assets like PSUs. They warned that they will not let anyone who wants to buy RINL enter Visakhapatnam.
Kabul, July 25 : The Afghan government announced that it has imposed a night-time curfew in 31 provinces except Kabul, Panjshir and Nangarhar, in the wake of unabated Taliban attacks across the war-torn country.

The night-time curfew will be effective between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m., TOLO News quoted the Ministry of Interior as saying late Saturday.

The new measure comes as the government forces continue to fight the Taliban in 21 provinces of the country.

According to Radio Television of Afghanistan (RTA), the decision was made to check the infiltration of Taliban militants to provincial capitals, reports Xinhua news agency.

According to the statistics provided by the Afghan security agencies, the security forces have killed 262 Taliban fighters over the past 24 hours and wounded 176 more.

The Taliban has however, rejected the numbers.

Since the start of the withdrawal of the US-led foreign forces from Afghanistan early in May, the Taliban militants have intensified activities and seized more than 170 districts, according to reports.

Fierce clashes took place last week on the outskirts of the city of Kandahar.

In response, the US launched airstrikes against militant positions in the area on July 22.

The Taliban slammed the US airstrikes as a violation of the Doha agreement, warning that it "would lead to consequences".
New Delhi, July 25 : Microsoft has warned customers about a new crypto mining malware that can steal credentials, remove security controls, spread via emails and ultimately drop more tools for human-operated activity.

Called 'LemonDuck', the crypto mining malware is targeting Windows and Linux systems, spreading via phishing emails, exploits, USB devices and brute force attacks in various countries, including India.

"LemonDuck's threat to enterprises is also in the fact that it's a cross-platform threat. It's one of a few documented bot malware families that targets Linux systems as well as Windows devices," warned Microsoft 365 Defender Threat Intelligence Team.

The malware can quickly take advantage of news, events, or the release of new exploits to run effective campaigns.

"For example, in 2020, it was observed using Covid-19-themed lures in email attacks. In 2021, it exploited newly patched Exchange Server vulnerabilities to gain access to outdated systems," Microsoft informed.

This threat, however, does not just limit itself to new or popular vulnerabilities.

It continues to use older vulnerabilities, which benefit the attackers at times when focus shifts to patching a popular vulnerability rather than investigating compromise.

"Notably, LemonDuck removes other attackers from a compromised device by getting rid of competing malware and preventing any new infections by patching the same vulnerabilities it used to gain access," said the company.

In the early years, LemonDuck targeted China heavily, but its operations have since expanded to include many other countries - the US, India, Russia, China, Germany, the UK, Korea, Canada, France, and Vietnam.

"Once inside a system with an Outlook mailbox, as part of its normal exploitation behaviour, LemonDuck attempts to run a script that utilises the credentials present on the device," the Microsoft team said.

The script instructs the mailbox to send copies of a phishing message with preset messages and attachments to all contacts.

Because of this method of contact messaging, security controls that rely on determining if an email is sent from a suspicious sender don't apply.

"This means that email security policies that reduce scanning or coverage for internal mail need to be re-evaluated, as sending emails through contact scraping is very effective at bypassing email controls," the company suggested.

Last Monday, US President Joe Biden's administration finally came out publicly against China's involvement in cybercrimes, accusing it of running a massive global operation of "state-sponsored activities" causing billions of dollars of losses to victims.

In a show of solidarity indicating the serious global repercussions, all the 30 NATO allies and the European Union, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan joined in indicting Beijing.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the US and its allies had "formally confirmed" that China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) used the vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Exchange Server "in a massive cyber espionage operation that indiscriminately compromised thousands of computers and networks, mostly belonging to private sector victims".
Kabul, July 25 : A media report has revealed that there were 117 Afghan civilian casualties in the past seven days, a drastic difference from the 433 fatalities reported the previous week amid US airstrikes on the Taliban and international calls for a reduction in violence in the war-torn country.

The Pajhwok News report revealed on Saturday that the deaths were reported in the provinces of Kandahar, Jawzjan, Kapisa, Nangarhar, Samangan, Faryab, Balkh and Kunduz.

Besides the casualties, 41 people were also injured in the past seven days.

Afghan government forces and Taliban insurgents also suffered casualties in this, but the Pajhwok News report did not publish the figures as there was no official confirmation from either side.

The Afghan provinces have been the scene of heavy battles between Taliban and security forces since the start of withdrawal of the US-led forces from the war-torn country on May 1.

US President Joe Biden has set a formal end to the US military mission in Afghanistan for August 31, days ahead of his original September 11 deadline.

US Central Command said last week over 95 per cent of the withdrawal has been completed.

More than 2,400 US troops were killed in Afghanistan over the past two decades, with 20,000 wounded, according to the Pentagon.

Estimates show that over 66,000 Afghan troops have been killed, and over 2.7 million people were displaced.
Bengaluru, July 25 : Karnataka revenue minister, R. Ashoka said on Sunday that due to heavy rains for the last two weeks across north Karnataka region, thousands of people were displaced and at least 31,360 people have been evacuated from low-lying areas so far in this region.

Ashoka, who is also vice-chairman of the Karnataka State Disaster Management Authority (KSDMA), told reporters that more than 22,417 people have been rehabilitated in 237 relief camps set up in this region.

According to data shared by the KSDMA, as many as 283 villages in 45 taluks were worst affected due to widespread rains which have affected more than 36,498 people.

He added that at least nine people have died in rain related incidents in the last 72 hours and three others are missing in the flood-affected regions of the state.

The KSDMA data stated that more than 3,502 electric poles have been uprooted and 342 transformers were damaged due to which electricity supply in several villages has been disrupted.

The minister added that agriculture crops in around 59,000 hectare and around 2,000 hectare horticulture crops were submerged due to excess release of water and heavy rains in the north Karnataka region. "As many as 134 houses have collapsed, 2,480 houses partially, while 213 schools have been partially damaged due to excess rains in the region," he explained.

He added that villages in Shivamogga district were worst affected due to uprooting of 2,864 electric poles and the damage of 274 transformers due to which most of the villages in this district are facing electric supply disruption.

He also added that the state has also recorded 16 major landslides in districts that are in Western Ghat range, while across the north-Karnataka region, there have been 73 minor landslides that occurred on state and national highways, throwing traffic out of gear.

"We would need at least a month to have these highways repaired once the rain recedes. The KSDMA is well equipped as it has been constantly monitoring the situation using its 16 State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) teams and seven National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) teams in these flood ravaged districts," the minister explained.

The India Meteorological Department (IMD) had sounded a red alert in Karnataka on Friday night in the districts of Dakshina Kannada, Udupi, Uttara Kannada, Shivamogga, Chikkamagaluru, Hassan, and Kodagu while an orange alert was also issued in the Belagavi and Dharwad districts.

After reviewing the flood situation, Karnataka chief minister B.S. Yediyurappa on Saturday directed the district in-charge ministers to stay put in their respective districts and monitor the relief and rescue operations in the areas.

The chief minister is already on tour of the rain and flood-affected border district of Belagavi in north Karnataka on Sunday to assess the situation there, the chief minister's office (CMO) said in its statement.
Jerusalem, July 25 : New data from Israel and the UK is showing a contradictory picture on the effectiveness of Pfizer-BioNTech's Covid-19 vaccine in fighting off the Delta variant, the media reported.

A new Health Ministry statistics from Israel indicated that, on average, the Pfizer-BioNTech shot is now just 39 per cent effective against infection, while being only 41 per cent effective in preventing symptomatic Covid-19.

Previously, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was well over 90 per cent effective against infection, reports The Times of Israel.

Meanwhile, a new UK study published this week in The New England Journal of Medicine found the same vaccine to be 88 per cent effective in preventing symptomatic Covid-19 -- more than twice the rate found in the Israeli data.

Israel's research agreed, at least, that the shot was highly effective in avoiding serious illness, at 91.4 per cent effectiveness, the report said.

Some analysts have warned that the figures on vaccine effectiveness are prone to major inaccuracies because of a range of factors, including questions over whether there is accurate data on infection levels among the non-vaccinated, which is vital for such stats.

The Israeli statistics also appeared to paint a picture of protection that gets weaker as months pass after vaccination, due to fading immunity.

People vaccinated in January were said to have just 16 per cent protection against infection now, while in those vaccinated in April, effectiveness was at 75 per cent.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Srinagar, July 25 : One of the three militants killed in gunfight with the security forces in J&K's Bandipora district had exfiltrated to Pakistan via Wagah border in 2018, police said on Sunday.

The militant was killed on Saturday.

"A resident of Bandipora, Sariq Baba had exfiltrated via Wagah border in 2018 and had infiltrated recently through the LoC", Vijay Kumar, Inspector General of Police (Kashmir) told reporters.

Kumar said Sariq was affiliated with the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) outfit. The other two militants killed in the gunfight at the Sumlar-Aragam area in Bandipora district on Saturday were foreigners.

The gunfight had started after militants opened fire on a joint party of the police, Rashtriya Rifles, Marcos (Para Special Force) and CRPF in the forest area.

Search operation was resumed in the area this morning in Bandipora as there could be more militants hiding in the thick forest.
Amaravati, July 25 : Opposition Telugu Desam Party (TDP) on Sunday demanded that all MPs of the ruling YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) resign to step up pressure on the Central government in the current session of Parliament to withdraw privatisation of the Visakhapatnam Steel Plant.

Former minister and TDP leader Bandaru Satyanarayana Murthy said if the YSRCP MPs in the Rajya Sabha and the Lok Sabha resign, then the TDP members would also follow in their footsteps.

He said Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy should come to the rescue of one lakh workers of Visakhapatnam Steel Plant (VSP) as it was his basic duty in his capacity as the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh.

He said it was in the interest of VSP workers and people that TDP national president and leader of opposition N. Chandrababu Naidu offered to follow Jagan Mohan Reddy. The CM should have responded positively to the gesture made by the opposition leader in a respectful manner.

Naidu had on Saturday asked Chief Minister Jagan Mohan Reddy to join the struggle and lead it from the front.

Extending his party's complete support to the 'Save Vizag Steel' agitation, Naidu reiterated that his party's elected representatives would be ready to resign from their posts for the sake of the steel plant.

Satyanarayana Murthy said the general feeling among the people is that the only goal of YSRCP MPs is to have their rebel MP Raghurama Raju disqualified. Jagan Reddy should realise that the present burning issue in Andhra Pradesh is to prevent the privatisation of steel plant and to safeguard the interests of the workers, he said.

He recalled that Jagan Reddy had stated during the elections that he would bend the necks of the central leaders if he was given 25 MPs. If Jagan takes over leadership of the steel plant agitation, then the AP MPs can bring Parliament to a standstill till the privatisation move was withdrawn, Murthy said.

The TDP leader termed as 'reckless' the statement by Jagan Reddy's advisor Sajjala Ramakrishna Reddy that if TDP MPs want to resign they can do so. "Instead of giving a plan to stop the Steel Plant privatisation, Sajjala is only diverting the public attention by making unwarranted comments against the appeal of Mr. Chandrababu Naidu. It is clear how the chief minister, his advisor and his Rajya Sabha MP Vijay Sai Reddy are not bothered about the steel plant at all," said Satyanarayana Murthy.

The TDP said that the YSRCP is ruthlessly betraying the aspirations of over 38 villages that contributed their thousands of acres of land for the VSP. He alleged that YSRCP leaders were only interested in making quick and easy money through sand, land, liquor and cement mafia but not in the struggles of the workers and common people.

He urged the people to realise whether the TDP or the YSRCP had the credibility when it came to the fight for saving the steel plant. He pointed out that Chandrababu Naidu immediately rushed to the protest camp and extended his party's overall support to the agitating workers whereas, Jagan Reddy was playing all sorts of discreditable dramas without giving any hope to the steel plant workers on the privatisation issue.
New Delhi, July 25 : The Economic Offence Wing (EOW) of Delhi Police on Sunday said it has arrested former managing director of Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services Ltd (IL&FS) Ramchand Karunakaran in connection with the alleged cheating and siphoning of money.

The accused -- Karunakaran, who was on bail in connection with an earlier case of alleged misappropriation of money in 2019, was arrested from Mumbai for an alleged siphoning of around Rs 100 crore.

"We had received a complaint from the director of Enso Infrastructures, Ashish Begwani, in 2018. He alleged that he was approached by Karunakaran, Ravi Parthasarthy and Hari Shankaran -- all former directors of IL&FS -- with an investment proposal in 2010. Begwani's company poured in Rs 170 crore for a 15 per cent share in IL&FS Rail Ltd. This was for the Gurgaon rapid metro project," R.K Singh, Additional Commissioner of Police (Economic Offences Wing), said.

According to the police, the complainant further added that his funds were being misused since no work was started by the company. They had also bagged "bogus contract orders" worth Rs 21 crore from another company called Silverpoint Infratech Ltd. These contract orders were forged by the accused.

The police added that Begwani has also alleged that the directors showed inflated expenses and lower profits in their books to siphon off money.

Police said several cases have been registered against Karunakaran and other directors of the IL&FS Rail Ltd for misappropriating funds, cheating other companies and forgery.

Police said during the investigation it found that the accused had made payments to several companies without actually doing any work to get contract orders.

"The accused didn't have the names, addresses or account details of any of these contractors. The money was being transferred through shell companies," the police added.

"We are checking his involvement in other cases as well. He was arrested in 2019 and 2020 by different agencies but got out on bail. The matter is in the court. We have now arrested him in a cheating case that was lodged by Begwani," Singh added.
New Delhi, July 25 : Describing the draft e-commerce rules as a perfect set of guidelines for conducting structured and transparent e-commerce business in India, the Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) has said that the rules if implemented would end the crony capitalism that allegedly exists in the current e-commerce scenario in the country.

The traders' body has also suggested to come up with a monitoring mechanism to ensure compliance of these regulations by the online majors. In a letter to the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, it has also suggested the penal actions should be taken in case the rules are violated.

CAIT Secretary General Praveen Khandelwal said that the foreign funded e-tailers and some of the prominent industry chambers are giving lame arguments to oppose draft rules.

He noted that it is a "sinister trap" of vested interests of companies duly supported by industry chambers to dislodge the draft rules. However, more than eight crore small businesses of the country are committed to oppose any wrong narrative if anyone tries to build around the draft rules, Khandelwal said.

He added that inclusive growth of e-commerce business in India largely depends on four core fundamentals -- transparent operations of e-commerce platforms, easy accessibility and adequate grievance redressal by e-commerce entities, non-discriminatory access of marketplace platforms to all stakeholders of the value-chain, avoidance of conflict of interest between marketplace platforms, sellers and various service providers on the platform.

The organisation further said that any marketplace having an equity or economic interest in any entity should not be allowed to sell goods on the said marketplace and it should be treated as "affiliated entity".

In its submission, the CAIT argued that mandatory registration of e-commerce entities conducting business through any e-mode should lay the substantial foundation of a well-defined eco-system and the extent of e-commerce landscape can easily be gauged with the registration process and shall protect consumers from rogue or fraudulent e-commerce companies.

Transparency should be the hallmark of any business activity and every e-commerce marketplace must therefore act in a transparent manner with respect to all stakeholders, namely - the customer, sellers, logistics partners and payment gateways, it said.

Therefore, all sorts of agreement between the platform and sellers registered on the said platform should be disclosed in a transparent manner disclosing all information about the sellers and products to the consumer at the pre-purchase stage, according to the traders' body.

Further, the search algorithm used by the e-commerce marketplace must be transparently disclosed and displayed to the users so that they can make informed choices.

Among other suggestions, CAIT has said that it must be ensured that consumers can reach out to senior grievance redressal officers of the marketplace entities to resolve their concerns and therefore the provision of appointment of Grievance Officer, Nodal Officer nd Compliance Officer is laudable.
New Delhi, July 25 : Confidence of urban Indians over the employment scenario in the country and the economic prospects remains subdued although the overall consumer confidence has recorded in uptick in July.

As per the Refinitiv-Ipsos Primary Consumer Sentiment Index (PCSI), the Employment Confidence Sub-Index is down by 0.1 percentage points, and the Economic Expectations Sub Index, has reduced by 1.8 percentage points.

The Primary Consumer Sentiment Index (PCSI), which constitutes of four sub-indices slightly improved by 1.1 percentage points in July 2021, over the previous month.

The overall growth can be attributed to improved sentiments in terms of investment climate and personal finance conditions.

The PCSI Investment Climate Sub-Index is up by a significant 3.7 percentage points, while the Current Personal Financial Conditions Sub-Index has also recovered by a healthy 3.5 percentage points.

"Easing of restrictions and reopening since June has positively impacted livelihoods and we are seeing a robust uptick in sentiment for personal finances (for day to day running of households) and for investments (savings and investing for the future)," said Amit Adarkar, CEO, Ipsos India.

"However, the recovery around jobs and particularly the economy is slow and unless the mass immunisation becomes a reality, we are likely to see the government working with utmost caution, to mitigate another wave of infections. And hence the economy may take longer to get back on grid. Which I believe we'll need to accept because the corona virus threat is still far from over, with many other countries facing the onset of a new wave," Adarkar added.
Mumbai, July 25 : Actors Kriti Kharbanda and Vikrant Massey played the lead on-screen couple of the latest released film '14 Phere'.

As the basic premise of the story revolves around how what starts as ragging eventually turned into a love story, in conversation with IANS, the lead actors - Kriti and Vikrant - share how a class fight and instant dance performance turned into a beautiful friendship in their real life back in the college days.

Recalling her days, Kriti told IANS : "Even though I never faced ragging in college and actually I went to college only for six months as I started acting, modelling since then...I had an experience of how a fight turned into dating! On the first day of my college, in our class, one of the guys did some irritating things and me being me, got into a argument followed by a fight and my friends were like, 'Jaane de yaar'...and we walked away from the situation.

"On the same day, in the evening, all my friends gathered at a cafe in Indira Nagar (Bangalore) and he was also there with his gang of boys! We also realised that we have so many friends in common! I started fighting again and I said how irritating he is etc and he got into argument again...of course friends were also there to control both of us. The funny part is, eventually we ended up dating for few months! Can you believe that? (Kriti laughed) So yes, I love my college days!" Vikrant on the other hand, a typical Bombay boy, went to the RD National College, Bandra.

Asked about his college story, and Vikrant said, "You know when you start trimming your beard and wearing full pants, as a boy you start feeling like the king of the world. I was no exception so I also did ragging of my juniors but in college my seniors also ragged me. I was asked by my senior to dance, but it was so easy for me because I am a trained dancer and I danced in Shamaik Davar dance group. So I danced on 'Mohabbat Karle' , that famous song and eventually all of them became my friends!" Directed by Devanshu Singh, the film also features - Gauahar Khan, Jameel Khan, Yamini Das, Vineet Kumar, Priyanshu Singh, among others.

'14 Phere' is streaming on ZEE5.

(Arundhuti Banerjee can be contacted at arundhuti.b@ians.in)
Kabul, July 25 : A total of 81 militants were confirmed dead as the Afghan forces, backed by helicopters and fighter planes, launched airstrikes in the northern Balkh province, an army statement released here on Sunday said.

The sorties were launched on Saturday in parts of the restive Kaldar and Chamtal districts, leaving 81 insurgents dead and injuring 43 others, reports Xinhua news agency.

A large number of arms and ammunition, as well as over two dozen vehicles and motorbikes of the militants, were also destroyed during the air raids, the statement added.

The Taliban militants have claimed capturing nearly 200 districts since early May across Afghanistan.
Srinagar, July 25 : Militants snatched the service rifle of a policeman on Sunday in Jammu and Kashmir's Kulgam district, police sources said.

Sources said an AK-47 rifle was snatched from a policeman in the Shamsipora Khudwani crossing area by militants.

Police said a search operation is now going on to trace the assailants.
New Delhi, July 25 : President Ram Nath Kovind completed four years in office on Sunday.

An e-book -- 'President Kovid at Four' -- has been released on the occasion highlighting his work in office.

The Rashtrapati Bhavan said in a tweet, "President Ram Nath Kovind completes four years in office today. Here are some highlights of the fourth year of presidency in a flip through e-book." Kovind was sworn in as the 14th President of India on July 25, 2017.

The e-book said, "As the custodian of the Constitution, the President administered oath of office and secrecy to the members of the council of ministers and the chief justice of India, and gave assent to 43 Bills of the Union government and 20 Bills of the state governments." The President also appointed 94 judges to the Supreme Court and the high courts, Governors of 12 states, Controller and Auditor General of India, Chief Information Commissioner, three Chief Election Commissioners, UPSC Chairman and Vigilance Commissioner.

Lauding the efforts of Corona warriors, the e-book says, "For the at home reception on Independence Day at the Rashtrapati Bhavan last year, President Kovind invited some frontline Corona warriors working in Delhi as special guests and lauded their courage and dedication in saving countless lives across the country." The e-book also says that President Kovind celebrated Raksha Bandhan with nurses from the Trained Nurses' Association of India, Military Nursing Service and the President's Estate Clinic.

According to the book, as the commander of the armed forces, the President visited the National War Memorial and paid tributes to the martyrs who made the supreme sacrifice to defend the nation, inaugurated the General Thimayya Museum at Madikeri in Kaodagu, Karnataka, and witnessed Joint Services Operational demonstrations by the Andaman and Nicobar Command at Swaraj Dweep.

The President visited 13 states and two Union Territories in the fourth year of his Presidency, including visits to Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat twice.
New Delhi, July 25 : With the countdown for the change of guard nearing, the BJP top brass is contemplating to recommend the incumbent National General Secretary (Organisation) of the party, B.L. Santhosh as the successor of Karnataka Chief Minister B.S. Yediyurappa.

The speculation about change of guard gained unprecedented momentum in the state after the 78-year-old Lingayat strongman and the BJP's aging mascot in Karnataka said on July 23 that he would abide by the party high-command's decision whether to remain as Chief Minister or to quit.

"Our party leaders will inform me on Sunday (July 25) evening and I will follow their diktat on Monday, (July 26), as I will be completing two years in the office," he had stated on July 23.

According to top level BJP functionaries in New Delhi, apart from Santhosh, the top brass is also mulling over four Deputy Chief Ministers retaining Laxman Suvadi, who belongs to the Lingayat community, which is one of the biggest in Karnataka comprising nearly 15 per cent of the state's population.

One of the functionary said that Yediyurappa will be resigning on Monday after citing his ill-health as reason during the BJP's legislator's meeting.

The functionary added that Santhosh belonging to Brahmin community, which is about 2 per cent of the state's population, and in order to balance caste equations, the BJP top brass has come out with four DCM formula -- Lingayat, Vokkaliga, OBC and SC/ST -- to placate all prominent communities in the state.

The functionary further elaborated that among the three incumbent DCMs, in all probability Laxman Suvadi is likely to continue, while C N. Ashwath Narayan, belonging to the Vokkaliga community, may be replaced with former Karnataka Chief Minister D.V. Sadananda Gowda, who is one of the 12 Union Ministers dropped by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The functionary added that first time MLA, Rupali Naik from Karwar who belongs to OBC Maratha community, is likely to clinch as Deputy Chief Minister's post under the OBC category.

The Deputy Chief Minister's post is yet to be decided on whether to appoint an SC or an ST leader to shore up a sizeable chunk of the SC/ST votes in the state.

The functionary added that the new Chief Minister will be sworn in along with others in a day or two after July 26.
Chennai, July 25 : A war of words has erupted on Twitter between the Chairperson of The Hindu Publishing Group (THG), Malini Parthasarathy, and N. Ram, Director, THG, following a tweet by the former.

On July 22, Parthasarathy, a former Editor of The Hindu daily, had tweeted after meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi: "Had the privilege of calling on Prime Minister @narendramodi today & had an illuminating conversation in which he shared his perspective on issues of current public interest." A day before, Parthasarathy had tweeted about her meeting with Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman: "Had a lively & enjoyable discussion with the cerebral & feisty Union Finance Minister @nsitharaman on current issues." Apparently with reference to Parathasarthy's tweets, a Twitter user by the name of ProG @Mrs_DoSoLittle asked Ram: "@nramindwhy sir, why? Hindu's hard-earned legacy is being squandered away." To which Ram had replied: "I have nothing to do with this. What I can assure you is that we will do our very best to prevent The Hindu's 'hard-earned' reputation and legacy of 142+ years 'being squandered away'." Responding to that, Parthasarathy tweeted: "Our 142+ years of hard-earned reputation was built by reporting that was factual & not driven by political prejudice or bias. We @the_hindu are determined to restore the honesty & credibility of our reporting & commentary. This is the only way forward to revive our great legacy." It appears that she implied in her tweet that The Hindu daily has lost its credibility and she is trying to restore the same.
Hyderabad, July 25 : Thousands of devotees flocked the Ujjaini Mahankali temple in Secunderabad here on Sunday as the annual Lashkar Bonalu was celebrated with traditional gaiety.

Devotees, especially women, queued up at the historic temple and other Mahankali temples in Secunderabad since early morning to offer 'Bonam', containing cooked rice, jaggery, curd and neem leaves to goddess Sri Mahankali.

A festive atmosphere prevailed in the area as people from various parts of the state descended to participate in the traditional festival being celebrated with Covid-19 protocol.

Animal Husbandry Minister T. Srinivas Yadav along with family members presented first 'Bonam' and silk clothes to the goddess on behalf of the state government. Endowments Minister A. Indrakaran Reddy also offered prayers.

The ministers said they offered for an early end to Covid-19 pandemic and for the welfare and prosperity of people.

Yadav said that the government has made all arrangements for the smooth conduct of the Bonalu festivities. He appealed to people to follow all Covid-19 precautions while participating in the celebrations.

Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao's wife Shobha, along with family members, visited the temple and offered 'Bonam' and silk robes. She was accompanied by Rajya Sabha MP J. Santosh Kumar.

Haryana Governor Bandaru Dattatreya, Labour Minister Malla Reddy, Telangana Congress chief Revanth Reddy and filmmaker Dil Raju were among the prominent personalities who offered prayers.

Union Culture and Tourism Minister G. Kishan Reddy, who is a Lok Sabha member from Secunderabad, greeted people on the occasion of Bonalu.

Police made elaborate arrangements for smooth passage of devotees during the darshan. Vehicular traffic was diverted at several points in Secunderabad to facilitate smooth movement of devotees. Additional police personnel were deployed as part of the elaborate security arrangements.

Senior police officials were monitoring the festivities through CCTV cameras. Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) and other civic departments made necessary arrangements for the devotees.

Darshan and offering of Bonam will continue till early hours of Monday. The festival will conclude on Monday with famous 'Rangam' where predictions about the state's future will be made by an unmarried woman, followed by the Ghatam procession.

This will be followed by a procession of a caparisoned elephant carrying a portrait of the deity. Smeared with turmeric and vermilion, potharajus dance to rhythmic drumbeats in the procession that will pass through various areas.

Bonalu in Secunderabad, or Lashkar Bonalu as it is called, is the second phase of the nearly month-long traditional festival.

The traditional folk festival began on July 11 at the Jagadambika Temple on Golconda Fort here.

Public events during Bonalu were cancelled by the state government last year in view of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, with the lifting of Covid-19 related restrictions last month, the government allowed people's participation this time.

This year, the festivities are being organised with mass gatherings and traditional procession. The organisers have been directed to ensure adherence to Covid-19 protocol, including wearing of masks and social distancing.

Ashada Bonalu is a festival held in the month of Ashada, according to the Hindu calendar, celebrating goddess Mahankali.

Devotees, especially women make offerings in the form of food to goddess Mahankali in specially decorated pots. During the nearly month-long festival, people also hold 'rangam' or forecasting the future, organise processions and cultural events.

After the formation of Telangana in 2014, the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) had declared Bonalu as the state festival. The festivities reflect Telangana culture with performances by the artistes.

This year, the government has allocated Rs 15 crore for the celebrations. The money was spent to spruce up the temples for the celebrations and for making all necessary arrangements for the devotees.

Every year, Bonalu is celebrated in a grand manner at different places in Hyderabad on three Sundays. The festivities at at Sri Simhavahini Mahankali temple in Lal Darwaza and at Sri Akkanna Madanna Mahankali temple in Haribowli in the old city of Hyderabad will be held on August 1.

It is commonly believed that the festival was first celebrated over 150 years ago following a major cholera outbreak. People believed that the epidemic was due to the anger of Mahankali and began offering Bonalu to placate her.

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Jaipur, July 25 : Amid speculation of change in the Congress' organisational structure in Rajasthan and a possible cabinet expansion, the partys state in-charge Ajay Maken on Sunday directed all the MLAs to stay put in Jaipur on July 28 and 29.

Maken and senior Congress leader K.C. Venugopal, who came here on Saturday night, had a detailed meeting with Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot that lasted almost till midnight.

On Sunday, state Congress chief Govind Singh Dotasra organised a welcome event for the two party leaders in which all the MLAs and party office-bearers were present.

Before the start of the meeting, the supporters of former state Congress chief Sachin Pilot raised slogans demanding his anointment as the next CM of Rajasthan in the presence of Maken and Venugopal.

Meanwhile, after a thorough brainstorming session with the MLAs and party workers, Maken announced that he will have one-on-one discussion with all the MLAs on July 28 and 29 to collect feedback on the party's functioning in the state.

Addressing the MLAs, Maken said, "I will be coming to Rajasthan for two days on July 28 and 29. I will talk to each Congress MLA. We feel that the AICC should also know the opinion of the MLAs as to who all are being made the district presidents, block presidents etc." Asked when the cabinet expansion will take place in the state, Maken said, "We cannot bound ourselves to take this big decision on a particular date. The Congress leaders have expressed their faith in the central leadership; everything has been decided mutually," he said.

"All the Congress workers have said in one voice that they shall abide by what the Congress high command says. We are discussing the cabinet expansion and appointments at different levels," he added.

Sources said that Maken's meeting with the MLAs is meant to collect first-hand feedback to know more about the working of the state government.

The sources also said that there is pressure from the Congress high command to resolve all the grudges of the party workers in the state.

Maken and Venugopal left Jaipur soon after the meeting, taking along a proposed list of candidates who can be elevated to different posts, both in the organisation and the state government.
Panaji, July 25 : BJP national President J.P. Nadda on Sunday termed the accusations of snoopgate against the Central government as baseless, and said that they are being raised by an issueless opposition.

Nadda also described the Congress under Rahul Gandhi (without directly naming the Congress leader) as a "rudderless boat" under a sailor who does not know which way the wind is blowing.

"It is baseless. It is issueless and as I have said, the opposition led by the Congress has got no issue to raise that is related to the people. Therefore, they raise such issues," Nadda said during a press conference here, when asked to react to the accusations of illegal surveillance on politicians, activists, journalists using the Pegasus spyware.

"From Delhi to Goa, the Congress is a rudderless boat and the sailor does not know which side to sail. This is the situation with the Congress. He does not even know which way the wind is blowing," Nadda said.

When asked about the repeated disruptions of Parliament impacting the business of the country's apex legislative body, Nadda said: "As far as the Parliament is concerned, we are ready for all kinds of discussions. But the Congress and the opposition are so issueless that they do not know what to do.

"But people know that despite such antics, the productivity of the Parliament has broken all records under Prime Minister Narendra Modi's dynamic leadership. Both in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha, the business undertaken has broken all records. We will keep working. They (opposition) will walk their own path. They have no issues for discussion," Nadda said.
New Delhi, July 25 : In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, educational institutions across the country have remained closed. However, Delhi University (DU) worked round the clock and burnt midnight oil to prepare results of the examinations for undergraduate courses held in June this year.

The varsity has set a new record under which the results of all undergraduate courses have been prepared within just one month of the conduct of the examination. This is the first time since its inception that the university has taken less than 30 days to prepare the results of undergraduate courses.

Not only this, results of some courses were prepared within 2 days of the examinations. There are more than 73,000 students in the regular undergraduate courses alone. Apart from these, thousands of other students have also appeared for the exams held in June 2021.

The university said that till now the results of 64 different undergraduate (UG) courses have been prepared.

The results of the remaining 10 courses are also being compiled. For declaring the results, the university employees are working late at night, even on the holidays, on Saturdays and Sundays.

DU Dean of Examination, D.S. Rawat told IANS, "The last exam was held on June 28, and since then the results of 88 per cent of the UG courses have been prepared. Only 56 copies of the Bachelor of Arts (B.A) courses in Delhi University are left to be checked." According to him, the results of 11,879 students pursuing B.A programme will be declared by Monday and results of nine other courses as well as all other courses are likely to be declared by Tuesday.

"For the first time in the history of DU, the results of all UG courses will be declared within a month. The results for BA programme, including remaining courses, will be declared in 2-3 days," DU Dean of Examination said.

Rawat said, "This time a provision was made wherein the data generated by the colleges had to be verified by the teachers concerned through online mode. Hence the data received was more than 95 per cent correct. While during the March Open Book Examinations (OBE), I announced a citation for those who completed the assessment in stipulated time. Certificates were issued for March OBE before the start of June assessment. It was not that easy but we did it. It worked really well." This time the DU constituted a 14-member committee which monitored the progress of the evaluation. Their job was to follow up the assessment at every stage of the evaluation, sending messages, making phone calls, etc.

The DU Examination department says that the result of these efforts is in front of us. Generally it takes 3-4 months to declare all results of UG courses. "Last year, we had asked the court for a time period of four months but this time a new record has been set by the university." The Delhi University Examination Department is also releasing the confidential exam results this year. These exam results are for the students who wish to take admission in foreign universities. Confidential results are being sent directly to the foreign universities. The first confidential result was released on June 30, 2021, within just two days of the examination.

These confidential results are not made available to the students but the final exam results are directly sent to the university or department concerned. According to Rawat, the confidential results of all students who needed them till now have been sent to the respective universities.
New Delhi, July 25 : The Indian Coast Guard has saved 215 lives in rescue and relief operations in water-logged areas of Maharashtra, Goa, and Karnataka, an official statement said on Sunday.

The Indian Coast Guard, at the request of civil authorities, dispatched Disaster Relief Teams (DRTs) with inflatable Gemini boats and life-saving gear to the affected areas, the National Disaster Response Force said in a statement.

The DRTs reached areas rendered unapproachable due to water inundation, especially in Chiplun and Mahad areas of Maharashtra and Umlijoog, Khargejoog, Bodjug Island and Kinnar village in Uttar Kannada district of Karnataka, "and with dedicated efforts evacuated the stranded persons to safety and provided required relief material", it said.

In Goa, Coast Guard aircraft have undertaken aerial assessment of Ganjem Dam, Usgaon and Codli areas, and its helicopter had air-dropped approx 100 kg of relief materials, including food packets and drinking water, for the stranded people.

"The ICG efforts have translated into saving 215 precious lives under the current rescue operation till to date across these three states," the statement said.

The services of Coast Guard air station at Ratnagiri are also being extended to Indian Navy and Indian Air Force aircraft for airlifting of NDRF teams, relief material and facilitating rescue operations across the affected regions.

"In addition to the already deployed teams, the Coast Guard DRTs as well as ships and aircraft are standby at high readiness for immediate mobilisation for exigencies, if any and a close coordination with local administration is being maintained," the statement said.
Lucknow/Ayodhya, July 25 : Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath on Sunday reviewed the medical and health infrastructure in Ayodhya in view of the expected third wave of the Covid pandemic.

The chief minister visited the Raja Dashrath Medical College in Ayodhya and inspected the facilities available for treatment of Covid patients. He also went for the on-ground inspection of the recently installed Oxygen Plant and reviewed the other healthcare available for Covid patients.

The chief minister also asked the district administration to formulate a detailed action plan to check any further spread of the virus.

While addressing the media during his visit, the chief minister said, "Medical colleges are important institutions for better, superior and special health care facilities. But in the last 70 years, the state had only 12 medical colleges. The present government has either built or sanctioned 32 medical colleges. There are no medical colleges in 16 districts. We are planning to set up medical colleges in these districts on PPP model before December." He further said, "UP has made progress from getting the first Covid test conducted from the lab at National Institute of Virology, Pune in 2020 to becoming the leader by conducting maximum Covid tests. Testing is the backbone of checking transmission of the virus." Yogi Adityanath said that the centre and state governments were 'committed to restoring Ayodhya to its ancient glory and importance'.

"Ayodhya offers an amalgamation of spirituality and tourism and the state government is working with dedication for its development. Ayodhya will shine globally as lakhs of devotees and pilgrims will visit the city in the time to come," he added.

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Ranchi, July 25 : Maoist guerrillas set afire six vehicles of a private road construction company in Jharkhand's Garwah district on Sunday, police said.

According to police, 10 to 12 armed Maoists raided the company's camp office in Ghghari village of Garwah early on Sunday, beat up the sleeping staff, poured diesel on vehicles involved in road construction work and set them on fire.

The six vehicles included two road-rollers and two JCBs.

Refusal to pay the 'levy' to the rebels is said to be the reason for the attack.

A month ago, an engineer of the same company was abducted by Maoists.

Maoist guerrillas are active in 18 of the state's 24 districts.
Gurugram, July 25 : Four Afghan nationals, who were allegedly over-staying in India after their visa expired, were arrested from Gurugram by Haryana Chief Minister's flying squad, officials said on Sunday.

The four had come to India on tourist and medical visas, but the visas of three had expired in 2016, and of the remaining one in 2019, the flying squad officials said.

Those arrested were identified as Abdul Gaffar Nori, Muhammad Shabir, Amal Ira, and Muhammad Yasin Shahadat, all hailing from Kabul.

"We received information from our reliable sources that few Afgan nationals are residing in Jharsa village of Gurugram illegally. Following the information, we conducted a raid on Saturday and nabbed the accused who were residing here without legal documents. Even the owner of the house Punit Thakaran also did not obtain necessary documents from them," Harish Budhiraza, an official of the flying squad, said.

A case under relevant sections of the IPC has been registered against the four at Sadar police station in Gurugram.
New Delhi, July 25 : In less than ten months since the launch of the campaign, tap water has been made available in 66 per cent schools and 60 per cent anganwadi centres across the country, the ministry of Jal Shakti has informed.

Nine states and one Union Territory have 100 per cent provision of clean tap water supply in all schools, ashramshalas and anganwadi centres, despite Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdown.

To ensure clean tap water supply to children in schools, anganwadi centres and ashramshalas (residential schools) for their wellbeing and better health, the Prime Minister Narendra Modi on October 2, 2020 launched a campaign to make provision of tap water supply in these institutions.

The Ministry of Jal Shakti said, "In less than ten months since the launch of this campaign, tap water has been made available in 6.85 lakh (66 per cent) schools, 6.80 lakh (60 per cent) anganwadi centres and 2.36 lakh (69 per cent) Gram Panchayats and Community Healthcare Centres (CHCs) for drinking and cooking mid-day meal, 6.18 lakh schools have tap water in toilets/urinals and 7.52 lakh schools have tap water for hand washing facility." In Andhra Pradesh, Goa, Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Kerala, Punjab, Sikkim, Tamil Nadu, and UT of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, provision of clean tap water supply in all schools, ashramshalas and anganwadi centres have been made, despite Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown resulting into repeated disruptions, the ministry said.

To ensure safe tap water to children, on September 29, 2020, Prime Minister Modi appealed to all States and UTs, to reach every school and anganwadi centre with tap water connection on priority basis.

On October 2, 2020, a 100-day campaign was launched by Union Jal Shakti Minister, Gajendra Singh Shekhawat to bring awareness and a sense of urgency to provide clean drinking water to children across the country.

To ensure water availability and treatment of used water, in 91.9 thousand schools, rain water harvesting and in 1.05 lakh schools, grey water management systems have been put in place. This will not only boost the water availability but also create awareness among children and inspire them to learn water management in their growing stage.
New Delhi, July 25 : Afghanistan is now squarely blaming Pakistan for supporting the Taliban insurgency with the topmost officials attacking Pakistan's links with terror in quick succession.

Afghanistan National Security Advisor Hamdullah Mohib fired another salvo at Pakistan, as he said that as many as 15,000 militants could enter Afghanistan from Pakistan to fight the Afghan forces.

Mohib said Pakistan has been a safe haven for the Taliban and that the group has been using Pakistani madrasas to recruit fighters.

"Every year, the Taliban were defeated in Afghanistan but they had an opportunity to recuperate, to re-recruit people from Madrasas in Pakistan and bring them back the next year.

"This year, we estimate that 10,000 fighters have come in from Pakistani madrasas to fight in Afghanistan this fighting season and intelligence shows that they could be as many as 15,000 more new recruits coming towards Afghanistan," Mohib said.

"The Taliban have had safe havens in Pakistan... throughout this period they enjoyed their leaders living there at peace and in Pakistan, their injured were treated in Pakistani hospitals, they had military and emotional support and financial support from elements within the Pakistani military establishment and it continues to be the case," he added.

Afghanistan President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani too slammed Pakistan. On a visit to the Special Operations Command Center in Kabul, Ghani said that the Taliban has "deep ties" with Al Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed and the group wants Afghanistan "to become a haven for insurgents".

A video has been doing rounds on social media shows Pakistani militias crossed the zero point of the Durand Line at Spin Boldak. Local reports say the Pakistani military has fired hundreds of rockets across the Durand crossing, killing and wounding dozens of people.

First Vice President Amrullah Saleh recently posted the photo of the signing of the Instrument of Surrender in Dhaka in 1971 on Twitter and said Afghanistan does not and will not ever have such a picture.

"Dear Pak Twitter attackers, Taliban and terrorism won't heal the trauma of this picture. Find other ways," VP Saleh wrote. "Yes, yesterday I flinched for a fraction of a second as a rocket flew above and landed few meters away," he wrote.

In the 1971 war, following which Bangladesh was created, Pakistan had to publicly surrender to the joint forces of the Indian Army and Bangladesh's Mukti Bahini, which was the largest military surrender after World War 2. Pakistan's General Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi, along with 93,000 troops, surrendered and signed the Instrument of Surrender on December 16 in Dhaka after a 13-day war.

Saleh has been tweeting about Pakistan Army supporting Taiban in the Spin Boldak area.

(Sanjeev Sharma can be reached at sanjeev.s@ians.in)
Hyderabad, July 25 : Telangana chief minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao on Sunday expressed his happiness over historic Ramappa Temple receiving UNESCO World Heritage site status.

The temple is located at Palampeta in Mulugu district of Telangana.

The chief minister said that Telangana's spiritual and cultural heritage reflecting the creative and architectural expertise of Kakatiya rulers has a special place in the country.

Chandrasekhar Rao said under the self-rule, the state government is trying to restore Telangana's historical, spiritual and cultural glory.

The chief minister thanked UNESCO's member countries and the central government for helping Ramappa temple get the World Heritage site status. He congratulated the state's public representatives and government officials who made the efforts in this regard.

Earlier, minister for tourism, culture and archaeology V. Srinivas Goud shared the good news on Twitter. "Happy to announce that the 800-year-old architectural marvel of Kakatiya era Ramappa Temple is inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site," he tweeted.

Minister for municipal administration and urban development K.T. Rama Rao also took to Twitter to compliment everyone involved in the effort. "This is the first world heritage site from Telangana. Next aim is to get world heritage city status for our capital city Hyderabad," he wrote.
Mumbai, July 25 : The death toll in flood-ravaged Maharashtra shot up from 112 to 149 on Sunday while another 64 are still missing, the State Disaster Management Authority said.

In what is billed as the biggest flood rescue operations in the state in decades, over 2.29 lakh people have been evacuated to safer areas after their homes were submerged in flood waters, in some places up to 20 feet high.

As many as 50 people were injured and are undergoing treatment at various hospitals in Raigad, Ratnagiri, Sindhudurg, Sangli, Satara, and Kolhapur.

With rains taking a respite on Sunday, the flood-ravaged districts presented a grim scenario with scores of people grappling to rebuild their lives.

Continuing his tour of the ravaged areas in coastal Konkan for the second day, Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray visited badly-affected towns like Chiplun and Khed in Ratnagiri.

Union MSME Minister Narayan Rane, accompanied by Bharatiya Janata Party's Leaders of Opposition Devendra Fadnavis (Assembly) and Pravin Darekar (Council) also toured some of the regions like Taliye village in Raigad and Chiplun in Ratnagiri.

He assured to submit his tour report to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and said both the Centre and state government will unitedly work to rehabilitate the flood-victims.

Later, he launched a scathing attack on the Maha Vikas Aghadi government, accusing it for various lapses and delays by the administration in rushing help to the affected populace.

According to the SDMA, the towns of Chiplun and Khed in Ratnagiri district were completely inundated and cut off as the bridge on River Vashishti was washed away on Friday.

As unprecedented rains jacked up the water levels to more than 15-20 feet, thousands of people, stranded on rooftops or upper floors of their houses, were seen screaming for help.

Teams of the Indian Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, NDRF, and SDRF are still deployed in various areas, rescuing people, and providing food or medicine and other aid materials to the victims, said the SDMA.

People in several towns and villages voiced their rage at the administration for not rushing them food, water, clothes, medicines, cleaning materials and other items of daily use to help them re-start their lives from scratch.

When Thackeray, ministers and officials went to the affected, they were virtually mobbed by desperate people demanding help, recounted tragic tales of how they survived only in the clothes they wore and had lost absolutely everything in the flood fury.

Over a dozen hillslides and landslips have been reported in different districts which buried scores and many more reported missing, while scores of roads in the regions are still closed for vehicular movement.

The state government has sanctioned Rs 2 crore each for Raigad and Ratnagiri for relief operations and Rs 50 lakh for the other affected regions where water levels have started receding and cleaning operations have been taken up.

-- Except for the title, this story has not been edited by Prokerala team and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed
New Delhi, July 25 : India has pushed for stronger action by rich countries for bringing down per capita emissions at the G20 climate ministerial that concluded in Italy on Saturday, but experts back home are sceptical and have demanded matching action on ground.

The G20 Energy and Climate Joint Ministerial Meeting 2021 was held under the Italian Presidency on July 22 and 23 at Naples, and saw Energy and Environment Ministers from the G20 nations deliberate upon the pressing issue.

The Indian delegation was represented by Ministry of Power and Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, with the ministers participating virtually.

At the end, India issued a statement: "We have noted the pledges made by some countries to achieve 'Net Zero GHG emission' or carbon neutrality by or around mid-century. However, this may not be adequate in view of the fast-depleting available carbon space. Therefore, and keeping in view, the legitimate need of developing countries to growth, we urge G20 countries to commit to bringing down per capita emission to global average by 2030." Ahead of the the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) conference to be held at UK's Glasgow in November this year, this is India's stand against the developed, rich countries that occupy about 70 per cent of carbon space.

"India has always said that developed countries are changing the goal posts, they should cut their emissions more, India and BASIC countries (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) have been saying so since Copenhagen (COP15, the UNFCCC climate conference at Copenhagen in 2009). There has been no dramatic change in India's stand," think tank International Forum for Environment, Sustainability and Technology (iForest) CEO Chandra Bhushan said.

Pointing out that India needs to recognise that the original grouping for BASIC doesn't hold any ground now, he said: "China alone now accounts for 1/3rd of the global emissions. It does not make sense for India to defend China. And because we are bracketed together, China is able to pass itself as a developing country. This is the biggest mistake we are doing, this grouping of India and China together in climate negotiations is doing more harm to India than good." Climate activist from Public Advocacy Initiatives for Rights and Values in India (Pairavi), Soumya Dutta said: "This is just a statement from India, there is no matching action on the ground - at policy level, at the government's economic level; everything is counter to that (India's statement)." Most of the new infrastructure which is carbon-intensive is coming up in developing countries and the funding for it comes from rich countries, he added.

Echoing the sentiment, senior researcher at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) Kanchi Kohli said: "India cannot step back on its own responsibility to cut down carbon emissions while demanding the G20 countries free up carbon space." "The post-Covid economic expansion in India relies heavily on fossil fuel expansion and leniency towards carbon emitting projects like coal-based power generation. Our commitment to address climate change should be our own commitment, rather than a reaction to, or in comparison of what other G20 countries are proposing," she added.

At the meet, Indian Environment, Forests and Climate Change Minister Bhupender Yadav had underlined the need to cut absolute emissions rapidly while taking into account the Paris Agreement, which emphasised on respective historical responsibilities, delivery of promised climate finance and technologies at low cost keeping in perspective per capita emissions, differences in per capita GDP, and the unfinished agenda for sustainable development.

Asserting that common but differentiated responsibilities to combat climate change, as per respective capabilities and national circumstances, lies at the heart of the UNFCCC & its Paris Agreement, Yadav said: "We should not be shifting goalposts and setting new benchmarks for global climate ambition." Power and New and Renewable Energy Minister R.K. Singh apprised the delegates from the G20 countries of the significant progress made by India in meeting its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) targets while staying committed to meeting its climate goals under the Paris Agreement.

Against the targeted emission reduction of 33-35 per cent by 2030, India has already achieved emission reduction of 28 per cent over 2005 levels and at this pace, it is all set to exceed its NDC commitments before 2030, the meeting was informed.

NDCs are at the heart of the Paris Agreement which requires each country to outline and communicate their post-2020 climate actions.

The G20 communique concluded: "Mindful of the interconnectedness of poverty, health, economic and environmental challenges, we commit to a just and equitable transition to sustainable economies, leaving no one behind, whilst taking into account the different levels of development and capacity of countries. We encourage the provision of financial, technological and capacity building support to developing countries especially to the least developed countries, making the best use of existing governance frameworks and working to identify new and innovative solutions. Recalling the principles of the Rio Declaration and recognising that we face different challenges, we will strengthen our international cooperation towards sustainable development." But Bhushan reminded that climate of today is not the climate of 1991 when UNFCCC was signed and that the developed countries have postponed their actions for a long time. "(But) what has happened to India over the last 10 years is devastating our economy, it is killing people. So, it is in India's interest to move to modern technology. Why should India remain in polluting technology? India should not be afraid of 'Net Zero'.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), global carbon emissions should decline by about 45 per cent by 2030 to restrict the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius (compared to the pre-industrial temperatures from the 1880s). If the countries cut emission, net zero is likely to be achieved around 2050.

Dutta offered a hope in the context of very different circumstances. In view of the massive floods in Germany, and extreme weather events such as increasing number of hurricanes along the US coast, there is some public pressure building in both the US and Europe. "I hope some kind of pressure will be on those leaders from their own voters. That might change their actions to much greater extent than what Modi or India says," Dutta added.
New Delhi, July 25 : Prime Minister Narendra Modi has expressed grief over the loss of lives in an accident in Kinnaur, Himachal Pradesh.

At least nine tourists were killed when they were on the way from Sangla to Chitkul, when the boulders fell on their vehicle. Two of the injured have been referred to a nearby hospital.

The Prime Minister has announced an ex-gratia of Rs two lakh to the next of kin of those who lost their lives and Rs 50,000 to those injured.

In a series of tweets, the Prime Minister Office (PMO) said, "The incidents of rockslide in Himachal Pradesh's Kinnaur is extremely saddening. My heartfelt condolences to the families of those who lost their lives in this. All arrangements are being made for the treatment of those injured in the accident. I wish them a speedy recovery." In another tweet, PMO said that the Prime Minister announced an ex-gratia of Rs two lakh to be given to the next of kin of those who lost their lives and Rs 50,000 to those injured. "An ex-gratia of Rs 2 lakh each from PMNRF would be given to the next of kin of those who lost their lives in an accident in Kinnaur, Himachal Pradesh. Rs 50,000 would be given to the injured: PM @narendramodi," the PMO tweeted.
Patna, July 25 : A man, accused of stealing a goat, and his two relatives were brutally assaulted by villagers in Bihar's Supaul district on Sunday morning before their heads were shaved and they paraded through the entire village, police said.

According to the villagers, Pradeep Yadav allegedly entered the house of Ranjeet Kumar, a resident of Badkhudwa village in the early hours and tried to steal his goat. Villager A.K. Yadav, a villager said that Kumar managed to nab him, and said that he was carrying a 'katta', a home-made firearm.

Soon after the incident, a large number of villagers gathered at the place and started brutally assaulting Pradeep Yadav. When his family members heard of the incident, his father-in-law Madan Yadav and another relative Domi Yadav reached the spot and tried to rescue him.

The angry villagers nabbed the two too, shaved their heads and wrote 420 on them and paraded the trio in the village. When the incident came to the knowledge of Triveniganj police station, a team immediately reached the village and rescued Pradeep Yadav.

"We have registered an FIR against Pradeep Yadav on the charge of theft and illegal possession of firearms. The complaint was given by Ranjeet Kumar," R.M. Sharma, investigating officer, said.

"We have also obtained photographs and videos of three persons including Pradeep Yadav of having shaved heads but Madan Yadav and Domi Yadav were not found at the place," the officer said.

"The complainant Ranjeet Kumar said that he has no knowledge about the persons who were responsible for assaulting Pradeep Yadav and the other two. Pradeep Yadav, on the other hand, accused Ranjeet Kumar and some of the villagers of assaulting him. Now, we have initiated the process of identification of persons who shaved their heads and paraded them in the village. The investigation is on," Sharma said.
Islamabad, July 25 : Pakistan's mainstream major political party, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), leader and ousted Prime Minister Mian Muhammad Nawaz Sharif's recent meeting with Afghan National Security Advisor Hamdullah Mohib in London has evoked a political storm back home.

The uproar started after the Afghan NSC tweeted a picture of the meeting with Nawaz Sharif in London.

"NSC Afghanistan @NSCAfghan NSA @hmohiband State Minister for Peace Sayed Sadat Naderi called on Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in London to discuss matters of mutual interest," the tweet read.

The Afghan NSA tweet sparked an angry response from various senior officials of the Prime Minister Imran Khan's dispensation as they criticised Nawaz Sharif for meeting the Afghan NSA, who has been hostile towards Pakistan and has been giving statements that have prompted Islamabad to cut off all contacts, over what it called "unacceptable and controversial remarks".

In May, Pakistan cut off all communication with the Afghan NSA after he compared Pakistan with a brothel.

As per details, the meeting in London was held after the Afghan NSA requested to meet Nawaz Sharif on the directions of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, with an aim to discuss the changing regional situation and the ongoing tense situation in Afghanistan.

Former Pakistan Finance Minister Ishaq Dar said that the controversial remarks by the NSA were made after the request of meeting with Nawaz Sharif by the Ashraf Ghani government was accepted.

"The choice was between cancelling and going ahead with it. We decided to do the latter and meet them in the national interest, because we wanted to do damage control on the government's failed foreign policy," he said.

"Obviously we spoke in Pakistan's interest. We do not want Pakistan to go into isolation as a result of foreign policy failures. We do not want to give a message to the international community that we are operating as a hegemony. Why should we not do damage control in Pakistan's interest?" he asked.

In Pakistan, serious criticism was witnessed on Sharif's meeting with Afghan NSA. Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry called the Afghan NSA "RAW's biggest ally in Afghanistan".

"Be it Modi, Mohib or Amrullah Saleh, every enemy of Pakistan is a close friend of Nawaz Sharif," he said.

The pouring criticism on social media was responded to by Nawaz Sharif's daughter, Maryam Nawaz Sharif who said that "it was the very essence of diplomacy to talk to everyone, listen to their point of view and convey one's own message across; something this government doesn't comprehend and hence is a complete failure on the international front".

"Pakistan's peaceful existence with its neighbours is the very foundation of Nawaz Sharif's ideology for which he has worked tirelessly," she tweeted.

Analysts say that the meeting of Nawaz Sharif with the Afghan NSA may have brought discomfort to the Pakistani leadership, but it certainly has established that the main opposition party, PML-N, is still run by Nawaz Sharif, who as per senior leadership of the party, has put Pakistan's strong reaction to the Afghan NSA and has acted as a national leader, even at a time when he is sitting in London and is wanted over corruption charges in Pakistan.

Pakistan and Afghanistan relations are in a sensitive phase, especially after Taliban have started taking control over major areas of Afghanistan and have started to impose their version of rule.
New Delhi, July 25 : Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank, the former Education Minister was presented the most prestigious special "Maharishi Inter National Invincible Gold Medal Award" in the annual Vedic conference of the Global Maharishi Organization, in which representatives of more than 119 countries of the organization participated.

This honour was announced in May after extensive deliberations by a high-powered committee headed by the organization's global head Tony Nader.

Receiving the gold medal, Nishank said, "Our corona warriors are the real heroes in the dreadful situation of the corona transition period, I have recently suffered the pain of corona".

Without caring about their lives, our doctors, nurses and other health workers are engaged in the service of patients round the clock.

I salute their vitality, dedication, their devotion to duty and with utmost humility dedicate this award to those warriors".

It may be noted that Global Maharishi Sansthan Maharishi Mahesh Yogi has five hundred schools in 150 countries, four Maharishi universities in the world and several Vedic educational institutions in various countries.

In his statement on behalf of the Global Maharishi organization, it was said that rising from a very poor background, Nishank has done an excellent job in establishing human values as a great litterateur, poet, politician.

Nishank has been honoured in more than fifteen countries, and more than thirty researches have been done or are being done on his work.

Tony Nader, the global president of the organization, deeply appreciated Nishank for his Ved and World Peace movement. He said tireless efforts and commitment of Nishank to promote world peace through the World Peace Program is commendable.

He added that his efforts will help in taking Vedic knowledge all over the world.

In his speech, Nader said that there is great enthusiasm in the country and abroad to integrate India's Vedic tradition and eternal knowledge science in the new education policy all over the world.

The communique said that more than hundred top institutions of the world including Harvard, Cambridge, Michigan have praised the education policy, which is a matter of pride.

In the online program, Allen, representative of Maharishi Vedic University, The Netherlands, presented the International Invincible Gold Medal at Nishank's residence in Delhi.

Calling upon the representatives of transcendental meditation centers and institutions established by Maharishi ji in more than 130 countries of the world, Nishank said in his address that the establishment of peace, prosperity, mutual love, equality, tolerance in the world is only through Vedic knowledge.

This can be done only through education based on traditional knowledge, cultural values, and universal values, this is what we have done in the new education policy, which will become a strong foundation for building a new India.
Jaipur, July 25 : Four people from Rajasthan, including three of a family hailing from Sikar, were among the nine killed in the landslide in Himachal Pradesh's Kinnaur district on Sunday.

The other deceased was Deepa Sharma, 34, from Jaipur who was posting some beautiful pictures on her social media accounts a few hours before her sudden death.

In her introduction on her Twitter page, Deepa has said: "I am not a IAS/IPS, IIM, Ivy league school pass out, any celebrity or any Politician, but I am confident, In few years people will know my name very well for my good work and my professional attributes for our Nation and for #WomenEmpowerment.." Her followers are stunned to believe that the woman interacting with them a few hours back is no more.

The other deceased were identified as Maya Devi Biyani, 55, from Sikar's Bajaj Road (near Maheshwari Dharamshala), her son Anurag Biyani (35) and daughter Richa Biyani (25). Anurag was working as a Company Secretary in Mumbai, where the entire family lived.

However, they have a house in Sikar where his uncle stays.

A month back, Anurag came to Rajasthan with Richa, mother, father Nandkishore and elder sister. Two days ago, he, along with his younger sister and mother, went to Himachal on a group tour. His father had stayed back in Sikar while the elder sister returned to Mumbai.
Guwahati, July 25 : Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Sunday said that without the development of the northeastern region, India's growth would not be complete.

He noted that for the first time since Independence, there are five Central ministers, including two of cabinet rank, from the region and Prime Minister Narendra Modi had visited the northeast 35 times in six years showing how much he values it.

"At the instructions of the Prime Minister, one Central minister visits the northeastern states once in every 15 days," the Home Minister said after launching various projects including laying the foundation stone of the 430-bed Tamulpur Medical College and Hospital in the Bodoland Territorial Region in western Assam.

Addressing the function at the famous Srimanta Sankardev Kalakshetra here, Shah said that rejecting false propaganda, people of Assam voted for the BJP-led government for the second time as they wanted development and rejected "aatankwad" (insurgency) and "andolan" (agitation) in the state.

"BJP governments in Tripura and Manipur resolved many long-pending issues and problems including resettlement of the Reang tribal migrants (from Mizoram) and other ethnic troubles. Now there is no road blockade and high price rise of essentials, including cooking gas, in Manipur." The Home Minister on Sunday evening inaugurated the Radio Therapy Block and dedicated to the people the new LINAC machine in the state cancer institute in Guwahati to provide better and free of cost treatment to cancer patients.

Shah said that the Prime Minister, as he loved the northeastern states, cleared all roadblocks and irritants so that the region's peace and development are speeded-up.

He said that after the signing of the Bodoland peace accord in January last year, the government has already fulfilled the 90 per cent of the conditions of the agreement.

Reiterating the Union Government's commitment for protecting and preserving Assam's language, its heritage, and glorious culture, the Home Minister said that the language, dialects, cuisine, and cultural traditions of Assam and the northeast are India's jewels and the government would safeguard these.

Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, in his speech, said that in six decades after Independence, there were only six medical colleges in Assam. "However, the BJP-led government after coming to power initiated steps for setting up of 23 new medical colleges, out of which few are completed while many are on various stages of implementation process," he said.

The Union Home Minister also handed over financial assistance to 100 selected beneficiaries of 'Prarthana' scheme under which the state government provides Rs 1 lakh to the next of kin of 5,114 Covid deceased.

Sarma said that the state government, in a bid to provide succour to Covid victims' families, especially those who lost their family members, initiated the Chief Minister's Sishu Sewa Achoni, the Chief Minister's Widow Support Scheme, and the 'Prarthana' scheme.
Islamabad, July 26 : Just before the all-important visit of Secretary of State Antony Blinken to India and other destinations of South Asia and the Middle East, the US has issued a statement, encouraging arch-rivals India and Pakistan to work for a more stable relationship.

Blinken is scheduled to visit India and other countries between July 26-29 in what is being said is an important tour in reference to the developing situation and increasing Afghan Taliban control in Afghanistan.

As per Acting Assistant Secretary for South and Central Asia Affairs Dean Thompson, Blinken would be discussing different options for what he called a "negotiated settlement" in Afghanistan.

Blinken is going to be landing in New Delhi on July 28 and is scheduled to meet External Affairs Minister Dr S. Jaishankar and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

As per details, India's role in Afghanistan and relations with Pakistan is going to be on Blinken's agenda during his visit to India.

"We strongly believe that India and Pakistan's issues are ones for them to work out between themselves. Washington would continue to encourage better ties between South Asia's two nuclear-armed neighbours," said Thompson.

"We are pleased to see that ceasefire that went into place earlier this year has remained intact, and we certainly always encourage them to continue their efforts to find ways to build a more stable relationship going forward," he added.

The US played an important role in engaging both Pakistan and India to come down to an agreement and abide by the 2003 ceasefire after backdoor meeting between top military leadership of both countries in the Middle East.

On the other hand, the US seems to have keen interest in engaging India in seeing its increased role in Afghanistan, especially after the withdrawal of all foreign forces.

"We expect that all the countries in the region have a shared interest in a stable and secure Afghanistan going forward. We will certainly be talking to our Indian partners about how we can work together to realise that goal, to find ways to bring the partners together, and continue to pursue a negotiated settlement to the longstanding war," said Thompson.

Interestingly, Blinken's visit does not include a visit to Islamabad. However, the Biden administration has invited Pakistan's National Security Advisor Moeed Yusuf and Director General of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Lt General Faiz Hameed to Washington during next week for talks with the American counterparts.
Bengaluru, July 26 : With the pandemic's second wave subsiding, state-run and private colleges across Karnataka would resume classes from Monday, Deputy Chief Minister C.N. Ashwath Narayan said on Sunday.

"All higher education institutions, including under-graduate and post-graduate, engineering and polytechnic colleges across the state will reopen on Monday to resume classes as per the guidelines to ensure Covid appropriate behaviour," Narayan said in a statement here.

Regular classes in colleges and universities were suspended since mid-March as the pandemic's second wave began in the state and online classes were held to ensure continuity.

"The decision to reopen colleges from July 26 was taken as per the advice of the committee of health experts, which recommended easing Covid curbs in a calibrated manner to contain the virus spread," said Narayan.

Narayan, a medical doctor by profession, holds portfolios of higher education, IT, BT and Science & Technology in the BJP-ruled government.

"As per the standard operating procedures (SOP), students who took at least one dose of anti-Covid vaccine will be allowed to attend regular classes. The same norm applies to teachers and non-teaching staff," said Narayan.

Students have to submit a consent letter from their parents in a prescribed format to attend classes in colleges and universities.

The Union Ministry of Home Affairs and the Union Ministry of Health have issued SOP and guidelines to comply by all the higher education institutions.

"Wearing mask and physical distance between students are mandatory during class hours. Institutions have to take into account the number of students and class rooms available to ensure social distancing," the minister said.

The students are given the option of attending online classes and contact classes will be held to facilitate for clarifying doubts.

According to the state health department, 74 per cent students above 18 years of age have been vaccinated so far across the state.

Institutions have also been advised to map with the nearest primary health centres for testing students and faculty if found with Covid symptoms.

The colleges have to sanitise all areas, including furniture, laptops and computers to maintain hygiene.

"Teachers should send content material of each period covering the syllabus for one month in advance through WhatsApp, e-mail or Telegram. The content can be in the form of video lectures, power-point presentations, e-notes, e-books, audio books and practice questions," added Narayan.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Aerial Picture of Rancho Daisy The prime example is Rancho Daisy. The grounds are ideal for a private community development.

The rising costs of senior living in the U.S. and the shortage of facilities have turned the eyes of both seniors and developers to Mexico. Hot new opportunities for investors in the Care Industry abound in the area. The proximity to the United States border, an affordable lifestyle, oceanfront scenery, and the gentle weather have made the Northern Baja an increasingly desirable spot for American retirees.

Real estate agents in the region have witnessed the trend firsthand. The prime example is Rancho Daisy, says Max Katz, President of Baja Real Estate Group. Katz is referring to a stunning, 47-acre ranch-style property overlooking the Pacific Ocean, which the group listed a couple of weeks ago. Though large properties such as these usually take months to attract serious buyers, Katz received three calls within a week from the announcement from serious investors, from the U.S. and Mexico, all asking if the property would be suitable for a retirement community.

His answer was a resounding yes: The grounds are ideal for a private community development. The ranch, which currently hosts a flower production business, would be an ideal place for a senior community in Baja. The growing interest of investors seems to go in hand with the inquiries the Baja Real Estate Group has received in the last year from seniors and families looking for American-style assisted living or independent living housing in Rosarito and Ensenada.

Prime Spot for Senior Living Development in Baja

Rancho Daisy is undoubtedly a prime spot for investors looking to develop senior living housing in Baja, California. Just an hour South of the US-Mexico border, Rancho Daisy is located on the peaceful slopes of Descanso Bay, overlooking the dunes. This huge piece of land is both accessible and serene.

The propertys amenities include a water well and a desalinization plant that produces 80 gallons of water per minute. While some developers in this area most often strive for access to basic utilities, Rancho Daisy is already outfitted with electricity and water supply. It is easily accessible from the main road, close to the city of Ensenada and Tijuana.

Growing Need of Senior Housing in Rosarito and Ensenada

In 2020, assisted living costs rose by an average of 6.15% in the United States. And contrary to predictions, the general real estate market heated to pre-2008 prices across the Country, creating a ripple effect on senior housing. In California, the median cost of a house increased by a whopping 20%. According to experts, the shortage of skilled labor has also increased the costs of assisted living. The logistical and financial challenges brought on by the pandemic have steepened the lack of options for seniors.

Mexico, on the other hand, boasts an abundant and skilled workforce, especially in the care sector, and an affordable lifestyle. Northern Baja Coast is home to many American retirees, however, there arent enough communities that offer medical and daily care for seniors. AMAR (the Spanish acronym for the Association for Assisted Living in Mexico), shows only one assisted living community in Rosarito. The opportunity is there, the need is there, the land is there, says Katz. It only needs the right investor to run with it.

In a recent interview with AARP, Former Mexican President, Vicente Fox, stated that Mexico was the logical place for Baby Boomers to relocate in their retiring age. Mexico is a great place to live and enjoy, so, come with peace of mind, feel safe, he said. The median age of Mexicos population is 29 years old, meaning there is a plentiful and energetic group willing to take care of the elders. Moreover, in Mexican culture, it is customary for family members to take care of aging parents and grandparents. Active seniors who dont wish to join a community can easily secure the services of a private caretaker, and it is easy and costs a fraction of the price of what it might in the U.S.

Northern Bajas proximity to the San Diego border, along with a better lifestyle at a fraction of a price, is the reason Americans are flocking to the Rosarito-Ensenada corridor, eager to live and invest in the region.

About Rancho Daisy

Rancho Daisy represents the ultimate real estate investing opportunity. Located among the slopes of El Descanso, and overlooking the sand dunes of Descanso Bay, this huge piece of land is ideal for private community development.



State: Baja California

City: Rosarito Beach

Community: Descanso

Type: For Sale

Category: Lots and Land

Market Status: Available

Type: For Sale

Area: 2078.48 sq ft

Lot size: 47.71 acres

Location: 40 minutes South of the U.S.-Mexico border / 20 minutes North of Ensenada, B.C.

The fertile grounds of Rancho Daisy currently host a flower production business, and some construction is present. Amenities include a water well, a desalinization plant that produces 80 gallons per minute, city water supply, electricity, phone service access, and easy access from the main road. The West frontage extends 1,830 feet along the Rosarito-Ensenada toll road.

Rancho Daisy is a developers' dream and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to own land along Mexico's Pacific Coastline.

Rancho Daisy: https://www.ranchodaisy.bajaregroup.com

About Baja Real Estate Group

Baja Real Estate Group is the most reputable real estate brokerage firm in Northern Baja California and has been doing business in Mexico since 1990. Baja Real Estate Group has created long-standing relationships with Mexican and American developers, architects, civil engineers, structural engineers, land planners, contractors, attorneys, and accountants, to assist in every stage of your development project or real estate transaction.

Baja Real Estate Group: https://www.BajaREGroup.com
The CRT debate is just the latest squall in a tempest brewing and building for five years or so, wrote Andrew Sullivan earlier this month in What Happened to You: The radicalization of the American elite against liberalism. Sullivan is correct that the left has turned sharply against freedom in recent years. And he vivisects the illiberal ideology about race and justice espoused by many schools, private corporations, and government agencies. However, in dating the origins of the larger tempest, Sullivan is off  depending on how you count  by about 50 years, 100 years, or perhaps 250 years.

Many Americans associate the recent round of the culture wars to the Yale University Halloween costume imbroglio of 2015. That autumn, a university official sparked outrage among undergraduates by suggesting that they should manage their own Halloween parties. Erika Christakis  at the time a lecturer in Yales Child Study Center and associate master at Silliman College  advised students that they were capable, without the aid of university authorities, of using their own good judgment when choosing a Halloween costume and letting classmates know if they crossed the line of good taste or failed to respect the feelings of others.

Some students vehemently disagreed. A vocal group demanded that the university oversee their parties and punish those whose holiday garb offended other students sensibilities.

Yales faculty said little. But university President Peter Salovey concluded that the controversy somehow confirmed  despite many years of effort and the expenditure of considerable sums of money to increase minority representation on campus the persistence of deep-seated racism at the university. He announced the allocation of tens of millions of additional dollars to support racial-sensitivity training for administration, faculty, and staff, and the hiring of a decidedly more diverse  that is, racially diverse  faculty.

Student authoritarians  the same should be said of faculty and administration authoritarians  of this generation are the spiritual descendants of the student rebels of the 1960s. Students importuning universities to curb campus freedom today may seem like the opposite of students a half-century earlier who rebelled against university-imposed restrictions on freedom of expression, not least student attire. But the former carry forward the work of the latter. In the 1960s, students fought for free speech but as a means to give voice to their cutting-edge progressive sensibility, which included contempt for the logic and achievements of existing institutions and for the wisdom contained in old books and ideas. Todays students, sustained by a campus culture in which that progressive sensibility prevails, wish to impose it on everybody  in part, by stifling free speech.

However, it was not university students  either todays or those of the 1960s  who first introduced the idea that progressive moral and political ideas were objectively true, beyond reproach, and should be affirmed by all. That conceit we owe to the founders of the progressive era.

For example, in a 1912 essay, The New Meaning of Government, then-governor of New Jersey and soon-to-be president of the United States Woodrow Wilson worked out some implications of the progressive convictions that he had been articulating for decades both as a political scientist and president of Princeton University. Government, he argued, should be an instrument of civilization and of humanity managed by a new professional class of highly trained and scientifically adept technocrats. By virtue of their education and impartiality, they would rise above the mere consent of the governed in which the nations founders grounded the legitimate exercise of political power. They would discern genuine public opinion  that is, not the preferences people expressed through voting and the choices they made in all the other areas of their lives but the policies that the experts determined would promote the peoples better selves and best interests. Through efficient, rational, central administration, the experts would implement public policy that was unlimited by any consideration  including citizens expressed preferences  other than the experts authoritative reconstruction of the purpose of the people of the country.

On what grounds did progressives suppose that power must be shifted to experts because the people cannot be trusted to identify their own interests, much less the public policies that would advance them? The Social Contract, a 1762 treatise by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, gave classic expression to the idea that the will of the people was something other than what the people said they wanted or for which they voted. His point of departure in search of some sure and legitimate rule of administration was the proposition that [m]an is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Rousseau had in mind the chains of custom and tradition which, he believed, corrupt minds and hearts. A properly organized government, he argued, must see to it that each citizen shall be forced to be free of inherited beliefs, practices, and associations. Such coercion, Rousseau emphasized, must only be undertaken by those capable of accurately discerning the General Will, which reflects the peoples true interests and is constant, unalterable, and pure.

In line with Rousseaus thinking, his intellectual and political minions through the centuries have believed that imposing on people what they ought to want reflects the highest expression of freedom and the purest form of democracy. However, these closet  and often not-so-closet  authoritarians tend to overlook Rousseaus stern insistence that identifying and executing the General Will require exceedingly rare intelligence and character.

In If you hate the culture wars, blame liberals  a short, perceptive essay to which Andrew Sullivan refers in his analysis of the lefts intensifying illiberalism  progressive Kevin Drum provides evidence that his colleagues on the left would do well to take Rousseaus stern insistence to heart. It is not conservatives who have turned American politics into a culture war battle, writes Drum. It is liberals. And this shouldn't come as a surprise: Almost by definition, liberals are the ones pushing for change while conservatives are merely responding to whatever liberals do [emphasis in the original]. Left-liberals, however, are a peculiar sort of aggressor. While, as Drum observes, Democrats have been moving further and further away from the median voter for years on issues such as crime, immigration, and race, they also have been demanding greater and greater submission on the part of the public to progressive moral judgments and policy prescriptions. In other words, the left has adopted the quasi-Rousseauian view that the public is not merely mistaken but must be emancipated from their errors  in the contemporary case through the regulation of speech and the redistribution of privileges and punishments based on race, sex, and gender properly understood.

Drum suggests that many on the left err in seeing conservatives as the culture-war mongers owing to a distortion explained by behavioral economics. Since the pain of losing something is greater than the pleasure of gaining a good of similar value, conservatives have reacted more intensely to losing the customs and hierarchies that theyve long lived with than have progressives to their victories  for example, in the Supreme Courts recognition of the constitutional right to same-sex marriage; in spread of the idea of gender fluidity; and in the imposition of narrative control in the mainstream media, on giant social media platforms, and within universities. This, according to Drum, produces more outrageous behavior from conservatives even though liberals are actually the ur-source of polarization.

Drums principal concern is electoral. He believes that the Democratic Partys leftward lurch, especially the whole woke movement in general, is in danger of driving away enough moderate Black and Hispanic voters to give Republicans the edge. He is right that tempering its positions while exercising empathy and tact would go a long way to enabling the left to reach out to the vast middle of the country. But he fails to appreciate that the casual disdain for those who depart from the progressive party line has been assiduously cultivated by elite institutions since at least the late 1960s. And that the squall through which he wants to help the left maneuver to safety is part of a tempest that has been swirling for 250 years.

To contain the culture wars, it is necessary to counter the lefts intolerant doctrine that the job of government is to force people to be free. Schools can do their part by teaching students the alternative set forth four years after the publication of The Social Contract in the Declaration of Independence. By helping students to understand how a government assigned the limited task of securing rights shared equally by all enables a diverse people to prosper, schools not only transmit crucial facts about American history but also foster the toleration on which free societies depend.
Emmy- and Tony-winning comedian Jackie Mason has died at the age of 93.

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His longtime friend, attorney Raoul Felder, told The Hollywood Reporter and The New York Times the former rabbi died Saturday.

Felder said Mason died in his sleep at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan where he had gone because he was having trouble breathing.

No official cause of death has been disclosed.

Born in Wisconsin, the son of Belarusian immigrants is best known for his one-man show, The World According to Me!, which was adapted as a TV special and comedy album called Jackie Mason on Broadway.

Mason also headlined the stage shows Jackie Mason: Politically Incorrect, Love Thy Neighbor, Much Ado About Everything, Jackie Mason: Freshly Squeezed and The Ultimate Jew.

His screen credits include the sitcoms, Chicken Soup and 30 Rock, and the films The Stoolie, Caddyshack II, The Jerk and Mel Brooks' History of the World: Part I.

Mason also lent his voice to the animated character, Rabbi Hyman Krustofsky, on The Simpsons from 1991 to 2016.

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He wrote about his life and career in his autobiography, Jackie, Oy!: Jackie Mason From Birth to Rebirth.

Mason described his style of comedy to the Times in 1988 like this: "My humor -- it's a man in a conversation, pointing things out to you."

"He's not better than you, he's just another guy," he added. "I see life with love -- I'm your brother up there -- but if I see you make a fool out of yourself, I owe it to you to point that out to you."

Comedian Gilbert Gottfried paid tribute to Mason on Twitter.

"One of the best. RIP Jackie Mason," Gottfried tweeted Saturday.

"Truly one of the funniest shows I have ever seen .. ever .. thank you Jackie and now you get to make heaven laugh," actor Henry Winkler wrote in his own Twitter post.

Mason is survived by Jyll Rosenfeld, his wife since 1991, and his daughter, comedian Sheba Mason, from a previous relationship with Ginger Reiter.
98, of Williamsburg, went peacefully into the arms of Jesus on Wednesday, June 23, 2021. A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. Thursday, August 5, with visitation one hour prior at Reynolds-Jonkhoff Funeral Home in Traverse City. Visit www.reynolds-jonkhoff.com.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks, during her annual summer news conference in Berlin, Germany, Thursday, July 22, 2021. Merkel said Thursday that new coronavirus infections in Germany are once again rising at worrying speed. She appealed to her compatriots to get vaccinated and persuade others to do so.
Contact Susan Odgers at odgers-adapted@yahoo.com. She is a 34-year resident of Traverse City and has been using a wheelchair for 45 years. She is a faculty member of Northwestern Michigan College and a member of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.
Athens, GA (30605)

Today

Showers early then scattered thunderstorms developing later in the day. High 82F. Winds NE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 70%..

Tonight

Mostly cloudy with scattered thunderstorms mainly before midnight. Low 66F. Winds NE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%.
General Assignment Reporter

Chris Mays is a general assignment reporter for the Brattleboro Reformer. He has been with New England Newspapers Inc. since 2012.
Brattleboro, VT (05301)

Today

Intervals of clouds and sunshine in the morning with more clouds for later in the day. High around 80F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Overcast. Low near 55F. Winds light and variable.
Beckley, WV (25801)

Today

Partly cloudy this evening followed by mostly cloudy skies and a few showers after midnight. Low 58F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 30%..

Tonight

Partly cloudy this evening followed by mostly cloudy skies and a few showers after midnight. Low 58F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 30%.
Beckley, WV (25801)

Today

Showers early then scattered thunderstorms developing later in the day. High 73F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 50%..

Tonight

Cloudy skies early, followed by partial clearing. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 57F. Winds ESE at 5 to 10 mph.
Weather Alert

...AIR QUALITY ALERT REMAINS IN EFFECT THROUGH 3 PM CDT TUESDAY... * WHAT...The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency has issued an Air Quality Alert for fine particle pollution. The Air Quality Index (AQI) is expected to reach the Orange or Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups category. * WHERE...Central and south central Minnesota. * WHEN...Through 3 PM CDT Tuesday. * IMPACTS...Sensitive groups, such as people with lung disease (including asthma), heart disease, and children and older adults, may experience health effects. * ADDITIONAL DETAILS...Smoke from Canadian wildfires lingers over most of Minnesota. There has been some improvement Sunday afternoon to the air quality. However, on Sunday evening more smoke is expected to move into Minnesota. This reinforcing batch of heavy smoke along with smoke recirculating from the past several days will create high levels of fine particle pollution. Fine particle levels will begin to improve Monday as southerly winds start moving the smoke out of the state. Fine particle levels are expected to reach the Orange AQI category, a level considered unhealthy for sensitive individuals, across far central and southern Minnesota. This area includes The Twin Cities Metro, St. Cloud, Alexandria, and Albert Lea. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... Sensitive groups, such as people with lung disease (including asthma), heart disease, and children and older adults, should limit prolonged or heavy exertion. For information on current air quality conditions in your area and to sign up for daily air quality forecasts and alert notifications by email, text message, phone, or the Minnesota Air mobile app, visit https://www.pca.state.mn.us/air/current-air- quality. You can find additional information about health and air quality at https://www.pca.state.mn.us/air/why-you-should-care- air-quality-and-health.
Editors note: As international travel begins to flow again, we can all use a Shangri-La break. Heres one from our files to shoot for before it becomes a tourist trap.



LIJIANG, China  Is this the mythical Shangri-La come true? You might have a hard time convincing the old farmer hoeing his field 12 hours a day, but city officials have been bold enough to rename the main thoroughfare Shangri-La Road.

And the upscale Shangri-La hotel chain is eying more property in the area, something it does not do unless it can spot well-heeled travelers on the horizon.

I came here to find out what all the fuss was about and left with the conclusion that if this is not the elusive La-La land  well, well get to that later.

First, a little geography. Lijiang is far off the usual tourist route, situated in Yunnan Province in southwest China. A days drive to the south is the Golden Triangle of Burma, Laos and Thailand. Drive north for a day and you enter Tibet.

Few North Americans head here, opting instead for the big-three glamour spots  Shanghai, Beijing and Xian, home of the magnificent terracotta army. Lijiang wants to be number four on that select list, and work up from there.

Webster defines Shangri-La as any imaginary idyllic utopia or hidden paradise. Translation: It doesnt really exist. Even British author James Hilton, whose novel Lost Horizon first described a place called Shangri-La, said you would not find it on any map. But he went on to say that it was located near the loveliest mountain on earth where people of many ethnic backgrounds live in perfect harmony.

He didnt know it at the time (or did he?), and there are no records of him ever visiting here, but he pretty much painted a picture of Lijiang. This ancient city lies in the shadow of the 18,300-foot-tall Jade Dragon Snow Mountain in the lower Himalayas, and it is truly one of the most beautiful mountains you will see anywhere. Its 13 jagged peaks are snow-capped year-round and resemble a dragons teeth.

Lijiang is also home to many ethnic minorities  Naxi, Yi, Pumi, Lisu, Tibetan and Bai  who believe in many religions  Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism, Dongbaism and Hanguism  all of whom seem to live in perfect harmony, just like in the book.

But if author Hilton never set eyes on the place, then how could this be his Shangri-La? Enter American botanist and writer Joseph F. Rock, and this is where the plot thickens, bordering on (yikes!) even hints of plagiarism.

Rock made his headquarters in this area as leader of the National Geographic Societys Yunnan Province Expeditions. He published a series of articles with scores of photographs between 1924 and 1935, many of them describing the history, culture, landscape and religions of the Lijiang area. Hiltons book was published in 1933.

You do the math, the locals are quick to say.

Circumstantial and close, but still no cigar. The verdict to come.

Lijiangs Old Town dates back 1,300 years to the Song and Yuan dynasties. It is canal-laced and has often been described as a mini-Venice. Houses have earthen walls and tile roofs, courtyards are filled with flowers and trees are in bloom year-around. Although there is snow on the peaks of the nearby Jade Dragon Mountain year-round, you can still stroll through Old Town in T-shirts in late fall and early winter.

The narrow winding streets are cobbled, bridges are everywhere and the town is crisscrossed by rivulets and alleyways. Wooden planks lead from the streets  where no cars are allowed, only bicycles and carts  into the quaint shops and restaurants. The food is good, the atmosphere is intoxicating and the service is warm and friendly.

But fear not. If this sounds a bit too much like Shangri-La or perhaps Camelot, youre quickly jolted back to reality by the scores of street vendors hawking knock-off Rolexes, Gucci bags and the like. I bought a phony watch and got back some phony Chinese money in change. Hilton never described anything like that in Lost Horizon.

I spent a memorable evening in Old Town at a concert of ancient music performed by members of the Naxi ethnic group. Wearing colorful robes and sporting Confucius-like beards, the 30-odd musicians, average age perhaps close to 75, played a type music called Dongjing that was popular among the elite during the 16th century.

The instruments were strange and colorful, parts of them made from animals and reptiles. While the ancient music was literally foreign to my untrained ear, the sight of these seniors carrying on the tradition was both uplifting and entertaining. One member of the group, a man who looked to be well into his 70s, prefaced each segment with a strange chant. Each time he opened his mouth I counted no more than three teeth.

The group was established in 1987 to preserve the Dongjing music and has performed throughout Europe. But its aim may be a lost cause. There were only four members of the group under age 50 and it has become increasingly difficult to attract new members. It is sad to think that this delightful group will one day never again be a part of Lijiangs Old Town.

To get to Lijiang, one must fly from either Beijing or one of the other major cities of China to Kunming, the mile-high capital of Yunnan Province. Kunming is known as the City of Eternal Spring. The climate is mild, the skies are clear and flowers bloom year-round.

Historically, Kunming was a gateway to the famed Silk Road. Today, it is a clean, uncluttered city of some 10 million residents that represent 26 ethnic nationalities.

The Chinese have a flair for colorful names and a mountain on the outskirts of Kunming is called Sleeping Beauty Mountain. But this is more than colorful; the peak actually looks like a sleeping beauty, as though it was carved to fit the description.

Lijiang is 40 minutes by air northwest of Kunming. In addition to its charming Old Town and cable-car ride to the top of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, Lijiang can also be a base to view the Tiger Leaping Gorge, the first gorge of the Yangtze River system. The gorge has a drop of several thousand meters and the waters of the Jungshajiang River roll forward thunderously. Legend has it that a tiger, aided by a large rock in the center of the turbulent river, leaped from one side of the gorge to the other.

One of Yunnan Provinces other major attractions is the Stone Forest east of Kunming, a 200-acre site of limestone peaks ranging in height from about 10 to 100 feet. They are packed closely together and some of the shapes of the peaks have strong resemblances to a baby elephant, two birds kissing  whatever your mind wants to see.

You thread through the peaks along winding paths and bridges over pools and lakes. The Stone Forest was formed by sea sediment that was uplifted about 200 million years ago, and eroded into the limestone forest seen today. Its a geological wonderland that fits in easily with this mystical province.

But while the Tiger Leaping Gorge and the Stone Forest are bonafide attractions in their own rights, officials are banking on Lijiang to lure the tourists of the 21st century.

So now the answer. Is this the place? Is this what Hilton was talking about in Lost Horizon, whether or not he (yikes!) lifted the description?

Maybe. OK, that may sound like a cop-out. But a few other spots in the world like to call themselves the one and only Shangri-La. Both Pakistan and Tibet have their candidates, and theres another claim being made right here in Yunnan Province, from the small city of Diqing a few hours north of here.

Lets give Webster the last word. He called Shangri-La any hidden paradise. That doesnt sound like you could find it on a map. That sounds to me more like a place in the heart.

(Dominick Merle, a Montreal

resident and co-founder of the International Food, Wine & Travel Writers Association, can be reached at dmerle@videotron.ca)IF YOU GO

Passports and visas are required for entry to China. Contact your nearest Chinese Consulate or travel agent.

We flew Air China nonstop from Vancouver to Beijing, then changed to Yunnan Airways for the flight to Kunming.

Pack light. There are fantastic bargains throughout China. Buy a second suitcase after you arrive and stuff it with anything else you need.

Negotiate everywhere for the best prices, even in large department stores in big cities. Section managers are authorized to cut prices.

For further information, go to the websites tourismchina.com or www.cnto.org.
SHENANDOAH  As the home of the first Ukrainian Catholic congregation in the United States, this borough is precious to all Ukrainians, one of the churchs leading American prelates said Saturday.

Its very moving, just the story of the people who settled here, said the Most Rev. Metropolitan-Archbishop Borys Gudziak of the Archeparchy of Philadelphia. There was a real attention for the other (people). It wasnt individualistic or self-centered.

Gudziak, officially the archeparch of the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia, visited Shenandoah as part of an eventful weekend for Ukrainian Catholics across the coal region.

I find it fascinating, he said of the coal region.

Gudziak participated in Saturdays filming of a documentary about the history of St. Michaels, as well as the celebration of Divine Liturgy at 3:30 p.m.

Sunday, he will celebrate Hierarchical Divine Liturgy at 11 a.m. at St. Nicholas Church Hall, Primrose, as part of Ukrainian Day with the South Anthracite Deanery. Divine Liturgy will be followed from 1-5 p.m. by a takeout food sale of Ukrainian delicacies, including pierogies, halupki and halushki. Proceeds will benefit St. Josaphat Ukrainian Catholic Seminary.

Monsignor Myron Grabowsky, pastor of the church, is thrilled that Gudziak came.

To come upstate and participate in all the festivities shows his great love for people, Grabowsky said.

Albert Breznik, a lifelong parishioner and member of the finance committee, said the churchs history is meaningful even as it struggles to fill its pews.

This is where the Ukrainian Catholic Church started in America, he said. There had to be some sort of divine intervention.

Now, however, the congregation is down to around 100 members, Breznik said.

If we have 40 people at a liturgy, were lucky, he said. How do you keep young people interested? People are moving out of the area. It was standing room only.

The church impressed Maryana Karapinka, media assistant to Gudziak and a native of Lviv, Ukraine, who was visiting Shenandoah for the first time.

This parish is our history. We would like to record the history as it is, she said.

Karapinka showed Ardriy Rubel and Halyna Vasylytsia, the married couple making the documentary, around the church. The film will be shown in the Ukraine in some manner, according to Grabowsky.

Karapinka said she expected the church to be old, but it was modern. That is because the original building burned to the ground on April 7, 1980, and the current structure was constructed in 1984, Breznik said.

The roof has an unusual touch, according to Breznik, made possible by the domes so common in Eastern European churches.

The small dome on the very top of this was on the Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City, he said.

Gudziak, a native of Syracuse, New York, who has four college degrees, including a Ph.D from Harvard University, said this is his third visit to Shenandoah. He said he still likes seeing the area and its churches, especially since church history was his main graduate field of study.

One cannot but be struck by the beauty of the churches, he said. People gave their best for God.

Gudziak said he spent most of his life in academics and is happy he helped to develop Ukrainian Catholic University on Lviv.

Its the only Catholic university between Poland and Japan, he said.
Frackville

American Legion Post 398 meets regularly at 7 p.m. the first Tuesday of the month at 40 S. Mahanoy St. Members and other veterans are welcome. Interested veterans or their families are encouraged to call Paul Martin, membership chairman, at 570-985-6177.

Frackville

Elks Lodge 1533 and the Friendship Fire Company, Englewood, will host cow chip bingo from 2 to 6 pm. Aug. 14 at the lodge field, 307 S. Third St. Tickets are $20 each and include food and beverages. Tickets must be bought before Friday to be entered to win $200. For more information, call 570-874-2500 or go online to http://facebook.com/FrackvilleElksLodge.

Kelayres

The Kline Township Police Department has issued a reminder for residents that zoning laws require maintenance of properties, including trimming shrubbery, keeping grass cut inside and outside of fences to alleys or streets as well as trimming around fences and sidewalks.

McAdoo

The borough recreation committee will sponsor dances from 6:45 to 9:45 p.m. Aug. 4 at the Grant Street Playground and Aug. 11 at Veterans Memorial Park. Committee members ask that people attending cooperate by wearing masks and social distancing.

Pine Grove

Music in the Grove, a Southern Country Gospel concert, will be held from 6 to 9 p.m. Aug. 14 at North End Fire Department, 118 N. Tulpehocken St. It will feature the groups Mended Heart and Amberson. Ice cream and soft drinks will be available. The event is sponsored by Martin Carpentry Inc. and Martin Roofing and Siding. For more information, call 570-527-7879.

Pottsville

The Pottsville Free Public Library recently acknowledged the following honor donations: For Dr. Lisa Shuman Grabowski from Deborah Reed; for Jackie Dormer from Claude A.L. Shields.
Lehigh Valley Health Network announced it is participating in research to determine the need for a COVID-19 vaccine booster shot.

LVHN is part of Pfizers clinical trial to see if a third vaccine shot will be necessary, as variants of the virus continue to spread.

The health network previously participated in clinical trials for the initial Pfizer vaccine, and participation in the booster trial is limited to those who received the COVID-19 vaccine in the first trial.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health are involved in research to see if a booster is necessary.

Network officials stress that people should get the initial vaccines; vaccines are approved for people ages 12 and older.

Right now, 99% of COVID cases are occurring in those that are unvaccinated, said Joseph Yozviak, DO, LVHN principal investigator for the COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial. The most important thing you can do right now is make sure you are fully vaccinated with both doses of Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, or the single dose of Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

The number of COVID-19 patients in LVHN hospitals is slowly beginning to rise because of complacency among unvaccinated people, officials said. Hospitalized COVID-19 patients are primarily unvaccinated.

Each person who is fully vaccinated is one less person who might get sick and end up in the hospital, said Dr. Alex Benjamin, LVHN chief infection control and prevention officer. The emergence of the more contagious delta variant in the U.S., including here in Pennsylvania, is also a concern and another reason to get immunized.

To find a vaccine walk-in clinic location or to set up an appointment at a vaccine clinic, visit LVHN.org/vaccines, access your MyLVHN account, or call the LVHN COVID-19 Vaccine Hotline at 833-584-6283.
POTTSVILLE  Schuylkill County District Attorney Michael OPake and the Schuylkill County detectives are asking for the publics help in locating a man who failed to appear in court as required last month.

Detectives said Brian Scott Dixon Jr., 26, failed to appear at the Schuylkill County Courthouse on June 28 for his guilty plea and sentencing.

The original charges against Dixon are felony conspiracy in forgery and an unauthorized act in writing, misdemeanor in theft and movable property and misdemeanor in bad checks, detectives said.

Dixon is described as white, about 6 feet tall and weighing about 200 pounds.

He has a last known address of 419 Washington St., Frackville, detectives said.

Anyone with information on the whereabouts of Dixon or other fugitives in Schuylkill County is asked to call the district attorneys office at 570-628-1350 or the Schuylkill County Tip Line at 570-624-3988.

Information can also be sent by email to dadd@co.schuylkill.pa.us.

Detectives said that anyone who may see or come in contact with Dixon should call the Schuylkill County 911 Center or their local police immediately.

All information received will remain confidential.

A list of Schuylkill County bench warrants is available at www.co.schuylkill.pa.us.
100 years ago  1921

MINERSVILLE:

The Minersville Cornet Band gave a concert at Schuylkill Park Sunday.

Eugene Klee spent Sunday at Atlantic City.

75 years ago  1946 Aboard USS Appalachian, Bikini Lagoon  The first underwater atomic bomb exploding with an awesome roar that thundered upward into a beautiful cloudy geyser destroyed the battleship Arkansas and sank the huge old aircraft carrier Saratoga and seven lesser vessels today.

50 years ago  1971 Jack Dixon, Frackville, was appointed chairman of the Schuylkill County Republican Partys annual campaign kickoff dinner to be held at Lakewood Park ballroom Saturday, Sept. 18, during a meeting of the partys Committee of 100 at Ace Banquet Hall, Frackville.

25 years ago  1996 AUBURN  Fire that spewed through the roof gutted a former knitting mill Wednesday across the street from the boroughs fire company. Ten firefighters suffered injuries, mostly heat exhaustion, fighting the blaze, which left the former Artistic Knitting Mill Inc. a ruined shell. The fire also closed Route 895  Market Street, Auburns main thoroughfare  for several hours. I came home about 5 oclock, pulled into the parking space and heard a loud whoom like an explosion, said Frederick C. Moyer, 115 S. Front St., while watching the fire rage across the street from his home. That whoom meant doom for the two-story mostly brick building at South Front and Washington streets that was being used as a warehouse for storing rags. Its gutted, thats for sure, sweat-soaked Auburn Fire Chief Ned A. Beck said after he and about 50 other firefighters succeeded in dousing the blaze. The bricks, stone foundation and floors are about all that is left of the 1922 structure, he said. Several factors, including low water pressure, heat and the buildings contents and condition, made fighting the fire a problem, according to Beck.
Wolf administration officials doubled down this week on pursuing more than $100 million in new pandemic-related emergency contracts as they faced questions from state lawmakers about the health departments spending.

The House and Senate held two hearings last week after Spotlight PA reporting found that the Department of Health was using the emergency procurement process, which allows state agencies to sidestep public bidding for contracts they say are urgent, to hire a new contact tracing company after the last one failed to prevent a data breach.

The health department requested a $34 million contract with Public Consulting Group, LLC, to take over the contact tracing program, though officials told lawmakers they expect to spend closer to $9 million.

Separately, the agency is pursuing an $87 million emergency contract to hire a company to perform COVID-19 testing in K-12 schools across the state. Officials also want to pay a Boston-based firm $2.7 million to perform consulting services. The company, Boston Consulting Group, was previously awarded an $11.6 million contract to assist the state with the vaccine rollout.

It is incredibly important right now that, even though case counts are low, we are on top of any potential outbreak, Acting Health Secretary Alison Beam said during a joint hearing of the Senate Health and Human Services and Communications and Technology Committees on Wednesday.

The needs are urgent, Beam said, because they want to have these programs in place before the start of the new school year in August.

But Republican lawmakers pushed back, saying that at this stage of the pandemic, there needs to be more oversight and transparency around how emergency contracts are used.

Now that the spread isnt occurring as rapidly as it was, did we not as a state have the ability to transition a little bit slower, take time, and perhaps vet some Pennsylvania-based vendors? Sen. Michele Brooks, (R., Mercer), chair of the Health and Human Services Committee, asked Wednesday.

The Department of Health wants to hire Ginkgo Bioworks, a Boston-based biotech company, to provide optional COVID-19 testing programs in K-12 schools in the coming weeks. Public Consulting Group is also headquartered in Boston and is the agencys choice to pick up where the last contact tracing company left off.

The previous vendor, Insight Global, headquartered in Atlanta, was hired through an emergency procurement request in July 2020. The state fired the company in June after a security breach exposed the personal information of about 72,000 people who participated in contact tracing efforts  outreach to people who were possibly exposed to the coronavirus in an attempt to prevent future outbreaks.

While the original contract was worth $22.9 million, it grew to $57.8 million by March, purchase orders on file with the state treasurer show. Health department officials on Wednesday told Senate lawmakers the state has paid the company $28 million so far. A hold has been placed on future payments as litigation related to the data breach is handled.

It was not until late June that the health department used the emergency procurement process to initiate a contract with Public Consulting Group to take over.

The contract has not yet been finalized, but a department spokesperson said in a statement that movement is expected soon. Officials would not say how many contact tracers would be hired, only that the number would be included in the contract.

According to the Contact Tracing Workforce Estimator built by the George Washington University Institute for Health Workforce Equity, Pennsylvania still needs 2,225 contact tracers.

Community health nurses employed by the health department, along with Pennsylvania National Guard members, have been assisting with contact tracing efforts since early June as the department works to replace Insight Global.

About 50 service members were assigned at the start of the transition, but that number has since been reduced to about 12, due in part to National Guard scheduling, Keara Klinepeter, health department executive deputy secretary, said during the Wednesday hearing.

Twelve, right now, is sufficient, Klinepeter said.

Klinepeter emphasized that the pandemic is not yet over, and in the instance of a threat to public health, time equals lives.

Health department officials told lawmakers on Wednesday that they considered at least eight vendors when picking a new contact tracing company. Still, only the final emergency procurement request, to hire Public Consulting Group, has been made public.

These contracts are only a small sample of the hundreds of emergency procurement requests made during the pandemic.

A Spotlight PA analysis showed state agencies made 483 emergency procurement requests in 2020, up from an average of 135 requests made each year since 2015. The estimated costs attached to those requests totaled more than $340 million last year, up from an annual average of $81 million.

The Department of General Services typically approves emergency procurement requests within a day or two after they are submitted, a Spotlight PA review of state records showed. Non-emergency solicitations can take a minimum of 45 days to finalize.

Health department officials said they work closely with the Department of General Services to craft emergency procurement requests, as well as subject-area experts within the health department, legal counsel, and department leadership to determine whether the expense is necessary and to oversee a contractors work.

We dont treat vendors who come in through emergency procurement differently than we treat vendors who come in through a traditional, competitive process, Klinepeter said.

Department of General Services Secretary Curt Topper told House lawmakers during a hearing Tuesday the process is rigorous and the format is necessary to make sure state agencies are able to respond to emergencies like the coronavirus pandemic.

I think we have a really good handle on this, Topper said. I dont have any complaints about the process with respect to emergency procurements.

Rep. Jason Ortitay (R., Allegheny), who chairs the subcommittee that held Tuesdays hearing, said hes still considering ways to strengthen the legislatures oversight of state contracts, including adding dedicated audit staff to legislative committees.

Ortitay also said he wants to improve transparency by requiring state agencies to publicly post emergency procurement requests. State law currently does not require agencies to make the requests public, but the Department of General Services does publish them to the state eMarketplace website, Topper said.

Thats one thing were going to fix, is to make sure they are statutorily obligated, and its not just an option, Ortitay said.

The health department will continue to communicate with legislators on the issue of procurement, a statement from a department spokesperson said.

Sen. Kristin Phillips-Hill, (R., York), chair of the Senate Communications and Technology Committee, said she would follow up with agency officials and colleagues in the House to collaborate on ways to improve the procurement process as a whole.

I think that we need to have more legislative oversight, Phillips-Hill said.

This story has been updated to clarify the amount of money paid to Insight Global.

WHILE YOURE HERE, if you learned something from this story, pay it forward and become a member of Spotlight PA so someone else can in the future at spotlightpa.org/donate. Spotlight PA is funded by foundations and readers like you who are committed to accountability journalism that gets results.
The Biden administration has repatriated to Morocco a prisoner from the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba.

Abdul Latif Nasser, 56, was held at Gitmo for 19 years without ever being charged. He was cleared for release in 2016 by a special board that had been created to review individual cases, but was held for an additional five years after former President Donald Trump halted releases in 2017.

Nassers release reduces to 39 the number of prisoners still held at Guantanamo, down from about 800 soon after it opened in 2002.

For the sake of justice and economy, its time to close Guantanamo, which cost about $13 million per prisoner to keep open, or about $520 million a year.

The rationale for maintaining remote camp is that holding or trying the people held there on the U.S. mainland would create security risks relative to individual prisoners and invite terroristic attacks.

But the federal government operates several prisons that are at least as secure as Gitmo. The camps advocates also claim that U.S. courts cannot handle the cases under U.S. laws, even though more than 660 people charged with terrorism have been convicted in federal courts and held in federal prisons without incident.

Whatever Gitmos initial value might have been, it has become a costly anachronism. The Biden administration should continue to repatriate those prisoners who are eligible, formally charge the others and try them in U.S. courts.
During a re-examination of a 2,400-year-old body found in a bog, scientists found that the mummified man's stomach still contains undigested food. According to science, the Tollund Man, who lived approximately 300 BCE on the present-day Danish peninsula of Jutland, died by hanging. His body was preserved for 2,400 years in a Danish bog. Take a look at the tweet by the Antiquity Journal:

In the frugal last meal of a man 2,400 years ago, scientists see signs of human sacrifice



More coverage of Antiquity research spotted https://t.co/y8Ou3smZOe  ntiquity Journal (@AntiquityJ) July 23, 2021

Scientists discovered certain clues that suggested the man ate his final meal 12-24 hours before his death when probing the well-preserved Early Iron Age bog body. The data suggested that the meal was comprised of porridge and fish, two traditional foods in early Iron Age Denmark.

The examination also revealed that the Tollund Man was not in excellent health, since parasite traces were discovered in his gut.

Archaeologist Nina Nielsen of the Silkeborg Museum in Denmark led the study, which was just published in Antiquity. Bog bodies are those that have been mummified in the acidic peat bogs of the past. Bogs, according to scientists, can help to preserve skin, hair, nails, and even internal organs.

When was the Tollund Man discovered?

This Iron Age body was discovered by chance in 1950 and was sent to forensic examination the following year. The mummy's digestive tract was analyzed, and barley, flax, gold-of-pleasure seeds, and pale persicaria seeds were discovered in the intestines. Research head Nielsen stated that they decided to re-investigate the stomach contents of Tollund Man since the understanding of plant macrofossils and procedures for evaluating gut contents has substantially increased since 1950.

The man's last meal, according to a protein study of his stomach, included fish. Nielsen continued to add that they get really near to a certain circumstance in the past in this way. One can practically visualize how they were sitting by the hearth preparing the barley porridge and the fish.

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The body of Sepoy Kamal Dev Vaidya, who was killed in a mine blast in Poonch area of Jammu and Kashmir, was cremated with full state honours near his native village of Ghumarwin in Hamirpur on Sunday morning.

Amid slogans of 'Shaheed Kamal Dev amar rahe' and 'Pakistan ho barbad', the soldier's cousin Bobby Vaidya lit the pyre after a final salute to the mortal remains.

According to locals, Sepoy Vaidya (27) was popular among the local residents as well as his own Army battalion for singing 'Pahari' songs. His songs were also found on YouTube and people used to relish them, they said.

Sources said Vaidya was supposed to get married in October later in the year in a village in Bilaspur. He was recruited to the Indian Army five years ago.

Earlier, the soldier's body was brought in an Army vehicle to the village where it was kept for the locals to pay their last respects.

As the body reached home, Sepoy Vaidya's parents and the rest of the extended family wept bitterly and hit out at Pakistan for their son's death. Heartfelt scenes were witnessed at his house when local women were consoling the bereaved family.

Deputy Commissioner Debasweta Banik and Hamirpur SP Gokulchandran Karthikeyan paid their respect to the soldier's body. They also consoled the bereaved family and assured them that all facilities would be made available to them from the government.

Local MLA Kamlesh Kumari and leaders and workers of both BJP and Congress parties were present in the house and paid their respects.

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)
INS Airavat reached Indonesia on Sunday with 300 oxygen concentrators and 100 MT liquid medical oxygen. In the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, the ship brought five cryogenic containers of liquid oxygen and concentrators to support the country. Meanwhile, Indonesias Health Ministry reported that the Coronavirus cases rose by 45,416 in the past 24 hours, taking the numbers to 3,127,826. The death toll reached 82,013 in numbers by adding 1,415 in the last 24 hours. However, a total of 39,767 patients have been recovered, raising the total number of recoveries to 2,471,678.

Indonesia faces oxygen crises due to the COVID-19 pandemic

Despite Indonesia converting nearly its entire oxygen production to medical use as COVID-19 patients struggle to breathe, it is still hoping to secure an adequate amount of the breathing aid. While speaking about the current oxygen crisis, Ketut Suarjaya, the head of Bali's health agency told a state news agency that Bali, which is a famous tourist spot, has been facing an acute shortage of oxygen since July 14. He added that the condition is getting even worse with each passing day. Suarjaya claimed that Bali needs around 113.3 tonnes of oxygen, while hospitals only have 40.5 tonnes. Oxygen shortages have also been reported from other corners of the country.

In order to fulfil the cope with the ongoing crisis, the government has urged international agencies and approached several countries including China, United States, Singapore, and Australia to help them. Earlier in May this year, Indonesia donated 3,400 oxygen cylinders and concentrators to India when a brutal outbreak ravaged the country. As a humanitarian gesture, India also pledged to help the neighbouring country that shares cultural ties with the world's largest democracy. Meanwhile, the Indian Naval Ship, Airavat, on Saturday arrived at the Port of Jakarta in Indonesia, carrying essential Covid-19 supplies. The ship brought five cryogenic containers containing 100 MT of Liquid Medical Oxygen (LMO) and 300 oxygen concentrators to support Indonesia in its fight against the ongoing pandemic, a statement from the Defence Ministry said.

India and Indonesia relations

Both countries enjoy close cultural and commercial relationships. They have been working together in the maritime domain towards a safer Indo-Pacific. The countries also carry out joint naval exercises in the form of bilateral exercises and coordinated patrols. According to data released by MEA in 2016, Indonesia has emerged to become the second-largest trading partner of India in the ASEAN region. While India was the largest buyer of crude palm oil from Indonesia in 2016.

(With ANI inputs)

(IMAGE: ANI)
The successful operations by the Indian Army continues as another identified terrorist has been killed in the Munand area of Kugam on Sunday morning. The forces had received inputs regarding the presence of terrorist in the area, following which a search operation was launched which led to an encounter. Retaliating swiftly to the firing by the terrorist, security officials have now eliminated the sixth terrorist in different operations in the past three days.

Within almost an hour, the Indian Army officials neutralised the hidden terrorist who tried to attack. The search operation is currently going on.

Several developments were reported in the past few days regarding successful operations of the Indian Army. Prior to the current information from South Kashmir, several developments were being reported from North and other parts of the valley. Here is a list of the latest development regarding terrorist elimination in Kashmir:

On July 23, the security forces of Kashmir neutralised two terrorists including LeT commander Fayaz War after an encounter broke out on late Thursday evening in Warpora village of Sopore in Baramulla district.

Two terrorists were neautralised on Saturday in an encounter in the Bandipora district of Jammu and Kashmir.

Drone recovered with timer, IED

Meanwhile, the timely intervention of security forces also averted another threat after a massive drone was found along with an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) from the Kanachak area that falls along the International Borders with Pakistan during the wee hours of Friday. On-ground visuals show the drone was nearly 6 ft long and had 6 wings attached with 5 kg IED. As per the initial investigation and inputs from sources, it was suspected that Indian Army personnel were possible targets however the inquiry is currently going on.

The drone was noticed by the Indian Army that is deployed along the international borders and was shot down. Later it was witnessed that it had a timer ID and explosives which were disposed of by the bomb disposal squad of the Indian Army. Moreover, top security officials had reached the spot to carry out the investigation amid fresh scare of drone attacks. Several areas of Kashmir were recently banned from using drones or any similar instrument after the June 26-27 incident when twin explosions had shaken the technical part of the IAF airbase in Jammu.
Delivering the 79th episode of Mann ki Baat, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday talked about India's win at the Tokyo Olympics, the supreme sacrifice of Kargil martyrs, and the campaign for Independence Day. The Prime Minister urged citizens to cheer for team India that is currently present at the Tokyo Olympics. While talking about the Kargil Vijay Diwas which will be celebrated tomorrow (July 26), PM Modi wished that every citizen reads about the war story.

Highlighting the 75th Independence Day, 'Amrit Mahotsav' that India will soon celebrate, the Prime Minister launched a campaign hoping citizens to sing National Anthem.

"The Union ministry of culture has created a website for the occasion, rashtragaan.in, so that more and more Indians sing the national anthem. With the help of this website, you will be able to record the national anthem by singing it and join the campaign. I hope you will definitely join this unique initiative," he added.

'Amrit Mahotsav'

Explaining what 'Amrit Mahotsav' is, the Prime Minister added that it is not a Government or political initiative but it is a programme for every Indian. Citing the example of freedom fighters, PM Modi said that, 'we have to come together for the development of the country'. 'We have to live for the country, work for the country and in this even small efforts bring big results,' mentioned the Prime Minister.

Vocal for Local- To celebrate National Handloom Day

Stressing upon the importance of handloom products in India, the Prime Minister added that it is a huge way of earning in several parts of India. With the mantra of 'Nation first, always first,' the Prime Minister urged citizens to buy local times. Adding more to the 'vocal of local' PM cited examples of enhancement of Khadi operations with a sale of over 1 crore Rs on a single day.

Continuing his address, this time the Prime Minister presented talents from all around the India including:

Andhra Pradesh's Software engineer Sai Praneeth who provides weather updates especially to the farmers and guides people regarding Dos and Don'ts during floods and heavy rainfall.

Odisha's Isac Munda who has become an 'internet sensation' through his youtube channel where he presents content with the perfect combination of culture and cuisine. Now this YouTuber earns a lot through thousands of videos that he has posted.

IIT Madras alumni team, through their start-up, built a 3-D printed house. While talking on this, the Prime Minister talked about Government initiatives on powerful house-building.

Manipuri farmers cultivating apples in their orchards.

Best from waste- Banana fiber initiative by women in Lakhimpur in Uttar Pradesh.

Inspiring work is being done in agriculture in Tripura and Manipur.

Sanjay Rana from Chandigarh selling free 'Chole Bhature' to people who get vaccinated against COVID-19.

The Prime Minister also talked about External Affairs Minister Dr. S. Jaishankar's visit to Georgia to hand over the Holy Relic of St. Queen Ketevan of Georgia to the Government and people of Georgia. He will also unveil the newly installed statue of Mahatma Gandhi in the city of Tbilisi. The inauguration of the Silat Road Sikh temple in Singapore by the Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Hsien Loong who was also wearing a turban was mentioned by the Prime Minister in his Mann ki Baat address.

The Prime Minister concluded his speech by talking about preservation of water and reminded citizens that the COVID-19 scare is still not over.
PM Modi during the 79th edition of his radio show, Mann Ki Baat, highlighted the importance of people-to-people contact in developing a cordial atmosphere and understanding the culture between two countries. He gave examples of India handing over a holy relic of Saint Queen Ketevan to Georgia and the inauguration of renovated Silat Road Gurudwara in Singapore.

"People-to-people connect between two nations gets strengthened through such events, such efforts. We also get to know that living in a cordial atmosphere and understanding the culture of each other, carries so much importance," said PM Modi.

India hands over Holy Relics of St. Queen Ketevan to Georgia

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, on July 9, handed over a part of the Holy Relic of St Queen to the government and the people of Georgia. Upon consideration of a persistent request from the Georgian side seeking a permanent transfer of the Holy Relics and taking into account the historical, religious, and spiritual sentiments that are attached to the St. Queen Ketevan by the Georgian people EAM Jaishankar, during his two-day visit to Georgia, decided to gift one part of Holy Relics to the people and government.

"Friends, a few days back a very interesting and emotional event took place which imparted a new strength to India-Georgia relationship. EAM Jaishankar himself went there and handed over a holy relic on St. Ketevan to Georgia. President, PM and many religious leaders and people of Georgia were present in large numbers during the function, held in an extremely emotional environment," PM Modi shard on his radio show.

"During the function, the words said in the praise of India are so memorable, along with bilateral relations between the two nations, the function also strengthened relations between Goa and Georgia," he added.

The incident happened about 400-500 years ago, Queen Ketevan, daughter of the Royal Family of Georgia was martyred after 10 years of imprisonment in 1624. According to ancient Portuguese documents, the mortal remains of St Queen Ketevan were kept in Goa. However, it was believed to have been buried and disappeared in the infamous 1930 earthquake but subsequent to the untiring efforts of GOI and Georgian historians, archaeologists and Churches', the Holy Relics of St. Queen Ketevan was found in 2005 St. Augustine Church in Goa.

"This is an emotional issue for the people of Georgia. Keeping in mind their historical, religious and spiritual sentiments, the Indian government decided to gift a portion of the Holy Relic to the people of Georgia. I wish to extend heartful gratitude to the people of Goa for preserving this unique aspect of the joint history of India and Georgia," PM Modi said.

Singapore PM inaugurates Gurudwara donning a Sikh turban

PM Modi, during his radio show, also gave the example of the historically glorious moment that came to the fore in early July when Singapore PM Lee Hsien Loong inaugurated a Gurudwara in Singapore while wearing a Sikh turban. He marked the importance of humans' association to develop harmonious and amicable conditions.

"Singapore's PM and my friend Lee Hsien Loong inaugurated recently renovated Silat Road Gurudwara. He also wore a traditional Sikh turban. This Gurudwara was built approximately 100 years ago and there is also a memorial dedicated to Bhai Maharaj Singh. He fought for the independence of India. This moment becomes more inspirational at a time when we are celebrating 75 years of Independence, shared PM Modi.

Salute bravehearts of Kargil war on July 26

PM Modi further urged fellow countrymen to salute to bravehearts of Kargil on July 26 marking the 22nd anniversary of Kargil Vijay Diwas. Hailing Indian Armed Forces, he said that the Kargil war is a symbol of valour and discipline of our security forces which the entire world has witnessed.

The Indian Armed Forces had defeated Pakistan on July 26, 1999. Since then, the day is celebrated as Kargil Vijay Diwas to rekindle the sense of pride and valour of the soldiers, soldiers who concluded Operation Vijay as well as citizens of India.
With the 22nd Kargil Vijay Diwas just a few hours away, the bike rally of the Indian army, which has Northern Army Commander Lieutenant General Yogesh Kumar Joshi leading from the front, was on Sunday going to cross the dangerous Zojila pass. Right before the army bikers were gearing up to ride through the pass located at 11649 feet, Lieutenant General YK Joshi stopped and took a moment to ask in as filmy a way possible, 'How's the Josh?' In unison came the reply from the men in uniform, 'High Sir!'

After crossing the Zojila pass, the bikers are going to head straight towards Ladakh. "Take care, ride safe, and do not take any pangas,' Lieutenant General YK Joshi was heard saying in the video shared by DD News, on its official Twitter handle. The rally of the bikers began on Thursday, July 22 from Udhampur.

Army Commander Northern Command leads the bikers of Dhruva Kargil Ride from the front; Asks How is the Josh! just before crossing the dangerous Zojila pass which is at 11649 feet.@adgpi #KargilVijayDiwas pic.twitter.com/1Olgi6tJvG  DD News (@DDNewslive) July 25, 2021

Before the bike rally, Lieutenant General YK Joshi in an exclusive conversation with Republic Media Network, said, "On 7th of July I had gone over Batra Top in Sukhoi to pay my homage to Captain Vikram Batra, my commander and now, we are taking up this ride to go all the way to Drass to pay homage to all the brave soldiers who laid down their lives during Operation Vijay." He added, "I decided to take up this challenge, I am driving a bike now after 30-35 years."

Then Indian Army Chief Gen Malik Narrates Kargil War

On Saturday, the then Indian Army Chief General Ved Prakash Malik chronologically narrated the happenings of the Kargil War in an exclusive conversation with Republic Media Network. He, during the conversation, affirmed that it all started when India and Pakistan carried out nuclear tests. "The Prime Ministers of both India and Pakistan thought that now that we have become nuclear nations, we should bring about peace, and get over all our differences through talks", he said, pointing out that it was what led to Atal Bihari Vajpayee's visit to Lahore, where he signed the Lahore Declaration along with Nawaz Sharif towards the end of February 1999.

He then went on to throw light on how Pakistan took a U-turn and established that Pakistan cannot be trusted. Narrating what exactly happened, he said," The Pakistani army, through the areas where we were holding it very thinly, and our posts were far apart took the initiative of infiltrating their men making the best use of the winter months when there was heavy snowfall. The initial perception was that they were Mujahideens, but they were Pakistani soldiers."

"It took us some time to establish the facts," General VP Malik underlined, adding that once that happened the forces were all mobilized, and there began the process of recapturing our heights. "I think the first height that was recaptured was the Tolo Link and then our boys really did well and kept recapturing heights one after the other," he said.

Pakistan, as per the then Army chief, got under a lot of pressure by then- both because of the forces, as well as the international opinion. "He first visited China, then went to the USA for help, and ultimately, he approached India and both the Prime Ministers agreed for a ceasefire," he added.
Ahead of Kargil Vijay Diwas, Former Army Chief VP Malik who led the army and country into the victory of the Kargil war spoke to Republic TV on the strength and determination of the Indian Army. He further shared his thought on Pakistan's continued dirty tactics that might never change in the near future.

Who initiated the Kargil War?

Speaking on the chronological event of the Kargil war, VP Malik, said, "War was initiated by Pakistan. This thought occurred to them when both India and Pakistan carried out nuclear tests. India carried out the test in May 1998 and Pak did it a few days later".

Both countries Prime Ministers thought that as nuclear nations they will have peace and should further resolve all differences through talks. Following this decision, the then PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee was invited to Lahore where both the Prime Ministers signed the Lahore Declaration at the end of February 1999.

VP Malik informed, "But Pak army took the initiative of infiltration through the areas where we were holding it thinly or posts were far apart. They took advantage of winter months when there was heavy snow to infiltrate the soldiers".

He added, "Our intelligence agency was unaware of this invasion. The initial perception was that these are all Mujahideen but gradually we realized they were all Pakistani soldiers".

It took a while for the Indian Army to understand who were the infiltrates and who were supporting them. But, once the security forces established the facts, India was ready for the war.

India's achievement in the Kargil War

Explaining the movement of the Indian Army in recapturing height, VP Malik said, "The first height recaptured was Tololing which was overlooking the road going from Srinagar over Zojila to Kargil".

He added, "And then on our boys did really well as they kept recapturing heights till there was so much pressure on the Pak. They were pressurized not only by India's security forces but also form the international opinion on the attack. We were also ready on the rest of the western borders and we put pressure on Pakistan at the Arabian sea".

As the war intensified, the then Pakistan Prime Minister went to China seeking help and then moved to the US. Altimightly both the Prime Ministers agreed to a ceasefire.

He informed, "By that time we had recaptured most of our area".

Tololing- a turning point in the Kargil war

Speaking on the important battles during the Kargil war, Malik said, "Tololing battle really turned the corner of the war. It gave me a lot of confidence as a Chief. It made me realize that our boys are strong and that they can do it.

He added, A few battles in Batalik, Dras, tiger hill, 4875 were some of the major battles fought. First was Tololing and second was Tiger hill because that really demoralized Pak".

Memories of Kargil War

Brushing the memories of the Kargil war, Former Army Chief, said, "A war leaves behind a lot of memories and Kargil war is no exception".

He added, "There are memories of surprise weapons, proof of Pakistani involvement, our boys recapturing those heights tiger hills, 4875".

"There are also memories of sad news like our boys were killed and injured", he said.

Pakistan and India

Speaking on Pak's behavior now, VP Malik, said, "As far as Pak making use of dirty tactics is concerned, they will carry on because in their case the so-called Mujahideen are being trained by the Pakistani army. This is how they fought in Afghanistan and in India's 1965 war."

He added, "I can't say there is any improvement in trusting Pakistan as far as the Pak army is concerned".

He informed that India must be alert. And give them a hard time whenever it's required like Balakot or Uri. Along with such defensive measures we should also be taking some offensive measures.

He stated, "A message must be sent to terrorists that both parties can play the same game and we can play it more effectively than they can".

(Image credit: TWITTER@VEDMALIK/PTI)
Ahead of his participation to pay homage to the Kargil soldiers, Ram Nath Kovind, President and Supreme Commander of Armed Forces of India, has arrived at Srinagar on Sunday, July 25. He was received by the Lieutenant governor of J&K, Manoj Sinha, and was accorded a guard of honor. The President has undertaken a four-day visit to Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh from July 25 to 28.

Shri Manoj Sinha, Lt Governor of Jammu & Kashmir received President Kovind on his arrival at Srinagar. The President was accorded a guard of honour. pic.twitter.com/OERDQ2zTgJ  President of India (@rashtrapatibhvn) July 25, 2021

In 2019, due to bad weather, the President did not visit Drass to participate in Kargil Vijay Diwas. His flight was unable to take off in Srinagar. Instead, he had paid his tributes to the brave soldiers by laying a wreath at a war memorial at the Armys 15 Corps headquarters in Badamibagh in Srinagar.

President's 4-day visit schedule

On July 26, on the 22nd anniversary of the Kargil Vijay Diwas, the President will visit Drass in Ladakh to pay homage to the Indian armed forces who sacrificed their lives for the country during the Kargil war of 1999 at the Kargil War Memorial.

On July 27, the President will address the 19th annual convocation of the University of Kashmir in Srinagar. And on July 28, he will be returning back to Delhi.

According to officials, the president is also expected to visit the ski resort of Gulmarg though the details are unclear.

Kargil War of 1999

On Monday, July 26, India will observe the 22nd anniversary of Kargil Vijay Diwas or 'Operation Vijay', which marks the triumph of Indian armed forces over Pakistani troops in Kargil on July 26, 1999. During the winter of 1998-99, Pakistan was sending its troops and terrorists into the Indian side of the Line of Control (LoC). When the intrusion came to light in May, India launched Operation Vijay, a mobilization of 200,000 Indian Armed forces to reclaim its territories. However, due to mountainous terrain near about 30,000 Indian troops, including from the Paramilitary and air force, were deployed in the conflict zone. While Pakistan had a strategic advantage in the conflict, the Indian troops were able to reclaim their posts in a three months battle.

(Image credit: @RASHTRAPATHIBHVN/TWITTER)
9 dead in horrifying landslide in Himachal Pradesh, PM announces ex-gratia | Watch

In a tragic incident, at least 9 people lost their lives in a landslide in Himachals Kinnaur district on July 25, Sunday. The incident occurred as heavy boulders fell rolling from the hilltop, crushing everything that came in its way. Along with the Batseri bridge, several vehicles beside it also got crushed into pieces. The horrifying incident was reported around 2:15 pm Sunday and a vehicle carrying 11 tourists was hit by the landslide, out of which 9 were killed and 2 were injured. A local was also injured after being hit by the boulders.

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Telanganas Ramappa temple inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage Site; PM says 'excellent'

In a moment of pride for India, the Kakatiya Rudreshwara Ramappa Temple in the Palampet district of Telangana was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site on Sunday. The decision in relation to the 13th-century temple was taken during the online meeting of the World Heritage Committee, where 17 countries voted for the inscription of the site. India, reportedly, had reached out to 24 countries whose representatives were to vote on the proposal.

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TRS MP Kavitha Maloth convicted of bribing voters during 2019 Lok Sabha elections

Kavitha Maloth, Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) Lok Sabha MP from Mahabubabad, has been convicted by a local court on Saturday for bribing voters during the 2019 general elections. The special court for MP and MLA cases in Hyderabad also slapped a Rs 10,000 fine and six months imprisonment. This is the first time that a sitting MP has been convicted of bribing electors ahead of Lok Sabha polls.

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Need for regional parties to come together, form a front for 2024 Lok Sabha polls: SAD

Amid speculations that the Opposition parties may form an anti-BJP front for 2024 Lok Sabha polls, similar opinions have now been voiced by former NDA ally Shiromani Akali Dal. Speaking to PTI on Sunday, President Sukhbir Singh Badal said SAD is talking to various regional parties to bring them on one platform before the 2024 general elections.

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Union Minister Pralhad Joshi denies speculations of him being the next Karnataka CM

Responding to questions on replacing BS Yediyurappa as the next Karnataka CM, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Pralhad Joshi on Sunday said that the high command has not spoken to him. The union minister denied claims of being offered the position and said that it was the media who are talking about the same. Prahlad Joshi is currently doing the rounds as one of the favourites to replace Yediyurappa as CM.

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HM Amit Shah congratulates Assam CM Himanta for 2nd innings, inaugurates key projects

Union Home Minister Amit Shah, who is on a two-day visit to the northeastern party of the country, on Sunday congratulated Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma for the second inning of his government. The union minister also informed that the vote percentage of the party has been increased from 28% to 33% in the state.

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'PM Modi should break silence on Pegasus snooping row,' demands Chidambaram

Senior Congress leader P Chidambaram demanded on Sunday that Prime Minister Narendra Modi make a statement in Parliament on Pegasus snooping allegations and clarify whether there was surveillance or not. He said the government should either call for a joint parliamentary committee probe or request the Supreme Court to appoint a sitting judge to investigate the matter.

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Pakistan-occupied Kashmir polls affected by violence; Opposition mulls 'calling India'

During the 11th general elections for the legislative assembly in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, clashes broke out in numerous polling stations. The Pakistan army, as is very evident from the video brought to you by Republic Media Network, watched as people fought amongst each other, hitting each other with sticks and planks. In the clashes, two people lost their lives.

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UK: New COVID-19 variant under investigation, here's everything you need to know

The Public Health England (PHE) recently identified a new strain of Coronavirus which is now being investigated after 16 cases were detected in the UK. According to a press release, the latest strain, B.1.621, has been designated a 'variant under investigation (VUI),' which was made on the basis of early analysis of its genetic profile as well as its apparent international expansion and subsequent importation to the UK. The officials have clarified that not much has been known about this variant and there is no evidence that suggests that it might make vaccines less effective or lead to more severe illness.

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IPL 2021: BCCI releases full match schedule, venues, timings; MI vs CSK to clash first

The BCCI on Sunday announced the schedule for the remaining matches of IPL 2021, which is slated to be held in the UAE. The second leg of the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2021 edition will begin with a "blockbuster clash" between defending champion Mumbai Indians and MS Dhoni-led Chennai Super Kings. The cash-rich league will re-start on September 19 with the final set to be played on October 15. A total of 31 matches will be played in the given time frame.

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Ahead of the Independence Day celebrations on August 15, a high-level joint security forces meeting was held on Sunday, July 25, to review and discuss security preparation in Jammu. The Indian Army, Air Force, Border Security Force (BSF), Central Reserve Police Force (CPRF), Intelligence bureau, and J&K police were part of the meeting.

The meeting was aimed at discussing operational preparedness, coordination, and convergence on issues of mutual interest among the internal security forces.

According to Security force sources, ahead of August 15, drone attacks are planned in the region. Also, some terrorists might use internal links to seek into Indian territory and carry out attacks in the Kashmir valley.

Following the multiple incidents witnessed in the Jammu and Kashmir international borders, the security forces are on high alert to neutralize any suspicious incidents reported in the region.

Explosives discovered in J&K

On July 13, about 5 kgs of explosives were dismantled in Jammu's Samba district. This was reported to be a heavy explosive if triggered, would have resulted in a 'high magnitude effect' and evoked irresistible damage.

On July 11, a terrorist carrying harmful weapons was arrested. He is identified as a terrorist from Jaish-e-Mohammed who was smuggling weapons to the Jammu valley. A Jaish terrorist named Muntazir Manzoor was nabbed with weapons which were airdropped from Pakistan. The J&K police have recovered weapons including grenades and a pistol.

Earlier on June 27, 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. This was reposted after the multiple blasts that occurred in the premises of the technical area of the Jammu airport on the same day. Two blasts were heard within a gap of 5 minutes, the first blast sound is captured in the CCTV at 1:37 a.m. while the second at 1:43 a.m.

Encounters by J&K Police

On July 19, two terrorists were killed in an encounter in Jammu's Shopian district. One of the terrorists is identified as LeT commander, Ishfaq alias Abu Akram.

On July 14, three terrorists were killed by the J&K Police in Pulwama. The encounter operation began at late night on July 13, where the police recovered incriminating evidence such as arms and ammunition and imposed strict restrictions in the surrounding region. LeT commander Aijaz along with two local terrorists were killed.

(Image credit: REPUBLICWORLD)
On Sunday, Batla House Encounter convict Ariz Khan moved the Delhi High Court challenging the death penalty awarded to him in the case by a Saket court. Khan - an alleged Indian Mujahideen terrorist - had been convicted of killing Inspector Mohan Chand Sharma and injuring Head Constables Balwant Singh and Rajbir Singh on March 13. Later, he was sentenced to death penalty and slapped with a fine of Rs 10 lakhs to be given to deceased Inspector Sharma's family.

Batla House encounter convict challenges death penalty

Ariz Khan has been charged under IPC sections 186 (voluntarily obstructs any public servant), 333 (causes grievous hurt to public servant), 353 (uses criminal force on public servant), 302 (murder), 307 (intention to murder), 174A (non-appearance in court) and 34 of IPC and 27 of arms act (use of contravention). As per reports, Khan had been arrested by Delhi Police's Special Cell in February 2018 from Nepal - a decade after he fled the encounter site in Delhi. In July 2013, a trial court had sentenced Indian Mujahideen terrorist Shahzad Ahmed to life imprisonment in connection with the case. His appeal against the trial courts verdict has been pending in the high court, as per reports.

What is the Batla House encounter?

On 13 September 2008, five serial bomb blasts had rocked the national capital killing 30 and injuring 90, with similar blasts occurring in Jaipur, Ahmedabad, and Bangalore. Indian Mujahideen had reportedly taken responsibility for the blast, ten minutes after the first bomb blast in Delhi's Ghaffar Market, as per reports. A week later, Delhi police received intelligence from Gujarat police regarding the location of Mujahideen operatives in Delhi, which led to an armed raid at Batla House on 19 September 2008.

As per reports, the Delhi Police Special Cell team reached Delhi's Batla House in Jamia Nagar and surrounded the location. The police planned to send its lead officer Mohan Chand Sharma to extract details of the residents posing as a telecom consultant, as his team would secure the sole entry/exit gate and the back lane of the house, state reports. But, when Sharma approached the flat, bereft of his bullet-proof vest, a 20-minute encounter followed with several rounds being fired from both sides.

In the encounter - two Batla House occupants were killed - Mohammad Sajid and Atif Amin, while Shahzad and Junaid (a.k.a) escaped and Mohammad Saif was arrested. Moreover, Encounter specialist Mohan Chand Sharma was martyred and head constables Balwinder and Rajbir Singh were injured. Police claim that Junaid (Ariz Khan) was present at Batla House, along with four others, but managed to escape.
China's foreign minister Wang Yi hit out at the United States on Saturday, on the eve of a visit by US deputy secretary of state Wendy Sherman.

"We need to tell the US clearly - there's no country in the world that is superior than others, and there shouldn't be one," Yi said in an interview with Phoenix TV.

"If the US has not learned to treat other countries equally, China and the international community have the responsibility to help the US learn this lesson properly," he added.

Sherman is due to arrive in China on Sunday.

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)
Dozens of Israelis gathered late Saturday outside the residence of Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to protest his call for all citizens to be vaccinated against the coronavirus.

The anti-vaxxer protest followed Bennett's call on Thursday for hundreds of thousands of unvaccinated people to come forward and get the shot.

If they don't, he said, they won't be able to attend public events unless they show negative test results which they will have to pay for themselves.

Bennett's comments marked the latest sign of concern in a country that has led the world in its vaccination drive, but has recently seen a sharp rise in cases.

Just a few weeks ago, Israel lifted almost all remaining virus restrictions.

But the arrival of the highly contagious delta variant has forced the government to reimpose many measures, and urge Israelis to postpone long-awaited vacations overseas.

The increase in cases has come even though 56% of its 9.3 million people have received two doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.

Most of the new cases are of the delta variant, which has spread even among people who are fully vaccinated.

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)
Lebanon on Saturday signed a deal with Iraq securing 1 million tons of Iraqi fuel as the Mediterranean country struggles with a crippling energy crisis, according to Lebanese and Iraqi media.

In exchange, Iraq would get access to services in Lebanon, Lebanon's Energy Minister Raymond Ghajjar told reporters in Beirut.

Local media said Iraq would benefit from health services and agriculture consultancy in Lebanon.

The swap deal, which Ghajjar estimates is valued at between $300-400 million, could offer a brief respite to Lebanon's growing blackouts and its cash-strapped government.

However, a structural power solution, in a sector steeped in corruption and political interference, is far from sight.

Blackouts have been a fixture in Lebanon since the end of its 15-year civil war in 1990, and the small country relies on imported fuels, through power barges or to operate generators.

The problem has intensified as the government grapples with unprecedented financial problems and is considering lifting fuel subsidies.

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)
Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi has said his country no longer requires U.S. combat troops to fight the Islamic State group, but a formal timeframe for withdrawal will depend on the outcome of talks with Washington this coming week.

Mustafa al-Kadhimi said in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press on Friday that Iraq will still ask for U.S. training and military intelligence gathering.

He spoke ahead of a planned trip to Washington where he is due to meet U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday.

"We do not need any foreign combat forces on Iraqi soil," said al-Kadhimi, falling short of announcing a deadline for their departure.

But he insisted any withdrawal schedule would be based on the needs of Iraqi forces, who he said had shown themselves capable over the past year of conducting independent anti-IS missions.

"The war against Daesh (IS) and the readiness of our forces require a special timetable (for withdrawal), this will depend on the negotiations that we will conduct in Washington," he said.

The U.S. and Iraq agreed last April that the U.S. transition to a train-and-advise mission meant the U.S. combat role would end, but they hadn't settled on a timetable for completing that transition.

In Monday's meeting at the White House, the two leaders are expected to specify a timeline, possibly by the end of this year.

It's unclear, however, whether that would result in any U.S. troop withdrawals.

The U.S. troop presence has stood at about 2,500 since late last year when President Donald Trump ordered a reduction from 3,000.

The current U.S. mission of training and advising Iraqi forces has its most recent origins in President Barack Obama's decision in 2014 to send troops back to Iraq in response to an Islamic State group takeover of large portions of western and northern Iraq and a collapse of Iraqi security forces that appeared to threaten Baghdad.

Obama had fully withdrawn U.S. forces in 2011 after invading in 2003.

"What we want from the American presence in Iraq is to support our forces in training, developing their efficiency and capabilities and in security cooperation," al-Kadhimi said.

"Iraq is not like Afghanistan," he said, referring to concerns that the Taliban will take over Afghanistan once the US completes its pullout there.

The trip to Washington comes as the Iraqi government has faced one setback after another, seriously undermining the public's confidence in it.

Ongoing missile attacks by militia groups have underscored the limits of the state and a series of devastating hospital fires amid soaring coronavirus cases have left dozens dead.

Meanwhile, early federal elections, in line with a promise al-Kadhimi made when he assumed office, are less than three months away.

Al-Kadhimi has promised to hold early elections, now scheduled for October, and to bring to account the killers of activists, including that of prominent commentator Hisham al-Hashimi who was killed outside his home last summer.

Activists, whose cries for elections once resonated in the squares of the capital, now say they will boycott the October polls.

Many are distrustful that the political establishment, which approved electoral reforms, could ever produce free and fair elections.

But Al-Kadhimi called on all political groups to take part in the vote.

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On Saturday, the Imran Khan government expressed strong displeasure over Afghanistan National Security Advisor Hamdullah Mohib's meeting with former Pakistan PM Nawaz Sharif in London. Pakistan has stopped official engagement with Mohib when he referred to the country as 'Heera Mandi'- a red light district in Lahore during his public speech in the Nangarhar province in May. Convicted in two corruption cases, Sharif has been residing in London since November 2019 for medical treatment.

A statement issued by Afghanistan's National Security Council on July 23 read, "They agreed that both nations' interests are served by a policy of mutual respect and non-interference in each other's internal affairs. They emphasized that strengthening democracy in both countries can put both nations on a path to stability and prosperity, opening the region to connectivity and commerce. NSA Mohib expressed his support for the democratic struggle in Pakistan, and Former Prime Minister Sharif said a strong and stable Afghanistan is good for Pakistan and the region."

Writing on Twitter, Pakistan NSA Moeed Yusuf remarked, "Afghan NSA has used vitriolic and unacceptable language against Pakistan and our people. The meeting of Kabul regime officials with MNS in UK is an attempt to further poison the atmosphere between the people of two countries. I can see what Mohib and company were trying to achieve. But what is the other side gaining except trying to embarrass his own country? Deplorable".

Some Pakistan Ministers accused Sharif of 'colluding' with RAW:

"Matters of mutual interest"? Seriously? After Mohib referred to Pak - not PTI govt but r country - as a " brothel", common RAW interest can only be to attack Pak. Such shameless self-interest of Sharif to preserve looted wealth & country be damned. & Maryam's retweet support pic.twitter.com/JR8fcRy0Lu  Shireen Mazari (@ShireenMazari1) July 24, 2021

Birds of a feather flock together. Nawaz Sharifs meeting with Afghan NSA proves his connections with Pakistan's enemies. Again proved that Nawaz Sharif is a tool to be used against Pakistani interests. His statements on crucial issues already used by India at global forums. pic.twitter.com/qEvCwHwqSq  Shehryar Afridi (@ShehryarAfridi1) July 24, 2021

Appalling to see fugitive Nawaz meeting with Hamdullah Mohib.

This jackass recently called Pakistan a brothel.

Nawaz has violated our stated policy of having no official contact with this despicable fool. https://t.co/WUtvPM6Kc5  Ali Haider Zaidi (@AliHZaidiPTI) July 24, 2021

However, PML(N) vice president and the ex-Pakistan PM's daughter Maryam Nawaz Sharif opined, "Pakistans peaceful existence with its neighbours is the very foundation of Nawaz Sharifs ideology for which he has worked tirelessly. It is the very essence of diplomacy to talk to everyone, listen to their point of view, and convey ones own message across: something this government doesnt comprehend and hence is a complete failure on the international front". Convicted in two corruption cases, Nawaz Sharif has been residing in London since November 2019 for medical treatment.

Friction with Afghanistan over Taliban

This controversy comes in the wake of many Afghan officials regularly accusing Pakistan of providing a safe haven to the Taliban top brass. For instance, Afghanistan's First Vice President Amrullah Saleh claimed that the Taliban is guided by Pakistan's special forces from Peshawar and Quetta. As the US military mission in Afghanistan comes to an end on August 31, concerns have grown over the Taliban push back against the elected government in the country.

While the US-led coalition forces had ousted the terrorist organization from power in 2001 following the 9/11 terror attack, it has been gradually regaining territory over the last few years. Though the Taliban had committed to cut ties with foreign terror outfits threatening the security of the US and its allies as per the agreement signed on February 29, 2020, it is believed that Pakistan-based outfits such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed are active in Afghanistan. Recently, Pakistan Interior Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed admitted that the kin of many Taliban terrorists lives in his country.
A mudslide at a mine in southwest Pakistan killed four coal miners and injured two others on Saturday following heavy monsoon rains, officials said.

Local government administrator Amir Khan said that by the time rescuers reached the area hit by the torrent, the 200-foot-deep mine had partially collapsed.

He said the mine, located in the Sharag area of Sharag area of the Harnai district, was ordered closed following the incident.

Such accidents are common in Pakistans coal mines, where safety standards are not widely respected.

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Islamabad, Jul 24 (PTI) Pakistan on Saturday acknowledged that a recent incident involving the death of nine Chinese nationals in a bus explosion in restive Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province was a terrorist attack, retracting from its earlier stand that the blast was caused due to technical problems.

The two sides agreed in a joint press release that it was a terrorist attack.

The press release was issued at the conclusion of the third session of the Pakistan-China Foreign Ministers Strategic Dialogue held in Chengdu, provincial capital of Sichuan in southwest China.

Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi on Friday reached China on a two-day visit to discuss various issues and restore confidence in the wake of the killing of the Chinese nationals.

At least 13 people, including nine Chinese, were killed when the bus carrying Chinese engineers and workers to the site of the under-construction Dasu Dam exploded on July 14. The bus fell into a deep ravine after the explosion in the Upper Kohistan district.

Pakistan had initially said that the accident was caused due to technical problems and later an explosion occurred due to gas leakage, while China has from the beginning called it a terrorist attack due to which the vehicle fell down. Beijing also sent a 15-member team of experts to Pakistan to probe the incident.

Both sides vehemently condemned the terrorist attack in Dasu which caused loss of precious lives and injuries to the Pakistani and Chinese workers, the release said.

It said that both sides expressed their firm resolve to expose the culprits and their reprehensible designs through the ongoing joint investigation, give exemplary punishment to the perpetrators, ensure comprehensive safety and security of the Chinese projects, nationals and institutions, and prevent recurrence of such incidents. The Pakistani side, while offering condolences, also promised to ensure medical treatment, care and comfort to the injured.

Interior Minister Sheikh Rashid this week said that Pakistan has completed the probe and the Chinese are satisfied with it. But he didnt share details about the nature of the bus incident.

For Pakistan, ties with China are crucial due to its increasing economic dependence on Beijing. This year, the two nations are celebrating the 70th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations and more than 100 celebratory events have been planned of which over 60 events have already been held so far. PTI SH RS AKJ RS

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After the Talibans declaration that it now controls 90 per cent, approximately 2,640 km border with Afghanistan, Pakistan on Saturday scrambled to deploy army troops on the front line position citing the threat of violence, uncontrollable refugee influx and worsening volatile border situation. The army troops replaced the paramilitary, Frontier Constabulary, (FC), Levies Force, Rangers and other forces along the Pak-Afghan border, Interior Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed told the local press reporters.

Now regular army troops are manning the border after replacing the paramilitary forces, he told a presser on July 24, adding that the army will be able to take control of the illegal border crossing and the smuggling.

This comes after the US top general confirmed the Taliban takeover saying the terror outfit seems to have 'strategic momentum in the conflict-ridden territory after the US Army and coalition troops pulled out. US joint chiefs of staff General Mark Milley told a briefing that as the US-led foreign forces withdrew, the militancy in Afghanistan gained resurgence and was now pressurising half of the country's provincial capitals, seizing the key border crossings.

Pakistan shares the longest border with Afghanistan which is now witnessing terrorism and refugee spillover. Pakistans national security adviser Dr Moeed Yusuf meanwhile told state reporters that there were threats of banned terror outfits like the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) entering the borders in disguise of refugees. This may uptick regional terrorism.

[Pakistani troops head for deployment. Credit: AP]

Taliban claims to have gained control of the Chaman border in Balochistan and Torkham in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, both of which are the key borders between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Military spokesperson Maj Gen Babar Iftikhar meanwhile is claiming that the Pakistan army manning the border may establish effective border management. It is to be noted that Pakistan has housed 3 million Afghan refugees since 1979, but it cannot take more due to limited resources, says Pakistans foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi.

Pakistan educates Afghanistan on 'how to deal' with terrorism issues

Pakistani Interior Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed told broadcaster Dawn that the current situation [in Afghanistan] demands that regular military troops deploy along the border, although without condemning Taliban as he said that Pakistan will not take any side and has no favourites. Ahmed further educated Afghanistans government on terrorism saying that the Afghan politicians and their military must learn how to deal with these issues. The country had earlier distanced itself from condemning the Talibans terror activities and its regional takeover saying that Pakistan was not a guarantor of Afghan peace. Pakistan had been providing treatment to Taliban terrorists at the makeshift hospitals near the Chaman border, foreign correspondents at the scene have reported. Afghan vice-president Amrullah Saleh accused the Pakistani military of providing "close air support to Taliban in certain areas".
During the 11th general elections for the legislative assembly in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, clashes broke out in numerous polling stations. The Pakistan army, as is very evident from the video brought to you by Republic Media Network, watched as people fought amongst each other, hitting each other with sticks and planks. In the clashes, two people lost their lives.

Police confirmed the news, and said, "Two PTI workers were shot dead by unidentified persons at a polling booth under Naarr police station area in Charhoi of Kotli." They were identified as Zaheer Ahmed, 40, and Ramzan, 50, by Pakistan Police. Around 12 others were injured in the violence that broke out during the elections.

'India much better than Pakistan': Opposition leader

Angered by the violence of the ruling party, Ismail Gujjar, a leader of PML-N, said 'India is much better than Pakistan'. "These incidents are indications that nobody can speak, nobody can stand in the elections against the serving government. If this continues, I will call India, at least they are better than you," he said, pointing out that such incidents do not occur during elections in India."

Condemning the incident, he asked for the government to take action against all those behind the outbreak of violence and ban them from elections. "If the government does not take any action now, the situation here will change for the worse, and violence would be reported every day, people would be killed," he added.

Elections in Pakistan occupied Kashmir

On Sunday, the Pakistan government conducted voting for 45 out of 53 assembly seats in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir. Imran Khans party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) has nominated candidates for all the 45 constituencies, while Nawaz Sharifs party Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and Bilawal Bhuttos Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) each issued tickets to candidates for 44 seats. Two other parties including All J&K Muslim Conference and Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) have given tickets for 42 and 40 constituencies respectively and are among the major contenders.

Among other parties, Jamaat-e-Islami has nominated 28 candidates; J&K United Movement 16 nominees; Jammu Kashmir Peoples Party 17; JK Liberation League 12; Muttahida Qaumi Movement 11; J&K Awami Tehreek 11 and the Pakistan Peoples Party (Shaheed Bhutto) 10 nominees.

In a bid to manipulate the results, the PTI workers with the strength of Power and administration are trying to illegally capture many polling stations.
The Pakistani frigate Zulfiquar was on Saturday docked in St. Petersburg and ready to participate in Russia's big Navy Day parade Sunday.

The ship arrived in the city Tuesday and will participate in the parade along with Indian and Iranian ships, as well as dozens of Russian ships, submarines and military planes.

The Day of the Russian Navy is celebrated annually on July 25, with this year being the 325th anniversary of its founding by Peter the Great.

Zulfiquar was commissioned in 2009 and built by a Chinese firm.

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The Emirates on Saturday prolonged flight suspension from India, Pakistan, and three other South Asian countries until July 28 in view of the novel coronavirus pandemic. The decision was taken in accordance with the directives of The United Arab Emirates (UAE) government. In an official statement on July 24, cited by news agency ANI, the air carrier said that passengers from 4 locations namely Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka would not be allowed to travel during the concluding days of July. Although it stated that the UAE nationals, holders of UAE Golden Visas, and members of diplomatic missions who adjust to up to date COVID-19 protocols, are exempt and could also be accepted for the journey.

Meanwhile, the passengers who have travelled to any of these four countries in the last 14 days would also be banned from travelling onboard UAE based airlines. Emirates Chief Operating Officer, Adel Al Redha, had earlier at a press conference stated that the air carrier was waiting for the directives from the UAE government to either extend the ban or lift it.

Emirates prolonged the travel ban in view of the highly transmissible Delta variant of coronavirus. Earlier, similarly, UAEs second flagship carrier Etihad Airways had banned its flight operations to India till July 31. In an official statement, Etihad Airways informed that it was banning flight services from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and two other Southeast Asian countries.

Following the latest UAE Government directives, passenger travel from India to the UAE and Etihads network has been suspended effective until 31 July 2021, the air carrier had tweeted.

Only the UAE nationals and diplomats have been exempt from the ban, as per the airlines website. Although a negative COVID-19 test prior to departure taken a maximum of 48 hours will be required to produce.

Delta variant spreads in 100 countries

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Gebreyesus had warned last week that the highly contagious Delta variant is dangerous and it continues to evolve and mutate worldwide. He asked world leaders to quickly ramp up the vaccination efforts. Meanwhile, WHOs regional director for South-East Asia, Dr. Poonam Khetrapal Singh, announced that the hypervirulent Delta variant of the novel coronavirus of the B.1.617.2 lineage has spread to over 100 countries.
Russia has sent two military cargo planes with 88 tons of humanitarian aid to Cuba, the Defense Ministry said in a statement Saturday.

The two An-124 planes took off from the Chkalovsky airfield outside Moscow carrying food products, as well as medical masks and other protective medical equipment, the statement said.

The announcement follows aid sent by the Mexican government to Cuba on Thursday.

Mexico sent aid after the U.S. government tightened sanctions on some Cuban officials after they violently put down rare street protests earlier this month.

Thousands of Cubans took to the streets of Havana and other cities across the island earlier this month to protest food shortages and high prices during the coronavirus crisis.

The new U.S. sanctions target a Cuban official and a government special brigade the United States says was involved in human rights abuses during the government crackdown.

In Cuba, the delta variant has also caused the collapse of Matanza provinces health care system.

A medical team sent to aid Venezuela was recalled to cope with a crush of patients.

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Vietnam has announced a 15-day lockdown in the capital Hanoi as a coronavirus surge spread from the southern Mekong Delta region.

The lockdown order, issued late Friday night, bans the gathering of more than two people in public. Only government offices, hospitals and essential businesses can stay open.

Earlier in the week, the city had suspended all outdoor activities and ordered non-essential businesses to close following an increase in cases.

On Friday, Hanoi reported 70 confirmed infections, the citys highest, part of a record 7,295 cases in the country. Nearly 5,000 are from Vietnams largest metropolis, southern Ho Chi Minh City, which has extended its lockdown until Aug. 1.

MORE ON THE PANDEMIC:

 Vietnam locks down capital Hanoi for 15 days as cases rise

 Thousands protest lockdown in Sydney, several arrested

 AP poll: Most unvaccinated unlikely to get shots

 Britain's summer getaway takes off but nothing like pre-coronavirus

HERES WHAT ELSE IS HAPPENING:

SYDNEY  Thousands of people have taken to the streets of Sydney and other Australian cities to protest lockdown restrictions amid another surge in cases.

Police made several arrests after crowds broke through barriers and threw plastic bottles and plants. The unmasked participants marched from Sydneys Victoria Park to Town Hall in the central business district, carrying signs calling for freedom and the truth.

There was a heavy police presence in Sydney, including mounted police and riot officers in response to what authorities said was unauthorized protest activity. Police confirmed several arrests. New South Wales Police said it recognized and supported the rights of free speech and peaceful assembly, but the protest was a breach of public health orders.

LONDON  British schools are closed for the summer, though fewer families are heading off for warmer climes since before the coronavirus pandemic.

This weekend traditionally marks the high point of the great summer getaway from Britain. However, with travel to and from many popular destinations facing varying quarantine and testing requirements, its clear that many families think its all too much hassle and have opted again to holiday within the U.K.

Still, Gatwick Airport is expecting its busiest weekend of the year so far. Spain remains the most popular foreign destination, with between 60 and 70 flights a day, while around 30 planes will depart each day for Greece.

U.K.s rapid rollout of coronavirus vaccines that has seen nearly 70% of the adult population receive the requisite two doses. Thats important for Britains travel sector, one of the worst affected, as well as many destinations in Europe which have relied heavily on the millions of British holidaymakers.

OKLAHOMA CITY  The number of newly reported coronavirus cases in Oklahoma topped 1,000 for a third consecutive day on Friday and the seven-day average of new cases has nearly quintupled in less than a month, according to Oklahoma State Department of Health figures.

The department reported 1,194 new cases for a total of 471,176 cases since the pandemic began, and a seven-day average of 938 cases, compared to a seven-day average of 196 on June 25.

Oklahoma ranked ninth in the nation with 249.8 new cases per 100,000 residents, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The number of hospitalizations reached 495 and health officials have estimated about 90% of those hospitalized are unvaccinated. The CDC reported Oklahoma was 39th among the 50 states and the District of Columbia with 46.6% of the population having at least one vaccination.

SEATTLE  The top public health official in Washington states most populous county is asking everyone to wear masks in indoor public spaces because of the rise of the COVID-19 delta variant  even if they have been vaccinated.

Dr. Jeff Duchin, health officer at Public Health  Seattle & King County, made the recommendation Friday.

Washington states top epidemiologist, Dr. Scott Lindquist, is urging people to use common sense and to try to not be in places with poor ventilation but is not issuing a state mask recommendation for vaccinated people.

Lindquist said Friday there are discussions about a broader recommendation but at this point the state is comfortable with local health officials making such decisions.

(This item has been updated to CORRECT that Washington state officials are not recommending vaccinated people wear masks indoors but are leaving such decisions to county officials. It also removes inaccurate figures about weekly case counts in Washington.)

WASHINGTON  White House press secretary Jen Psaki says the United States has shipped 22 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine to other countries this week.

The total was a weekly record as vaccines went to 23 countries. Psaki says the recipients included Pakistan, Vietnam, Guatemala, Panama, Senegal, Cameroon and Morocco, among other nations. By this weekend, roughly 80 million doses in total will have shipped from the United States to other countries.

Psaki stressed at Fridays White House news briefing that the United States is donating more to the world than any other country. Still, there is a global vaccine gap between wealthier nations and poorer ones, a reflection of the economic might of American and European countries as well as the pressure to address the needs of domestic populations.

BATON ROUGE, La.  Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards is encouraging everyone, whether vaccinated or not, to wear masks indoors if they cant stay distanced from others.

His guidance released Friday comes as Louisiana sees more 1,000 people hospitalized with COVID-19 across the state.

But the Democratic governor stopped short of issuing any face covering mandates or new restrictions on activities and businesses.

Louisianas in its fourth spike of COVID-19, driven this time by the highly contagious delta variant. The state has among the nations lowest COVID-19 vaccination rates and is seeing thousands of new confirmed cases of the coronavirus illness each day.

Edwards said Louisiana has the highest rate of new COVID-19 cases per capita in the nation.

OFALLON, Mo.  St. Louis city and county officials say they will require masks in some public places starting Monday, citing a sharp increase in COVID-19 cases spurred by the delta variant.

Masks will be mandatory in indoor public places and on public transportation for everyone age 5 or older, even for those who are vaccinated, officials said in a news release on Friday. Masking outdoors will be strongly encouraged, especially in group settings.

The decision comes as both of Missouris urban areas are seeing a big uptick in cases in hospitalizations that began in rural areas of the state, especially in southwestern Missouri. The Kansas City Star reported Friday that medical leaders in that region appear to be on the verge of calling for a new mask mandate there as well.

Dr. Fredrick Echols, acting director of health for the city of St. Louis, said more than 500 St. Louisans have already died from COVID-19, and if our region doesnt work together to protect one another, we could see spikes that overwhelm our hospital and public health systems.

ISTANBUL  Turkey has recorded another increase in daily COVID-19 infections with 11,094 positive cases and 60 deaths in the past 24 hours.

The seven-day average is hovering above 8,660 cases, according to health ministry statistics. The total reported death toll is at 50,821.

Turkeys government eased the majority of restrictions on July 1, lifting nighttime and Sunday curfews and opening nearly all businesses. While mask mandates remain, compliance has visibly dropped. People travelled for a nine-day holiday to seaside towns where distancing and masking rules were not followed.

Experts are worried the highly contagious delta variant could have spread across the country. The most recent figures for variant cases were released by Health Minister Fahrettin Koca on July 13, when he said there were 750 infections in Turkey  up from 284 a week earlier. The minister tweeted Friday that people should return from relaxation to strict precautions and urged vaccinations.

Though more than 65 million jabs have been administered using Sinovac and Pfizer vaccines, only about 26% of the 84 million population have been fully vaccinated.

MONTGOMERY, Ala.  With Alabama trailing the nation in COVID-19 vaccinations, infections rising and the governor refusing incentives to encourage more people to get shots, state prisons are offering $5 canteen credits to inmates to encourage getting shots.

The Department of Corrections, which said less than half of its more than 24,000 inmates have been vaccinated, is offering the canteen grab bag to inmates who get vaccinations, spokeswoman Kristi Simpson said.

Items like snacks, candy and personal hygiene products typically are offered to inmates in prison stores.

Facility wardens (have) also been authorized to provide other incentives to encourage staff and inmates to receive a vaccination at their respective facilities, she said in an email to The Associated Press.

Nearly all of the latest infections and deaths are among people who have not been vaccinated, health officials have said.

Gov. Kay Ivey has opposed incentives to encourage members of the general public to get shots, saying instead that common sense should be enough for people to get the free shots. A spokeswoman didnt immediately return an email seeking comment on the prison incentives.

BRASILIA, Brazil  Brazil is reopening despite a looming threat from the delta variant of COVID-19.

The variant is boosting cases and deaths globally after a period of decline, and the World Health Organization anticipates it will become dominant within months. The race is on to vaccinate as many Brazilians as possible.

Health Minister Marcelo Queiroga says getting more of the population vaccinated the best way to stop the variant, but he insists that Brazil must resume its economic activities.

President Jair Bolsonaro has long opposed restrictions and played down COVID-19s risks, often saying infection is inevitable. Lawmakers have begun investigating his administrations handling of the pandemic, particularly why officials appear to have been slow to acquire vaccines.

Brazils Health Ministry counted 140 cases of the delta variant by Friday, including its three most populous states, and 12 deaths. Analysts say the figures are vast undercounts due to lack of testing and genome sequencing.

WASHINGTON  The federal government is buying 200 million more doses of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine to prepare for future needs, such as boosters and shots for kids under 12.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki says the Biden administration wants to have maximum flexibility to address changing conditions, and its going to prepare for every contingency.

The additional doses will be delivered between this fall and spring of next year.

Its unclear whether booster shots will be needed for fully vaccinated people, but breakthrough infections attributed to the rapidly spreading delta variant have sparked a discussion. Most new coronavirus cases in vaccinated people have been mild or asymptomatic.

Likewise, it is still unclear if coronavirus vaccines will be approved for younger children.

BATON ROUGE  More than 1,000 people are hospitalized in Louisiana with COVID-19, the most since early February.

The states health department showed 3,127 new cases on Friday.

Soaring hospitalizations of mostly unvaccinated COVID-19 patients are putting medical staffs in Louisiana under stress for a fourth time, as state officials plead for people to get the shots that can prevent the disease.

The highly contagious delta variant has become the dominant strain of the coronavirus in Louisiana and around the country. Gov. John Bel Edwards planned to address the latest surge Friday.

NEW YORK  A new poll shows that most Americans who havent been vaccinated against the coronavirus say they are unlikely to get the shots. About 16% say they probably will get the vaccine.

Most also doubt they would work against the aggressive delta variant, despite evidence they do. Those findings underscore the challenges facing public health officials as soaring infections in some states threaten to overwhelm hospitals.

The poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found 35% of adults who have not yet received a vaccine say they probably will not, and 45% say they definitely will not.

That means that there will be more preventable cases, more preventable hospitalizations and more preventable deaths, said Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins University.

Just 3% of unvaccinated Americans say they definitely will get the shots, though another 16% say they probably will. Some 37% of those under age 45 say they havent and likely wont get the shots. Those without college degrees compared to those who graduated say they arent and wont be vaccinated, 30% to 18%.

Nationally, 56.4% of all Americans, including children, have received at least one dose of the vaccine, according to the CDC. Vaccinations are starting to increase in some lagging states where cases are rising  Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Missouri and Nevada.

What I learned from my patients is that when a loved one dies, thats a tragedy, says Dr. Howard Koh, a professor at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health. But when a loved one dies and you know it could have been prevented, that tragedy haunts you forever.

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US defence secretary Lloyd Austin sounded a cautious note Saturday when asked about the chances of Afghan government forces containing the Taliban surge.

Speaking at an air force base in Alaska, he said: "We look forward to them making progress ... but we'll see what happens."

The Taliban have swiftly captured territory in recent weeks, seized strategic border crossings and are threatening a number of provincial capitals - advances that come as the last U.S. and NATO soldiers prepare to leave Afghanistan.

Austin, who's visiting Alaska ahead of a trip to the Indo-Pacific region, said the Afghan government was "committed" to reversing the Taliban advance.

"In terms of whether or not it will stop the Taliban, I think the first thing to do is to make sure that they can slow the momentum and then be able to put themselves in a position where they can retake... some of the ground that they've lost," he told reporters.

"They have the capabilities, they have the capacity to make progress," he said.

The US-NATO withdrawal is more than 95% complete and due to be finished by August 31.

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The Republican governor of Alabama, Kay Ivey has said that unvaccinated people are to be held responsible for the rising COVID-19 infections. She further urged people in her state to get vaccinated against the virus and alleged that those unvaccinated are not using their "common sense". Addressing the media in Birmingham on Thursday, Ivey added "I want folks to get vaccinated. Thats the cure. That prevents everything". The statement comes after the US state of Alabama saw a recent spike in the COVID-19 cases.

"Start blaming the unvaccinated folks": Alabama Governor

In a statement on July 22, the governor mentioned that the rise in cases was happening owing to the reluctance of people towards getting vaccinated against coronavirus. The statement comes after a study found out that more than nine out of ten COVID-19 deaths in the US have been of unvaccinated people. Encouraging the citizens to get the vaccine dose, she asked why do people have to mess with 'just temporary stuff' and added "We dont need to encourage people to just go halfway with curing this disease. Lets get it done. And we know what it takes to get it done..

Further describing the shots as 'safe' and 'effective', she said, "The data proves that it works. [It] doesnt cost you anything. It saves lives.. Reiterating the statistical proof, she said that the majority of the new hospitalisations in COVID-19 cases and the coronavirus-related deaths have been of those not vaccinated against the virus. Further blaming these people's lifestyle and a poor choice for the increasing cases in the state, the governor added "These folks are choosing a horrible lifestyle of self-inflicted pain."

When asked about what would it take for more citizens in Alabama to get their shots, her remarks got serious and more pointed. Reiterating that everyone should have 'common sense,' she said it's time to blame the "unvaccinated folks that are letting us down". Disappointed with the state's vaccination numbers, she told reporters "I had done all I know how to do" to boost the vaccination drive. "I can encourage you to do something, but I cant make you take care of yourself," she stated.

Alabama has the lowest vaccination rate: CDC

Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reported that Alabama, with 39.6% of its residents remains with the lowest vaccination rate in the country as compared to 48.8% of Americans nationally who have gotten their shots. Deeming the upcoming wave as a "pandemic of the unvaccinated", the Federal health officials have issued warnings related to the much lethal Delta variant that is supposed to surge cases across the country.

The Delta variant now represents 83% of the virus present in the US, CDC mentioned, with 97% of COVID-19 related deaths and hospitalisations accruing due to the non-vaccinated people.

(IMAGE- AP/UNSPLASH)
Colombia has its first case of the highly transmissible COVID-19 Delta variant strain, Colombian President Ivan Duque confirmed Saturday.

The first case of this new infectious variant in the country was an international traveller who arrived in Cali from the United States.

The president stressed the fact that the new variant comes at a relatively positive time for the country, given the decrease in cases.

Authorities called to be more careful with biosecurity protocols and urged citizens to get vaccinated.

Health officials are concerned, however, that the infectious variant could spread quickly through the unvaccinated population.

So far, 21.63% of the Colombian population has been fully vaccinated, according to the Johns Hopkins University track.

According to the World Health Organisation, as of 20 July, the delta variant, which was first detected in India in October 2020, has spread over more than 100 countries.

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Anti-government protesters took to the streets in various Brazilian cities on Saturday, calling for the impeachment of President Jair Bolsonaro over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Walking down Paulista Avenue, Sao Paulo's main commercial street, protesters chanted for Bolsonaro to resign and held banners denouncing him.

Brazil's death toll from COVID-19 stands at 546,000, and many blame the high figure on the president's repeated attempts to downplay the severity of the virus.

He's also under pressure in Congress where he faces corruption allegations over alleged kickbacks for the purchase of vaccines.

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As the Taliban continues to make sweeping advances in Afghanistan, US Defense Chief has asserted the first thing that countrys security forces need to do is to hold the insurgents momentum before attempting to retake territory. Addressing media reporters in Alaska, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin disclosed that the Afghan troops had overhauled their military strategy and had zeroed in on key areas including the capital city of Kabul and major border areas. They are consolidating their forces around the key population centres, Austin said on July 24.

In terms of whether or not it will stop the Taliban, I think the first thing to do is to make sure that they can slow the momentum, he said.

Earlier this week, US General Mark Miller had pointed out how the Islamist Fundamentalist group was gaining strategic momentum in the central Asian country and were creating an impression that their victory in the war was inevitable. With US troops set to complete their pullout by the end of next month, Austin opined that Afghan troops had the capability and capacity to make progress but well see what happens. The politically perilous strategy appears to be a military necessity as over-stretched Afghan troops try to prevent the loss of provincial capitals, which could deeply fracture the country.

Meanwhile, Pentagon has ramped up airstrikes in Afghanistan in their attempt to deter the Taliban and aid native troops. In addendum, American President Joe Biden had also promised to provide financial aid to the Afghan forces and had also relocated scores of petrified Afghan contractors and aids to the military bases in America. However, with the Taliban inching closer to reestablish an Islamic emirate in Afghanistan, the country has once been shadowed by an emerging refugee crisis.

95% troops back home

Speaking at the same press conference, Defence Llyod Austin said that more than 95 per cent of the troops have been pulled out of the war-torn country and the complete pullout is expected to be completed by August 31st. According to US intelligence assessments, after the American military drawdown, the country's civilian government may fall to the terror group within months as the Taliban have already taken control of several districts across Afghanistan. Also, Afghan officials have accused Pakistan of extending support to Taliban terrorists and providing safe haven to them.

Image: AP
A white man in western Michigan said a noose he hung in a window was a statement against corrupt politicians and had nothing to do with race.

Someone took a photo of the noose in a second-floor window at Greg Kazemiers Grand Rapids home and posted it Thursday on social media, WOOD-TV reported Friday.

Kazemier, 59, told the television station that his ire is aimed at elected officials in Washington.

I think the corrupt politicians should be hung, Kazemier said. (The noose) has nothing to do with race. Ive been down here for 11 years. Ive never had a problem with any of my neighbors. I love it down here.

A hangmans noose is symbolic of the lynching of Blacks, mostly in southern states, and stretches back to the nations slavery past and Jim Crow era. It mostly is used now in efforts to intimidate and instill fear.

Kazemiers neighborhood is in Grand Rapids Third Ward, which has the citys highest Black population at about 33.7%, according to WOOD-TV.

Grand Rapids police said they investigated a report about the noose, but it had been removed by the time officers arrived at the home.

Kazemier said the noose was in the window for three days until he took it down after a neighbor told him about posts on social media saying it was racially offensive.

Im not like that. I like all people, he said. It had nothing to do with color. A noose is an equal opportunity employer.

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)
The United States on July 2 slapped fresh sanctions on 22 senior Myanmar ministers and family members in response to the February military coup and attacks against the countrys pro-democracy movement. According to Associated Press, the Treasury and Commerce Departments announced the move against seven members of the Myanmar military and 15 spouses and adult children of previously sanctioned officials as part of Washingtons continued response to the overthrow of Aung San Suu Kyi's elected government.

The militarys suppression of democracy and campaign of brutal violence against the people of Burma are unacceptable, the US Treasury 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.

As per reports, 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 will now freeze any assets they or any companies they own may have in the US jurisdictions and bar Americans from business with them.

In a separate statement, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the sanctions do not target the Myanmar people, but are aimed at pressuring the military to immediately restore Burmas path to democracy.

Myanmar military coup

Meanwhile, the Southeast Asian nation has been hit with gruelling violence after military leader Min Aung Hlaing declared a coup detat on February 1. Not only have Myanmars democratically elected lawmakers including ousted state counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi detained but hundreds of thousands of people have lost their lives in the fight for democracy. According to the rights group AAPP, nearly 888 people have been killed, 6472 total arrested, 5173 currently detained or sentenced while 1964 people are evading an arrest warrant as of July 2.

AAPP DAILY UPDATE (02/07)



888 killed by this junta



6472 total arrested since coup



5173 currently detained/sentenced



1964 evading arrest warrant



brief https://t.co/N1NhVK1wo9

detained https://t.co/RgnWYo4ZzG

fatalities https://t.co/C97DnljHuB

releases https://t.co/zHmHTxw2yy pic.twitter.com/HvaApqMYwE  AAPP (Burma) (@aapp_burma) July 2, 2021

In its latest development, Myanmars government began releasing prisoners, including activists who were detained for protesting against the military's seizure of power in February and journalists who reported on the protests, officials said. Earlier this week, Zaw Zaw, head of the Yangon Regions Prison Department, confirmed that more than 720 people were released from the prison, which for decades has been the main facility for political prisoners. However, it also appeared that not all activists and journalists were freed.

(With inputs from AP)
MINSK -- Belarus was plunged into chaos in August 2020 when a disputed presidential election handed a sixth term to Alyaksandr Lukashenka, who has ruled the country since 1994 and has been described as Europe's last dictator.

The election sparked an unprecedented wave of protests that were met with a clampdown that was brutal even for authoritarian Belarus. More than 30,000 Belarusians have gone through the detention process. The number of political prisoners has passed 540 and includes over two dozen journalists.

Any form of protest can lead to a fine and even jail in Belarus. As can any display of red and white, the colors associated with the democratic opposition and the flag of the first short-lived Belarusian democratic republic of 1918. Here are some of the most extreme cases:

Wrong Socks

A woman walking to a driving lesson was stopped by Minsk police in March. Natalia Sivtsova-Syadushkina was told her attire was inappropriate. The problem? Her socks were white with a red stripe, the same pattern as the historic flag that is effectively banned in Belarus. She was also wearing red running shoes that apparently were also incriminating. Police also accused her of flashing the "V for victory" sign to passing drivers, who apparently saluted back.

Sivtsova-Syadushkina was prosecuted under laws banning unauthorized protest and ordered to pay 2,320 Belarusian rubles ($900). The judge noted that her offending socks and running shoes were highly visible as she was wearing short jeans at the time.

It was not Sivtsova-Syadushkina's only run-in with the authorities. The day before she was stopped because of her socks, police showed up at her apartment in the capital. They tore down a red-and-white banner draped from her balcony. She was later charged with "illegal picketing" and fined 2,030 Belarusian rubles ($794).

"Now I owe 4,350 rubles," Sivtsova-Syadushkina told RFE/RL's Belarus Service at the time. "I don't have that kind of money to pay the fines, even though I work."

Sivtsova-Syadushkina's was not an isolated case. In the western city of Hrodna, Lyubou Sarlay spent a day behind bars and was fined for wearing red-and-white pants. She was detained by police in January while walking from a cafe to her car.

"I asked the police why they detained me," she told Current Time. "And they said, 'So, you weren't trying to make a statement with your pants?'"

Other 'Crimes Of Color'

Andrey Drazhin, from the western town of Ivanava, was fined in March for erecting a sign outside his house that was painted white with a red stripe. Police considered this a form of illegal picketing.

Crisis In Belarus Read our ongoing coverage as Belarusian strongman Alyaksandr Lukashenka ramps up pressure on NGOs and independent media as part of a brutal crackdown against protesters and the opposition following an August 2020 election widely considered fraudulent.

"Being at his place of residence, he hung on the facade of his house for public demonstration and unhindered public viewing a white-red-white flag in the form of a stencil plate not registered in the Republic of Belarus," the police report said.

The white-red-white flag -- to say nothing of the mere combination of these colors -- is not officially prohibited in Belarus. But this did not stop the judge from fining Drazhin the equivalent of $450.

Even a bouquet of flowers might be scrutinized by the authorities. Alena Vinokurova from Navapolatsk was fined the equivalent of $350 for the flowers -- with red and white blooms -- she was taking to her daughter's birthday party, reported Current Time, the Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.

Boxes can also raise suspicions in today's Belarus. Andrey Parkhomenka was arrested in April for exhibiting a red and white banner from the balcony of his high-rise apartment in Minsk. Parkhomenka denied that, explaining the banner was in fact a box -- albeit red and white -- from a television that he had not removed as he had just moved into the apartment.

Parkhomenka was jailed for 14 days, spending part of that time at Minsk's Akrestsina detention center, which is synonymous with torture due to the abuses alleged and documented to have been committed by guards there. Parkhomenka told Vyasna, a leading Belarusian NGO that was recently targeted by the Lukashenka government, that he contracted COVID-19 while in prison.

Refusing To House Regime Prosecutor

Other Belarusians have been punished for actions they refused to take.

Volha Sinyalyova owns an apartment in Minsk that she rented out to Alina Kasyanchyk, a prosecutor who was notorious for her role in politically charged cases, including the high-profile trial of Katsyaryna Andreyeva and Darya Chultsova.

The two journalists for Belsat, a Polish-based satellite television station aimed at Belarus, were each sentenced in February to two years in prison for reporting live from a Minsk rally in November, in a case that sparked condemnation in the West.

As the case was progressing last year, Sinyalyova suggested to Kasyanchyk that she move out, a move the prosecutor agreed to. But Belarusian authorities got wind of the case and charged Sinyalyova of violating Kasyanchyk's rights because of her job.

The trial of Sinyalyova, the mother of two small children, was held behind closed doors, and her attorney had his license revoked. On June 30, Judge Anzhela Kastsyukevich sentenced Sinyalyova to two years of restricted freedom.

Dirty Dancing?

One of Belarus's largest criminal trials involves dozens of people who were detained for singing songs and dancing in the streets of Brest in September. Security forces broke up the gathering and detained many. Lukashenka's authorities later charged them with "endangering" the "safety of road traffic."

In total, more than 70 people are involved in the case. Several dozen of the accused have already been convicted, receiving from one year of restricted freedom to nearly two years in prison.

The rule of law, always weak in authoritarian Belarus, has been smashed, explains Syarhey Ustsinau of Legal Initiative, a Belarusian NGO that helps people file cases with the European Court of Human Rights.

"The law works the same way," Ustsinau told Current Time. "If you are a political prisoner, you will achieve nothing, neither in court nor by complaining to the prosecutor's office. But if you're a police officer, people are given five to six years in prison for any push or scratch [against them]."

Since the presidential election, the Belarusian judicial system has not issued an acquittal in any of the thousands of protest cases. And not one member of the country's security apparatus has faced criminal charges for actions taken during the brutal -- sometimes deadly -- crackdown.
Voters in Kazakhstan's rural districts are casting their ballots in the authoritarian Central Asian country's first-ever direct election of local mayors.

Nealy 2,300 candidates are competing for the 729 seats in the July 25 polls that President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev has described as a stepping-stone toward electing more senior public figures, instead of appointing them.

Under Kazakhstan's current political system, the president appoints the governors of the country's 14 provinces. Provincial governors in turn name the mayors of major districts. Then, those mayors appoint the heads of smaller rural districts from candidates chosen by local representative bodies dominated by the ruling Nur-Otan party.

Under the new system introduced by Toqaev in September 2020, any citizen 25 or older can run for the position -- the lowest in the administrative hierarchy. Those who have been convicted of corruption are not eligible.

As many as 1,419 out of the 2,297 candidates are registered as independents. The remaining 878 candidates represent officially registered political parties.

Rural mayors aren't allowed to hold office for more than two four-year terms. The final election results are expected in the next three days.

The mayors of 45 larger districts will also be chosen in a direct vote that is expected to take place by the end of the year.

Toqaev came to power two years ago as a handpicked successor to Nursultan Nazarbaev, who ruled the energy-rich country with an iron fist between 1991 and 2019. Nazarbaev continues to wield considerable influence as chairman of the Security Council and enjoys almost limitless powers as "elbasy" -- leader of the nation.

Based on reporting by Reuters, RFE/RL's Kazakh Service, and Sputnik.kz
A bus traveling from Germany to Kosovo swerved off the road and crashed near the Croatian city of Slavonski Brod early on July 25, killing at least 10 people and injuring dozens more.

Officials from Kosovo and Croatia said the victims were mostly Kosovars working in Germany and returning home to spend the summer holidays with their families.

The crash happened early in the morning when the driver lost control of the bus after falling asleep, officials said. The bus driver has been detained.

The bus with Kosovo license plates was traveling from Frankfurt, Germany, to Kosovo's capital of Pristina, carrying 67 passengers, including children, and two drivers, one of whom died.

In addition to the dead, 44 injured were transferred to local hospitals, 15 of them in serious condition.

The government of Kosovo said Prime Minister Albin Kurti and other ministers planned to visit the injured in the hospital later on July 25 alongside top Croatian officials.

Kosovar President Vjosa Osmani cut short her stay in Tokyo for the Olympic Games and pledged to support the families of victims and those injured.

Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic expressed his condolences and said the injured would be provided health care as the authorities work closely with Kosovo's government.

With reporting by AFP, AP, and RFE/RL's Balkan Service
President Vladimir Putin praised Russia's naval capabilities during a large warship parade in the port city of St. Petersburg, which drew throngs of spectators despite high infection rates and record deaths from the coronavirus.

"The Russian Navy today has everything it needs to guarantee the protection of our country and our national interests," Putin said on July 25 on the sidelines of the annual parade of navy vessels.

"We can detect underwater, surface, or aerial enemies and target them if a lethal strike is necessary," Putin said.

Mass events are prohibited in St. Petersburg and other parts of Russia due to a vicious wave of the pandemic caused by the highly infectious Delta variant and a sluggish vaccination campaign.

Despite the restrictions, local media reported thousands of people came to watch the parade. Many spectators did not wear masks.

RFE/RL's Coronavirus Coverage Features and analysis, videos, and infographics explore how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting the countries in our region.

Similar scenes were reported in the Crimean port city of Sevastopol, where another naval parade was held by Russia's Black Sea Fleet.

Thousands of residents packed together to watch the naval parade despite Sevastopol being under coronavirus restrictions.

Russia seized the region from Ukraine in 2014.

Russia is reporting a seven-day average of nearly 24,000 coronavirus infections and 766 daily deaths.

The total number of cases recorded since the pandemic began in Russia is over 6 million, out of a total population of around 144 million. The number is considered an undercounting of the true extent of the pandemic.

The national death toll linked to COVID-19 stands at 153,095, according to the country's coronavirus task force. However, Russia's statistics agency has recorded around 428,000 excess deaths from April 2020 to May 2021, suggesting the scale of the pandemic is far greater.

In June, Russia began to introduce compulsory vaccination of some workers and imposed restrictions on the unvaccinated. Only 16 percent of the population is fully vaccinated.

With reporting by RFE/RL's Russian Service, Current Time, and AFP
This story is part of the SoJo Exchange from the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous reporting about responses to social problems. Click here to read the original story.

A couple of weeks ago, Kiki Radermacher arrived at a Missoula, Montana homeless shelter where workers had called the police on a 19-year-old who tested positive for COVID-19.

The police had already arrived and, when the girl began having suicidal thoughts to the point that she wrapped a phone cord around her neck, they called Radermacher, a member of Missoulas Mobile Support Team.

She was really struggling, first with being homeless. She hadnt been homeless for long and was still adjusting to that lifestyle, Radermacher.

Radermacher spoke with the police officer on scene who explained the situation and the fact that theyd have to take the 19-year-old somewhere because of the threat she poses to herself and others, but that she wasnt willing to come voluntarily and they didnt want to cause additional harm by forcing her. Briefed on the situation, Radermacher approached the girl and immediately recognized her.

I had worked with her previously in private practice, Radermacher says. Just having that prior relationship was so incredibly valuable in that situation. As soon as she recognized who I was, she started talking and was honest about how she was feeling.

The girl began to calm down and Radermacher explained that she was going to have to get help, but that if she came willingly with Radermacher that she and her partner could take her in an unmarked van rather than in a police car and without any further involvement from the police, which she did.

It was one of those moments where I was so glad they called. Had they not, someone would have gotten hurt. We were able to resolve that by just offering support in that moment, Radermacher says.

This is exactly what Missoulas Mobile Support TeamMST for short, a collaboration between the fire department and Partnership Health Centerdoes. When behavioral health calls come through 911, the police contact MST and a clinician paired with an EMT arrive on the scene to offer specialized behavioral health services. The goal is to help people in crisis without sending them to jail or the emergency room.

Missoulas program began as a pilot in November 2020 and will become permanent this month. The team works in two shifts that, together, offer services from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., seven days a week. To date, the unit has had 499 calls that have led to 389 hours on scene since November, resulting in 128 emergency room diversions and 22 jail diversions. Much of their success is attributed to the slower approach that the MST is able to take.

[Traditional first responders are] trained to have solutions fast, mitigate a problem, and move onto the next one, explains John Petroff, a member of the Missoula Fire Department and the MSTs operations manager. The MST, on the other hand, spends an average of 46.8 minutes on each call they take.

With 16 years experience at the fire department, Petroff was excited to join the operation in January. He has since worked to build trust among the police department and other stakeholder groups that has helped get the program running as smoothly as it is today.

A big part of my job is letting them know how we can help, he says.

Thanks in part to funding for mobile response units that the state earmarked in 2019, Missoulas Mobile Services Team is one of six mobile response units currently active in the state and one of a growing number of programs around the country like Eugene, Oregons CAHOOTS and Spokane, Washingtons Mobile Community Assertive Treatment team, although theres no official count for the total number.

Many of them operate in a similar way to Missoulas MST, but one way that Missoula has expanded its behavioral and mental health work is by offering follow-up services.

We provide follow-up case facilitation at the end, explains Terry Kendrick, the MSTs program manager. If youre in crisis and someone hands you a referral or tells you to go to the Salvation Army, youre [probably] not in a place to take that information in. Or some of that is just hard for folks who are already feeling overwhelmed."

Thats why the MST will follow up with resources to increase the chances of the people they treat getting the longer term help they might need, she says.

While the pilot program has so far dispatched the MST alongside the police, Kendrick says that the newly permanent program is now exploring what it could look like for the MST to be dispatched on its own. Theyre also eagerly awaiting the introduction of the national 988 hotline in 2022 as a potential path to an alternate dispatch system.

Were trying to keep it on the ground level so its the fourth response resourcethats how were looking at it, Petroff says. We have law enforcement, fire fighters, and emergency medical services and now we have behavioral health.
Rocky Mount, NC (27804)

Today

Showers early, becoming a steady rain later in the day. High near 75F. Winds NE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 70%. Rainfall near a quarter of an inch. Locally heavy rainfall possible..

Tonight

Periods of rain. Low 66F. Winds NE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%. Rainfall may reach one inch. Locally heavy rainfall possible.
GRINGOR is a St. Petersburg-based modern jewellery manufacturing company established in 2002. It successfully develops and implements the innovations, many of which resonate with the Russians and the people abroad.

In 2012, GRINGOR was awarded the honorary title of the Official Supplier of the Russian Imperial House, and the companys president, Alexander Gorynya, was awarded the diploma In recognition of Outstanding Services in Preserving and Developing the Traditions of the Russian Orthodox Church Jewellery Art and in Honour of the Special Esteem.

Alexander Gorynya, the founder of the GRINGOR company, told Rough&Polished what his company has achieved for two decades and what contribution it makes to the development of the Russian jewellery industry.

Next year, it will be 20 years since the establishment of the GRINGOR company. What are your achievements to celebrate the anniversary?

The GRINGOR firm was founded at the turn of the century. But we released our first jewellery in 1999. And we entered the market with our know-how  diamond studded silver jewellery. We were the first to start producing it commercially, and for that time, it was a new approach, and our colleagues in the jewellery industry found this somewhat strange and wrong.

However, ten years later, the world-famous Tiffany & Co and Cartier also offered their jewellery collections in silver using diamonds.

And over the last eight to ten years, many of our rivals, even famous ones, also followed this way  at present, they produce this jewellery, too, and even on a large scale. We are proud of this achievement. In addition to the diamond studded silver jewellery, we were the first in the world to offer a jewellery collection with synthetic diamonds. It was in 2000, so, we were ahead of the Americans by three months. The first sales were held in the Passage shopping centre on Smolenskaya Square, the collection was small, since we were a small company, and we did not earn much money. But this is how we made ourselves known, although after that, we stopped using synthetic stones and switched completely to natural ones. And it was also interesting in terms of innovation.

In addition, we always wanted and want now to make some creative and sophisticated products. We have also made progress in this as evidenced by our diplomas and prizes won at the jewellery competitions. In 2012, the company was awarded the title of Supplier of the Russian Imperial House from Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna Romanova. Since 1917, there have been only three such firms in Russia, and only one is in the jewellery sector.

We also made jewellery pieces for the Russian Orthodox Church  the timeless classic jewellery, as its called nowadays. This is a short story about what we can be proud of.

You were the first in the world to start making diamond studded silver jewellery collections commercially. Whose idea was it and how was it implemented?

The idea was mine, but it just didnt come from the sky as everything develops on the earth evolutionarily. Before the 1917 revolution, silver frames were used in large quantities, silver was used as a frame, and the fittings were gold. That is why, when we see antique jewellery pieces, they are black, only diamonds shine that look white against a dark background  moreover, the diamond quality was very low: before the Soviet time, all diamonds were imported to Russia from Europe and India.

In 1998-1999, the manufactures started to plate silver with rhodium to keep it from tarnishing as long as possible. And the idea was quite simple: after the default in 1998, people had less money - and it should be noted that this happens in our country from time to time because the very concept of capitalism implies crises. White gold came into fashion. We began to combine silver with diamonds, using rhodium plating technology for the first time, and brought this new product to the market. There was a lot of reasoning whether it was necessary or not, so I even had to write and defend a thesis Ensuring the Competitiveness of Jewellery Products. The idea was quite simple: if you enter the market with this product, from scratch, you need at least three and a half years, and generally, more than four years. This is how we introduced these jewellery products and, in general, radically changed the market, bringing a new promising direction to the jewellery sector.

The diamond studded silver jewellery is our daily work and our daily bread. And this is our livelihood  not substantial windfall revenues, but normal and constant money.

What directions does GRINGOR develop in its production, what technologies does the company use?

We use all the up-to-date technologies available in the world now, such as 3D-modelling, which has quite developed over 15 years, and other advanced technologies in laser processing, in tools - we use all these, because otherwise, it is impossible to make high-quality jewellery pieces. We keep on developing new directions, mastering new materials, so, we used titanium, platinum, and palladium and we know how to work with them. There are only three such companies in Russia able to work with different metals  they are Krasnoyarsk Non-Ferrous Metals Plant (KZTsM), one Rostov-based company, and one firm in Yekaterinburg working with palladium.

Do you have any ideal among the jewellery brands - not for copying, imitating but as an example of artistic creativity and commercial success to follow?

As a brand, I think that Carl Faberge and Russkiye Samotsvety (Russian Gems) are all that we have in Russia.

As successful examples, I can count the jewellery firms in the post-Soviet times on the fingers of one hand. Kostroma Jewellery Factory - V. V. Sorokin kept it from sinking, which is his merit. Krasnoselsky Yuvelirprom (Krasnoselsky jewellery industry)  it is also great that it was saved from collapsing as it is the only company making 3D filigree pieces in the world. As an example of high art and creativity now in Russia, I would like to distinguish Ilgiz Fazulzyanov - he is great in all respects in his perseverance, hard work, and artistic taste. Among the new companies, the VIP-2000 firm is possibly the best today; it introduced new technologies and is one of the few companies supplying to most countries of the world, even to Australia; moreover, it supplies silver and offers the best prices (thanks to using advanced technologies) that are even better than those offered by the Chinese. And this company is the only example of commercial success as they both export and import the goods, and develop their own chain as well  a small but a stable one.

Tell us about your company, who are its founders, designers, and jewellers?

Prior to founding GRINGOR, I had worked at the Russian Gems company for 19 years. And I set myself the task of starting company from the ground up, without inviting the craftsmen and employees from that company. I invited five guys who had graduated from the Art Lyceum named after Carl Faberge, and we started working with them, and later on, a young technologist joined us. Together with them, we gained experience, got training, suffered and came up with new ideas, and this gave me an impetus, including in understanding the production process (although there was little to surprise me). We have done a lot of work from scratch, now they work at well-known firms taking higher posts - some of them are chief engineers, the others are leading specialists.

As for the designers, we had long discussions with Tatyana Platonova arguing over some things, and at the first stage, we made progress. Later on, I worked with Anastasia Kovalyova, she is from a group of young talented designers working in 3D-modelling. The good thing about the in the market though is it allows you working with at least a dozen designers at once, and all communications are very easy.

As for the founders: there must be a leader, a charger (sorry for the term: I have three university educations - all are different - and my first background is electrical engineering), so, I had to act as an initiator. Fortunately, I had a strong support from my family, and we still work together. Our jewellers also improved their skills, and all this is confirmed by the diplomas where all the names are mentioned. In addition, without engineering and technical personnel, we would not have made much progress. I had to take it upon myself, since I already knew all the jewellery technologies available in the world. From an economic point of view, I was lucky as E. P. Novikov who survived the WW2 blockade in Leningrad and was the former head of the pricing department at Yuvelirprom (USSR Jewellery Industry Association) joined our company, and he made a great contribution to the pricing policy of the company and the promotion of our products.

Is there anything you regret?

We never regret anything. We have lived a very difficult life - suffice it to say that for ten years, we have been constantly relying on loans. But we jumped out of this trap and continued our work. Our years are our wealth, but it must be hidden. We overcame all the trying obstacles with dignity, with our heads held high - this is especially true for my wife Tatyana Petrovna Gorynya, director of the GRINGOR company, who at first had to stand behind the counter and sell the goods.

How did you come to the jewellery business? And what does this business give you? Besides the fact that this is a family business ...

I was born in St. Petersburg on Vosstaniya Street, and in the apartment owned by Eugeny Yakobson, the leading painter at the Faberge firm, (although I did not know about it at that time). To some extent, I may say that the Jacobsons formed me, because it was an artistic family. In addition, after that, at the age of 12, I became the citys champion in ship modelling  I made and glued small yachts, ships ...

So, you are pretty good with your hands.

Well, I have a clever pair of hands, but everyone also needs a head. Probably, this childhood hobby also played a role. Then, it happened so that I, being a good engineer at a defense enterprise, was appointed the chief of a workshop against my will, and as young specialists, I got an apartment in the Rzhevka district, and it took almost three hours to go to work and back home by tram. And when I saw the Russian Gems factory next to my house, I went there, and the head of the personnel department used to be the political officer of the scuba diving team (I was a part of the team long ago), and for some reason, he also remembered me ... Thats how I came to the jewellery workshop. I was told, Its difficult to work here, but in my previous jobs, I used more complex technologies, so, to be honest, I almost had to laugh. So, I changed my job pretty easily.

As they say in India, Dharma is your lifework, true calling. And as they say, keep on working over and over again. Therefore, there are no super-tasks, but we should do our job better than somebody else. This, by the way, is a Japanese philosophy.

Galina Semyonova for Rough&Polished
Rutland, VT (05701)

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Sunny, along with a few afternoon clouds. High 76F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Mostly cloudy. Low near 55F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph.
Was the illegitimate daughter of Clark Gable and Loretta Young a product of date rape? Thats the claim made by Youngs daughter-in-law, who said the actress revealed before she died that the tryst may not have been consensual.

The glamorous movie star and devout Catholic was 23 years old when she began filming The Call of the Wild with Gable, a married Hollywood heartthrob. After learning she was pregnant, Young embarked on an elaborate ruse to conceal the baby, feigning illness and exhaustion for her absence from the public eye. Eventually she returned to Tinseltown with an adopted daughter in tow, Judy.

In this May 16, 1961 file photo, actress Loretta Young, right, and her daughter Judy Lewis attend a party following the Emmy awards in Hollywood. ( / AP)

The scandalous story and secret birth was the talk of the town, but the truth did not come to light until Young herself revealed it in memoirs released in 2000.

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Apparently there was more to the story about what happened that night.

In a Buzzfeed article posted Sunday, daughter-in-law Linda Lewis said Young had been watching Larry King Live in 1998 when the subject of date rape came up and she asked Lewis and her biographer friend Ed Funk what that meant.

I did the best I could to make her understand, Lewis said. You have to remember, this was a very proper lady. She said she explained to her then-85-year-old mother-in-law that date rape was basically when youre with someone that you trust, or literally on a date with them, and youre not compliant, or youre saying no, and theyre not listening. And they either cant hear it or believe the old myth of Oh, you really want that. I said, It doesnt have to be violent, it doesnt have to be rip-your-clothes-off. Its when your no isnt no.

And when she was done, the reality of what actually happened to her became clear, said Lewis.

Young took it all in and replied, Thats what happened between me and Clark.

We talked about it, and it didnt make her angry at him, it just gave her a new frame that I think lifted a lot of her guilt, Lewis said.

Young explained the stars were on an overnight train on the way home from production in separate sleeping compartments when Gable joined her. Young never told anyone, not even daughter Judy Lewis, what happened until decades later.

Linda Lewis said the actress did not want the truth to come out because it would hurt her daughter to find out she was not conceived in love.

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Biographer Funk said that Young lived with guilt all those years and felt the fault was all hers because she was unable to fend off Gables advances.

Lewis said that she is talking about the revelation now that Judy, who died in 2011, is not around to hear it.

I realized that its almost every day, all these rapes, and the men just keep getting away with it, she said.

In a piece in the New York Post, writer Lou Lumenick talked to Hollywood historians who were skeptical about the story. Robert Matzen noted that The Call of the Wild director William A. Wellman had said there was monkey business going on between Gable and Young and that he asked them to stop. He also pointed out that Young worked with Gable again on another movie years later. This new story makes her sound sort of like an idiot, Matzen said. Loretta was no idiot.

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But film historian David Stenn told the paper that it was entirely conceivable that Youngs version of events was true.

Its also possible that her Catholic guilt caused her to reframe the narrative decades later. It speaks to the tragic and unjust attitudes of the era. Not only did Loretta have the shame of premarital sex, but [she] had the burden of pregnancy. Judy told me her mother told her, You are my mortal sin. 

Young died in Santa Monica in 2000 at age 87. Gable never acknowledged that Judy was his daughter.
BAGHDAD (AP)  Iraqs prime minister says his country no longer requires American combat troops to fight the Islamic State group, but a formal time frame for their redeployment will depend on the outcome of talks with U.S. officials this week.

Mustafa al-Kadhimi said Iraq will still ask for U.S. training and military intelligence gathering. His comments came in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press ahead of a planned trip to Washington, where he's slated to meet with President Joe Biden on Monday for a fourth round of strategic talks.

There is no need for any foreign combat forces on Iraqi soil, said al-Kadhimi, falling short of announcing a deadline for a U.S. troop departure. Iraqs security forces and army are capable of defending the country without U.S.-led coalition troops, he said.

But al-Kadhimi said any withdrawal schedule would be based on the needs of Iraqi forces, who have shown themselves capable in the last year of conducting independent anti-IS missions.

The war against IS and the readiness of our forces requires a special timetable, and this depends on the negotiations that we will conduct in Washington, he said.

The U.S. and Iraq agreed in April that the U.S. transition to a train-and-advise mission meant the U.S. combat role would end but they didn't settle on a timetable for completing that transition. In Mondays meeting at the White House, the two leaders are expected to specify a timeline, possibly by the end of this year.

The U.S. troop presence has stood at about 2,500 since late last year when former President Donald Trump ordered a reduction from 3,000.

The U.S. mission of training and advising Iraqi forces has its most recent origins in former President Barack Obamas decision in 2014 to send troops back to Iraq. The move was made in response to the Islamic State group's takeover of large portions of western and northern Iraq and a collapse of Iraqi security forces that appeared to threaten Baghdad. Obama had fully withdrawn U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011, eight years after the U.S. invasion.

What we want from the U.S. presence in Iraq is to support our forces in training and developing their efficiency and capabilities, and in security cooperation, al-Kadhimi said.

The Washington trip comes as the premiers administration has faced one setback after another, seriously undermining public confidence. Ongoing missile attacks by militia groups have underscored the limits of the state to prevent them and a series of devastating hospital fires amid soaring coronavirus cases have left dozens dead.

Meanwhile, early federal elections, in line with a promise al-Kadhimi made when he assumed office, are less than three months away.

Chief on the agenda in Washington, however, is the future of American-led coalition forces in Iraq.

Iraq declared victory over IS in late 2017 after a ruinous and bloody war. The continued presence of American troops has become a polarizing issue among Iraqs political class since the U.S.-directed drone strike that killed powerful Iranian general Qassim Soleimani and Iraqi militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis on Iraqi soil last year.

To quell the threat of widespread instability following the targeted killings, the U.S. and Iraq have held at least three rounds of strategic talks centering on Iraqs military needs in the ongoing fight against IS and to formalize a timeline for withdrawal.

Four years since their territorial defeat, IS militants are still able to launch attacks in the capital and roam the countrys rugged northern region. Last week, a suicide bomber killed 30 people in a busy Baghdad marketplace. That attack was later claimed by IS.

Al-Kadhimi has faced significant pressure from mainly Shiite political parties to announce a timeline for a U.S. troop withdrawal. Ongoing rocket and, more recently, drone attacks targeting the American military presence have also heaped pressure on the government. They are widely believed to be perpetrated by Iran-aligned Iraqi militia groups.

An announcement that combat troops will withdraw might serve to placate Shiite parties but will have little impact on the ground: The coalitions combat mission ended effectively in November when the Pentagon reduced U.S. troops in the country to 2,500, according to Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein. Shiite parties have said they do not object to trainers or advisors who may remain as part of the coalition.

U.S. and coalition officials have maintained that U.S. troops are no longer accompanying Iraqi forces on ground missions and that coalition assistance is limited to intelligence gathering and surveillance and the deployment of advanced military technologies. Iraqi military officials have stressed they still need this support going forward.

Iraq has a set of American weapons that need maintenance and training. We will ask the American side to continue to support our forces and develop our capabilities, al-Kadhimi said.

Al-Kadhimi assumed power as a consensus candidate following months of political jockeying between rival parliamentary blocs. The blocs were firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadrs coalition on one side and paramilitary commander and former minister Hadi al-Ameris Fatah group on the other.

The stakes were high: Al-Kadhimi's predecessor had resigned facing pressure from historic mass anti-government protests. At least 600 people were killed as Iraqi forces used live ammunition and tear gas to disperse crowds.

Al-Kadhimi presented himself as a champion of protester demands and set a lofty agenda: He promised to hold early elections, now scheduled for Oct. 10, and to bring to account the killers of activists, including whoever killed prominent commentator Hisham al-Hashimi outside his home last summer.

The arrest of an Interior Ministry employee in the shooting death of al-Hashimi fell short, many said, because it did not reveal which group ordered the killing.

Critics say al-Kadhimi has not gone far enough. This is partly because the very conditions that facilitated his rise to the premiership have also served as his chief limitation in parliament.

Political opposition watered down ambitious economic reforms that targeted Iraqs bloated public sector when the country faced a disastrous financial crisis after falling oil prices. Without a party backing him in parliament, and with rival parties vying to control ministries and other state institutions, al-Kadhimis government has appeared weak.

Repeated standoffs with Iran-backed militia groups following the arrests of militiamen suspected of launching attacks against the U.S. Embassy and U.S. troops have further tarnished the governments credibility.

Activists whose cries for elections once resonated in the squares of the capital now say they will boycott the October polls, distrustful that the political establishment could ever produce free and fair elections.

A U.N. monitoring mission has been established in hopes of boosting voter turnout. But protesters have taken to the streets recently and expressed outrage over the rise in killings of prominent activists and journalists. Even al-Kadhimi conceded certain forces were actively seeking to undermine the polls.

We are in a sensitive situation. We need to calm the political situation until we reach the elections," he said.

Al-Kadhimi has managed to prove his mettle in one arena: That of regional mediator. Iraqs friendly relations with Saudi Arabia and Iran have brought both regional foes to the negotiation table for at least two rounds of talks in Baghdad.

Iraq has succeeded in gaining the trust of these countries, and accordingly, it is working toward the stability of the region.

___

Associated Press writer Robert Burns in Washington contributed reporting.
Sacramento District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert is the person Republicans would cook up in a laboratory as their perfect candidate for California attorney general.

Shes a career prosecutor who put Joseph DeAngelo, better known as the Golden State Killer, behind bars. She takes a tough-on-crime stance at a time when the GOP is trying to pin rising homicide rates on Democrats. She supports the death penalty, in contrast to Attorney General Rob Bonta, a progressive Democrat who is very vehemently against the death penalty because of its racist history.

Schubert lumps Bonta with progressive district attorneys like San Franciscos Chesa Boudin and Los Angeles George Gascon as prosecutors who dont really want to prosecute people.

Were in a state of chaos in the criminal justice system, Schubert said on The Chronicles Its All Political podcast. Its a refrain that has won her praise and endorsements from law enforcement and prosecutor organizations.

That said, Schubert has a big political challenge.

The lifelong Republican is no longer a member of the GOP. She left the party after being re-elected to a second term in 2018 and is now registered as a no party preference candidate. Nathan Hochman of Los Angeles, a former assistant U.S. attorney general appointed by President George W. Bush, is the most prominent Republican in the race.

I felt very strongly that the job of the district attorney and of the attorney general should be a nonpartisan issue, Schubert said. Public safety is not an R or D issue. So thats why I made the decision to leave, the party, adding that she had no problems with the GOP.

Schuberts challenge is that nobody has won statewide office in California with an NPP next to their name on the ballot. Not only do independent candidates lack a partys ability to blast their name across the state  and drop a few dollars on their campaigns  but voters almost reflexively vote their party registration. And right now, there are nearly as many registered Democrats as Republicans and NPPers combined.

Running independently will be especially challenging for Schubert, who is not well known outside of Sacramento. It was hard enough for former state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, the last Republican elected to statewide office, along with former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. And that was in 2006.

But when Poizner ran for his old job in 2018 as an independent, he lost to Democrat Ricardo Lara. If a wealthy, former office-holder like Poizner, who sold his GPS company to Qualcomm for $1 billion in 2000, couldnt win as an independent, who could?

Schubert is unfazed by the prospect of running without the GOPs imprimatur.

Theres a reason why people are kind of fed up with politics, Schubert said. And I think California is ready to elect somebody thats not going to allow this partisanship to enter a position that should be nonpartisan. 

Nevertheless, she will need to win a lot of Republican votes in next years June 7 top-two primary to get into a one-on-one matchup, presumably against Bonta. Yet she has made one move that wont endear her to the GOP grassroots who worship Donald Trump: Schubert told me she didnt vote for Trump. Twice. (Hochman declined to say whether he voted for Trump.)

I actually wrote in Condoleezza Rice both times, Schubert said. I just respected her.

Schubert is going to rely on her record rather than Trump obeisance to win over Republicans. Like how she has been a leader in investigating the massive fraud at the state Employment Development Department. Or how she has been a national pioneer in using DNA evidence to solve cases.

But sometimes she veers into hyperbole. Like when she denounces the rampant theft going on across California. Crime decreased in the states largest cities last year compared with 2019, remaining near a decades-long low, according to a study by the California Policy Lab at UC Berkeley.

People say, Oh, theft is down. Just because crime is not reported doesnt mean it doesnt exist, Schubert countered. Ask any of the retailers whether or not were really reporting all the theft. Ask people that are in San Francisco whose cars are broken into after five minutes of being left alone. Is everybody reporting? Of course not. They know nothings happening. Theyre fed up.

Some Californians may find Schuberts history of police oversight problematic. Her office has reviewed more than 40 cases of police killings of civilians since she was elected in 2014, but has never filed any charges. She faced widespread criticism for not prosecuting two Sacramento officers who killed Stephon Clark, a Black man, in a widely publicized 2018 case. (Then-Attorney General Xavier Becerra, a Democrat, also declined to press charges.)

Asked whether voters should be concerned about her oversight of alleged police misconduct, Schubert said: I prosecuted the Golden State Killer, who happened to be a cop. DeAngelo was briefly an officer in the 1970s. She added that her office has cases pending against officers for using excessive force.

I follow the facts and the law. The law is the law, Schubert said. Im not going to politicize it. Im not going to decide something because, you know, somebody yells at me too much.

While Bonta notes that he is Californias first attorney general of Filipino descent, Schubert would also make history if she won. She would be Californias first openly gay attorney general  only the fourth ever in the United States, according to the Human Rights Campaign.

Her campaign doesnt lead with that fact, but as Schubert said, Id be proud to be the first openly gay person as the AG in California, obviously. I dont wake up every morning and say, Im a gay prosecutor. I wake up and say, Im a prosecutor and Im gay. I also happen to have two kids and I love my children.

A side note to that potential history-making moment is that Schuberts brother Frank Schubert, was the political mastermind behind Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot measure that banned same-sex marriage. Some LGBTQ organizations have opposed Anne Marie Schubert in the past for not speaking up against the ballot measure. She said it would have been inappropriate to take a position on it then when she was preparing to run for a judgeship. She said she did not vote for Prop 8.

In 2012, Frank Schubert told me: I love my sister deeply, and I love her children. That doesnt require me to accept that marriages should be redefined because my sister is in a gay relationship with two kids. I worry about anybody who doesnt have the benefit of a loving, active father in their lives. And those kids wont have that. I pray for them.

Anne Marie Schubert said that what he said in that article was deeply personal to me because I love my children and I think Im quite capable. Two people, loving parents, no matter what their sex is, can raise very healthy children in this world. And thats what I strive to do every day with my kids. So while I love my brother, I completely disagree with him on this issue.

Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicles senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli
A condemned Death Row inmate known as the Dating Game Killer who was convicted of five murders  including that of a 12-year-old girl  died early Saturday in a hospital near Corcoran State Prison, south of Fresno, authorities said.

Rodney James Alcala, 77, died of undisclosed natural causes, according to a statement from the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Alcala was convicted in 2010 of five counts of murder and sentenced to death for a series of killings in the late 1970s in Southern California. His victims included a 27-year-old nurse, a 21-year-old keypunch operator, a 32-year-old legal secretary and an 18-year-old runaway. DNA evidence linking Alcala to the victims played a key role in the convictions.

For one of those killings  the 1979 murder of 12-year-old Robin Samsoe, as aspiring ballerina  he was convicted three times and sentenced to death each time, as the first two judgments were overturned. In 2013, he was convicted in the murder of two additional women in New York, also in the 1970s, for which he received an additional sentence of 25 years to life.

Prosecutors said he strangled his victims with shoelaces, pantyhose and his bare hands.

Alcala, an amateur photographer and a former typesetter for a Los Angeles newspaper, had appeared as a contestant in 1978 on The Dating Game television show. He was selected by a bachelorette from among three male contestants and went on a date with her.

California has executed 13 condemned inmates since 1978, the most recent in 2006.

Steve Rubenstein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: srubenstein@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SteveRubeSF
Chris Carlson/Associated Press

One person was killed and another was injured Saturday evening in a shooting on Highway 4 in Concord, prompting all westbound lanes to close, the California Highway Patrol said.

Someone opened fire at about 6:35 p.m. on westbound Highway 4, just east of Port Chicago Highway in Concord, CHP officials said. The victims were traveling in a black Toyota Camry, which CHP officials said crashed into the guardrail at the top of the Port Chicago off-ramp after the shooting.
Ive heard several stories from San Francisco Public Defender Manohar Raju about his courtroom experiences over the years. One thats stuck is about a man who was excused from jury service because he lived in Bayview, the same neighborhood as the Black defendant.

Raju said the dismissal prompted a different prospective juror to criticize the process.

He said he didnt see anyone that was African American, he didnt see anyone that was from the Bayview, and because of this, he didnt see how the process was going to be fair, Raju told me recently. People started clapping for him.

Applause isnt common during the jury selection process. Concerns about racial equity are.

Discrimination has been an enduring part of Americas criminal justice system for centuries. When it comes to who is picked to determine guilt or innocence, this sacred responsibility has been withheld from women and people of color until fairly recently. Women were still being kept off state juries until 1973, and courts were allowed to ban prospective jurors based solely on their race as recently as 1986.

This multigenerational disenfranchisement hasnt been fixed by a few belated rulings or laws, and the laughably low financial reimbursement for serving on a jury prevents many working-class individuals from performing their civic duty.

Which is why its time to introduce the concept of reparations to the ongoing work of jury reform.

Thats a scary word in America, where nearly two-thirds of people oppose the idea of financial reparations for descendants of slaves, according to a nationwide University of Massachusetts Amherst/WCVB poll released in April. But its a concept that may actually be tested, if not outright named, if California passes a bill intended to address class inequities in jury service.

This year, Assembly Member Phil Ting introduced AB1452. The San Francisco Democrats bill would create a pilot program called Be the Jury, which would raise the per-day pay for low-income jurors from $15 to $100 starting in 2022 and stopping before the end of 2023. Funded by philanthropic groups, one of the pilots goals is to improve racial and economic diversity in juries.

Thats certainly been a problem in San Francisco, where approximately 3,800 low-income residents were excused from jury service due to financial hardship in 2018 and 2019, according to the Financial Justice Project, an initiative within the city treasurers office that evaluates how fines and fees impact residents. Financial dismissals accounted for 12% of all jury excusals in that time. Meanwhile, data from the Bay Area Equity Atlas shows that 59% of Black families and 53% of Latino families qualified as very low income last year because they earned less than 50% of the area median income.

The size of your wallet or who your employer is shouldnt impact your right to serve on a jury, said Anne Stuhldreher, the director of the Financial Justice Project, which raised the philanthropic money that would finance Be the Jury.Were trying to make sure our system of justice serves everyone fairly.

Having a truly reflective cross-section of society represented in the jury box matters.

Diverse juries spend more time in deliberations and are less likely to presume a defendants guilt, according to an influential 2006 study by Tufts University psychology Professor Sam Sommers. During a recent phone call, Sommers told me jury diversity shouldnt be considered a magic bullet to address disproportionate incarceration rates. But it might influence the perceived legitimacy of a criminal justice system by the people who feel most targeted by it.

When one sees juries that are not diverse, that tends to undermine the general publics faith in the legitimacy of the system, and probably more so among certain demographics, he said. Im not sure your average white citizen is attuned to that perhaps as your average Black, Latino or Asian citizen might be.

The state I grew up in, Louisiana, has the highest incarceration rate of any state in the country. More than half of the folks behind bars are Black despite making up one-third of Louisianas population. So when I received my first jury summons at the age 19, I jumped at the opportunity.

The details of the trial have blurred with time, but what I remember clearly is how our jury pored over the case for days. We ultimately found the defendant guilty of a parole violation, but it was by no means an easy decision. The experience made me feel like I had influence on a system that historically didnt care about people like me.

In a way I was fortunate because I had enough financial support to spend two weeks focused on nothing else but the case before me. I couldnt have done that if I was trying to get by on minimum wage.

In San Francisco, the hourly minimum wage is $16.32. For the daily juror pay to reflect this, Be the Jury would need to increase its $100 per-day pay to $130.56. Of course it would take more philanthropy to accomplish this, but San Francisco, which has a billionaire for almost every one of its 49 square miles, shouldnt have a problem covering the gap.

If we really want juries to represent all colors and classes, then we need to reimburse people for the sacrifice were asking them to make. If you dont want to call it reparations, then fine. Think of it as fair pay for civic services rendered.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Justin Phillips appears Sundays. Email: jphillips@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JustMrPhillips
Police have arrested two people on suspicion of defacing a Black Lives Matter mural painted on a street in downtown Santa Cruz, investigators said Sunday.

The mural at 800 Center St. was defaced with vehicle tread marks late Friday, according to authorities, who said they received reports early Saturday.

The targeted vandalism of the ... mural is heartbreaking and violating, Santa Cruz Mayor Donna Meyers said Sunday.

Brandon Bochat, 20, of Santa Cruz and Hagan Warner, 19, of Boulder Creek (Santa Cruz County) were seen on video provided to law enforcement by community members burning out or intentionally applying vehicle tread marks to the length of the mural, officials said.

The two took turns driving over the mural, authorities said. Police Chief Andy Mills said Sunday that the underlying street was also damaged.

This was an intentional act of vandalism on something that our community holds dear, Mills said Sunday.

For those who seek to minimize the events that took place, he added, shame on you. This was meaningful to this community, and we will do everything within our power to make sure those who did this are brought to justice.

City Manager Martin Bernal said the city is working closely with the Santa Cruz Equity Collaborative, the organization that originally helped create the mural, to repair the damage as soon as possible. He added the work is still in progress, and staff does not have a specific dates for completion yet.

The two suspects were arrested and booked on felony vandalism charges Saturday night, police said. Both were released on bail.

At a community meeting Sunday morning at Police Department headquarters that was attended by several dozen people and also broadcast on Facebook, tensions ran high, with many questioning why the two men were not charged with a hate crime.

This was a terrorist act against the Black community, said one attendee. This is actually an act of violence, its psychological damage.

Mills said investigators are still collecting evidence, including looking at the social media accounts of those arrested. He added that if sufficient evidence exists at the end of an investigation, the two will be charged with a hate crime.

Investigators are still looking for at least two more people in connection with the vandalism. Anyone with information about this case is encouraged to contact the Santa Cruz Police Department Investigations Unit at (831) 420-5820.

Emma Talley is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: emma.talley@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @EmmaT332
For several days in late spring, San Francisco General Hospital had no COVID-19 patients, and the staff rejoiced.

From the intensive care floors no longer near-overflowing with patients to the emergency department where doctors and nurses had worried for more than a year that anyone who showed up could be infected, the relief was palpable, said Dr. Robert Rodriguez, an emergency physician at San Francisco General and a professor at UCSF.

Then California reopened and dropped almost all pandemic safeguards, and the highly contagious delta variant arrived. Few had believed the pandemic was over, of course. But its discouraging to be bracing for yet another surge, Rodriguez said, and living again under a cloud of anxious anticipation of just how bad things will get.

Cases definitely are increasing, and there is a sort of  I would call it a triggering, Rodriguez said of a staff thats already exhausted and traumatized from the long pandemic.

As of Friday, eight people were hospitalized with COVID at San Francisco General, including three in intensive care; all were not vaccinated. And Rodriguez cant help wondering, Is this going to accelerate? Is this going to fade? Or are we just going to continue at this rate, this smoldering rate, indefinitely?

Those are questions that extend far beyond San Francisco Generals emergency room. Across a region with some of the highest vaccination rates in the world, theres a collective sense of dread, confusion, frustration and despondency. And people are asking: How can this be happening again?

The Bay Area appears to be hurtling into a fourth surge, with cases spiking in every county and hospitalizations rising quickly, too. But this wave is unlikely to mimic the past  at least thats the assumption of health experts.

Its fueled largely by the unvaccinated, who tend to be young and healthy and not at high risk of serious illness or death. So far, vaccinated people who get infected almost always have mild illness or no symptoms at all. That means this wave should be less devastating than earlier ones.

Even so, the numbers contain a stark warning: Until the world conquers COVID  until global vaccination stomps out any opportunity for the coronavirus to mutate into something more dangerous and harder to contain  even the Bay Area will remain at risk. Eliminating the virus is probably not possible. This summer surge may simply be a bump on the rough path toward learning to coexist with COVID.

Were going to have to live with this for a while, said Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, an infectious disease expert at Stanford. And we are reaching the point where people have to just settle into that. We have to get back to some kind of a normal life. We cant keep living like this. But normal life now may be different.

This current surge in many ways feels distressingly familiar to the three previous waves the Bay Area has endured. New cases are doubling every week or two, and are now roughly in line with the early stages of the summer and winter surges. Two weeks ago, Dr. Erica Pan, the state epidemiologist, said California could be facing a wave one-half to two-thirds the size of last summers.

But cases are not as useful a marker of this pandemic as they once were. Those who are vaccinated may still become infected, therefore contributing to the case counts, and they may be able to transmit the virus to others. But very few of them will become seriously ill or die. Even if large numbers of unvaccinated people also get infected  which is exactly whats happening  and end up with severe illness, there probably wont be enough of them to overwhelm hospitals.

COVID hospitalizations, though, always lag a few weeks behind cases, and deaths a few weeks after that. And hospitalization numbers already are creeping up  they climbed 30% in just five days in the Bay Area last week. Deaths remain at or near their lowest points in the pandemic.

We are very concerned about the rise in cases, and the rise in hospitalizations also, said Dr. Chris Farnitano, the Contra Costa County health officer, at a news briefing last week. Its going up as rapidly as we saw it last summer and last winter.

Bay Area health officials said they dont anticipate any major new lockdowns in response to this surge, and the response so far has been more nuanced and diffuse. Instead of mandates, health officials are issuing recommendations and hoping people understand enough about the virus to abide by them. Meanwhile many businesses are requiring that staff get vaccinated, or theyre demanding everyone wear masks. Some Bay Area restaurants and bars have become vaccination-only establishments.

Los Angeles is the only county in California to issue a wide-reaching new mandate in response to climbing case rates, now requiring everyone, vaccinated or not, to wear masks in public indoor spaces. Eight of the nine Bay Area counties have recommended a return to masking for all residents but are not  yet  requiring them.

The Bay Area holdout is Solano County, where the health officer said he doesnt think a mask recommendation, or even a mandate, will help. Cases in Solano County are climbing as rapidly as anywhere in the region, but theyre mostly due to social gatherings, especially from the Fourth of July, said Dr. Bela Matyas, and the masking mandates do not apply to your backyard barbecues.

Matyas, a frequent contrarian among his Bay Area public health colleagues, said he understands why people are feeling anxious over this latest uptick in cases. In many ways the region has experienced a shared trauma, and every setback can seem ominous.

Now we are at a time when we pretty much have to face facts: This disease will be with us chronically. Theres nothing about it that indicates its going away any time soon, Matyas said. As long as hospitalizations and deaths dont spike again, the fact that a lot of people are getting sick from a disease we cant get rid of, thats normal. In fact, this (reopening) has been an enormous success.

That success can be hard for some people to embrace as the pandemic continues to smolder. But public health and infectious disease experts say people should remain confident in the vaccines, and that this phase of the pandemic, though at times disheartening, is part of the long road toward recovery.

In many ways this isnt unexpected, whats happening now, said Dr. Maria Garcia, a UCSF professor of medicine who focuses on health disparities. Its disappointing. It may feel like were moving backwards. But we are still moving forwards.

The situation the Bay Area now faces is a huge turnabout from June 15, when California reopened. The region, with relatively high vaccination rates and low case rates, seemed like a safe place for unvaccinated as well as vaccinated people.

What weve learned in the last 18 months is this thing just has curveball after curveball, said Dr. Robert Wachter, chief of the Department of Medicine at UCSF. Though the delta variant  perhaps twice as infectious as the original strain of the virus  was causing chaos in other parts of the world by the time California reopened, many experts still underestimated it.

You think you can project the future because its mostly math. And mostly things looked great (before June 15). We felt like we had a pretty good handle on what the summer would look like, Wachter said. And we were wrong, because the virus got smarter.

What may be most challenging about this stage of the pandemic is the familiar, unsettling sense of uncertainty over what comes next. In the fall schools will reopen. Influenza may come back. The winter will drive people indoors for holiday gatherings.

The Bay Area will almost certainly never experience anything like the calamity of last winters surge. But beyond that, its hard to know what to expect, said Dr. Jahan Fahimi, an emergency room physician at UCSF.

Theres really only one thing that in my mind we can say with certainty, he said. You need to get vaccinated if youre not vaccinated.

Erin Allday is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: eallday@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @erinallday
I am done with domesticity. I do not mean Im done with cooking, or cleaning, or staying home on occasion these are all necessary at times to preserve ones life and paycheck.

But I am done aspiring to domestic goddess status. And I suspect a lot of women feel the same.

For most of the past 17 months, women have been told to distract ourselves from the horror of living in an era of mass death by baking focaccia and sourdough and cooking beans from scratch. We were supposed to isolate, first for a couple of weeks, then for a year and change. We were expected to drink, but not too much, and to avoid gaining a single solitary pound lest we emerge from quarantine unattractive  presumably all that bread we were baking was for other people. Working women, especially working mothers, were supposed to do all this even as the second shift  parenting, household labor  became temporally and spatially indistinguishable from the first shift, and child care all but vanished.

I can chart most of my relationship to womanhood via my relationship to food. Eating it (fraught; guilt-laden; also a much surer source of pleasure than almost anything else), yes, but especially preparing it.

I used to love cooking dinner  for myself, but mostly for others. Part of this comes down to how I was raised. My mom is a farm girl from Georgia who baked her first cake at the age of 4. My dad, bless him, cannot cook, and marriage at 23 precluded the possibility of him ever learning (at least in his mind). These facts injected my liberal New Jersey childhood with a jolt of traditionalism.

For the most part, in my childhood home, women cooked and men ate.

I started to cook regularly for the first time in college, when I moved into a rickety apartment with two friends. The meals I created were nothing fancy  pasta with Marcella Hazans tomato sauce, roasted vegetables, omelets glossy with butter. More often than not, we would have people over. Friends were always dropping by in those days, and I took pleasure in playing the role of the flustered, put-upon wife when one of my roommates came by with seven classmates before their evening seminar.

What am I going to feed all these people? I cried, and then reassured everyone that I was actually having a great time.

Throwing a dinner party is a foolproof way to make yourself the protagonist of a social setting. I liked hosting because I liked being important. Cooking  cooking well  gets you praise, attention and a kind of indispensable status. People want to be with you; people want to keep you around. Its a self-aggrandizing scheme that reads as completely selfless.

I suspect my mother knows this. My brothers and I, even at the height of our teenage closed-door brutishness, would always come out of our rooms for a slice of homemade pie.

But more than a year into a pandemic that has led to a 33-year low for womens participation in the labor force, I dont find cosplaying as a 50s housewife to be quite so cute.

Im now vaccinated, employed and freshly installed in a major city. My new job has hours that lend themselves well to late dinner reservations, but badly to cooking a meal. Sitting down at a restaurant at 8:30 feels glamorous and cosmopolitan, while starting to cook at that hour reminds me of my mother as a young wife, baking brownies at 9:30 so my dad would have dessert in his lunch the next day.

I cook when I need to, as well as I need to. I let the dishes pile up. I stay out late (and sometimes even early).

I am lucky, of course, to be able to live like this, but I am also making a choice: I dont need to channel Nigella Lawson or Alison Roman to feel indispensable, or interesting, or beloved.

Selfishness is not a virtue, but self-possession is.

The work that goes into a successful performance of femininity is so all-encompassing that opting out of even one aspect can be exhilarating. These days, I most try to emulate women who seek pleasure and experience on their own terms: party girls, career women, protagonists of female-authored 50s screwball novels. Women have been expected to pick up the slack for Americas failing-to-nonexistent social safety net throughout the pandemic, and theres a joy in sometimes dropping the rope to go dancing.

Mariah Kreutter is a writer and a news assistant at the New York Times.
WASHINGTON  As Democrats maneuver over what to include in their massive infrastructure package working its way through Congress, theres someone perhaps unexpected shaping the conversation: Shyamala Gopalan Harris.

Legislators are working on a $3.5 trillion Democrat-only bill that would fortify Americas human infrastructure, not just physical items like roads and bridges, a potentially historic move that is also politically fraught.

Thats where Vice President Kamala Harris mother comes in. Its no secret that the vice president was heavily influenced by Gopalan Harris, an Indian immigrant scientist and single mom who raised Kamala and her sister in the East Bay in the 60s and 70s. Many of Harris speeches feature quotes or stories about her mother, who died in 2009.

Tucked into the repeated parables Harris tells is a revolutionary narrative out of the White House: That parenthood, and in particular motherhood, is not just an individual challenge, but a societal one that needs and deserves an infrastructure around it to succeed.

Speaking with The Chronicle, Harris said she tells her stories very purposefully and that she was profoundly shaped by watching her divorced mom balancing children and career. There was a lot of juggling that had to happen in order for her to pursue her life, right? Harris said of her mom.

Its not just about the past: Harris is also a mother, affectionately known as Momala, to two now-adult stepchildren with husband Douglas Emhoff, whom she married in 2014 when she was California attorney general. That has meant her own juggling of career and family, including a high-profile Senate hearing that conflicted with her stepdaughters high school graduation.

Kamala Harris / Democratic National Committee

Experts say this is one of the subtle but powerful ways that Harris is changing politics by virtue of being the first person like her in her position  including the first mother elected on a presidential ticket, as well as the first woman and woman of color. And, they say, it couldnt be more timely.

For decades now, men have made policy and men have talked about the importance of roads and bridges, so that men can go to work, and so that men can create more jobs for men, said Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat whose own presidential campaign prominently featured her struggles as a working mother.

With more women in policy-making  specifically, more mothers  were now talking about child care as part of infrastructure, Warren said. And that helps create more opportunities for women, more opportunities for mothers, and more opportunities for women to work.

As with any vice president, Harris role is usually to give credit to her boss, President Biden. Widely seen as Bidens political heir apparent, Harris has become a lightning rod for criticism on hot-button issues assigned to her by the president, including migration to the southern border. But advocates who work with the White House say her presence and platform have already played a key role in shaping policy around motherhood, both in public-facing and internal ways.

Even before the White House introduced its proposed human infrastructure package named the American Families Plan, Harris was deployed nationwide to highlight some of its components, including a daylong trip to New Haven, Conn., in March to focus on child care and administration efforts supporting children. She has also pressed these issues in internal meetings, according to staff and those close to the White House, helping keep the entire administration focused on it.

In a call with reporters marking six months of the new administration, Harris spokeswoman Symone Sanders noted the vice presidents work on these issues. Harris vision, Sanders said, specifically led to the implementation of monthly payments for the child tax credit, a provision of the COVID relief bill. Harris also elevated the national emergency facing women during the pandemic and was a champion for the child care provisions of the relief package, Sanders said.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Allies say her ability to call attention to these issues is invaluable. The White House, for instance, marked Black Maternal Health Week for the first time this year and held a roundtable on the topic hosted by Harris. It has been a focus of hers going back to her days in the Senate.

Part of the work we have to do is to make all of this visible, said Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Womens Law Center, a group that promotes gender equality. She participated in a February roundtable with Harris and other female leaders about the pandemics impact on women.

Once we do that, well understand what it will take to invest in it, Goss Graves said. Babies and children dont care for themselves. ... So one of the things I think the vice president has been able to do is to make it visible, to help weave together why care is so essential to families but also to our full economy.

When Harris tells the story of her mothers balancing act between career and child care after getting divorced, she invariably mentions the crucial help of a neighbor and day care operator whom she calls a second mother. The ecosystem of care, she said, was simply seen as natural.

Those were the earliest models I had, Harris said. It was about community as an extension of family, but it was about taking care of working women and their children.

Kamala Harris / Democratic National Committee

Harris longtime staffer and domestic policy adviser Rohini Kosoglu has observed firsthand how the vice president keeps this focus up across the administration. In a recent meeting with the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, for example, Harris stressed how the proposed budget benefited children and other family issues. Harris said she tells her team to break down every policy they present to her in terms of how it would affect a child.

Shes using her platform to elevate this issue for the American people, Kosoglu said. This is is her experience, and its also shes a great ambassador to do that.

As a candidate for president, Harris first policy proposal was an idea to raise teacher pay, and as vice president she has been the White Houses chief campaigner for pouring billions of dollars into child care.

Several of Harris supporters say her taking the office of vice president couldnt be more timely, as mothers have disproportionately dropped out of the workforce during the pandemic after decades of their needs being neglected by policy.

White House proposals to boost human infrastructure  Provide universal preschool for children ages 3 and 4 and two years of free community college post-graduation.  Ensure that middle- and low-income families have access to high-quality child care at the cost of no more than 7% of their income.  Create a national paid family and medical leave program.  Expand nutrition assistance to families to address hunger.  Extend and expand tax credits most beneficial to families. Harris' work on motherhood issues Feb. 18: Held a virtual roundtable with female senators, representatives and nongovernment leaders to discuss the coronavirus relief package's impact on women and the needs of mothers in the workforce. March 3: Visited a female-owned business in Alexandria, Va., to highlight the coronavirus relief package and its impact on women leaving the workforce, especially mothers. March 18: Met with female leaders in the labor movement to discuss women and mothers in the workforce. March 24: Held a roundtable discussion with female leaders of advocacy groups on Equal Pay Day. March 26: Traveled to New Haven, Conn., to visit a child care center and highlight the needs of families and parents. April 13: Convened a Black maternal health roundtable with women who experienced complications in pregnancy, birth, and postpartum. April 15: Gave remarks about implementing the coronavirus relief package's support for child care. May 5: Held a roundtable in Rhode Island with women leading small businesses to discuss their needs, including child care. June 8: While in Mexico City, met with female entrepreneurs and highlighted needs such as child care and paid leave. June 11: Spoke about the administration's support for families at a child care center in Washington, D.C. June 21: Delivered remarks in Pittsburgh on the expansion of the child tax credit and other parent-focused efforts by the administration. See More Collapse

To be sure, its hard to pinpoint evidence that having mothers in elected office narrows those gaps, said Sarah Damaske, a sociologist at Penn State University who studies gender, family and work. The sample size is just too small: We dont know because we havent had enough moms making policy, she said.

But there is plenty of evidence about where mothers fall through the cracks  and a liberal political culture isnt enough to fix the problem, according to Leah Ruppanner, a Bay Area native who studies work and family in the U.S. and abroad at University of Melbourne.

Ruppanners analysis found, for example, that despite Californias progressive policies on gender equality, it has among the lowest rates in the U.S. of workforce participation by mothers. Short school days, expensive child care and the high cost of living discourage many mothers from working, she said.

States like California are really, really good at empowering women, Ruppanner said. Theyre abysmal in supporting mothers.

Time and again, experts emphasized that policies that support mothers arent niche concerns, but rather benefit all of society.

One of the participants in the Black maternal health roundtable Harris held was Erica McAfee, who founded a company to support other women after her own losses in pregnancy and birth. The gaps in maternal health and fertility care for Black women are especially tragic, but not isolated, she noted: If we truly do save Black moms and babies, well save all moms and babies.

Other prominent mothers in political office say having representation at the highest levels makes changes in some obvious and some subtle ways  something they credit Harris with building upon.

Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth, who was the first person to have a baby while serving as a senator, said her own experience made her realize the importance of private lactation rooms, leading her to get laws passed to ensure access to such spaces in airports and federal buildings.

Theres just a lot of lived experiences that ... I didnt think about until I actually gave birth to my first daughter, said Duckworth, a Democrat. I never got it, how hard that was, until I was trying to pump breast milk for three hours. Thats when I wrote the law.

File photos

Oakland Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee, who raised two sons while going to Mills College as a single mom and has long supported Harris career, said shes starting to see change thanks to more representation for mothers. When Lee was a staffer for former Oakland Rep. Ron Dellums, there was no child care for Capitol Hill employees. Now, they have access to it. She said mothers can also make change through how they shape the national conversation, including as committee chairs in what hearings they schedule, and whom they invite to speak.

The impact isnt only from Democratic mothers in office, though there are more of them. Washington Republican Rep. Jaime Herrera-Beutler helped start a congressional caucus on maternal care and has written laws including requiring the Transportation Security Administration to better accommodate parents traveling with breast milk.

Harris confirmed to The Chronicle that there have already been times in this administration that she changed the direction of a discussion because she was in the room, emphasizing that mothers deserve more than platitudes from society.

Recognizing someones value is not about giving them a greeting card, Harris said. Its about a true recognition, understanding the value of that work and then acknowledging that with the resources and the support that is necessary to allow that work to happen.

Tal Kopan is The San Francisco Chronicles Washington correspondent. Email: tal.kopan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @talkopan
- Cal Fire: See incident reports from Cal Fire's website.

- Maps: View maps from the U.S. Forest Service.

- Road closures: Get updates from Caltrans District 2's Twitter feed.

- Evacuations: Find the latest information from Cal Fire.

- Dixie Fire information line: (530) 538-7826.

California's Dixie Fire has been exploding in size in recent days amid high winds and hot temperatures, and while the blaze 230 miles northeast of San Francisco torched an additional 2,000 acres on Sunday, its speed of growth slowed.

A heavy blanket of smoke created a temperature inversion, and incident meteorologist Julia Ruthford said at a Sunday night briefing that this cooled the fire. Plus, winds were calmer, according to Plumas News. The smoke turned out to be our friend, Ruthford said.

Cal Fire pinned the blaze at 192,849 acres, or 301 square miles, on Sunday night. That's six times the size of San Francisco. It's 21% contained.

The fire is the 15th largest fire ever in California, according to Cal Fire data.

JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images

Though more evacuations were issued Sunday, the overall day was a relief after Saturday, when the fire exploded into a raging monster merging with the smaller Fly Fire and devouring multiple homes.

Flames had already leveled over a dozen houses and other structures when it tore through Indian Falls after dark. Some structures in this Plumas County neighborhood about 13 miles north of Quincy burned, but many were also saved.

"Devastating," wrote one Twitter user, commenting on a video showing firefighters trying to put out flames engulfing a home.

As of Sunday night, the number of structures destroyed stood at 16 and minor structures at six. This number is expected to grow as crews on the ground assess damage, including properties in Indian Falls.

There are 10,721 structures still threatened.

JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images

The fire burned in steep, rugged terrain with limited access, hampering firefighters efforts as it charged eastward, fire officials said. It has prompted evacuation orders in several small communities and along the west shore of Lake Almanor, a popular area getaway.

The Fly Fire that ignited Thursday in Plumas County in Butterfly Valley and near the junction of highways 89 and 70 grew to 4,300 acres and merged with the Dixie Fire Saturday night into Sunday.

"These two fires have come together tonight," Dennis Burns, a fire behavior analyst with Cal Fire, said at a Saturday night briefing posted on Facebook. "We have crews actively engaged in structure protection down into some of the communities along Highway 70 and in Butterfly Valley."

Burns reported that the blaze didn't pose a threat of pushing south toward Quincy at this time: "This fire is pulling itself over into Taylorsville. It went over the top of Mount Hough this afternoon. Were seeing long-range spotting. The fire has also come down to Highway 89 to Indian Falls."

The Plumas County Sheriff's Office issued new evacuations Saturday and Sunday: See evacuation information from the sheriff here.

Threats and risks associated with this fire are very real, Commander Troy Minton-Sander said at a Saturday night briefing, adding later that Taylorsville, Crescent Mills, and Greenville are our main concerns tomorrow.  If you occupy one of the mandatory evacuation areas, please leave.

U.S. Forest Service

There are more than 7,400 people evacuated in Plumas County and more than 100 in Butte County due to the Dixie Fire, California's Office of Emergency Services said.

The fire has pumped out massive pyrocumulus clouds and on Saturday the smoke plume was directly over the town of Greenville.

"When I was there at 4 oclock, it looked like it was midnight," said Burns. "A lot of ash fall."

Wildfire photographer Josh Edelson shared a photo on Twitter taken in downtown Greenville late afternoon Saturday showing an eerily dark blood red sky waning into darkness overhead. "(iPhone pic) Darkest fire Ive ever seen," Edelson wrote. "Hearing this is directly under a 15k foot smoke column. Its also 93 degrees."

The Dixie Fire started July 13 in the Feather River Canyon near Cresta Dam, about 100 miles north of Sacramento. At well over 100,000 acres, it's what considered a megafire. These are becoming increasingly common, especially in California, which has been hit repeatedly by extreme weather events, including heat waves, drought and dry lightning.

These humongous fires were rare in California before 2003  but 18 of the 20 largest fires in the states history have occurred since then, according to state data.

SFGATE

Elsewhere in California, the Tamarack Fire south of Lake Tahoe continued to burn through timber and chaparral and threatened communities on both sides of the California-Nevada state line. The fire, sparked by lightning July 4 in Alpine County, has destroyed at least 10 buildings.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has declared a state of emergency for four northern counties because of wildfires that he said were causing conditions of extreme peril to the safety of persons and property. The proclamation opened the way for more state support.

Such conditions are often from a combination of unusual random, short-term and natural weather patterns heightened by long-term, human-caused climate change. Global warming has made the West much warmer and drier in the past 30 years.

JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
When my friend Amy suggested a little hike up Puu Waawaa, what may be the oldest cinder cone on Hawaii Island, I was excited to tackle the 100,000-year-old landmass that dominates the landscape between Kona and Waimea.

Then came the summit ... or so I thought. No, just another incline. Some choice words flew out of my mouth as we continued to ascend.

After 4 miles of trekking, we finally crested the real summit, panting and out of breath. Greeted by the view, our companion Joe joked that we could do a little swim to Maui next weekend. I glared at Amy briefly, before we all collapsed in laughter.

Wed made it. Breathtaking doesnt quite describe the experience of hiking to the top; it feels as if you just conquered the world. We had just scaled a 1,900-foot vertical elevation, surrounded by miles of panoramic expanse before us once we reached the extraordinary peak. Upon seeing the views of the Kona coastline, Mauna Loa, Mauna Kea, the Kohala Mountains and the puus mother, Hualalai, every drop of effort became worth it.

Gazing at our immediate surroundings, we spotted lava flows that date back 3,000 to 5,000 years and embrace the cinder cone like molten arms.

Theres much to see along the way. Leaves of centuries-old trees whisper in the cool, gentle breeze laced with delicate floral aromas wafting through the mixed mesic and tropical dry forest ecosystems comprising this geological wonder. A cacophony of birds sing, and majestic monarch butterflies flit by.

Vivid fuchsias, neon oranges, luminous yellows and vibrant purples bloom throughout the greenery.

Centuries of Hawaiian navigators have used this long-standing landmass as a vantage point and landmark while traversing the island. Peaking at approximately 4,000 feet in elevation with a diameter of one mile, this ancient remnant of the Hawaii Island shield volcano Hualalai and some of its native vegetation have remarkably survived thousands of years of volcanic devastation.

Delory Morales/Special to SFGATE

Hiking through history

Puus are hills or cinder cones on a volcanos flanks. Touring the Hawaiian Islands, many are spotted along the landscape, visual reminders of the power of Pele.

Long ago, the islands were divided into pie-like swaths of land, called ahupuaa, running from the ocean to the uplands to evenly distribute vital natural resources for the Kanaka Maoli, or Native Hawaiians, who inhabited the archipelago. Areas with the richest resources were the most populous.

People residing in the higher elevations could barter with others near the coast, trading woods or taro for fish, for example, thus fostering an evenly balanced resource-access system that kept island inhabitants alive.

Puu Waawaa translates into furrowed hill because of its dramatic landscape, carved by millennia of water flows. It is also the namesake of the Waawaa Ahupuaa that comprises 104,000 acres of land, roughly the size of half of Molokai, extending from Kuhio Bay to nearly 6,000 feet in elevation.

Delory Morales/Special to SFGATE

Generations have lived in and cared for Waawaa Ahupuaa. Aloha Aina, or love of the land, permeates Hawaiian culture; it is ingrained that if you take care of the land, it will take care of you.

King Kamehameha III made this ahupuaa his home, earning it the title of Crown Lands. Trees such as the wiliwili, aiea and koa that grew here were sought after for their woods used to craft canoes, tools and weapons.

In the late 18th century, cattle were introduced to the Island of Hawaii. The king sent an emissary to California to recruit cowboys to manage the cattle and teach Hawaiians how to handle the grazing livestock and horses used to wrangle them. Three vaquero, Mexican Spanish cowboys, relocated to the island and began the history of Hawaiis paniolos, a cowboy culture which exists to this day.

But the American government annexed Hawaii as a U.S. territory in 1898. Where once the alii, or Hawaiian royalty, gave residents use rights for land that was believed to belong to everyone, ranchers and businesses began demanding land rights. Leases were soon provided to ranchers seeing the ranging opportunities on Puu Waawaa.

Once livestock were introduced in the late 18th century, the growth that had thrived for thousands of years was soon grazed down to almost nothing.

The Hawaiian Islands are geographically isolated, and researchers believe that new species only arrive every 20,000 years or so. Upon arrival, the even-keeled climate allows them to adapt and thrive.

Unless cattle, sheep, pigs or goats get to them.

Non-native plants and trees were introduced to the puu by ranchers for shade and ornamental use. With so much unoccupied space that once boasted native trees and sacred plants, the newly planted foreign species proliferated quickly.

One was fountain grass, a fire-resistant, easily spread weed that today is proving to be one of the most dangerous threats to the islands ecosystems. The land was forever altered.

The Waawaa Ahupuaas diverse and historic lands were transferred in January 2002 to the Division of Forestry and Wildlife. Today, only 1% of the multiple ecosystems found on the cinder cone consist of native trees and flora, says Puu Waawaa coordinator and natural area reserves specialist Dr. Elliott Parsons.

Protecting the ecosystems

Ascending Puu Waawaa, hikers witness the transition of ecosystems from dry forest to mesic, followed by one of the most endangered forest types on Earth, a tropical dry forest. Continuing onward, a damp cloud forest crowns part of the hill.

Delory Morales/Special to SFGATE

A 2003 biological assessment study of Puu Waawaa by Hawaii's Department of Land and Natural Resources Division of Forestry and Wildlife counted 189 native vascular plants, 264 native arthropods, 15 native birds and 38 non-native bird species.

The area boasts at least 40 rare plant species, 17 of which are listed as federally endangered, plus 11 endangered birds and one insect. Many others have been obliterated completely.

In 2007, 38,885 acres of the Puu Waawaa State Forest Reserve were designated as an Experimental Tropical Forest, 3,885 of which became a bird sanctuary. The exquisite area was protected from further harm while remaining accessible to the public.

Some acreage continues to be leased to ranchers to help keep fire hazards down through livestock grazing, allowing the native species to be repopulated. Reforestation of Puu Waawaa is of critical importance to the management team and is being accomplished in some innovative ways.

While its difficult to age trees in Hawaii because the consistent climate doesnt allow for formation of rings in the trunk, officials have mapped many kupuna trees, or elders among the landscape.

Reforestation of these trees begins in a nursery within the reserve. Miniscule ohias and koas, along with approximately 40 to 60 native species, begin as seedlings and are then nurtured to the point of planting.

Encompassed by fencing to encourage growth, 84 acres of the reserve now burgeon with saplings trying to spear the sky. Endemic birds like the endangered Hawaiian crow, once nearly extinct, are repopulating thanks to the bird sanctuary.

Research supported through the experimental forest designation is expected to help other similarly endangered ecosystems around the world. And soon, the first-ever community-managed forest should allow residents, often with familial ties to the ahupuaa going back generations, to decide what culturally significant plants and trees will populate this portion of the reserve.

Once in danger of being robbed of its endemic native growth and fauna, Puu Waawaa is looking at a thriving future.

Delory Morales/Special to SFGATE

Hikers wonderland

But protection doesnt stop there. A big part of managing the preserve is managing the people, trail and access specialist for Hawaii Island Jackson Bauer explains.

Signage financially supported by the Hawaii Tourism Authority is being installed and improved to make the hike a more educational and interactive excursion. Roads and paths used by ranchers and miners have been repurposed into navigable public trails, with existing structures serving as meeting spaces, offices and housing for groups interested or working in the area.

Its working. During our hike, we encounter two other Hawaii Island residents traipsing down the trail, blissfully discussing their visit to the puu in French. The women, one originally from Lyon, the other Montreal, stopped to share what they love about the hike.

I like to walk around and discover the things around you, Mother Nature, Catherine Klug of Waikoloa said. Youre at the top of the world. You can see Maui and Mauna Loa, its like paradise.

When its so hot everywhere else, its cool up here, Klugs neighbor Maria Faria explains. When seeking a more leisurely bond with the elements, the duo simply doesnt climb to the top. [The hike] is not scary or dangerous. We sit on the bench and just enjoy the view!

On the 4-mile descent, we stop halfway to sit on the bench Klug and Faria are fond of. It overlooks the ocean, allowing us to revel in the lower temperatures and magical vistas.

The reserves management team works hard to maintain the vast area year-round. They welcome the opportunity to share their beloved Puu Waawaa, and encourage visitors to keep to the trails, pick up trash when spotted, be cautious of the fire dangers and help them steward the elysian land.

Future generations of hikers will thank you.

Natasha Bourlin is a travel-loving, Hawaii Island-based freelance writer whos been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, AFAR media, Time Out, USAToday.com and more.
BEL-RIDGE, Mo. (AP)  A 19-year-old Missouri man was killed Saturday in the St. Louis suburb of Bel-Ridge.

Police said late Saturday that the Major Case Squad had been called to investigate the homicide although few details were released.
AMMAN, Jordan (AP)  Two coronavirus patients died at a hospital in the Jordanian capital of Amman on Sunday after a short circuit knocked out power at the facility's intensive care unit, the country's health minister said.

The private Gardens Hospital is being rented by the Jordanian government to treat coronavirus patients.
ISTANBUL (AP)  Two Turkish soldiers were killed and two others were wounded in an attack in northern Syria, Turkeys defense ministry said Sunday.

The ministry tweeted that a Turkish armored vehicle was attacked. The assault occurred Saturday in the so-called Euphrates Shield area, which consists of a region between the Turkish border and northern Aleppo, including the towns of Jarablus and al-Bab.
PINEVILLE, Mo. (AP)  Authorities are searching for three men who escaped from a jail in southwest Missouri after allegedly attacking an officer.

The McDonald County Sheriff's office in Pineville, Missouri said David Molina, 49; Carmelo Miguel Burgos, 27; and Shuntavion Ladarrias Thomas, 23; escaped from the jail around 5 p.m. Saturday. Pineville is about 190 miles south of Kansas City.
BRIDGEPORT, Conn. (AP)  More than 700 employees of People's United Bank will lose their jobs when the Connecticut lender is acquired by a New York bank, according to a filing with the state.

Buffalo, New York-based M&T Bank Corp. reported that 747 positions in Connecticut, including 661 at People's Bridgeport headquarters, would be eliminated.
PHOENIX (AP)  In mid-May, partisan investigators hired by Arizona state lawmakers backed off their allegation that the state's most populous county had destroyed its 2020 election database. Confronted with proof that the data still existed, they admitted everything was there.

Two months later, the tale lives on. At an event Saturday, former President Donald Trump presented the debunked allegation as a key piece of evidence that the state's electoral votes were stolen from him in 2020.

It was one of a number of fabricated and familiar stories Trump told the crowd in his relentless effort to deny the well-established legitimacy of his defeat at the hands of President Joe Biden.

Over nearly two hours, Trump revisited his touchstones of grievance, leveling allegations of fraud that election officials and judges have systematically refuted or brushed aside. It was Trumps most explicit effort to insert himself into the widely discredited Arizona audit as he tries to increase the pressure on other states to embark on similar efforts.

He spoke of untold thousands of dead people voting  no such phenomenon surfaced in postelection audits. He alleged 168,000 Arizona ballots were fraudulent  there is no support for that.

A look at his remarks in Phoenix:

TRUMP: Unbelievably, the auditors have testified that the master database for the election management system, Im sorry to tell you, has been deleted.... Meaning the main database for all of the election-related data in Maricopa for 2020 has been illegally erased. Its been erased.

THE FACTS: Wholly false. The database was never deleted.

At first, auditors hired by Republican state senators sympathetic to Trump reported that a database directory was deleted from an election management server. The official Twitter account tied to the audit said the deletion amounted to spoliation of evidence.

The Republican-dominated Maricopa County Board of Supervisors responded by calling the auditors incompetent and threatening to file a defamation lawsuit. Board Chairman Jack Sellers said the auditors cant find the files because they dont know what theyre doing. Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican who took over the elections office after defeating a Democrat, called the allegation unhinged."

The next day, Ben Cotton, founder of a digital forensics firm working on the audit, confirmed he had recovered all of the files. I have the information I need, he acknowledged, and the auditors deleted their tweet.

___

TRUMP: There were 18,000 people who voted in Arizona in 2020 who were then purged from the rolls immediately after the election.

THE FACTS: This didn't happen. His insinuation that people were stricken from the rolls because they voted for him is baseless.

Actually, 13,320 voters were removed from the rolls in the two months after the election, not 18,000 right away, and there were routine reasons why.

Voting rolls are updated constantly as people move, die, get convicted of felonies or have their voting rights revoked because of incapacitation. Trump was repeating a claim made by Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber Ninjas, the inexperienced firm leading the state Senate Republicans audit of the 2020 election.

Maricopa County officials said their analysis of the data shows 7,916 voters were removed from the rolls because they moved out of the county or died between Nov. 3, which was Election Day, and Jan. 2. An additional 5,404 people were removed for other reasons, including felony convictions, incapacitation or the voters' own request to cancel their registration.

The county has about 2.6 million registered voters.

Overall, Biden won Arizona by 10,457 votes out of 3.4 million cast. That's vastly more than the number of votes where fraud is truly suspected.

County election officials only identified 182 cases where voting problems were clear enough that they referred them to investigators for further review, according to an Associated Press investigation. So far, only four cases have led to charges. No one has been convicted. No persons vote was found to have been counted twice.

___

Woodward reported from Washington. Associated Press writers David Klepper in Providence, Rhode Island, and Jill Colvin in Washington contributed to this report.

___

EDITOR'S NOTE  A look at the veracity of claims by political figures.

___

Find AP Fact Checks at http://apnews.com/APFactCheck

Follow @APFactCheck on Twitter: https://twitter.com/APFactCheck
XINXIANG, China (AP)  Trucks carrying water and food on Sunday streamed into a Chinese city hit hard by flooding that killed at least 63 people, while soldiers laid sandbags to fill gaps in river dikes that have left neighborhoods under water.

Residents cleared away mud, wrecked cars and other debris after record rains that started Tuesday and flooded streets and disrupted train service in Henan province. The rains have subsided, but some neighborhoods were still waiting for water up to two meters (six feet) deep to drain.

The provincial government raised the death toll to 63 on Sunday, with five people missing, state TV reported. It said 8,876 homes had collapsed.

Trucks dropped off instant noodles and other goods at a stadium in Xinxiang, 40 miles (65 kilometers) north of the Zhengzhou, the provincial capital. Volunteers shifted pallets of drinking water stacked higher than their heads onto other trucks for distribution, occasionally breaking into cheers of, Go, Xinxiang!

The city was hit as the rains moved north from Zhengzhou, where flash floods killed more than 50 people, including 12 in the inundated subway system.

Business owner Han Yuan and her employees loaded boxes of disinfectant onto a truck for delivery to the citys Fengquan district, one of the worst-hit areas. This is the city that raised me, and every one of us is devoting all we have to protect this city," she said.

Three military helicopters were used to bring drinking water, medicine, food and other relief items to about 20,000 people in inaccessible areas, including Xinxiang's Hongzhou and Yuhe townships, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

Direct economic losses throughout Henan were estimated at 13.9 billion yuan ($2 billion), Xinhua reported. It said more than 1.1 million people had been relocated to safer areas.

Lu Qinghan, the owner of a recycling station, estimated she lost 30,000 to 40,000 yuan ($4,700 to $6,200), at least one third of her annual income, after floods washed away some of the station's waste material.

Her family got power back Sunday evening, but still needed clean water. Fengquan district residents lined up to register at a relief station for bottles of water.

When (the flooding) was at its most severe, there was no electricity, and I couldnt see anything," Lu said. "When I smelled something different, the water was already reaching my bed.

Emergency crews were trying to close gaps in flood dikes that flooded sections of villages.

Soldiers and paramilitary police dumped stones and sandbags into a 100-meter-long (300-foot-long), eight-meter-deep (25-foot-deep) gap on the Weihe river in Xinxiang, the state-owned Global Times newspaper reported.

On Saturday, authorities intentionally had flooded parts of the nearby city of Hebi to lower water levels elsewhere, according to Shanghai online news outlet The Paper.

In Xinxiang, Zhang Meirong said she was so moved when people from Heze city in neighboring Shandong province came to help that she asked her daughter to take photos of them.

I couldnt feel more touched, she said. "I didnt have much education, and I couldnt express it too well, but its all in my heart.

___

Associated Press news assistant Caroline Chen contributed.
DEWEY BEACH, Del. (AP)  A Delaware police officer was recovering at a hospital after a suspect knocked him unconscious, police said.

Cliff Dempsey, a spokesman for the Dewey Beach Police Department, told The News Journal that the officer was chasing a 27-year-old Georgetown man who had been acting disorderly at a restaurant and assaulted an employee.

An off-duty police officer from the New Castle County Police Department saw the interaction and tried to assist, the newspaper reported. Other unknown men became involved in the altercation, during which the initial suspect struck the Dewey Beach officer, rendering him unconscious.

The off-duty officer and a concerned citizen restrained the suspect until responding officers arrived, according to police.

Both officers were taken to a hospital. The New Castle officer was treated for facial lacerations and released, while the Dewey Beach officer was treated for a concussion, Dempsey said.

The suspect faces charges including second-degree assault on a law enforcement officer, resisting arrest with force or violence, and criminal mischief.

He was arraigned and was being held on $35,000 bail. It wasn't immediately clear if he had an attorney who could speak on his behalf.
LAKE CHARLES, La. (AP)  Stewart Buller, 54, has spent the last two months at a Lake Charles RV park, living in a rundown camper that has power, but no running water. Disabled for the last two years, he has to retrieve water from a nearby faucet, urinate in cups and defecate in buckets.

Buller said his brother gave him the camper, but he didnt realize how bad its condition was until he went inside and saw it had been infested with rats who had chewed through the water lines. Today, its his only housing option, with FEMA denying an application to replace the trailer he owned on Koonce Road in Moss Bluff that Hurricane Laura destroyed nearly one year ago.

Flies are taking over, he said. I cant live here anymore; its just too bad.

Bullers disability has left him unable to work. He has a back surgery scheduled for Aug. 2, in which he will be cut open and have an existing titanium disc and pin removed and have calcium shaved off his sciatic nerve. An initial surgery in February 2019, which used a laser incision, didnt take and only saw his condition worsen. He has no vehicle and relies on crutches to get around, but he remains largely immobile.

I cant come back here after my surgery and be able to keep myself clean, Buller said. Im going to have bandages and everything else.

Not being approved for FEMA assistance has left Buller frustrated.

I need help, he said through tears. I did everything by the book the whole way through.

The Salvation Army took Buller to a mega shelter in Alexandria to evacuate from Hurricane Laura. He spent two weeks there before returning to find his camper destroyed. Buller again went to the mega shelter ahead of Hurricane Deltas landfall last October, spending two weeks in a hospital bed because of his disability.

Buller was then sent to a hotel in New Orleans for three months. When he found out his mother had died, he returned to Lake Charles. During this time, all of his progress to secure Section 8 housing in New Orleans went away, he said.

I had all my paperwork going through; I had been approved for Section 8, he said. Because I checked out and came back down here, its like I wasnt even in their system anymore.

Buller said he has fought with FEMA to get his destroyed camper replaced  making three trips on a bus from New Orleans to Lake Charles to provide the necessary paperwork. He said he lost the bill of sale on his Moss Bluff camper after Hurricane Laura, but provided proof of residency and ownership multiple times. He said FEMA officials could not get in touch with the person who sold Buller the camper and the person he was renting the land where the camper was located.

Buller said he last spoke to a FEMA official two months earlier at the Lake Charles Civic Center.

A few days later, I received a letter saying I got denied, he said. Ive asked for no money. Ive asked for housing.

Tiana Suber, FEMA spokeswoman, said the agency cannot comment on specific cases. However, residents who applied for FEMA assistance from Hurricanes Laura and Delta can still receive help, even though the registration deadlines have already passed.

We know people are frustrated, exasperated and tired, she said. We want to make sure people are getting the help that is needed.

Suber said residents who registered with FEMA can write an appeal letter that includes documents supporting their claim. They can also call the agencys hotline at 800-621-3362 or visit disasterassistance.gov.

Residents can also visit the FEMA Disaster Recovery Center at Washington-Marion Magnet High School, 2802 Pineview St. The center is open from 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Monday through Friday.

Suber said the center was opened to help residents impacted by the May 17 flooding. However, officials can also help residents needing assistance with recovery from Hurricanes Laura and Delta.

The center is open through July 30. Suber said 1,500 residents have visited the center since it opened June 16.

Buller said he is unable to stay in shelters because he has a dog. Hes had no luck finding low-income housing and lacks transportation needed to secure a pet-friendly rent home.

Buller said he and his girlfriend, Elizabeth  who is staying at a volunteer shelter in Lafayette  are considering leaving Lake Charles after his back surgery.

Were going to buy a car and were just going to go, he said. Im not saying Im not going to come back, (but) we need some time.
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP)  Prosecutors in El Salvador said Sunday they have formally charged former President Salvador Sanchez Ceren and nine other former officials with illicit enrichment and money laundering.

The charges are related to crimes allegedly committed when Sanchez Ceren served as vice president in the administration of President Mauricio Funes from 2009 to 2014. Sanchez Ceren left the country in December and has not returned.

The nine other former top officials in the Funes' adminsitration were also charged in an alleged illegal scheme to pay exorbitant bonuses. Four of them are also at large.

The scheme allegedly involved $351 million in government funds that were used to make illegal payments to government employees and their associates. The case has become known as the Public Looting scandal.

Sanchez Ceren, who went on to serve as president from 2014 to 2019. allegedly received $530,000 from the scheme.

Both Funes and Sanchez Ceren were members of the FMLN party, founded by guerrillas who fought the government in the countrys 1980-1992 civil war.

Funes fled to Nicaragua, where he was granted asylum in 2016, allowing him to avoid facing trial back home on corruption charges.

Some of the officials detained are considered top leaders of the FMLN, which along with the conservative ARENA party, governed El Salvador for many years.

On Sunday, FLMN supporters gathered outside the court demanding the release of the five detained ex-officials. The protesters claimed those arrested are political prisoners.

Both the FMLN and ARENA were reduced to a shadow of their former levels of support by the appearance of the populist New Ideas party of the current president, Nayib Bukele.

Most of the countrys post-war presidents have been charged with corruption.

Francisco Flores, who was president in 1999-2004, died in 2016 while awaiting trial under house arrest.

Tony Saca, president from 2004 to 2009, is serving a 10-year prison sentence for corruption and has been ordered to return some $260 million to the state. Courts ruled Saca could not explain the origin of $6.5 million in income he made while president.
BISMARCK, N.D. (AP)  An effort to recall a Republican legislator largely over his vote to expel a fellow GOP lawmaker accused of sexually harassing women at the state Capitol is being viewed as a litmus test for party loyalty, the state GOP s new chairman said.

The move to recall Rep. Dwight Kiefert over his vote to oust former Rep. Luke Simons has fanned the flames of an intraparty fight that has a far-right faction seeking to control the party apparatus and replace Republicans they see as too moderate.

Perrie Schafer, who was elected chairman of the state GOP last month, has the task of repairing damage to the partys image.

I dont like this infighting, he said. My goal is to get people rolling in the same direction.

North Dakota Republicans wield supermajority control in the Legislature and hold every statewide office. The party, however, began splintering in the past decade with the emergence of the loosely organized Bastiat Caucus, fervent supporters of limited government and spending and privacy and gun rights.

Simons, who was expelled by the House in March, was one. The caucus has said 30 legislators paid dues in 2019, though the membership has not been publicly disclosed.

Mark Jendrysik, chairman of the University of North Dakotas political science department, said loyalty or purity tests arent unusual in states where a party has a strong majority. He said the Kiefert recall appears to be such a test.

If he is recalled, I really think its a warning to other representatives to pay attention to the more conservative faction of the party, Jendrysik said.

Simons denied wrongdoing and complained that he wasnt getting due process and was targeted for his political ideology.

Of 80 House Republicans, 55 voted to expel Simons. A few GOP lawmakers were formally condemned at the district level for backing the expulsion but Kiefert is the only one so far to face recall.

Kiefert said he voted to remove Simons because of his alleged inappropriate behavior toward women.

How do you stand up for that? said Kiefert, a farmer who represents a district in southeastern North Dakota.

The recall petition accuses Kiefert of failing to meet the standards of a Republican representing the district.

I cant imagine people wanting to recall me because Im not a Republican, he said.

Kiefert hardly qualifies as a moderate.

He has long pushed bills to let teachers and school workers have guns at schools. In 2015, Kiefert was among the most vocal of lawmakers who objected to having a Muslim lead prayers at the Capitol on Ash Wednesday, and insisted on having a Christian deliver the invocation instead. Also that year, he called a Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage a victory for the mentally ill.

Those incidents drew rebukes from the state GOP party.

The party is now defending Kiefert, calling the recall a misguided attempt by a select group of individuals to thwart the democratic process for their own gain.

Dan Johnston, who aligned himself with the far right during two terms in the Legislature, is now the party chairman in Kieferts district.

Johnston gave up his seat in an unsuccessful bid for state treasurer. The race got extra attention after Gov. Doug Burgum gave $25,000 to Thomas Beadles campaign and Johnston got the support of former President Donald Trump and U.S. Sen. Kevin Cramer.

Kiefert and others believe the recall effort is being done in part as a backdoor move to give Johnston the Legislative seat, which Johnston denied. He said the recall is an organic effort driven by local constituents

It was an honor to serve but I have no desire to serve in that capacity again, he said. Ive never seen myself as a career politician.

Former GOP House Majority Leader Al Carlson called Kiefert a far right-wing conservative and said he thinks hes being targeted as a personal vendetta.

Carlson said the Bastiat Caucus is slowly but surely gaining a foothold at the district level and in Bismarck, with strong grassroots organization skills.

I wouldnt call these guys Republicans. Theyre extremists, he said. They are out to purge anybody who doesnt think like they do. And all they do is vote against everything and they dont like anything and they dont bring any solutions.

Jared Hendrix of Minot is seen as the architect of the groups organizational effort in North Dakota. He was state director of Texas congressman Ron Pauls 2012 presidential bid and worked on campaigns for Sen. Kevin Cramer and Bismarck Rep. Rick Becker, who founded the Bastiat Caucus.

Most recently, Hendrix was a campaign worker for Hazelton GOP Rep. Jeff Magrum, a vocal Simons supporter and one of several mostly far-right candidates who faced political spending by GOP Gov. Doug Burgum aimed at defeating them.

Hendrix, also a GOP district chairman, said he has nothing to do with the Kiefert recall.

He is, however, a principal in the effort to change the state constitution to impose term limits on the governor and legislators. Several state lawmakers linked to the Bastiat Caucus and some newly elected GOP district chairmen are among the measures sponsoring committee.

Hendrix said the state GOP party is suffering from stagnation and no clear direction. The party doesnt actually advance anything we actually believe in, he said.

If youre not going to change mindset, you got to change the people, Hendrix said.

Schafer, the party chairman, said Republicans have to get together or risk watching Democrats start winning elections.

This agree-with-me-or-hit-the-highway mentality is not healthy, Schafer said.
MILAN (AP)  Fires raged Sunday on Italy's Mediterranean island of Sardinia, where nearly 400 people were evacuated overnight. No deaths or injuries have been reported.

Firefighters said several homes were damaged in the island's western interior region. Civil protection authorities said a preliminary survey indicates 10,000 acres have been consumed by flames around Montiferru, near the center of the Italys second-largest island.
BUNNELL, Fla. (AP)  A man in a cylindrical floating contraption washed ashore in Florida Saturday in an apparent attempt to walk on water to New York.

The Flagler County Sheriff's Office reported that the man left St. Augustine in the vessel with the goal of reaching New York. The department posted photos of the vessel on Facebook.
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (AP)  Less than a century ago, it was unusual for a 30-year-old not to have dentures, according to Dr. Bob Russell, Iowas public health dental director.

A lot has changed in oral hygiene, but one of the most sweeping changes and one that helps poor and wealthy people alike is the fluoridation of drinking water. Boosting the natural fluoride in drinking water hardens the enamel on peoples teeth and makes teeth less vulnerable to cavities.

But an increasing number of communities  including cities in Iowa  have stopped adding fluoride to drinking water, possibly based on misinformation about how much fluoride people get from other sources. A new Iowa law that went into effect July 1 requires public water system operators to give residents at least a 90-day notice before they stop adding fluoride to drinking water.

We had reports that communities had stopped fluoridation and had not informed their citizens or councils, Russell told the Cedar Rapids Gazette. When residents discovered the change and wanted to return to fluoridation, their water supply systems were required to upgrade to new state standards, which could be costly, Russell said.

Our goal was we should alert our citizens these things are in debate and we should let them choose, he said.

Starting in the 1930s, dentists observed people who drank water with naturally-occurring fluoride seemed to have fewer cavities, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. Scientists started researching fluoride, a mineral released from rocks, to try to find out if it could safely be added to water to protect people from tooth decay.

In 1945, Grand Rapids, Mich., became the first U.S. city to add fluoride to drinking water. The move paid off when five years later researchers learned that Grand Rapids children had significantly fewer cavities than did children from surrounding communities, the CDC reported. Other U.S. cities started adding low levels of fluoride to boost the natural levels to a standard set by the government.

The city of Iowa City has been fluoridating drinking water since the 1960s, now adding fluoride until the natural levels of about .25 milligrams per liter reach .7 milligrams per liter, said Craig Meacham, assistant water superintendent for the city of about 75,000.

The city has flow-controlled pumps, so if the water flow reduces, the fluoride feed slows down. Water operators test the raw drinking water and finished drinking water for fluoride every day. The city also sends a monthly water sample to the State Hygienic Laboratory in Coralville so the local tests can be verified for accuracy.

Over the years Ive had a number of phone calls from customers who wanted to talk about fluoride and argue about fluoride, said Meacham, who has worked for the citys water department for 31 years. When I tell them it exists naturally and its proven by science to help tooth decay and that we carefully monitor the feed and dont overdose, I think some people are reassured by that.

If not, he tells them to go talk to your dentist.

For every dollar spent on community water fluoridation, $38 is saved in dental treatment costs, the state Public Health Department reported. Fluoride reduces cavities by at least 25 percent in both children and adults.

And a growing body of evidence shows keeping teeth healthy improves overall health, Russell said.

What weve been learning quite clearly is there is an interface between medical and dental disease that drives up cases of morbidity, Russell said. As teeth get infected, that can get into the blood stream (into) the heart, lungs and many different systems.

There are a variety of related conspiracy theories about fluoride, all revolving around the idea of governments  including the Nazi regime  putting fluoride in water supplies to control the population, according to a 2016 article in Vice. Some of these theories say large corporations are in on it, making profits based on keeping people docile.

There is this resistance to fluoride in drinking water and its mostly unfounded, said David Cwiertny, a University of Iowa engineering professor and director of the Center for Health Effects of Environmental Contamination, which provides free testing for lead and other contaminants in school drinking water.

There are legitimate questions about how much fluoride should be added to water.

Fluorosis, a condition that can cause discolored teeth, can occur if people get too much fluoride, but severe cases of the illness are rare and no evidence indicates that recommended levels of community water fluoridation lead to severe dental fluorosis, the U.S. National Institutes of Health reported.

There also have been concerns about fluoride hurting childrens bone growth. But a team of researchers, led by Steven Levy, a UI dentistry professor, found by tracking children from birth until age 25 that fluoride consumption did not affect their bone development.

In 2015, the CDC updated its recommendation on fluoride levels from 1 to 2 milligrams per liter of water to .7 to 1.25 milligrams per liter in response to new information about fluoride available from other sources, including from toothpaste and mouthwash.

If science says we dont need as much, you want to reduce it, Russell said. Its a sign of transparency and honesty.

About 20 percent of Iowa communities do not fluoridate water, Russell said. Since 2017, 15 Iowa communities totaling more than 25,000 residents have stopped adding fluoride to water, the state Public Health Department reported.

Ely, a Linn County city of 1,650, ended decades of fluoridation in 2020 at the recommendation of the water treatment manager, Mayor Eldy Miller said.

A report the water treatment manager provided to the City Council before the vote says most homes use water filtration systems that remove fluoride. Reverse osmosis filtration systems do remove fluoride, The Gazette confirmed, but most water softening is done with ion exchange, which does not remove fluoride.

The Ely report overstates the amount of fluoride in toothpaste and uses as evidence a 2016 article in Harvard Public Health that was widely refuted by dental and pediatric organizations, some of which asked for the article to be retracted.

We have not received complaints from the citizens since it has been removed, Miller said. We did receive complaints beforehand that fluoride was being added.

The city of Tama, which has about 2,700 residents, stopped fluoridating water earlier this year based on a decision by Water Superintendent Kent Campbell, the Tama Toledo News Chronicle reported. The City Council decided April 5 to support Campbells decision, but at a June meeting several public health officials asked the council to reconsider.

Mayor Doug Ray told The Gazette the council still is collecting data and may reconsider the decision. We havent ruled it out by any means, he said.
ATLANTA (AP)  A Georgia board tasked with overseeing the state's efforts to get patients access to medical marijuana has approved the six companies that will be allowed to sell the drug, a major step to finally getting patients legal access to the medication.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the Georgia Access to Medical Cannabis Commission voted Saturday to pick six companies from 69 that had applied for licenses. Specifically they'll be able to sell medical marijuana oil that contains no more than 5% of the THC compound that is found in marijuana and which makes users high.

About 200 people were on hand to watch the proceedings. Each of those six companies will be able to open five dispensaries, the paper reported. The state capped the number of companies that can sell medical marijuana at six. The limit was part of a compromise in the Legislature designed to provide access to patients who legitimately needed the drug to treat health conditions but at the same time not allowing marijuana to be illegally distributed.

The state first authorized medical marijuana oil in 2015 but there was still no legal way to buy it in the state. Patients were forced to go to other states or through underground markets to find it while the state set up a program by which it would be sold in Georgia.

It's a blessing. We're near the end of the tunnel," Jessica Reid of Atlanta told the newspaper. She said marijuana oil is the only thing that she's seen that can stop her 4-year-old son's seizures.

After the contracts are signed, companies will have one year to begin operations. Prospective patients who suffer from certain conditions outlined in Georgia law would need to get approval from a doctor and apply through the Georgia Department of Public Health. The conditions include terminal cancers, Parkinson's disease and seizures.

Officials made the Saturday announcement in Rock Spring in northwest Georgia. The commission had committed to traveling around the state as opposed to focusing just on the Atlanta area.
ATHENS, Ga. (AP)  On rainy nights, Cheryl Gamble sometimes found shelter at a vacant warehouse on Willow Street.

She and her fiance, Clint Marable, would use the facilitys looming structure to shield them from torrents of water.

We were just looking for somewhere warm out of the rain, Gamble, 47, recalled.

Gamble and Marable, 38, met in Athens several years ago after differing circumstances left them both without permanent housing. They bounced around Georgia, and from job to job, living in motels and sometimes on the streets.

But last month, they returned to Athens, where they said resources were available for the homeless and they were more familiar with the area. That same month, Athens-Clarke County commissioners passed a resolution to address homelessness.

The facility the couple once slept at is now one of many locations being considered by the commission for a new, government-sanctioned homeless camp as part of this resolution.

Gamble and Marable are just two of many facing homelessness in Athens. In 2020, Athens-Clarke County counted 210 homeless individuals in the city, according to an annual Point-In-Time count to document homelessness. The numbers represent a rough estimate with those living in doubled-up housing, or couch surfing, not included in the count.

Darius Willoughby said he first experienced homelessness after separating from his now ex-wife over a year ago. He said he eventually moved back with his mother because he was unable to sustain housing alone before what he called his own bad decisions pushed her to drop him off at a community shelter.

My mother brought me over here to Bigger Vision, Willoughby, 39, said. A lot of new people get dropped off here.

The shelter on North Avenue sits between two of the larger encampments in Athens. In North Oconee River Park, a small community, called New Tent City by some, stays in proximity to the shelter in hopes of getting in for the night.

Its like a little community, Willoughby said. This is how I see it  were all family. We all try to help each other in the way we can.

Willoughby, who has a learning disability and battles bouts of depression, said he has been fortunate in more recent months to find temporary housing by living with a friend. But a new facility could provide a transitionary home for the homeless, he said.

I would like the facility because with rainy days we might also be able to come in and get out the rain, Willoughby said, adding resources to help people get on their feet would be most important.

Bobby Smith, 67, shared similar sentiments. Smith, a longtime Athenian, said he was pushed to homelessness as prices for housing soared after retiring. Smith is one of many who have set up tents in North Oconee River Park.

Its not like I want to be here, he said. But my money situation doesnt fit in the category of $1,800 rent ... it got me in a situation where I cant afford to get it. You have to have a certain amount of money.

Smith said between his Social Security and the money he gets for disability, he brings in under $800 a month. He said a new facility could help him and others who have been homeless for years as housing has become more unaffordable.

He said he also hopes any new facility in town would have kind and respectful people who looked to help those in need.

They need to have somewhere for disabled people, Smith said. For people with Social Security who cant get a place because were not making enough money.

In interviews with the Banner-Herald, several people experiencing homelessness listed programs and resources such as job training during the day as important. Many said there are few places for the homeless to be during the day, leaving them out on the streets.

Id like to see in this new facility some transparency and a human element that understands people have things going on in their daily life, said Michael Duggan, 35, who has been homeless for several years. There should be people who work there who know forgiveness, know about second chances, and how to grant those.

Those without housing in a separate, more stable encampment under the train tracks on Willow Street also face relocation in the near future.

CSX received multiple complaints about a homeless camp on our property at Willow Street from local landowners, said Sheriee Bowman, a spokesperson for CSX Transportation. We have been in contact with Athens-Clarke County police about the complaints in an effort to find a solution that would direct the occupants to safer living conditions.

But many said a new facility could help the occupants safely relocate, while also helping those in other encampments who are left out at night when they are unable to get a bed at a shelter.

Gamble and Marable have faced the daily challenge of securing one of the 35 beds in Bigger Vision. With one phone between the two of them, they are left to call one at a time to reserve a bed, they said, losing crucial time in a rush to get in the nearest shelter for many.

On some nights, Marable ensures Gamble is able to get in while he sleeps outside. On other nights, they are both forced to sleep in the woods off Jefferson Road, choosing to stay away from larger encampments because of the possible dangers.

Marable said when they are unable to get in a shelter they start their days in a tent. Upon waking up, they take makeshift showers using body wash and water bottles.

I hate washing up in the woods because anybody could be watching you, she said, adding Marable stands guard for her. But there is nowhere to go to wash up ... thats kind of scary being a female.

During the day, they go to the library to continue job searches and find respite from the sun, Gamble said. For transportation, they use the bus with rides currently free.

But she said she hopes a new facility could help provide a bed for the many who are still without permanent housing, including many single women. Like many, she said a facility that has programming during the day would be important, and somewhere for people to lock up their belongings while heading out to job interviews.

Training or computers where we could look for jobs would be good, Gamble said. Something where homeless people could learn a trade so they could have the tools to go look for a job because some of them dont know how to read, count or stuff like that.

Charles Hardy, president of Athens Alliance Coalition, an organization that has helped the homeless, can often be seen on Willow Street passing out tents and food. He said his organization got involved because he wanted to make a change.

I just got tired of city officials sitting around not wanting to do nothing, Hardy said, adding every day he sees a different person without housing, some from states far away.

Having boots on the ground in the community and directly helping the people is important, he said. This first-hand experience informed some of the discussions he held with city officials to pass a resolution to address homelessness.

Who would you rather listen to: a person who sits behind the desk all day, or an organization who is out there in it and see it every day? Hardy said.

Just what the facility or encampment will look like remains unclear, but the mayor and commission will discuss the location of the site on Tuesday.

Hardy, like others, said he hopes the facility will help to transition those without permanent housing into stable homes.

But while Marable and Gamble join others in their hope for a new encampment, they are still working hard to see their situation change. Marable said he recently was able to secure a job interview at a Wendys in town, though he shared concern the pay may still not be enough to secure permanent housing.

We just need the help, Marable said, because were really working and trying to get out of this.
GADSDEN, Ala. (AP)  Because of COVID-19, many schools and universities across the U.S. had to turn away international students from attending classes in person last year. Countries under travel restrictions because of the pandemic have seen their embassies reduce hours or close completely, preventing international students from obtaining vital legal documents like visas and passports.

David Ford is involved with the international student program at Coosa Christian School, which managed to avoid those problems. Still, he said many other schools refused to take those students last year because of the pandemic.

As a whole, many of the student exchange organizations could only place about half of the students they had because many schools were going virtual, he said. Its because if a school is virtual, international students were not allowed to come, which limited how many schools could take them.

He said international students typically are taking in person classes to see how America works, and the virtual format many schools went with during the pandemic was not that.

They are here to learn about the culture and different things about America, Ford added.

Ford also believes many international students were not allowed to leave their countries because of travel bans; others may have been afraid to travel.

At the ... beginning of the school year, we were at our worst with cases, he said. I think the fear of coming to America with everything going on was what slowed it down.

However, Ford said Coosa Christian has not had any problems bringing international students through its doors because of COVID-19.

We were expecting two or three students this year because of the pandemic, but we had 10 international students this year, said Ford, They all were great and did really well this year.

Of those students, five graduated this year with their high school diplomas. The pandemic didnt really slow us down. We had a great year, Ford said.

Coosa Christian School is the only school in the county certified to take F-1 international students, according to Ford, which allows them to stay in the country for longer than a year to study, rather than a those on a J-1 visa, which expires after a year.

We are proud to have international students come here because we believe that they add value to our student body, said Ford.

Coosa Christian works with partnering agencies within both the U.S. and the students home countries to bring them here to study abroad.

We have three agencies that will send us a kid that wants to come to school here in Alabama, and we will start searching for host families, Ford said.

He said international student programs are heading to a normal format once again, adding, Overall, students that had put it off are now ready, and more students are interested in coming to America.

In fact, the biggest problem facing Coosa Christians program is internal, within the U.S.

Ford said its a challenge each year to find host families for the international students. These families are responsible for the students, to ensure they have a safe place to live during their stay in the U.S.

We could get plenty of students, its just finding enough host families to take them, Ford said. Its the same for both private and public schools.

There are many strict criteria that need to be met to be a host family, such as background checks and adequate housing  which can include a proper bed and a window in the students room from which to escape should there be an emergency.

We also have to interview every single family member to make sure that they are all in agreement that they want to host an international student and that they are going to provide a safe environment, Ford said.

He said the strict requirements are in place so they can assure the families of the students coming to the U.S. that they are in a safe, reliable environment.

I encourage anyone who is able to do it. Ive personally had 11 students live with me during their stay, and I still have correspondence with 10 of them. Ford said, Its a really great opportunity and you gain experiences and friendships that youll have for life.
EAST ST. LOUIS, Ill. (AP)  The city of East St. Louis violated labor standards for not tracking or paying police overtime hours, according to a U.S. Department of Labor investigation.

According to a recent news release, the city's police department had employees sign a document agreeing to forgo pay for working overtime because it didn't have the funds to pay them. The labor department said the city violated the Fair Labor Standards Act.
COLUMBUS, Ga. (AP)  The county jail in Columbus will no longer hold suspects charged with low-level misdemeanors, including shop lifting and driving without a license, a newspaper reported.

The change in policy at the Muscogee County Jail will bring it in line with other places that summon people to court for minor offenses rather than putting them in jail, the Ledger-Enquirer reported.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP)  A New Mexico man accused of fatally shooting five people in 2017, including three family members, is set to go on trial this week for four of the killings.

The Albuquerque Journal reports that jury selection is scheduled to begin Monday in 1st Judicial District Court in Santa Fe.
WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. (AP)  A man seen carrying an unconscious woman into a white van and driving away has been arrested and charged with kidnapping, Los Angeles County sheriff's officials said.

The woman had just left a bar in West Hollywood when witnesses saw a man with gray hair carry her into a 1997 Dodge Ram around 2 a.m. Friday, said sheriff's Lt. Jose Aguirre.
LONDON (AP)  Two adults and a 9-year-old boy have died and a 7-year-old boy is in intensive care after getting into difficulty in the water at Scotlands Loch Lomond, police said Sunday.

Police were called Saturday night to a report of concerns for people in the water near Pulpit Rock in Loch Lomond, a large lake in southern Scotland. A 41-year-old man, a 29-year-old woman and the 9-year-old were pronounced dead at the scene.

The 7-year-old was rushed by ambulance to a hospital in Glasgow. The victims were not named and it was not yet clear what happened.

Our boat team took part in a multi-agency search operation in the north end of Loch Lomond on Saturday evening led by Police Scotland after a group of people got into difficulty in the water. Tragically, three people, including a child, have lost their lives, the park authority overseeing the lake said.

Three other children have died in Scotland this weekend after getting into difficulty in water. An 11-year-old boy died in the river in South Lanarkshire on Saturday, and a 16-year-old boy died at the south end of Loch Lomond on Friday.

Emergency services were also called to the River Clyde near Lanark on Saturday. Officials recovered the body of a 13-year-old boy on Sunday morning.

Authorities in the U.K. have warned people to take extra care while swimming in open water after at least two dozen people drowned during recent hot weather.

Assistant Chief Constable Mark Williams urged people to exercise extreme caution."

The warm weather can make open water swimming and paddling very inviting but it is extremely dangerous, even for the most experienced swimmers or supervised children," he said. The conditions can change very quickly and there are often hidden risks like deep water and strong currents.
TOLEDO, Ohio (AP)  A man and woman were shot to death as they were sitting in a vehicle outside a Toledo apartment complex, authorities said.

Toledo police said officers responded to the shooting outside the Birmingham Terrace apartment complex in East Toledo at about 10:20 p.m. Saturday.
YORK, Pa. (AP)  The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has ordered a new trial for a man accused of killing his wife and then faking an all-terrain vehicle accident to cover up the slaying almost a decade ago.

The state's highest court ruled 5-2 Friday that 48-year-old Joseph Fitzpatrick III might not have been convicted of first-degree murder in York County in 2015 without the admission into evidence of a note from his wife which the court called inadmissible hearsay that injected significant prejudice" into the trial, the York Daily Record reported.

Fitzpatrick was accused of having drowned 43-year-old Annemarie Fitzpatrick in a Chanceford Township creek in June 2012 and then telling police they crashed their ATV in the water. Authorities alleged that he wanted out of his marriage, was emotionally involved with another woman and had a $1.7 million life insurance policy on his wife.

Hours before her death, prosecutors have said, Annemarie Fitzpatrick wrote, dated and signed a note in her day-planner at work saying If anything happens to me  Joe. She also wrote an email to herself titled if something happens to me saying the couple had marital problems and a huge log had almost fallen on her the night before.

Joe was on the pile with the log and had me untying a tarp directly below, the email said, according to prosecutors.

The trial judge, in a rare move, set aside the jury verdict, saying prosecutors had not presented enough evidence to support a conviction. The Pennsylvania Superior Court reinstated the conviction, saying the note was allowed as evidence to show the victims state of mind, an exception to the hearsay rule. The court said the email wasnt admissible but ruled that its admission was harmless in light of the overwhelming evidence against Fitzpatrick.

In a 47-page opinion for the high court's majority, Justice David Wecht said the note not only reflected the woman's fear but also asserted that her husband would be responsible if something untoward or violent happened to her. Offering the note as proof of that would be inadmissible hearsay, and Wecht said it was offered and repeatedly highlighted" to establish the truth of the matters asserted therein.

The remaining evidence simply was not so overwhelming so as to overcome the notes enormous impact, Wecht said. Accordingly, the admission of the note cannot be deemed harmless.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sallie Updyke Mundy said the note could have been allowed to show that the defendant's wife feared him, if the judge read a limiting instruction to the jury, but she would have upheld the conviction even though that was not done.

Defense attorney Chris Ferro called the ruling a thorough and well written repudiation of the evidence used to secure this conviction, the newspaper reported.

We are one step closer to righting a terrible wrong, Ferro said. Joe Fitzpatrick is innocent.

A representative of the York County district attorneys office said prosecutors were analyzing the high court's opinion.

We look forward to retrying Joseph Fitzpatrick, spokesperson Kyle King said.
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (AP)  Olga de Leon is all smiles as she begins to show her home  a house made from wood pallets  to guests on a recent afternoon.

But when she points out bags of trash and clothing stuffed into crevices near the ceiling, de Leons expression changes to grave concern. The extra insulation was meant to curb the rain and wind from the night before, but it did little to help. Instead, its making the home significantly hotter as the midday sun beats down. Theres no air conditioner, but there are buckets filled with rain water placed along the concrete floor.

When asked where she and her six family members sleep, de Leon, 62, gestures to the two beds against one wall and a mattress tipped up over more trash that had been moved to make room to walk around.

We are women of struggle, of work, she says in Spanish. I am infinitely grateful for the rest of my life, even with no (secure) living place.

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Help on the way

De Leons situation is not unique in the colonias outside of Ciudad Juarez. Thousands of families live in wood pallet homes making $40 a week even with overtime, the Las Cruces Sun-News reported.

But de Leon and others see a light at the end of the tunnel in Jane Fuller and her El Paso-based nonprofit Siguiendo los Pasos de Jesus.

Our mission is to help a total familys basic needs, said Fuller, 65. Thats a pretty broad mission. So we educate you, we help you find a job. We support the community as far as food and clothing and housing and education and medical all together.

Since 2000, Fuller has been assisting the 4,000 or so families who live along in colonias on the outskirts of Juarez  between kilometer 30 and 33 of the highway Carretera a Casas Grandes  about a 40-minute drive from the Santa Teresa port of entry in southern New Mexico.

De Leon said Fuller and SPJ have helped her in many ways  especially food and medical services  and she hopes one day to move her family into a home custom built by her neighbors and with funding from the nonprofit.

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Building a community

Fuller has been helping the colonias residents for 20-plus years through her nonprofit, which routinely brings food, hygiene products, clothing and other basic necessities to the neighborhood.

In 2006, Fuller founded the SPJ nonprofit and began to build homes and infrastructure.

SPJ has built 566 safe and stable homes, as well as a market, two parks, a library, a church and a health clinic thats open once a month with volunteer medical professionals.

These are people that want to make it there where they live, Fuller said, not those dying to come to America.

To that end, Fuller had construction workers from Texas teach some of the men in the area how to build houses, so they are the ones getting paid to work. SPJ also gets all its building materials from Juarez. Now, SPJ contracts with business owners based in the colonias who can do work such as window and door framing and glass cutting.

Because the idea is BSC  building sustainable communities, Fuller said.

SPJ will custom build homes for each family, some who have 15-plus members. The cost to build each home is about $7,500. The money goes to supplies and labor.

Before SPJ builds a house, the resident must own the land on which it is built.

SPJ does have limited housing available for families awaiting a home to be built. Fuller said de Leon and her family will move into that housing in September after another family moves out and into their permanent house.

Fuller said this will be a long-term temporary solution until de Leon can pay off her land, which could be years.

De Leon says shes been able to save about $2,400 over the last year  much of that thanks to other services SPJ provides. To buy the land would be about $7,224, minimum.

Every day I pray to Christ for (Fuller), for Nuri (the mercado manager), for Mr. Martin (the foreman), for all of you who gather in your help and work that you give others, that He blesses you and guards you forever de Leon said.

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Lives changed

Maria Guadalupe, 25, moved into her SPJ home about a year ago with her three young children  ages 12, 9 and 4.

Fuller said that when she met Guadalupe, she was working full time at a factory and had to leave her three children at home all day to make money. At that time, her oldest son was 10 and would watch over his two younger siblings while Guadalupe was away.

In the place we lived, it was a very bad place, Guadalupe said. We didnt have a door. We faced danger every day.

Fuller knew Guadalupe needed to be home with her children, but if she wasnt working there would be no way for her to save money to buy her land. Fuller said for an extreme case like Guadalupes, SPJ will build a home for a family on land the nonprofit owns.

Today, Guadalupe and her children live in a home painted a cerulean blue in the shared living space. In rooms down the hallway, yellow, orange and green walls light up the home.

For me its something very precious (to live in this house), Guadalupe said.

I have food to eat, clothes for my children, shoes for them, for me, she added, her eyes filling with tears as her 4-year-old daughter sat on her lap and her 9-year-old son leaned on the couch behind her. They gave me my stove, my bed  Im so grateful to everyone who was a part of Janes team in giving us support. Shes changed the lives of many people, and me, completely.

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Place of great need

Nuri Sanchez, 38, is another resident in the colonia who says Fuller has changed her familys fortunes.

I lived in a home made out of wood with my five small children. She came to see how we lived, and she built us a house, Sanchez said, noting her previous single-room home would flood every time it rained.

Today, Sanchez, her husband and children work at SPJ mercado, maintaining the building and helping run other locations within the large mall-like structure. Sanchez also helps to organize products that Fuller delivers weekly.

Fuller fondly calls Sanchez her mini Jane.

Sanchez calls the colonias a place of great need and praises Fuller for the help, but notes its not a complete solution for everything.

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Education is key

Fuller said education is the way to ultimately end the cycle of poverty and SPJ built a library about four years ago.

It now has hundreds of childrens books on short shelves to be accessible to the kids. Several tables and chairs, a computer lab and a movie room also fill the library.

Eliezer Valdivieso, Valeria Luna and their 3-year-old daughter have lived in the library for the last year, managing it full time to ensure that its open 24/7 for children in the community.

Were really striving with the younger generation, and they want (a better life through education), Fuller said.

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How it began

Fuller and her family relocated to El Paso in 2000. Her husband, Jack, worked for Philips Electronics and his office was in Mexico.

One day, Jacks secretary invited the Fullers to her house in Juarez and showed them around the city.

I was not used to poverty that was generational, Fuller said. I was used to homeless people, whether its from psychiatric problems or a paycheck away from the street or addictions, but to see people that were born into the cycle of poverty was very humbling.

In the beginning, Fuller, her husband, and her six children would cross the border weekly to bring peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to families. Fuller jokes that SPJ also means special peanut butter and jelly.

Later, Fuller began asking neighbors and family friends for food and donations to give to the families she saw in the colonias and the mission grew from there.

Fullers faith is a huge part of her work, hence the English meaning behind the programs name: Following the Footsteps of Jesus.

My faith plays 100%, Fuller said. Ive had a lot of medical issues along the way. People that have had the same things have not made it, and Ive made it in at this point.

Fuller survived breast cancer twice, years before starting the foundation. She said after she was fully healed, she wanted to do something to give back in the name of her faith.

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The effect of the pandemic and change over years

Fuller arrived in the colonias on her most recent visit in an SUV filled with donations. She drove the SUV along the unpaved road to the mercado where a dozen residents arrived to greet her and help unload all the new supplies.

The people that live in the community are our volunteers, Fuller said. Each of them has been trained to do something different to help.

This time, Fuller brought large furniture, boxes of food, bags of clothing and hygiene supplies. Also on this trip was Chet Wright, from Las Cruces, who comes with Fuller twice a month to give children bicycles with his nonprofit Bikes for Juarez.

Fuller said, because of the COVID-19 pandemic and travel restrictions, it hasnt been possible to bring any other US volunteers to Juarez to help other than Wright. Because of this, the health clinic that is normally open monthly hasnt been functioning regularly during the pandemic.

Also, the pandemic affected fundraising.

Normally, SPJ raises the vast majority of its donations at a big fundraiser in El Paso in November. But it was canceled in 2020.

Without having that fundraiser last year, I was really, really worried, Fuller said. Because were not eligible for community grant money because we do work in Mexico. So we have to look for personal grants, family foundation grants, things like that.

She said that she was able to make up the difference thanks to donors.

This allowed Fuller to keep the donations and funding flowing into the community that she says isnt looking for a handout.

They just try so hard to improve their lives, Fuller said. Shes happy to help out where she can.

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Cyr is a corps member for the Report for America initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues. Follow Cyr on Twitter.
ISLAMABAD (AP)  Four Pakistani soldiers died on Sunday when their vehicle plunged down a ravine off a curvy mountain road in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, the military said in a statement.

The soldiers were in the semi-autonomous region to police its local parliamentary polls, it added. Another three soldiers and the driver were injured in the accident.
LINCOLN, Neb. (AP)  Marie Kondo, the famous organizer who has encouraged millions to look at items and discard them if they dont spark joy, has clearly never been in Tim Linkes position.

Because railroad cars that have taken up space at the Lincoln Fire and Rescues training facility for decades have failed to spark joy in the battalion chief in charge of training -- or anybody else in fire administration.

Turns out discarding an old caboose, two box cars, a flat car and a tank car -- each roughly 25 to 30 tons of metal -- is easier said than done.

But Lincoln Parks and Recreation and about six acres of grassland in the West Haymarket could provide a solution.

The Lincoln Journal Star reports the rail cars recently came up during a discussion between Parks and Recreation Director Lynn Johnson and Fire Chief David Engler. Engler asked if Johnson had any interest in them.

That got us thinking, said J.J. Yost, parks and recreations planning and facilities manager.

Specifically, it got them thinking about a stretch of open space near Seventh and N street across the street from the still-under-construction Canopy Park, a residential and commercial development.

The West Haymarket Joint Public Agency gave the land to the Lincoln Parks Foundation, which then sold the land to the city in 2018. Development of the park is part of the Downtown Master Plan, and the estimated cost in 2018 was about $9 million.

Railroad tracks run just west of the future park, and sitting around watching trains is apparently a thing people like to do, which is what got parks officials thinking.

Maybe a few of those old rail cars could be refurbished, Johnson thought, put in the park and used as observation areas or perhaps shelters for family gatherings.

Parks officials contacted a Wyoming company that refurbishes rail cars and representatives passing through Lincoln deemed them good candidates for refurbishing, Johnson said.

Its a pretty neat deal, said Linke, who has been working around the cars for years.

Nobody seems to know just how they ended up at the training facility at Third and South streets, but theyve been there a lot longer than Linkes 23-year tenure with the department.

The fire department has used the cars for classrooms, storage and office space and to simulate hazardous materials incidents, but for years theyve sat empty.

Linke said the department has upgrades theyd like to do at the training facility and they could use the space now taken up by empty rail cars.

Parks officials wouldnt use all of the rail cars, and using even some of them is still just an idea -- but one officials want to pursue. Theyve yet to talk cost with the Wyoming company, Johnson said.

Developing the park would require a fundraising campaign, Yost said. That could happen in 2022.
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP)  More than 100 people gathered outside the Iowa state Capitol Saturday to rally against mandates requiring people to get vaccinated against COVID-19, such as the ones some Iowa hospitals have issued.

One of the speakers at the rally, Republican state Rep. Jeff Shipley, called vaccine mandates a crime against humanity. People in the crowd held signs that said stop vax bullying and mandates belong in socialist countries.
BALTIMORE (AP)  A family of ducks swam along Baltimores Inner Harbor as the sun rose, glimmers of pink and red reflecting off the buildings dotting the harbor. Aside from a few early-morning joggers, the harbor was still. But the ducks were about to have some company  stand-up paddleboard instructor Emily Knaus was setting up for her regular Wednesday sunrise class on a pier next to the Rusty Scupper.

Watching the harbor wake up when its quiet, its really kind of special, said Lauren Flowers, 51, one of the participants in Knaus class. If I take one deep breath, I can feel my blood pressure drop 10 points.

The sunrise class is one of the offerings from stand-up paddleboard company BMore SUP, which opened a new location on the Inner Harbor this summer. Owner Jessie Benson said shes dreamed of opening an Inner Harbor location ever since she started paddling in 2010.

Im very used to being on the water in Baltimore and I just have this passion for showing people the city through a different perspective, Benson said.

Many Baltimore residents might not find paddling out into the harbor so appealing. The waterway doesnt have the best reputation, as sewage overflows and other pollutants have streamed into the water over the years. The water is becoming safer, but is not yet swimmable, according to Baltimore Waterfront Partnerships 2020 Harbor Heartbeat Report.

So the big question for potential paddleboarders: What happens if you fall in?

That doesnt faze Lisa Gerolamo, one of the recent class participants. It was her first time taking a board into the harbor, but the nurse from Canton has paddleboarded consistently for the last five years. Gerolamo, 32, has traveled to quite a few places, including Costa Rica, for paddling retreats.

Ive done quite a bit of traveling and Ive probably swam in questionable places, Gerolamo said. Theres never been a hesitation in my mind.

The Harbor Heartbeat report, based on data collected by Blue Water Baltimore, showed that fecal bacteria levels have improved significantly between 2009 and 2019. Blue Water Baltimore found heartening bacteria trends at 34 of their 49 monitoring stations across Baltimores waterways. Experts have pointed to the citys sewer system repairs as a possible reason behind declining bacteria levels.

People definitely have an initial feeling of yuck when they think about the Baltimore Harbor, said Adam Lindquist, director of the Waterfront Partnerships Healthy Harbor Initiative. But the reality is that the harbor is much cleaner than people perceive it to be.

James Bentley, spokesman for the city Department of Public Works, said the agency discourages people from swimming in any urban lake or stream at this time. But he emphasized the departments support of the Healthy Harbor Initiative and other efforts to clean up Baltimores waters. In addition to alleviating sewage backups, the department is working to reduce nutrient levels, allowing for greater oxygen levels in the water.

Despite such progress, Blue Water Baltimore Waterkeeper Alice Volpitta stressed that the harbor is a long way from meeting Marylands criteria for swimmable waters. Bacteria levels vary day by day depending on rainfall, but some days those levels are dangerously high.

Just because something is getting better, it still doesnt mean its good enough, Volpitta said.

This doesnt mean its unilaterally unsafe to paddleboard or enjoy other recreational activities on the harbor, she said.

We have been conditioned over time to see the harbor as this untouchable entity and thats really not true, Volpitta said. Theres a lot of life that exists in the harbor.

She recommends a risk management approach, and encourages people to make a decision based on a variety of factors. For example, it is unsafe to enter the harbor after powerful rainstorms that can send gallons of sewage into streams and eventually the harbor. If you have an open cut, you could develop a staph infection.

Benson said she follows water safety data closely, and cancels sessions if theyre within 48 hours after heavy rainfall. All instructors are certified in water safety training. BMore SUP also accepts only experienced paddlers, who are much less likely to fall in, at its harbor location. First-time paddleboarders need to take a class at BMore SUPs Dundalk location if they want to paddle in the harbor.

Even with advanced paddlers, BMore SUP cant eliminate the risk of falling in. Benson said there are showers on site for people to use if they slip into the water.

Knaus, the main Inner Harbor instructor, said shes seen just one person fall in. The paddler went down laughing and, when they paddled back, hopped in the shower.

At the sunrise session on an early July Wednesday, Knaus helped the six paddlers launch off the pier and slide out into the harbor. They headed past the Ritz Carlton apartments and toward the Domino Sugar sign. Knaus said she keeps her eyes peeled for the wildlife nestled in the harbor, such as jellyfish and ducks.

Lizette Tirado, 55, has paddle boarded for over five years. She loves paddling back home in Puerto Rico, but shes also a longtime fan of paddling in the harbor. She first paddled in the Inner Harbor about three years ago with the Baltimore Floatilla, an annual five-mile paddling event.

I understand that some people might be hesitant, but it really is beautiful, said Tirado, a health care specialist living in Dundalk.

Volpitta said shes excited people are taking advantage of the harbor, and hopes this will encourage people to take better care of the resource. But she emphasized that people need to be able to make informed decisions, and called on the city to install educational signage around the harbor to make people aware of the risks of swimming.

This is a nuanced issue, and people need to be able to make those choices on a case-by-case basis, Volpitta said. And the only way that people are ever going to be able to do that is by having the data at their fingertips and having the knowledge that this is potentially an issue.

Bentley said the city installs signage only in areas where officials know sewage overflows and/or active swimming occurs.

These tend to be more along streams and rivers where there is no separation from the water and where it appears scenic, he said.

For the sunrise BMore SUP crew, paddle boarding on the harbor is about pure enjoyment. Flowers, a nurse practitioner in Dundalk, said shed get up early to paddle in her city any day.

Having a high-stress job, coming out here and getting an hour of peace, its totally worth it to get up at 5 in the morning, Flowers said.
QUOGUE, N.Y. (AP)  Five people were dead and another person was in critical condition after a head-on collision on Long Island, according to police.

The accident occurred at about 11:15 p.m. Saturday on Montauk Highway in Quogue.

A Nissan Maxima traveling west with one person aboard left its lane and slammed into an eastbound Toyota Prius with five people inside, Quogue police told Newsday.

Quogue resident Joseph Dicarlo told the newspaper he was sitting in his home with the air conditioning on and the windows closed when he heard the crash.

From what I heard it sounded like a train was hitting a bus doing like 100 miles per hour, he said.

Four people were pronounced dead at the scene and one person died at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital. Police identified them as Farhan Zahid, 32, of Bay Shore, who was driving the Prius; 20-year-old Michael Farrell and his brother, 25-year-old James Farrell, of Manhasset, and 25-year-old Ryan Kiess, also of Manhasset. The driver of the Maxima, 22-year-old Justin Mendez of Brookhaven, also died.

Twenty-two-year-old Brianna Maglio of Garden City was in critical condition, police said.

Additional details weren't immediately available, and the accident is under investigation.
DEDHAM, Mass. (AP)  The driver in a rollover crash that left a passenger dead has been charged with drunken driving and motor vehicle homicide, State Police said Sunday.

Arkeem Samuel, 28, of Boston, was being held on $50,000 bail and is expected to be arraigned Monday in Dedham District Court.
HASTINGS, Neb. (AP)  Police are investigating a fatal shooting in the Nebraska town of Hastings.

Police the shooting was reported shortly before 10 p.m. Friday. When officers arrived at the home on South Pine Avenue, they found a 28-year-old man with a gunshot wound dead inside.

The victim was identified as Santinorey Adalberto Gonzalez of Harvard, Nebraska.

Details about the circumstances of the shooting weren't immediately released and no arrests were reported, but officials said there was no threat to the public. Police initially detained a person of interest in the case, but later released that person.

Hastings Police and the Nebraska State Patrol are investigating, and an autopsy will be performed on Monday.
LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP)  A retired University of Kansas professor received Poland's Medal of Valor this weekend more than 75 years after he fought with the Polish resistance against the occupying forces of Nazi Germany during World War II.

Polish Air Force Major Gen. Cezary Wisniewski who is based at the Polish embassy in Washington D.C. visited Jarek Piekalkiewicz's home in Lawrence, Kansas, Saturday to give him Poland's second-highest combat honor on his 95th birthday.

Wisniewski said the honor was overlooked during the war and then the post-war communist government of Poland refused to honor the country's wartime resistance fighters. The recommendation that Piekalkiewicz receive the medal for his efforts was recently discovered in Poland's archives, according to the Lawrence Journal-World.

Piekalkiewicz joined the Polish resistance at age 16. Two years later, he was promoted to platoon sergeant and commanded 1,000 men during the bloody uprising of 1944 when roughly 6,000 resistance soldiers were killed before the resistance surrendered in October when its forces ran short of ammunition and food.

Piekalkiewicz said he then became a prisoner of war at a German labor camp, and he tried to escape three separate times before he finally succeeded. Later he served with the U.S. Army and British military.

After the war, he earned his bachelors degree and met his wife at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, before coming to the United States and earning his doctorate. He went on to teach at KU from 1963 to 2000,

Wisniewski said Piekalkiewicz continued to serve Poland after he came to America by advocating for Poland to become a member of NATO.
CONCORD, N.H. (AP)  A volunteer organization that advocated for residents of long-term care facilities during the pandemic has ended its work now that most have been vaccinated and infections are low.

For 14 months, members of the Senior Support Team of New Hampshire served as liaisons to more than 55 facilities across the state. Their work included daily communication with the state Department of Health and Human Services to relay timely information about PPE supplies and other issues.
JACKSON, Miss. (AP)  Even as COVID-19 cases have increased rapidly in Mississippi in recent days, some school districts are saying masks will be optional for students, teachers and staff.

Among the districts taking that approach is the state's largest one, DeSoto County School District.

Right now, there are no state mandates or local mandates requiring masks, Superintendent Cory Uselton told WMC-TV. Last year, we were under a mask mandate because of the governors executive order. Theres no executive order in place right now, so that will be a parental decision.

As part of its guidance for K-12 school settings, the Mississippi State Department of Health recommends masks for anyone not fully vaccinated. It also recommends people 12 and older get vaccinated. Instead of encouraging either of those things, the DeSoto District will give families information from the health department, the CDC and American Academy of Pediatrics, Uselton said.

The Mississippi chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics published a letter Thursday saying that it recommends masks indoors for schools for any child 2 or older and for all teachers and staff.

In the absence of schools being able to conduct monitoring of vaccination status on a daily basis, universal masking is the best and most effective strategy to create consistent messages, expectations, enforcement and compliance without the added administrative burden placed upon already stressed teachers, said the letter signed by the chapter president, Dr. Anita Henderson of Hattiesburg.

Classes started last week in the Gulfport School District. Superintendent Glen East told WLOX-TV that masks are not required but are strongly encouraged," especially for those younger than 12.

Without state mandates, East said it is up to the parents to make the good decisions.

The Lauderdale County School District, where classes begin Aug. 5, is taking the same approach.

We talked with medical professionals, Deshannon Davis, the districts director of career and technical education, told WTOK-TV. We talked with our school nurses, our administrators, our teachers on the front lines."

In the absence of mask mandate from Gov. Tate Reeves, the Lauderdale County schools decided to make that a parental decision, Davis said.

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Follow APs coverage of the pandemic at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak.
WAYNE, Ill. (AP)  A tick species native to the southeastern part of the United States has been found outside Chicago.

Three Gulf Coast ticks were located earlier this month in the Dunham Forest Preserve in Wayne, according to The (Arlington Heights) Daily Herald. Wayne is roughly 40 miles west of Chicago.
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP)  Connecticut could lag behind most states in regaining hotel jobs lost during the coronavirus pandemic, according to projections by a national trade group.

The Washington, D.C.-based American Hotel and Lodging Association predicts the state will have regained a little less than 72% of its roughly 26,000 direct hotel industry jobs by years end. The projected 7,400 unfilled jobs is a more dire forecast than the group made in May, when it predicted a gap of about 5,900 jobs.

The group predicts only four states  Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts and New York  and the District of Columbia will regain smaller percentages than Connecticut by the end of 2021. It estimates the hotel industry will end 2021 down about 500,000 jobs compared to 2019 levels.

Direct hotel jobs include positions such as housekeeper and front desk attendant but dont include jobs such as restaurant or retail workers or other small businesses supported by the hotel industry.

Experts say vacation and leisure travel in Connecticut has rebounded but business travel has lagged considerably. Business travelers account for roughly 60% of the hotel industry's customer base.

We are still facing incredible challenges, Ginny Kozlowski, executive director of the Connecticut Hotel and Lodging Association, told the Hartford Courant, adding that the industry is in serious trouble.

Tourism promotion and the hospitality sector are expected to receive more than $60 million in aid through the state budget and federal relief funding, the newspaper reported. The state also is expected to roll out a new grant program early next year that will assist hotels and related businesses.

Kozlowski told the newspaper the hospitality industry could make an additional appeal this year or in early 2022 for more assistance.

More than 70% of Connecticut residents 12 and over have been vaccinated, one of the highest rates in the country. But the infection test positivity rate has crept up recently as the delta variant of the virus has spread.
URBANA, Ill. (AP)  The University of Illinois system is setting up offices in India to help recruit students and build relationships with academic and corporate partners.

India already is one of the top countries of origin for students at the University of Illinois System's campuses, with 2,848 students between the universities in Urbana-Champaign, Chicago and Springfield last fall. That's more than from any foreign nation other than China, the system office said. More than 2,200 alumni call India home.
CULPEPER, Va. (AP)  Virginia's state government watchdog says the commonwealth's land conservation easement program that offers participants tax breaks needs improvement.

Auditors with the Office of the State Inspector General found items like trash, old tires, inoperable vehicles and a manure storage area containing dead-cattle parts on properties with easements it inspected, the Culpeper Star-Exponent reported.

Virginia provides tax credits up to $75 million per year for conservation easements and land donations, Inspector General Michael Westfall said in a statement. In effect, Virginia is paying for natural resource preservation through these tax credits.

There's currently a $1 million tax credit value threshold for a Department of Conservation and Recreation quality review of an easement. Among the watchdog's recommendations was lowering that threshold.

But Dan Holmes, director of state policy for the Piedmont Environmental Council, told the newspaper the tax credit was a valuable tool and questioned the audit's conclusions and methodology.

It is the most broad-based tool we have for sustaining our agricultural lands, preserving forests and protecting streams," Holmes said of the program.
PORTLAND, Maine (AP)  Proposed rules designed to protect a declining species of whale have arrived at the White House for review.

The federal government is working on rules designed to reduce risk to North Atlantic right whales. The whales number only about 360. They face threats including entanglement in ropes that connect to lobster and crab traps in the ocean.
LOS ANGELES  Guillermo Cozar waited months to get his vaccine because, he reasoned, hed already had COVID-19 last fall and didnt think he would get sick again.

When he showed up at a more-than-a-century-old house of worship in the Pico-Union neighborhood to finally get the shot, there was no more waiting to be done.

There was no line to stand in because few people showed up, even as the delta variant of the coronavirus causes an increase in infections and hospitalizations across much of the U.S.

I feel calmer now that I finally got the vaccine, the 45-year-old said. I need to protect myself and everyone else.

Cozar was among more than two dozen people, most of them Latino and immigrant, who showed up at a clinic Friday designed to bring in vaccine stragglers as cases in Los Angeles County reach levels not seen since the waning days of the winter surge.

With healthy vaccinated people getting sick and unvaccinated people in emergency rooms, now is not the time to ignore the COVID pandemic, the event flier read.

Nearby, volunteers gave away food as part of a weekly distribution hosted by the Pico Union Project. With the food drawing hundreds of people each week, organizers hoped that it would also attract people who have procrastinated from getting the vaccine.

The results were modest. And some of those who showed up to be vaccinated were people from Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico who felt blessed to get life-saving shots that are so much harder to get it in their countries.

They, too, did not have to wait.

Wed heard there were a lot of people here who didnt want to get vaccinated and there was availability, so we thought wed take advantage since wed be traveling here, said David Mendez, who was visiting from Guatemala with his wife and father. Its a shame that people have the opportunity to get vaccinated but havent done it. Ideally we would all get vaccinated so we could get out of this as quickly as possible.

On Friday, the county reported 3,058 new coronavirus cases. That means the county has confirmed 10,000 cases just in the last four days.

Hospitalizations are also rising, with the number hitting 655 on Friday.

Between July 12 and July 18, just about 57,000 first-dose shots doses were administered across the county. It was an increase of about 2,000 from the previous week.

We do continue to vaccinate Angelenos at low but steady rates and last week after months, or really after weeks of steadily declining weekly vaccination numbers, we saw an uptick in first-dose recipients, L.A. County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said Thursday.

Although the number of vaccinations is slowly increasing, Latinos still lag behind, with 55% having received at least one dose, compared with 66% of whites. In the Black community, that number stands even lower, at 46%.

Its the same communities who have been impacted the most that are still not getting vaccinated, said Dr. Yelba Castellon-Lopez, an assistant professor with UCLAs Department of Family Medicine. Its a preventable catastrophe.

Before 9 a.m., clinic workers set up blue and white tents in the parking lot of the headquarters of the Pico Union Project, a nonprofit that teamed up with Curative health to host the clinic. They planned to administer tests and vaccines over four hours.

Many of those who arrived at the clinic came from outside of Pico-Union, where 60% of residents have received at least one dose.

Around 10 a.m., Marco Figueroa had completed five deliveries for work when he saw the sign hed been waiting for: Vacuna de COVID gratis. Free COVID vaccine.

His sister and brother got vaccinated in May, but the 42-year-old wanted to avoid taking a day off of work.

Luego, luego, he would tell his siblings when they asked when hed go. Later, later.

When he spotted the poster board affixed to a utility pole, he decided to give up his lunch hour to get vaccinated. His co-worker parked their work truck in a loading zone on 12th Street and waited as Figueroa headed to the blue tents where two registered nurses were giving vaccines.

As Figueroa waited the 10 minutes for workers to prep the Pfizer vaccine, he gripped the sides of the black folding chair where he sat. Not because he was scared, he said, but because he was worried about falling behind on the deliveries he had left.

As she waited to get vaccinated, Ericka Millan stared skeptically at the needle. She pulled nervously on her pink nails.

Are you sure its Pfizer? she asked the nurse, who assured her it was. Her family said they had experienced fewer side effects from that vaccine.

The 27-year-old had recently tested positive for an autoimmune disease and worried about what her reaction would be. Because she rarely left home, she delayed getting vaccinated, making her one of the last in her family to get it.

She finally decided to come because she starts teaching at a high school in mid-August and worried about getting exposed to more people. She also cited a growing number of people getting sick at her husbands work in recent weeks.

Were over here anxious about whether they have COVID, Millan said. So we were like, might as well get the shot.

A handful of people who showed up at the clinic, like Cozar, cited the fact that they had gotten COVID during the last surge and felt they had immunity.

Castellon-Lopez said its something thats come up in webinars shes done with community organizations. Shes also heard from Latinos who worry that the vaccine is too new, who initially worried about the cost and who brought up disinformation around the vaccine.

Im able to really spend time and leverage my role as a doctor and trusted source of information to provide people with more information so they feel informed and feel more confident in getting the vaccine, she said.

Masha Norman, 19, arrived at the clinic to get her grandmother tested for the coronavirus after her unvaccinated brother tested positive. Her sibling, who is in a band, had gone to play at a show and started feeling sick afterward.

Norman and her grandmother were both vaccinated months ago, along with most of her family. But she called her brother an extreme anti-vaxxer.

Why its spreading in L.A. County, why we have to wear masks inside again, its mainly because of unvaccinated people, Norman said. Hopefully with my brother getting COVID now, he can realize that no one is invincible and everyone can get it.

Auxiliadora Gutierrez waited on her twin sister, Socorro Santamaria, to join her at the vaccine clinic. She had held off on getting vaccinated over the last few months, she said, to see how other people reacted to it.

Gutierrez said she had recently watched a man on Spanish-language TV talk about how he had waited and finally decided to get vaccinated, but got sick before he could get his shot.

He said vaccinate yourselves, dont keep thinking about it, Gutierrez said. That motivated me. I didnt want to keep thinking about it.

Santamaria filled a black pushcart with produce and a box of rice before getting vaccinated. The 55-year-old had heard mixed messages about the vaccines and decided to delay, but the rising COVID cases in the county, along with counsel from the pastors at her church, persuaded her to come.

Gutierrezs sons have been vaccinated but her daughter, who administers the vaccine to others, has not gotten the shot. Her daughter was shocked to hear that she was at the clinic.

It was lack of information. Now I know its good to get vaccinated, Gutierrez said.

Santamaria said none of her children have been vaccinated, calling it a roulette. Her 13-year-old granddaughter showed the family a video filled with misinformation about women becoming infertile after getting vaccinated.

Now Im going to motivate my daughters, Santamaria said.

By 1 p.m., Curative had administered around 80 tests and 30 vaccines. Jennifer Pajounia was one of the last people to get vaccinated. Because she had COVID back in October, she questioned the point of getting the shot.

Instead, she decided to wait, to let things settle down a little.

Clearly things arent getting better, she said. Clearly its something that everyone has to do.

The 27-year-old, who lives at home with her parents and her brother, said her family started to feel sick two weeks ago.

I thought to myself, Im tired of being scared and wondering if its COVID or not, she said. I might as well just get vaccinated to avoid that.

___

(Los Angeles Times staff writers Luke Money and Rong-Gong Lin contributed to this report.)
BARCELONA, Spain (AP)  Firefighters in northeast Spain were battling a wildfire Sunday that has consumed over 1,200 hectares (3,000 acres) of woodland.

High temperatures and strong winds fanned the flames in the rural area 100 kilometers (62 miles) west of Barcelona that broke out on Saturday evening.
MADISON, Wis. (AP)  For 26-year-old Olivia McKnight, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour would transform her life.

As a full-time Popeyes employee in Milwaukee, McKnight makes $10 an hour. This isnt nearly enough to support herself and her three children. She also works a second job. The long work hours have forced her to miss out on time spent with her children, including holidays and key life moments.

For 29-year-old James Rudd, who earns more than $15 an hour now, he is finally able to pay for the things he needs. And he now fights for all workers in Wisconsin to reach at least $15 an hour.

In contrast with McKnight, Rudds maintenance job at AT&Ts Milwaukee office cleaning floors and changing light bulbs has made his life easier. He can afford health insurance, bus fare and to keep current on his bills  all of which were out of reach when he earned $7.25 or $8 an hour.

Thats where McKnight is now.

I try to provide for my family day to day, month to month, paying rent, paying electric, lights, and trying to find babysitters, she said. Its definitely hard, it takes the majority of my time away, and its like Im almost working for pennies.

___

The nonprofit news outlet Wisconsin Watch provided this article to The Associated Press through a collaboration with Institute for Nonprofit News.

___

Roughly 1 million hourly workers nationwide earn the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour or less. Like others fed up with low earnings, McKnight recently joined the Fight for $15, a global political movement working to increase the minimum wage for all underpaid workers.

In Wisconsin, where the racial wealth and income gaps are some of the greatest in the nation, many feel raising the minimum is long overdue. According to a 2019 Marquette Law School Poll, 55% of Wisconsinites support raising the minimum wage, while 39% oppose it. And Black women like McKnight are among those who would benefit the most from it.

Black and Hispanic women are more than twice as likely as white men to make less than $15 per hour, according to calculations by The Washington Post using federal jobs data. About 46% of Hispanic women and 39% of Black women earn less than $15 an hour, while only 18% of white and Asian men earn less than $15 per hour. In Wisconsin, an estimated 43.7% of residents earn less than $15 an hour.

Because of grassroots movements like the Fight for $15 and growing political support, eight states and the District of Columbia have already passed legislation to raise the wage to $15 an hour, most recently Florida, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center.

But not Wisconsin. It is among 21 states whose minimum wage matches the federal level of $7.25 an hour. In 10 other states, the minimum is higher but still under $10, the UC Berkeley Labor Center reports.

Legislators, activists and community members have organized, lobbied and proposed changes to the federal and state-level wages for years, well before Democrats tried unsuccessfully to include a federal $15 minimum wage in the pandemic relief package passed in February 2021. `

In January, Democrats reintroduced the Raise the Wage Act, which would gradually increase the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2025 and end pay below-the-minimum wage for tipped workers. Under the bill, the minimum wage would increase immediately to $9.50 an hour, then to $11 per hour next year, $12.50 in 2023, $14 in 2024 and then $15 in 2025. A similar bill was introduced in 2019 but never cleared the GOP-controlled Senate.

The main reason minimum wage bills have stalled: Opponents argue that raising it would force many businesses to close or cut their workforces, resulting in fewer jobs.

A recent Congressional Budget Office report estimated that implementing a nationwide minimum of $15 an hour would lift nearly 1 million people out of poverty  but employment would be reduced by 1.4 million workers. Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, a powerful business lobby, argues raising the minimum wage would reduce opportunities for entry-level workers by making it more expensive for companies to hire them.

Low wages have long been a problem for workers of color in Wisconsin. Black median household income in Milwaukee has fallen by almost 30% since 1979. In fact, the Black median household income of $29,655 is the lowest among the top 50 U.S. metropolitan areas, and it is only 42% of white median household income, which in 2018 was $70,561. Thats according to a 2020 study by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Center for Economic Development, which controlled for cost of living while comparing metropolitan areas.

I think thats a profound finding, said Marc Levine, co-founder of the center who led the study. It tells us a lot about not only our history, but about whats happening today in Milwaukee and how little progress it has made.

Levines recent research focuses on Black communities and how they fare in the nations 50 largest metropolitan areas on issues including housing segregation, incarceration, poverty and income. On nearly every measure, Milwaukee comes out at or near the bottom. Wisconsins largest city, he said, represents the archetype of modern-day metropolitan racial apartheid and inequality.

Differences in educational achievement do not account for the disparities in income. According to Levines report, a white high school dropout is over twice as likely to be employed in Milwaukee than a Black high school dropout. In fact, white high school dropouts have a higher employment rate than Black workers who have graduated from high school.

So when we talk about raising the minimum wage and the Fight for 15, you can see how important that is for Black Milwaukee given the very low wages that are earned by Black males, Levine told Wisconsin Watch. My estimate is that almost 40 to 45% of Black workers in Milwaukee would benefit from raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

For Wisconsin state Sen. Melissa Agard, the issue of raising the minimum wage is a moral one. Far too many people in the state who are working 40 hours a week  and who are disproportionately people of color  are still unable to take care of themselves and their families with dignity, she said.

On June 17, Agard announced she would reintroduce legislation to raise the minimum wage to $15 in Wisconsin. She said it is embarrassing and shameful that the minimum hourly wage in the state has been frozen at $7.25 since 2009.

Many minimum-wage workers are forced to rely on public assistance programs, which cost the state billions. Addressing income inequality, in part by raising the minimum wage, could actually save the state money in respect to government-funded assistance programs because people would be able to better support themselves and their families, Agard said.

Increased wages mean less people (are) reliant on government assistance for food, health care and other essentials, she said. In the richest country on the planet, no one should work full time and live in poverty.

The UC Berkeley Labor Center found that 45% of workers in Wisconsin who would receive a pay boost if the Raise the Wage Act were passed are currently enrolled in one or more public assistance programs, including Medicaid, FoodShare and the Earned Income Tax Credit. Those working class employees are supported by an estimated $2.4 billion in public assistance programs in Wisconsin, the Labor Center estimated.

Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce is a major voice of opposition to raising the minimum wage. The group argues that the biggest issue facing employers is a lack of skilled workers, and that the state should focus on training workers and incentivizing young professionals and college graduates to remain in the state.

The powerful business group did not respond to requests for comment. But in its legislative agenda, WMC stated that raising the minimum wage will increase the cost of employing entry level workers, resulting in fewer job opportunities for workers entering the workforce who need to build skills and experience for their career.

In addition, the Congressional Budget Office projected that the reduction in employment would increase spending for programs such as unemployment compensation. It also projected the costs of goods and services would increase, leading consumers to limit purchases and employers to reduce their employment.

After attempting to push through the bill in 2015 and 2017, the senator invited her Republican colleagues to join her. Everyone deserves economic security, she said.

Another Democratic-backed proposal in Wisconsin would ensure tipped employees currently making $2.13 or $2.33 an hour are compensated the same minimum wage as the rest of the workforce. Sen. Chris Larson of Milwaukee and Rep. Francesca Hong of Madison are sponsors of the measure.

This wage is simply not enough, Larson said at a March press conference introducing the legislation. Up to 60% of tipped workers report that their tipped wages are too low to meet unemployment thresholds, and 46% rely on public assistance for basic survival.

Larissa Joanna, a restaurant worker and single mother of two, said such a change would have helped her. She described getting paid the sub-minimum wage at her past restaurant jobs as dehumanizing. Having to rely so heavily on tips from customers to support her family made her stressed and worried.

For the past three years Joanna has worked as a manager at a Madison restaurant that starts every employee at the $7.25 minimum wage, plus tips. But she continues to fight for a higher wage for others because she knows what its like to work hard and yet not earn enough to support a family.

And she can never make up for lost time with her sons  one of whom has autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and speech delays  while she worked two jobs just to make ends meet.

Unfortunately I had to spend that time away from my children, and if we were all making better pay it would be beneficial for everyone as a whole including our children, Joanna said.

Fifteen dollars is just a start. We want to take vacations. We want to be able to live the American dream," Rudd said.
SAN FRANCISCO (BCN)

U.S. District Judge Edward Chen sentenced a 31-year-old Virginia man to 15 years in prison and ordered him to pay more than $20,000 in restitution for his role in a conspiracy to commit armed home invasion robberies in Sonoma County

Acting United States Attorney Stephanie M. Hinds announced the ruling Thursday, after reaching a plea agreement Aaron McArthur, also known as Gangster Boogie, G Boogie, Boogie and as Suave.

McArthur admitted that he agreed in January 2018 with others to commit home invasion robberies in Northern California.

Prosecutors said the plea agreement included other admissions, including descriptions of how McArthur recruited the participation of others, coordinated their travel from Virginia to Northern California, and planned the invasions.

The scheme included four robberies, a pair each on Feb. 8, 2018, and March 12, 2018. In one of the robberies on the earlier date, McArthur's co-conspirators shot and killed one of the residents.

McArthur pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit robbery affecting interstate commerce.

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INDIAN FALLS, Calif. (AP)  Flames racing through rugged terrain in Northern California destroyed multiple homes Saturday as the state's largest wildfire intensified and numerous other blazes battered the U.S. West.

The Dixie fire, which started July 14, had already leveled over a dozen houses and other structures when it tore through the tiny community of Indian Falls after dark.

An updated damage estimate was not immediately available, though fire officials said the blaze has charred more than 181,000 acres (73,200 hectares) in Plumas and Butte counties and was 20% contained.

The fire was burning in a remote area with limited access, hampering firefighters efforts as it charged eastward, fire officials said. It has prompted evacuation orders in several small communities and along the west shore of Lake Almanor, a popular area getaway.

Meanwhile, the nation's largest wildfire, southern Oregons Bootleg fire, was nearly halfway surrounded Saturday as more than 2,200 crew members worked to corral it in the heat and wind, fire officials said. The growth of the sprawling blaze had slowed, but thousands of homes remained threatened on its eastern side, authorities said.

This fire is resistant to stopping at dozer lines, Jim Hanson, fire behavior analyst, said in a news release from the Oregon Department of Forestry. With the critically dry weather and fuels we are experiencing, firefighters are having to constantly reevaluate their control lines and look for contingency options.

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has declared a state of emergency for four northern counties because of wildfires that he said were causing conditions of extreme peril to the safety of persons and property. The proclamation opened the way for more state support.

Such conditions are often from a combination of unusual random, short-term and natural weather patterns heightened by long-term, human-caused climate change. Global warming has made the West much warmer and drier in the past 30 years.

On Saturday, fire crews from California and Utah headed to Montana, Gov. Greg Gianforte announced. Five firefighters were injured Thursday when swirling winds blew flames back on them as they worked on the Devils Creek fire burning in rough, steep terrain near the rural town of Jordan, in the northeast part of the state.

They remained hospitalized Friday. Bureau of Land Management spokesperson Mark Jacobsen declined to release the extent of their injuries, and attempts to learn their conditions Saturday were unsuccessful. Three of the firefighters are U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service crew members from North Dakota, and the other two are U.S. Forest Service firefighters from New Mexico.

Another high-priority blaze, the Alder Creek fire in southwest Montana, had charred over 6,800 acres (2,750 hectares) and was 10% contained Saturday night. It was threatening nearly 240 homes.

Elsewhere in California, the Tamarack fire south of Lake Tahoe continued to burn through timber and chaparral and threatened communities on both sides of the California-Nevada state line. The fire, sparked by lightning July 4 in Alpine County, has destroyed at least 10 buildings.

Heavy smoke from that blaze and the Dixie fire lowered visibility and may at times ground aircraft providing support for fire crews. The air quality south of Lake Tahoe and across the state line into Nevada deteriorated to very unhealthy levels.

In north-central Washington, firefighters battled two blazes in Okanogan County that threatened hundreds of homes and again caused hazardous air quality conditions Saturday. And in northern Idaho, east of Spokane, Washington, a small fire near the Silverwood Theme Park prompted evacuations Friday evening at the park and in the surrounding area. The theme park was back open on Saturday with the fire half contained.

Although hot weather with afternoon winds posed a continued threat of spreading blazes, weekend forecasts also called for a chance of scattered thunderstorms in California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and other states. However, forecasters said some could be dry thunderstorms that produce little rain but a lot of lightning, which can spark new blazes.

More than 85 large wildfires were burning around the country, most of them in Western states, and they had burned over 1.4 million acres (2,135 square miles, or more than 553,000 hectares).
Close to 95% of the more than 2,400 confirmed and probable cases in Wyoming between May 1 and June 15 were in unvaccinated residents. More than 93% of hospitalized patients during that time frame were not fully vaccinated.
Also known as Rudreswara temple, this Kakatiyan architectural marvel is located at Palampet in Mulugu district near Warangal, about 200 km from Hyderabad.

Hyderabad, July 25 (IANS) The UNESCO World Heritage site status to Ramappa temple has come as the first global recognition of the rich spiritual and cultural heritage of Telangana, India's youngest state.

"Today, because of a historic decision taken at the 44th session of the World Heritage Committee, Ramappa temple now belongs to the whole world, to the entire humanity. I congratulate the people of Palampet," India's representative at the online session of the World Heritage Committee (WHC) said, expressing excitement over the inclusion of the temple among the list of World Heritage sites.

Seventeen countries including Russia, Oman, Brazil, Saudi, Egypt, Spain, Thailand, Hungary, Ethiopia and China described Ramappa as an outstanding heritage site and a manifestation of the master of human geniuses at the session.

Ramappa temple is the 39th site in India and the first in Telangana to get the coveted tag. This comes as the first major success of Telangana to get global recognition for its cultural heritage after attaining statehood seven years ago.

It was in 2014 that Ramappa temple was nominated for the inscription. A team of UNESCO officials had inspected the temple in 2019.

Last year, it was one of the global sites nominated for the coveted tag but the WHC meeting could not take place due to Covid-19 pandemic.

Ramappa Temple emple was constructed in 1213 AD during the reign of the Kakatiya Empire by Recharla Rudra, a general of Kakatiya king Ganapati Deva. The presiding deity here is Ramalingeswara Swamy. The temple became famous with the name sculptor Ramappa who executed the work for 40 years.

The temple complexes of Kakatiyas have a distinct style, technology and decoration exhibiting the influence of the Kakatiyan sculptor. The Ramappa temple is a manifestation of this and often stands as a testimonial to the Kakatiyan creative genius.

The temple stands on a 6 feet high star-shaped platform with walls, pillars and ceilings adorned with intricate carvings that attest to the unique skill of the Kakatiyan sculptors.

The sculptural art and decoration specific to the time and Kakatiyan Empire have an outstanding universal value. The distinct style of Kakatiyas for the gateways to temple complexes, unique only to this region confirm the highly evolved proportions of aesthetics in temple and town gateways in South India.

European merchants and travelers were mesmerized by the beauty of the temple and one such traveler had remarked that the temple was the "brightest star in the galaxy of medieval temples of the Deccan".

According to B.V. Papa Rao of Kakatiya Heritage Trust, which led the effort to get UNESCO tag, India had reached to 24 countries to inscribe Ramappa temple as World Heritage site. The countries were presented documents to show the importance of the site.

The Telangana government had also taken steps to conform to the demands made by the WHC in their agenda papers.

Two days ago, the state government announced that it is initiating formation of a management committee at the state level and Palampet Special Development Authority at the local level for adequate legal protection to the temple and to ensure regulated development by appropriately zoning areas near the temple.

Minister for tourism and culture V. Srinivas Goud stated that these steps will ensure that serenity and natural beauty of the surroundings of the temple are maintained. He announced that two temples near Ramappa will also be brought under the jurisdiction of Ramappa temple property as recommended by the International Council on Monuments and Sites.

--IANS

ms/skp/
Srinagar, July 25 (IANS) One of the three militants killed in gunfight with the security forces in J&K's Bandipora district had exfiltrated to Pakistan via Wagah border in 2018, police said on Sunday.

The militant was killed on Saturday.

"A resident of Bandipora, Sariq Baba had exfiltrated via Wagah border in 2018 and had infiltrated recently through the LoC", Vijay Kumar, Inspector General of Police (Kashmir) told reporters.
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Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size When the clock hit noon last Monday, Rick Lee logged onto a conference call and set a serious tone. As chairman of the ASX-listed energy producer Oil Search, he was here to face questions about why managing director Keiran Wulff had resigned today 17 months into the job. Lee was insistent from the outset: Wulff left due to ill health. But as the call went on, that wasnt quite the full story. It emerged there had also been a whistleblower complaint  believed to relate to Wulffs abrasive management style and behaviour  that the board deemed unacceptable under the companys code of conduct. Oil Search chairman Rick Lee now concedes the strategic logic of a merger, but wants a higher price. Credit:Steven Siewert Lees muddled explanation didnt go down well. Investors later described it as opaque at best. Analysts on the call began agitating for answers. Following last years emergency capital raising, the mysterious resignation of its chief financial officer-elect and now Wulff, one analyst remarked, shouldnt the board take some accountability for a dismal track record? Left now without a permanent CEO, said another, wasnt Oil Search at risk of being a lame duck in terms of fending off or maximising shareholder value from any potential takeover offers? We are just as well prepared if someone were to approach us, but that hasnt happened, Lee replied. If it does happen, you will be the first to know. If the board was under pressure already, by the next morning it was squarely in crisis.

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Within 24 hours, Oil Search was forced to issue a clarification to Lees remarks: the company had, in fact, been approached by a suitor. An offer had been received less than four weeks earlier. Documents released by Santos, Australias second-largest oil and gas producer, confirm it had sought on June 25 to merge with Oil Search to create a $22 billion industry giant. Oil Search investor Allan Gray Australia is in disbelief at last weeks events. It is not acceptable for boards to be anything but transparent, Allan Gray managing director Simon Mawhinney says. Oil Search owns oil and gas interests in Papua New Guinea and Alaska Credit: Since Tuesday, Lee has faced mounting calls to resign, according to multiple sources who requested anonymity to discuss the private matter. But so too is his board under pressure to re-engage with Santos after it became known that Oil Search rebuffed its suitors offer. Some consider Lee to be the safest pair of hands to see the process through. A tie-up looks like it makes a lot of sense, says Blake Henricks of Firetrail Investments, which has shares in both companies. My view is the Oil Search board should engage with Santos, to at least understand the offer and the value-creation. For many, the prospect of forming Australias biggest oil and gas company and one of the top 20 in the world is tantalising, particularly as accelerating concerns about the industrys contribution to global warming are causing equity investors and lenders to flee the sector, pushing the cost of capital ever-higher.

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Loading A landmark report by the International Energy Agency in May recommended investors must avoid funding any new oil and gas fields for the world to achieve the Paris agreements goal of limiting global temperature rises to 1.5 degrees. Its becoming a big boys game, says Henricks, and only the companies with big cash-flow will be able to afford the projects that will proceed. The proposed Santos-Oil Search tie-up is not an isolated one. In fact, there are growing expectations that a wave of merger-and-acquisition activity will sweep the sector in coming years. Just last week, speculation surfaced that mining giant BHP might be looking to accelerate its retreat from fossil fuels by selling its petroleum assets, with ASX-listed energy producer Woodside Petroleum tipped to be a likely prospective buyer. There has always been an obvious opportunity to combine Santos and Oil Search, industry insiders say. The companies are both joint-venture partners in the ExxonMobil-operated PNG LNG project in Papua New Guinea and have previously sounded each other out. But discussions are said to have begun in earnest six months ago, as the pandemic pummelled oil demand and sent stock prices falling. Santos documented its offer in June and put it to the board. Under its proposed all-stock deal, Oil Search shareholders would own 37 per cent of the merged entity and Santos shareholders would own 63 per cent, valuing Oil Search at the time with a 12 per cent premium at $4.25 a share. The big question now: is that premium enough?

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Loading Oil Search and some investors believe the Santos bid didnt stack up, undervaluing the company and falling well short of typical takeover premiums of 30 per cent or higher. Santos, on the other hand, sees its proposal as a merger rather than a takeover. Sources close to Santos, unable to speak publicly about the confidential negotiations, say the company is urging Oil Search to focus on the long-term benefits for shareholders. Santos wants to reopen talks, but sees no reason to put a higher offer on the table. With Wulff gone, the board looking weak and the danger of a shareholder class-action over Lees inaccurate comments, why would Oil Search seem more valuable now than it was at the time of the initial offer on June 25? Oil Search believes it is on solid ground and is confident that its shareholders agree. Sources close to the company reject the notion that value has been lost  the guys running the oil wells are still producing the same as they were last week  and they insist Oil Search is open to talks. But it was unwilling to engage fully before there was a proposal on the table that it considered acceptable. Following Oil Searchs series of missteps last week, says MST analyst Mark Samter, there is no way shareholders could feel confident their capital is well-stewarded. Now you can squabble about whether it should be a 10 per cent, 15 per cent or 20 per cent premium, but I think you end up losing as an Oil Search shareholder if you lose this bid, he says.

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Stephanie Liow knows that if shed received effective sex education at school it would have changed her life.

The big conversation around consent this year prompted me to really reflect on my own experiences, and I realised how many times I had been pressured into doing things, she said.

Year 12 student Stephanie Liow is campaigning for holistic sex education in Victorian schools. Credit:Chris Hopkins

I know for a fact that my decisions would have been very different if I had received the proper relationship and sex education. Im also aware that some people who put me in bad situations probably did not realise the impact they were having and would have acted differently if they had received the right education.

Stephanie was spurred to action by the discussions of consent, assault and harassment prompted by a rape allegation against federal Attorney-General Christian Porter, which he denies, the separate allegation of former parliamentary staffer Brittany Higgins that a colleague raped her, the online petition started by Chanel Contos and public misogynistic behaviour by male students from Wesley College after the Womens March 4 Justice.
Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size The lighthouse at Vlamingh Head, Exmouth, is one of the few places in Australia you can see the sun both rise and set over the sea. To the west is Ningaloo, the worlds largest fringing reef, meaning you can swim to it straight off the white sandy beach, unlike the Great Barrier Reef. To the east of the North West Cape peninsula is the Exmouth Gulf, an important ecosystem for fish and dugongs, but one that lacks the World Heritage listing protection of the reef. A snorkeller swims alongside a whale shark near Exmouth. Credit:Tourism Australia Tension around the development of the coastal land at the entrance to Western Australias northern Pilbara region has existed in the community for decades. But a bigger clash is looming, with a swathe of new green and eco-minded projects and several large resources operations on the cards. At the same time, a billionaire couple is changing the face of the town and a renowned Australian author is stepping up efforts to protect Ningaloo and the Exmouth Gulf with a new documentary. Ningaloo  derived from the Baiyungu word nyinggulu, said to mean high land jutting into the sea  is teeming with hundreds of species of fish, while turtles, manta rays and humpback and whale shark tours draw thousands of visitors from around the globe every year.

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But Exmouth  powered largely by tourism, military and commercial prawn fishing  has struggled to grow past 2700 permanent residents despite swelling to about 10,000 in the winter tourist season. Shothole Canyon in Exmouths Cape Range. Credit:Peter de Kruijff Oil and gas pipe dream cancelled There have been several ideas to open up Exmouths economy. One thought was to make it a home base for fly-in, fly-out workers operating in the Pilbara; another has been for a deep port to service the cruise ship industry. The latest idea to fall down was a plan to fabricate 10-kilometre pipes for the nearby offshore oil and gas industry that would be towed through the gulf. There was a massive outcry from environmentalists  including author Tim Winton, who is the patron of advocacy group Protect Ningaloo, and popular YouTuber Brodie Moss  given the gulf has a greater variety of fish than the reef and is a safe harbour for humpback mothers and their calves on their southern migration.

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In the end, the company behind the proposal decided not to push ahead due to changed market conditions, but the interest in the project and other industrial developments spurred Western Australias independent watchdog to try to measure commercial and community sentiments around the industrialisation of the gulf. The Environmental Protection Authority consultation now represents a line-in-the-sand moment for Exmouth to decide what sustainable growth looks like for a town that respects its natural assets. A single-jetty deep-water green port on the western side of the gulf, about 10 kilometres south of Exmouth and next to the beachfront estate where Moss and Winton own properties, is the latest flashpoint. Gascoyne Gateway wants to build a single-jetty deep-water port and renewable hub near Exmouth. Credit:Gascoyne Gateway Protect Ningaloo says the facility is incompatible with the area, while supporters believe it will underpin economic activity by bringing in cruise ships and super-yachts, and by providing more capacity for Defence and the Australian Border Force. Gascoyne Gateway, the private company behind the project, says it will create 70 ongoing jobs at the port, 130 in the town and 600 in the wider region. The jetty and associated marine infrastructure would have a 12.63-hectare footprint in the gulf, while more than 1 million cubic metres of seabed would need to be dredged.

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Gascoyne Gateway says the project would bring with it renewable energy, a reduction in cost-of-living pressures and access to more drinkable water. The company states the seagrass and coral cover within its project footprint is minimal and the location was chosen because it would have the least impact. Loading Exmouth Chamber of Commerce and Industry president David Gillespie, who supports the green port, has lived in the town for more than a decade and runs one of its many resorts. He said a lot of people wanted the town to stay sleepy but he believed a balance could be reached. Having corporates here who abide by the rules and the EPA umpire will work and it can work, Mr Gillespie said. The fact of the matter is we have these environmentalists who have no short-term or long-term future to see how the town should survive. Most of them dont live here, and if they do its really few.

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The commercial fishing industry in the gulf is uneasy with a new port, with MG Kailis, which has been in the region since the 1960s trawling for prawns, suggesting the area was already packed at times with vessels. The states Regional Development Minister, Alannah MacTiernan, said infrastructure for cruise ships previously had a good economic case but it may need to be revisited, given the impacts of COVID-19 on the sector. Were not saying there wont be other industries that could develop up there, Ms MacTiernan said. Were certainly open to it but we do understand whatever it is we do, whether its mining or hydrogen industry ... that weve just got to protect the reef.

A massive resort proposed three kilometres north of Coral Bay next to the Ningaloo Reef was rejected twice in 1997 and 2003 before the World Heritage Listing was awarded in 2011. Credit:Coral Coast Marina Development Pty Ltd Protesters dust off Save Ningaloo bumper stickers Seasoned environmental campaigners are lined up against the port project, including Protect Ningaloo director Paul Gamblin, who was part of the movement that stopped a massive resort being built in Coral Bay in 1997 and 2003. Mr Gamblin rejected accusations that a small group of activists not part of the community were making all the noise against projects such as the port.

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Australia reacted angrily when the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) released a draft decision in late June to place the Great Barrier Reef on the list of World Heritage Areas in danger.

Environment Minister Sussan Ley stated that UNESCOs recommendation to the World Heritage Committee was precipitous, without appropriate consultation, without a site visit, and without all of the latest information. Prime Minister Scott Morrison described the process as appalling.

Minister for the Environment Sussan Ley. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

But this saga has been ongoing for a decade, and UNESCO was quick to point out that its draft decisions are not shared in advance with individual countries before they are considered by the World Heritage Committee. Usually, draft decisions are accepted unanimously by the committee.

Thanks to intense diplomatic lobbying, Australia convinced the World Heritage Committee to defer the in danger listing yet again at a meeting on Friday night. But this pyrrhic victory may well have painted Australia into a corner.
Teachers say students are facing serious inequalities in HSC major works and practical exams as some are allowed to work on projects and rehearse ensemble performances on school grounds while others cannot even take major works home.

Public schools within Sydneys COVID-19 hotspot local government areas are discussing the prospect of whole-region misadventure applications for their year 12 students, and are asking the NSW Education Standards Authority to make the process simpler.

Narrelle Odeh, who lives in the Liverpool area, works on her HSC major work at home. Credit:Dean Sewell

Schools have been told only to allow HSC students onto campus when absolutely necessary, but there are different interpretations of necessary; some do not want students on campus at all, and others are allowing them in to focus on major works or rehearse performances.

Students are feeling extremely stressed, particularly if theyre at home and are watching their friends working on [their major work] in other schools, said Gemma Baldwin, a co-president of the Visual Arts and Design Educators Association.
Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk is beginning a fortnight of governing from a hotel room after arriving back in Brisbane on Sunday following her successful bid to secure the 2032 Olympic Games in Tokyo.

Sunday also marked the Premiers 52nd birthday, although she was not able to celebrate in any broad fashion as she was whisked away to quarantine soon after arriving at the airport.

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and Brisbane lord mayor Adrian Schrinner arrive at Brisbane Airport on Sunday. Credit:Nine News

Ms Palaszczuk will spend the required 14 days in hotel quarantine, and has previously promised she will be working while there.

There had been suggestions she had organised to stay in an upgraded room at one of the states quarantine hotels, however her office strongly denied those claims.
Professor Russell also noted there had been a worrying surge in hospital admissions in young people with Delta in the UK, but said this rise might be partially attributable to how transmissible Delta is, rather than an increase in virulence. Students in Victoria have already missed up to 126 days of face-to-face learning since March last year. Last week, some leaders in the education sector called for greater consistency in remote learning across the state, arguing disparity in the way education is being delivered is disadvantaging students. When Victoria went into lockdown on July 16, schools were closed to all but the children of essential workers and vulnerable children. Last week the Andrews government relaxed its settings so that students with a disability could attend school.

Professor Booy, the chair of the Immunisation Coalition Scientific Advisory Committee, recently led a major metadata analysis that examined 32 studies comprising 19 schools and more than 40,000 children worldwide who had been exposed to coronavirus. The research found the risk of an infected child passing on the disease to an adult was about 40 per cent lower than an adult transmitting it to another adult. However, Professor Booy stressed that some outbreaks examined involved less transmissible strains than the Delta variant. Children were also far less likely to become seriously ill, while older teenagers in high school had a slightly elevated risk of being infected and going on to transmit coronavirus than children aged under 10. Schools have never been the engine of this pandemic, he said. The engine is in the community, in households, in workplaces; it is not transmission in schools. He said while the risk of an outbreak at a school was inevitable, the threat could be curtailed by simple measures: limiting movement of students by keeping all their classes in the same room, while teachers wore face masks and practised social distancing when moving around.

Other mitigation strategies could include staggering lunch breaks to reduce mingling in corridors, changing timetables and improving ventilation in all school buildings. Andrew Neal is principal of Bacchus Marsh Grammar, whose staff and student body of more than 3000 people was forced into 14-day isolation after a teacher tested positive to COVID-19 on July 14. Seven more members of the school community including teachers and students have since tested positive, while a teachers child, who attends Barwon Heads Primary, was also infected. Andrew Neal, principal of Bacchus Marsh Grammar, says Victoria needs a much more refined approach to reduce the impact on children. Credit:Justin McManus Yet the non-government-school principal said he was wary of a containment approach that has forced every school in the state to return to a fifth period of remote learning.

We cant keep locking schools down, Mr Neal said. Weve got to get a much more refined view of what we are doing so that we are not impacting all of these kids learning. Mr Neal said that despite the best efforts of teachers it was clear that students were feeling more deflated with each lockdown and that their education was suffering. Education Minister James Merlino said the government was following health advice. Loading As we have throughout this pandemic, were following the advice of the Chief Health Officer on schools operating during lockdown and were incredibly grateful for the outstanding efforts of Victorian schools and staff in pivoting back to remote learning so seamlessly, Mr Merlino said.

The government has invested $250 million in a small-group tutoring program to help students who fell behind last year. More than 6000 tutors have signed up. Jordana Hunter, education program director at think tank the Grattan Institute, said the government should consider refining its settings further in the event of future lockdowns. Given where were at with vaccination rates across the country, it looks like the risk of school closures in some form or other will be a reality for at least the next six months as we manage outbreaks, she said. I would really like to see opportunities where preps, grade ones and twos could stay at school ... because what we are hearing is that students in those younger year levels really struggle with their learning at home and the challenges for parents supporting those younger students are a lot harder. A UNESCO report published this month on school closures suggests Victorian students have spent more time out of the classroom since the pandemic started than most other students in the world.

The survey, based on information from 143 countries education departments, found schools were closed for an average of 79 instructional days last year. The Grattan Institute has estimated that during Victorias first phase of remote learning in term 2 last year, disadvantaged students fell one month behind their more advantaged peers. Ms Hunter said the release of NAPLAN results in August would provide the first opportunity to analyse how far Victorian students went backwards in 2020. Laureate professor Jenny Gore, director of the Teachers and Teaching Research Centre at the University of Newcastle, led one of the few direct comparative studies that has been published on the learning impact of COVID-19 on Australian students.

Her study of year three and four students in NSW, who missed roughly eight weeks of face-to-face learning early last year, found a mixed picture. Results from terms one and four in 2019 were compared with terms one and four in 2020. Loading Students in more disadvantaged schools fell behind by two months in maths, students in advantaged schools experienced no change in performance, and students at schools in the middle bands actually performed better in maths during lockdown. Principals and teachers surveyed for the study reported a similarly mixed effect on student wellbeing. Some kids did really well at home, being away from the bullies or the anxiety they carry to school every day, but for lots of kids it was a huge relief to go back to school and to see their friends again and have that really important human contact, Professor Gore said.

Meredith Peace, president of the Victorian Branch of the Australian Education Union, said any decision on reopening schools had to take into consideration the health and safety of staff, as well as students. Even with the best intent, the best measures, we cant socially distance in schools, Ms Peace said. People rightly are nervous about returning to a workplace where we cant do some of the things that were asked to do in the broader community. Swifts Creek P-12 School principal Robert Boucher, with student Amelia Donchi, does not believe regional schools should be exempted from remote learning requirements. Robert Boucher is principal at Swifts Creek P-12 School in East Gippsland, one of the states most remote schools. Despite his schools geographically remote location and lack of COVID-19 cases in the local government area, Mr Boucher said he accepted the blanket lockdown across the regions.
As the first of Kevin ODonnells victims to report the paedophile priest to police, he paved a courageous path for other abuse survivors to follow.

Now, he hopes the $1.375 million he will receive from the Catholic Church will stand as a landmark settlement that assists ODonnells other victims who are seeking compensation.

BTZ will receive $1.375 million from the Catholic Church after being abused as a boy by priest Kevin ODonnell. Credit:Jason South

I never let go of the bone. I just kept fighting it. I thought, this is not right, said BTZ, as he is known in legal files.

The Melbourne archdiocese has known I was a victim for 25 years and its only in the past couple of months they were forced into mediation to start the conversation about how much money they had to pay me.
The Victorian construction industry is hoping to deliver tens of thousands of Pfizer doses on building sites throughout Melbourne in an attempt to insulate the sector from further shutdowns.

As the halt on construction in NSW enters its second week, leaders of Victorias third largest industry are in talks with the federal and state governments to inoculate 40,000 workers by Christmas, or months earlier if adequate resources are directed to the task.

Federal Health Minister Greg Hunts office welcomed the sectors plan. Credit:Scott McNaughton

Its protection against site shutdowns if we get mass vaccination at worksites  This would essentially future-proof the industry, said Erik Locke, chief executive of Incolink, an industry redundancy fund that provides welfare services for Victorian construction employees.

A spokesman for federal Health Minister Greg Hunt said the plan was an example of the type of potential worksite vaccination programs that could support targeting particular workers to ensure the highest possible vaccination rate.
The federal government has left the door open to increasing financial support for small business owners and stood down workers across the country amid strict coronavirus lockdowns that have shut down large parts of the hospitality and retail sectors.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Sunday said he and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg were continually evaluating the rapidly changing economic circumstances. However, he all but ruled out returning to the previous wage subsidy scheme, known as JobKeeper, because he believed the current support system was more effective and flexible.

Mr Morrison said the current support program had been designed to deal with the problem we have right now. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

The union movement and small-business groups have labelled the current disaster payments  a maximum of $600 a week for those who have lost over 20 hours of work and a minimum of $375 for lost hours of between eight and 20 hours  as grossly inadequate. Support for small businesses has also been labelled as confusing, inadequate and administratively burdensome.

NSW Treasurer Dominic Perrottet made a public appeal on Sunday for more federal financial support during the lockdown, warning that as case numbers remained stubborn there was a need for extra financial support from the federal government.
Like many people, I wished the very worst upon the anti-lockdown protesters in Sydney. I wished they would catch the disease they seemed to think was little more than an illusion. A mask-less rabble in their thousands, they marched down Broadway: new-age anti-vaxxers, angry gym junkies, Christians fixated on the apocalypse, rednecks waving their flags for liberty, whole swathes of people who have lost all faith in the media and politicians. Placards on display declared the ABC to be controlled by Zionists, while others talked of not wanting to be part of a vaccine Holocaust.

It was hard to know who was freedom-loving or freedom-threatening, who was pagan or religious, lost in conspiracies or enraged by their inability to believe in anything at all. But a mob does not channel thought; only ill will.

Thousands of people march through Sydney on Saturday. Credit:Rhett Wyman

The story of a nurse on her way to work being abused by the crowd for wearing a mask and a photo of large, muscular man seeming to strike a police horse summed it up. The mans singlet said Free Speech  more important than your feelings. Later we learnt the horse was OK and that his name, appropriately enough, was Tobruk.

Apart from contradictory appeals for freedom, the only unifying chant the protesters had was New South Wales, as if this whole anti-lockdown event was woven from a State of Origin NRL fan-base mired in a reality-TV update on Survivor.
The NSW Premier and the Prime Minister are at odds over how to bring Sydneys coronavirus outbreak under control, with Gladys Berejiklian insisting that a sharp increase in vaccinations is the citys best chance of reopening, while Scott Morrison says lockdown is the only solution.

Ms Berejiklian stressed on Sunday that it was critical for people aged over 18 to get vaccinated to help contain the outbreak after 141 local cases were reported. There were also two deaths, including a woman in her 30s with no underlying health conditions.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian says her state has carried the load of the nation during the pandemic. Credit:Dean Sewell

Mr Morrison said he wants to see more AstraZeneca vaccinations delivered through the NSW state-run clinics to speed up the rollout during the crisis.

However, he said no vaccine solution would end the growing outbreak and the only option for NSW to bring it under control was to continue its hard lockdown, which is due to end on Friday.
PHILIPSBURG:--- The COVID-19 Relief Group will hold its second Fundraising Drive on Saturday, July 31st, and Sunday, August 1st. On both days, the Group will be stationed at the Carrefour Market in Cul-de-Sac, from 10 am until the closing of the supermarket. Persons, families, companies, businesses are encouraged to stop by and give their donations in cash or checks.

With the funds, raised during its first Fundraising Drive, the COVID-19 Relief Fund was able to assist a total of 66 persons with the payment of small bills. The assistance went towards the payment of rent, medical or GEBE bills, and the purchase of food. Forty-two persons received a check to buy food at several of our supermarkets. The funds also helped 10 persons to pay their rent; 13 persons received help with their GEBE bill and 1 person received help with a medical bill. I am pleased that we have been able to meet the needs of so many persons with the funds that we raised from the general public and from several companies on the island, says Mr. Rollocks, the initiator of the Fundraising Group.

We all know that there are people in our community who are still suffering from the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. They are out of jobs, yet they still have bills to pay, mouths to feed but they do not know where the money will come from. The COVID-19 Relief Group wants to continue to assist these persons with their acute financial needs. For this reason, the Group is holding its second fundraising activity to raise additional funds to assist those persons in need.

During the first Fundraising Drive, the Group was able to raise a total of NAf. 12.415,80, dollars included. With the help of Father Adam of the Sint Maarten Christian Council, Pastor Cuvalay of the Seventh Day Adventist Church and Apostle Wilson of the Sint Maarten United Ministerial Foundation the Group was able to help 66 persons in our community. But the funds have now all been used up. We hope we can raise more money than we did last time because the need in our community is great and we would like to do something about it, said the Groups coordinator, Pastor Wycliffe Smith.



The Group will be at the Carrefour Market this weekend and is inviting everybody to pass by and give a donation. No donation is too small or too large. Finally, the Group would like to remind the general public of the words uttered by Jesus Christ: In as much as you have done this to the least of these my brothers (and sisters), you have done it unto me.
PARIS:--- The French Government announced that a state of emergency will soon be declared for St. Martin and St. Barthelemy. This is according to the Figaro newspapers. The announcement was made on the evening of July 24th due to a "worrying" health situation and a "sharp increase and rapid dissemination of the coronavirus.

The Senate voted for a government amendment to this effect, during the examination of the health bill.

The state of emergency, once reinstated, would be "applicable until September 30," the text indicates.

Deputy Minister Brigitte Bourguignon underlined the high hospitalization figures in Saint-Martin compared to the capacities of the territory and the low vaccination rate against COVID-19. The amendment also leaves the possibility of a return of the state of health emergency in Mayotte "before August 30" and until September 30.

The epidemic is very present": the prefet warns against an explosion of cases of Covid-19 in Martinique.

A "very strong epidemic recovery"

At this stage, the "health situation is under control" but "the degradation of the regional environment leads us to be vigilant", indicated Mrs. Bourguignon, mentioning the "very strong epidemic recovery" in South Africa and the Particularly worrying situation in Reunion Island, close to Mayotte.

The state of a health emergency is an exceptional regime that gives the authorities increased possibilities for restrictions on movement, restrictions on exits and gatherings.

See also - In Martinique, caregivers speak out against compulsory vaccination.

In the meantime, a number of persons participated in a march organized by the St. Martin resistance against the mandatory orders for COVID-19 vaccines and the mandatory health passes that is required to enter public building and spaces. The marches said during the protest march on Saturday that their rights and liberties are being infringed upon with the forced vaccinations for healthcare workers, and the COVID-19 passes that recently became mandatory.
STAMFORD  Eight months after his ordination, family and friends of the Most Rev. Robert Lombardo finally got the chance to celebrate the Stamford native becoming a bishop in Chicago.

Lombardos ordination ceremony took place in November, but with attendance strictly limited because of the COVID-19 pandemic, his family wasnt there in person.

On Sunday, Lombardo, who goes by Bishop Bob, joined the Most Rev. Frank Caggiano, the bishop of Bridgeport, in celebrating mass at St. Maurice Church in Glenbrook.

Its Lombardos home parish  where he was baptized and where he attended school through the eighth grade. He then attended Stamford Catholic High School, graduating in 1975.

Stamford has always had a very important place in my life, in my heart, and so I'm very happy to be coming back, Lombardo, 63, said. It's almost like coming full circle, back to where I was born and raised.

After high school, Lombardo went to the University of Notre Dame and earned a bachelors degree in accounting. He thought a nice career and a nice family was what the future held for him.

And God intervened and said, Hang on. I have another thought, Lombardo said.

When Lombardo was a resident assistant as a senior at Notre Dame, a student in his dorm became sick with spinal meningitis. He was brought to the hospital, and Lombardo rode in the ambulance with him. The student ultimately died.

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We were all seniors getting ready to graduate, Lombardo said. So that experience got me thinking about life, death, priorities, and the priests on campus were very good at dealing with us. And that's when I started thinking about it a bit, and then I thought, Well, it's probably just a reaction to what had taken place. But that little gnawing inside never went away.

He went on to work for Price Waterhouse for about a year and a half. His sister, Lisa Lombardo, said she remembered him telling their parents that he wasnt happy at his job.

So then all of a sudden it's like, Well, I'm going to go off to the seminary, Lisa Lombardo said. And obviously my family was a bit taken aback  not that they weren't happy but just were like, Where did this come from?

Robert Lombardo joined the Capuchin Franciscans. He worked in Manhattans Lower East Side and also went on missions to Bolivia and Honduras, where he put his years of studying Spanish in high school and college to use. Lombardo was ordained a priest in 1990, and he then spent years working in the Bronx with the homeless and mentally ill. He also helped establish a group called the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal.

Around 2005, the archbishop of Chicago at the time, Cardinal Francis George, asked Lombardo to move to the Windy City and work with the poor on the West Side. While leading the Mission of Our Lady of the Angels, Lombardo founded another group, the Franciscans of the Eucharist of Chicago.

The mission set up a food delivery program during the pandemic and also ran outdoor pantries.

Then, in September 2020, Lombardo got the call that Pope Francis had decided to appoint him a bishop. Lombardo was cleaning his bathroom floor when the call came at 6 a.m. on a Sunday.

I thought somebody was pulling my leg, honestly, Lombardo said.

Part of his surprise stemmed from the fact that he doesnt really have what appears to be the credentials for a bishop.

I don't have a doctorate degree, Lombardo said. (He does have two masters degrees.) And I've always pretty much worked with the poor and done preaching. But I think the Holy Father is looking for people that have a variety of backgrounds.

As one of Chicagos auxiliary bishops, Lombardo said he oversees an area with about 50 parishes, 26 grade schools, six high schools and three hospitals. The skills he learned in business school and at Price Waterhouse have come in handy, he said.

If I thought that God was asking something of me, I've always tried to respond positively, he said. I never thought I'd be out here in Chicago. I never thought that I would be a bishop. But when you say yes to God, there are all kinds of surprises along the way  and theyre good.

Lombardo, his large Italian-American family and close friends were set to have dinner together after Mass on Sunday. His parents are Emil and Christine Lombardo, and he also has a brother, Michael, and sister-in-law, Marie.

Lombardo has celebrated Mass at St. Maurice before, his sister, Lisa, said.

A lot of people  enjoy him so much because he really does do such a wonderful homily and brings it into today's world, Lisa Lombardo said. He brings humor. The church is laughing. And  you know people are really paying attention.

He is the hometown boy who made good, said Brian Wallace, a spokesman for the Diocese of Bridgeport.
STAMFORD  Stamford Town Center hosted its first Block Party: A Celebration of Culture and Community event on Saturday. The party will continue Sunday with food, activities and performances designed to celebrate local diversity as area residents inch toward post-pandemic normalcy.
STAMFORD  The Democratic City Committee on Sunday endorsed Caroline Simmons in this years race for mayor, deciding by two votes to throw its support behind the current state representative instead of incumbent Mayor David Martin.

Simmons earned 21 votes to Martins 19 during Sundays nominating convention at the Stamford Government Center.

I couldn't be more optimistic about the future of Stamford and all the potential and possibility that lies ahead for our city, Simmons said after receiving the nomination. As we come out of this pandemic, we need to make sure that we're doing everything we can to come together as a city and make sure that those who are hit hardest are not left behind and that were lifting up all voices around this city.

After the vote, Martin told the Stamford Advocate that he would try to force a primary.

Overwhelmingly, people keep saying, Youre doing a great job, Martin said.

Martin will need to gather signatures equaling 5 percent of the registered Democrats in the city, said Gabe Rosenberg, a spokesman for the Secretary of the States office. Primary petitions are due Aug. 11.

Martin said in a statement that his campaign is well primed and ready to collect the about 1,700 signatures he needs. The primary would take place on Sept. 14.

In 2013, when I ran and was elected mayor of our city of Stamford, I was the underdog, Martin said in the statement. But we beat the well-funded Hartford establishment that offered typical political campaign rhetoric and promises.

The voters of Stamford deserve a choice on their primary ballots, and we will give it to them, he added.

Martin has said that he is running for reelection for the last time. He has pointed to the city's economic growth and his leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic as reasons he should be elected once more.

In the state House, Simmons represents the 144th District, which includes parts of Springdale, Glenbrook, Bulls Head and Newfield. She was first elected in 2014.

Simmons, who has pitched herself as a candidate with innovative new ideas, is hoping to become the first woman to serve as mayor of Stamford.

Caroline Simmons is a fierce, intelligent, amazing, hard-working woman and, let's face it, to succeed as a woman in and of itself is a pretty high-standard skill because women have to do twice as much, sometimes three times as much, for the same recognition and opportunity as their given male counterpart, said Reischea Kapasouris, the DCC member who nominated Simmons.

Brook Manewal, who seconded the nomination, said she was a member of a candidate screening committee and during the screening process, someone asked Simmons: How will you have the time? Simmons is the mother of two young boys.

Simmons has not only proven that she is efficient, carrying her children everywhere, she's proven that she has the heart and she has an army of people behind her that will make sure she is the first female mayor of Stamford, Manewal said.

Bobby Valentine, the former manager of the New York Mets and a Stamford native, is also seeking the mayors office. His campaign manager, Dan Miller, said Valentines team has gathered enough signatures for him to appear on the ballot as an unaffiliated candidate.

No Republican has announced a campaign for mayor yet.

On Sunday, Keith Silver, a member of the DCC who nominated Martin, argued that the current mayor, with his track record and name recognition, would be a much stronger candidate against Valentine.

I think it would be playing into Bobby Valentine and the Republicans hands, if this committee, the Democratic City Committee, says to the city of Stamford, We need a change, Silver said.

In a statement, Valentine said the close vote highlights an unfortunate divide in our community.

The idea that so many members of the local Democratic party expressed discomfort with the incumbent they twice elected is concerning, Valentine said. Thats why Im running unaffiliated from the party system and building a broad base of support that will help us make history in 100 days.

brianna.gurciullo@hearstmediact.com
With key COVID-19 metrics climbing in July amid concerns over the delta variant, Gov. Ned Lamont said certain Connecticut travel restrictions could return.

Travel restrictions were broadly lifted in March as the vaccine rate rose and cases started to drop off, but in Connecticut and other parts of the country, the number of infections and hospitalizations have started to slowly rise in recent weeks.

Travel is a real possibility, obviously little Connecticut doing by itself would not be very effective, most people come in by car, Lamont said last week. Look, Arkansas, Mississippi, Florida, theyve got 10 times the infection rate and beginning to have 10 times the hospitalization rate we do, so youve got to watch it.

In Connecticut, the positivity rate among new COVID-19 tests jumped from a low of 0.30 percent in June to a recent high last week of 2.71 percent. Hospitalizations, a metric that Lamont has repeatedly said is among the most important in his decision making, have also been increasing from a low of 25 on July 9 up to 76 on Friday, state statistics show.

Meanwhile, the state has been working to drive up the total number of residents fully vaccinated against COVID-19 despite a sharp decline in demand.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 72.1 percent of all eligible Connecticut residents  people age 12 and over  were fully vaccinated as of Saturday afternoon. That number has been slow to increase in recent weeks as providers contend with vaccine hesitancy.

Despite an increase in infections and hospitalizations, Lamont has said he has no plans to reinstate other COVID-19 restrictions such as universal masking.

This comes as the delta variant, first found in India, continues to spread throughout Connecticut. The latest report from researchers at the Yale School of Public Health and Jackson Labs shows that 80 percent of all samples sequenced are delta variant.

The variant has drawn significant concern from officials given that researchers believe that it is 60 percent more transmissible than the alpha variant, which previously was the dominant strain in Connecticut.

The variant has led to outbreaks among unvaccinated people across the country.
Milton, PA (17847)

Today

Intervals of clouds and sunshine in the morning with more clouds for later in the day. High near 80F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Mainly cloudy. Low 58F. Winds light and variable.
Human trafficking frequently victimizes women and children and is the second largest criminal enterprise in the world. It is also one of the fastest growing and it is happening right here in Pennsylvania.

Three bills adopted by the House of Representatives earlier this year as part of a package of measures designed to combat human trafficking in the Commonwealth were recently signed into law.

Act 32 of 2021 prohibits defendants in human trafficking cases from introducing evidence of a victims past sexual victimization or allegations, ensuring victims have the same protections provided to victims of other sexual abuse offenses outlined in the Rape Shield Law.

Act 38 of 2021 adds human trafficking and strangulation to the list of convictions affecting a child custody determination. Prior law already paid special attention to violent offenses such as homicide, sex offenses and kidnapping. With one in seven children reported missing becoming victims of child sex trafficking, the goal of this new law is to prevent more children from suffering the same fate.

Act 45 of 2021 expands the list of offenses that require state inmates to participate in Department of Corrections counseling or therapy for sex offenders to include those convicted of human trafficking involving sexual servitude or other criminal offenses related to the sexual abuse of a minor. Studies funded by the U.S. Department of Justice have demonstrated that participants in sex offender treatment programs are significantly less likely to be rearrested upon their release.

Human trafficking is defined as the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of people through force, fraud or deception, for forced labor or sexual exploitation. If you or someone you know is the victim of this horrible crime, call the National Human Trafficking Hotline at 1-888-373-7888 or text 233733.

TARAH TOOHIL represents the 116th District in the state House of Representatives.
Hazleton, PA (18201)

Today

Partly cloudy skies in the morning will give way to cloudy skies during the afternoon. High 74F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Mainly cloudy. Low near 55F. Winds light and variable.
POTTSVILLE  The Schuylkill County commissioners took two steps Wednesday to boost the airport, as they approved a contract to improve its access road and agreed to make a payment on the loan that enabled the new runway to be built.

I feel its still a strong asset to the county, Commissioner Gary J. Hess said of Schuylkill County Joe Zerbey Airport in Foster Twp.

Under the terms of the road contract, Lehigh Asphalt Paving and Construction Inc., Tamaqua, will receive $1,074,420.73 to repair Airport Road, which provides the only access to the airport. Airport Road branches off Route 901 just north of the Interstate 81 interchange about a mile from Highridge Business Park.

The road project is our project, said Commissioner George F. Halcovage Jr., who noted that it is one of two roads the county owns.

Hess said the road must be fixed.

The road is terrible, he said.

Bill Willard, airport manager, said executives using the airport to visit their facilities at Highridge dislike the road.

Theyre breaking their axles on their vehicles, he said.

Without the road repairs, such incidents could increase due to the volume of traffic at the airport, Willard said.

Were getting a lot of corporate aircraft, he said. Everyone over at Highridge uses the airport.

With respect to the loan payment of $44,264, Willard said that does not mean the county Airport Authority is in financial trouble.

We can pay our bills, he said.

Willard said the $1,500,000 loan was for the new runway, which is the fourth-largest in Northeast Pennsylvania.

Its a good place to go now, he said.

Hess said the authority is operating the airport well.

Theyve cut expenses as much as they could, the commissioner said. They rely on fuel sales. They have rentals of the airport hangars.

County Administrator Gary R. Bender agreed that the authority does its best financially.

They have limited ways to bring in money, he said.

Bender also said the county obtained a grant for a feasibility study of establishing a business park at the airport, which has approximately 1,600 acres.

Hess said development of a business park at the airport would help.

Willard said the trucking company A. Duie Pyle Inc., West Chester, rents one of the terminals at the airport, which helps financially. Also, Fort Indiantown Gap and Medevac helicopters get fuel there, he said.

Willard also said even large airports like Philadelphia International are not self-sufficient. Nevertheless, he said, that is a goal.

Its going to take some time to be self-sufficient, Willard said. We are a municipal agency.

Even if that goal is not reached, the airport is good for the county, he said.

The airport is prime real estate. This airport is prime real estate, Willard said. Im very proud of this.
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Education Minister Sorin Cimpeanu announced that he asked the Finance Ministry to allot funds in the budget revision to ensure funding for over 6,000 more resident doctors in the medical higher education system, registered this year in addition to the number of 2020, the total number in 2021 being 29,000, agerpres.ro confirms.

"We have 63,000 seats for the licence degree, for all areas, provided in the budget this year. A share of round 10 percent is that of the seats in the medical area. Nonetheless we have more than just the licence degree level. This year, we have by over 6,000 more resident doctors in the medical higher education system as against last year. It is also a request I forwarded to the Finance Ministry for the budget revision to ensure funding for this increase by over 6,000 resident doctors this year, in comparison with the previous years. (...) More precisely, we have over 29,000 resident doctors this year, as against 23,000 resident doctors last year," Cimpeanu told the press conference on Sunday organised on the occasion of the admission exam to the Carol Davila Medicine and Pharmacy University.
Most COVID-19 newly confirmed cases compared to the previous report were registered in Bucharest - 22 and in the counties of Ilfov and Cluj - 9, Iasi - 7, the Strategic Communication Group (GCS) informed on Sunday.

No new cases of COVID-19 were registered in 17 counties, agerpres.ro confirms.

All counties and the Municipality of Bucharest remain in the green scenario in terms of infections with the new coronavirus, the highest incidence per thousand inhabitants being in Ilfov county - 0.10.
Hoghilag tuberose will be the first flower in Romania and the third in Europe protected at European level, the producers in this area of Sibiu County will submit to the Ministry of Agriculture, on August 7, the documentation for evaluation in order to subsequently obtain the Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) from the European Commission (EC).

"This year, at the Tuberose Festival, organised on August 7-8 in Hoghilag, the applicant group - the "Centre of Excellence for the Promotion of Hoghilag Commune" Association will submit to the Ministry of Agriculture the documentation for Hoghilag Tuberose - Protected Geographical Indication for evaluation and completion. The Association has proposed to register the product in the Official Journal of the European Union and to represent all tuberose growers in Hoghilag. The geographical area established is the entire territory of the administrative territorial unit - Hoghilag Commune," agricultural consultant on geographical indications and European funds, Ionut Diaconeasa told AGERPRES.

Currently, there are only two flowers in the register of geographical indications of the European Commission: the Gent Azalea from Belgium and the Szoregy Rose from Hungary, agerpres.ro confirms.
Romanian gymnast Larisa Iordache qualified on Sunday for the balance beam final with the fourth score, 14.133, following the artistic gymnastics women's qualification competition, in the Tokyo Olympic Games.

Larisa Iordache, who had announced she would only compete in the balance beam event due to her ankle pains, blamed the landing at the end of the performance on her accident as well, agerpres.ro confirms.

Having scored higher were Chinese Chenchen Guan (14.933) and Xijing Tang (14.333), as well as US gymnast Sunisa Lee (14.200).

The balance beam final is scheduled on August 3.

Larisa Iordache, a bronze medallist in the team event in the 2012 Olympic Games in London, did not miss the Rio Olympics in 2016, while she was still recovering after an accident.

Maria Holbura competed in the all around event in Tokyo, finishing 65th, with 49.166 points, after 13.166 in vaults, 11.100 in uneven bars (ranked 80), 12.700 in balance beam (ranked 43) and 12.200 in the floor event (ranked 65).

In the men's competition, Marian Dragulescu missed on Saturday the qualification for the vaults final.

Romania conquered the most recent Olympic medals in Artistic Gymnastics in 2012, in London, gold in vaults through Sandra Izbasa, and bronze in women's team competition.

Artistic Gymnastics is the sport that has brought Romania the most medals in the Olympic Games, 72, out of which 25 gold, 21 silver and 26 bronze.
During an interview with Face the Nation on CBS, Lucas called Kansas Citys vaccination numbers painfully low and said efforts are being made to reach out to more young people, especially young men of color.

As of Sunday, only 38.8% of the citys population was fully vaccinated, according to the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services. Nationwide, 49% of the population is fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Earlier this month, 10 Kansas City-area hospitals and health officials issued a joint public health advisory recommending members of the public wear masks. Kansas City lifted its mask mandate in May. St Louis returns to a mask mandate beginning Monday.

Unvaccinated individuals should wear a mask while visiting indoor public places, crowded outdoor settings, and for activities with close contact with others who are not fully vaccinated, according to the Kansas City advisory.

Asked about reinstating a mask mandate, as St. Louis did, Lucas said again Sunday that thus far, it is not necessary for Kansas City.

But Lucas said he is considering requiring all of Kansas Citys about 5,000 city employees to get vaccinated.
A number of such inquiries have been made to his staff since his selection as the vice-presidential nominee in Miami Beach 12 days ago. The first of the three occasions on which Eagleton said he had voluntarily hospitalized himself for what he termed nervous exhaustion and fatigue occurred between Dec. 1, 1960, and Jan. 1, 1961, or a few days later.

He entered Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, where he said he was under the care of his family internist, Dr. William D. Perry. The second occurred between Christmas of 1964 and New Year's Day 1965, when he spent four days at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., for a physical examination. The third occurred in mid-1966 when he returned to the Mayo Clinic for about three weeks.

Under questioning, Eagleton acknowledged that he had received psychiatric help when hospitalized in I960 and again during his stay at the Mayo Clinic in 1966. He said there had been no psychiatric care involved in the brief visit to the clinic in 1964. In speaking of the 1960 and 1966 hospitalizations, he said, "I received counseling from a psychiatrist, including electric shock treatment."
Jackson pleaded guilty in April and admitted absconding from a halfway house in 2019, then being caught with a pistol by police. He is a felon and is prohibited from possessing a gun.

Dunn said her son has been depressed by the lack of contact, and said some inmates do not have have the money to call relatives to tell them where they are. She said she has reached out to four families on behalf of inmates who cant afford a phone call.

No bus routes

One of McGraughs clients is in Ullin, Illinois, at least 135 miles south of the federal courthouse in St. Louis, and another is in Kentucky. One came from St. Charles and the other from a jail in St. Louis or St. Louis County, she said. McGraugh declined to name either client out of concern they could suffer consequences for discussing the move.

She said there are limited visiting hours in the jails, and no hotels nearby. No bus routes go near the Kentucky jail. If you dont have a private car, you cant even get to the one in Kentucky, she said.

McGraugh said she was upset about the client moved to Kentucky, but it turned out that he didnt mind the move. He said the the jail in Kentucky is so much better.
Elsewhere in California, the Tamarack fire south of Lake Tahoe continued to burn through timber and chaparral and threatened communities on both sides of the California-Nevada state line. The fire, sparked by lightning July 4 in Alpine County, has destroyed at least 10 buildings.

Heavy smoke from that blaze and the Dixie fire lowered visibility and may at times ground aircraft providing support for fire crews. The air quality south of Lake Tahoe and across the state line into Nevada deteriorated to very unhealthy levels.

In north-central Washington, firefighters battled two blazes in Okanogan County that threatened hundreds of homes and again caused hazardous air quality conditions Saturday. And in northern Idaho, east of Spokane, Washington, a small fire near the Silverwood Theme Park prompted evacuations Friday evening at the park and in the surrounding area. The theme park was back open on Saturday with the fire half contained.

Although hot weather with afternoon winds posed a continued threat of spreading blazes, weekend forecasts also called for a chance of scattered thunderstorms in California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and other states. However, forecasters said some could be dry thunderstorms that produce little rain but a lot of lightning, which can spark new blazes.

More than 85 large wildfires were burning around the country, most of them in Western states, and they had burned over 1.4 million acres (2,135 square miles, or more than 553,000 hectares).

Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
In mid-2021 there were more incidents involving manipulation of shipboard location devices, which no one is taking credit for. This time it was in the Black Sea, where NATO warships from several countries had assembled for joint training exercises with Ukrainian naval forces. Ukraine is not yet a NATO member but would like to be and joint training like this makes it easier to get in, especially when Russia violently opposes it.

The Black Sea location signal manipulation involved the AIS (Automated Identification System) ship tracker transponders on three destroyers (British, Dutch and American) docked in the Ukrainian port of Odessa. One day, the AIS transponders on the British and Dutch destroyers suddenly switched from showing where they actually were (Odessa) to a location at sea near the Russian naval base on the nearby Crimean Peninsula. Then, just as suddenly, AIS showed the two destroyers back where everyone nearby could see them, tied up at a dock in Odessa. A week later the same thing happened to the U.S. destroyer docked in Odessa. No one will take credit for the AIS signal manipulation, which is known as spoofing. This involves using EW (Electronic Warfare) equipment designed to jam or modify AIS signals that are transmitted to a space satellite that shares that location signal with all AIS users as well as anyone via several websites that carry such information. Russia and China took the lead in developing ways to spoof AIS signals and Iran was the first country to widely use AIS signal manipulation on a wide scale to support smuggling activities.

Russia apparently took the lead in developing EW jammers capable of inserting false location signals in AIS or GPS data sent worldwide via orbiting satellites. Russia was discovered using this regularly to hide the true location of senior officials and military units on land. You dont have to be an intel agency to notice GPS location data suddenly moving many, even hundreds, of kilometers. Intel agencies, and some commercial or non-profit organizations do monitor these signals regularly and on a large scale to detect where and when spoofing takes place. What most nations do not share is their techniques for spoofing and resisting spoofing. Which brings us back to the recent Black Sea incident; who spoofed who and how. The NATO ships could have been testing new equipment to simply send false location data via AIS (technically illegal) or new Russia techniques to spoof the AIS on an individual ship docked in a port crowded with AIS equipped ships. Its a mystery that will eventually be solved and made public.

AIS was originally developed as a local (non-satellite communications) system that made it easier for ships at sea to detect each other, especially at night or in bad weather. This local AIS was rapidly adopted by most large commercial vessels in the 1990s. AIS is essentially an automatic radio beacon (transponder) that, when it receives a signal from a nearby AIS equipped ship, responds with the ship's identity, course, and speed. This is meant to enable AIS ships to avoid collisions. The original non-satellite comms AIS only had a range of 20-35 kilometers but by 2006 space satellites were developed that could track AIS transmissions worldwide. Commercial ships have become very dependent on AIS, which greatly reduced collisions, and crew anxiety, at sea. After 2000 international agreements mandated ships larger than 300 tons, and all passenger ships, carry and use AIS at all times.

All warships were also equipped with AIS as a safety measure when operating near ports or commercial shipping lanes. Until 2017 it had been U.S. Navy policy to have some ships turn off their AIS transmissions and just receive those transmissions. This policy was changed in 2017 after several collisions or near-misses between navy ships travelling in bad weather or at night in areas where there was heavy commercial traffic. Navy bridge crews were supposed to be especially alert in situations like this but often were not experienced enough to handle the situation where their AIS presence was known to nearby ships that had their AIS in send/receive mode.

During wartime navy ships would have AIS turned off but a decade ago Russia and China, followed by NATO nations experimented with ways to manipulate AIS signals and detect when others were doing so. While AIS made it practical to track all high seas commercial traffic, it was also exploited by smugglers and pirates. Some ships traveled (in violation of international law) with AIS and other trackers turned off. Usually, only criminals turned these devices off, and this was often discovered when navies spotted one of these silent (AIS not broadcasting) ships at sea. It didnt take long for some intelligence agencies, especially those with ocean surveillance space satellites and lots of ships and subs at sea, to exploit the silent AIS ploy to create better ways to track smugglers by noting when some ships turn off their trackers and then turn them on again as they are about to enter a port or some other area where AIS use is mandatory and enforceable. Some nations, like Iran and North Korea, have tankers and cargo ships that are frequently found running dark. Naturally, intelligence agencies developed methods to take advantage of this and a growing number of smugglers, usually North Korean, are detected and tracked because of AIS manipulation. Iran had an easier time concealing arms smuggling because they could use smaller ships. Actually, for getting arms to Shia rebels in Yemen Iran used a lot of small ships that are not required to use AIS. These could be, and were, tracked by satellite but it was more difficult.

Before AIS came along most large ships carried (and some still carry) INMARSAT, which enables shipping companies to keep track of their vessels, no matter where they are on the planet. INMARSAT became available in the 1980s and uses a system of satellites which transmit AIS-like signals to anywhere on the oceans. It only costs a few cents to send an INMARSAT signal similar to an SMS text message to one of your ships, and a few cents more to receive a reply. The trackers and satellite-based navigation systems in general soon proved invaluable by preventing collisions or running into reefs, rocks, or (in bad weather) coastline.

Back in 2012, Iran was caught hacking AIS signals. Iran was sending false AIS signals to assist its smuggling operations. After 2012 security researchers found even more ways to hack AIS and called for changes in the AIS software to make it more difficult to spoof. Iran keeps working on new spoofing methods and has the technical people and tools to do so.

All ships now use GPS coordinates to record location and constantly report that back to the home office. GPS is standard with AIS equipment that uses satellite links to send its signal worldwide. Iran exploited this by having two of its ships trade INMARSAT IDs while they were near each other, leaving the U.S., or anyone else checking INMARSAT data, unable to track ships that have been switched. Well, for a while at least. Once the intel people caught onto this scam, they developed ways to counter it. This is very much a matter of move and counter-move when it comes to exploiting or creating AIS vulnerabilities.
SCHENECTADY, N.Y., July 23, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- SI Group, a leading performance additives company, announced today plans to complete an agreement to sell the majority of its global Industrial Resins business to ASK Chemicals, a portfolio company of private equity firm, Rhone Group, LLC.

The transaction includes SI Group's Industrial Resins products and associated manufacturing sites in Rio Claro, Brazil; Ranjangaon, India; and Johannesburg, South Africa, as well as licensed technology and multiple tolling agreements globally. ASK Chemicals, headquartered in Hilden, Germany, is a market leader in the foundry materials sector and manufactures binders, coatings, feeders, filters, and release agents, as well as metallurgical products including inoculants, inoculation wires and master alloys for iron casting.

"We remain confident this is the right strategic move for our employees and our business. ASK Chemicals has proven industry expertise that will add significant value and continuously enhance these businesses," said David Bradley, President & CEO of SI Group. "The deal also allows us to focus more intentionally on building and growing our portfolio as a performance additives powerhouse."

SI Group will carve out related businesses at these sites, including the manufacture of Rubber & Adhesives, Oilfield, and Surfactants, as well as Foundry products in Brazil, and will operate tolling agreements with ASK. The company will also retain the Industrial Resins businesses in the U.S. and China.

About SI Group

SI Group is a global leader in the innovative technology of performance additives, process solutions, active pharmaceutical ingredients, and chemical intermediates. SI Group solutions are essential to enhancing the quality and performance of countless industrial and consumer goods within the plastics, rubber & adhesives, fuels & lubricants, oilfield, pharmaceutical, and industrial resins industries. Headquartered in Schenectady, New York, SI Group's global manufacturing footprint includes 24 facilities on five continents, serving customers in 90 countries with 2,800 employees worldwide. SI Group innovates and drives change to create value with a passion for safety, chemistry, and extraordinary results. Learn more at www.siigroup.com.

Media Contact:Joseph Grande ph: + 1.413.684.2463joe@jgrandecommunications.com

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/si-group-signs-agreement-to-sell-industrial-resins-business-to-ask-chemicals-301340297.html

SOURCE SI Group
Coast Guard crews rescued 15 mariners aboard the disabled 72-foot sailing vessel Lucky, 26 miles east of Makapuu Point, Oahu, July 24, 2021. The Lucky was adrift due to a disabled rudder and crews aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Oliver Berry (WPC 1124) and a Station Honolulu 45-foot Response Boat-Medium successfully towed the vessel to Honolulu Harbor. (Matthew West/U.S. Coast Guard)

(Tribune News Service)  The Coast Guard early Saturday morning rescued 15 mariners aboard the Lucky, a 72-foot sailing vessel participating in the 2021 Transpacific Yacht Race. The vessel was found 26 miles east of Makapuu Point.

"With any towing evolution there is risk involved, " said Ensign Michael Meisenger, operations officer aboard the Cutter Oliver Berry. "In 30-knot winds and 10-foot seas we were able to establish a tow with the Lucky and safely brought them back to Honolulu."

He attributed their success to constant training and preparation.

Coast Guard Sector Honolulu watchstanders were notified at 1:32 p.m. Friday of the situation. When the rudder became disabled, the vessel began drifting towards Oahu.

Since those aboard the vessel were not in immediate danger, the Coast Guard diverted the Cutter Oliver Berry at 6:45 p.m. to tow the Lucky and the mariners to Honolulu.

They arrived at 2:30 a.m. Saturday just outside Honolulu, and the tow was performed by Station Honolulu's 45-foot response boat.

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The guided-missile destroyer USS Ralph Johnson steams near the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, July 14, 2020. (Anthony Collier/U.S. Navy)

HONOLULU (Tribune News Service)  The U.S. Missile Defense Agency, in concert with the Navy, today fired four SM-6 Dual II missiles against a "raid " of two short-range ballistic missile targets in the "broad ocean area " northwest of Hawaii.

The test described as the "most complex mission executed by MDA" resulted in at least one target being intercepted, the agency said.

"Based on initial observations, one target was successfully intercepted. At this time, we cannot confirm the second target was destroyed, " MDA said in a news release. The target missiles were fired from the Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai.

The firing ship for the test was the destroyer USS Ralph Johnson. The warship returned from its maiden deployment Jan. 14 from the Middle East and Western Pacific to its home port of Naval Station Everett, Wash., the Navy said.

The USS Mustin will be replaced in Yokosuka, Japan, by the Ralph Johnson, military.com reported in late June. Short-range ballistic missiles have a range up to about 620 miles.

North Korea announced the launch of a "new-type" of missile on March 25 that may be a variant of its KN-23 short-range ballistic missile, reported website 38north.org, which tracks North Korea activities.

Raytheon Co. said the SM-6 missile "is three missiles in one. It's the only weapon that can perform anti-air warfare, ballistic missile defense and anti-surface warfare missions."

The $5 million SM-6 missile can intercept cruise missiles and demonstrated the ability to strike surface targets in 2016. Raytheon said it upgraded the software on the SM-6 in 2017 to better engage medium-range ballistic missile threats.

The missile provides protection for aircraft carriers and is being developed as a defense against hypersonic threats.

On May 29, the Missile Defense Agency fired two SM-6 Dual II missiles from a destroyer off Kauai attempting to intercept a medium-range ballistic missile target, but failed to strike the mock enemy missile.

Today's launch of four SM-6 missiles against two simulated enemy missiles, designated FTM-33, was originally scheduled for December but was delayed due to restrictions in personnel and equipment movement intended to reduce the spread of COVID-19, the Missile Defense Agency said.

MDA said its mission is to develop and deploy a layered missile defense system to defend the U.S., its deployed forces, allies, and friends from missile attacks of all ranges in all phases of flight.

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Master Chief Tanya McCray and daughter Seaman Racquel McCray have a rare opportunity to serve on the same ship, USS Gerald R. Ford. (U.S. Navy)

(Tribune News Service)  Over nearly 30 years in the Navy, Master Chief Tanya McCray had to be apart from her two daughters and sailor husband, Sheridan, plenty of times  but this month, shes had a chance to do her job at sea alongside her oldest daughter.

Racquel McCray, who just joined the Navy and picked the same specialty her mother did, has been temporarily assigned to her ship for some at-sea training.

Tanya McCray is the leading chief petty officer of USS Gerald R. Fords supply department  the group that makes sure theres food for the ships company, that they are paid, that the spare parts are at hand and that the laundries, barbering and recreation facilities needed to help keep the crew healthy and happy are working properly.

Shes proud that her daughter picked the Navy and picked her specialty, after going to college.

They talked about the Navy but they never said I ought to join, Racquel McCray, 25, said. But joining the Navy was something she wanted to do since she was 18.

She first thought of following her fathers path as an information systems technician, but the logistics specialty rating that her mother holds was instead proposed when she signed up.

I knew I wanted to do something my parents had, she said.

And more recently, she wanted to experience something else her mother had  the first full ship shock trials of an aircraft carrier in 35 years. Those involve a series of large explosions close to a warship, to make sure it is as strong and stable as designed. The Ford completed the second in its series on July 16.

I definitely could feel it, Racquel said.

Shes assigned to the USS George H.W. Bush, which is at Norfolk Naval Shipyard for maintenance. When in the yard, ships leaders regularly dispatch sailors, especially younger ones, to other warships for the training and experience only available at sea.

At sea, its Tanya McCrays job to see all of the Fords logistics specialists are doing their jobs properly, and while her aim is to treat all her sailors the same, she says it is hard for a mother to expect even more.

And, on the flip side, over the course of her career, Tanya says she often takes on the task of being a Sea Mama, offering support and mentoring to sailors.

Being a Navy parent is tough  those months at sea away from family arent easy, she said. When both parents serve, it can be even more challenging, even though the Navy makes a point of ensuring one parent is home when the other is at sea.

From a daughters point of view, theres this plus: mom and dad are focused on spending lots of high quality time with their children when back from a deployment, Racquel said.

And now, theres this rare mother-daughter experience, she said:

Its pretty cool walking with her. Everyone says, Good morning master chief, and she greets them and Im just smiling the whole way. I feel like a proud daughter.

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Kim Marin and her 12-year-old daughter, Kate, isolate at home Friday in Fairfax County, Va. Both are fully vaccinated and recently tested positive for the coronavirus. (Amanda Voisard/For The Washington Post)

Kim Marin planned to spend her 51st birthday on Friday eating a cherry pie made by her 80-year-old mother and 12-year-old daughter.

But Marin and her daughter, Kate, began feeling ill earlier this week. On Wednesday the pair, who are fully vaccinated and live in Fairfax County, Va., tested positive for the coronavirus.

At first, it seemed like they just had a bad cold: They were coughing, sneezing and feeling achy. But their symptoms got progressively worse. Kate developed a bad sore throat and the two were outright exhausted.

"Because my daughter and I were feeling so badly, I just thought, let's go to urgent care and while we're here, they should probably test us (for the coronavirus)," Marin said. "We both got tested and we were shocked. We both were first in line to get vaccinated when we were able to."

Breakthrough cases are rare. Just 0.031 percent of the 4.5 million fully vaccinated people in Virginia have developed COVID-19, according to the state's dashboard. Just 0.05 percent of the more than 375,000 fully vaccinated people in the District of Columbia have tested positive. And out of the 3.5 million people who have been fully vaccinated in Maryland, just 2,493 have tested positive, according to state officials.

Betty Douglass, 80, drops off a cherry pie Friday for daughter Kim Marin's 51st birthday at her home, while Marin and her daughter are self-isolating. (Amanda Voisard/For The Washington Post) Kim Marin and daughter Kate, 12, are fully vaccinated for the coronavirus, but tested positive for the virus earlier this week. (Amanda Voisard/For The Washington Post)

"I think the thing that's so startling is that we have been really sick," Marin said. "The messaging has been that cases like ours should be pretty mild. ... We're not in the hospital, so we're so grateful for that. But it still has not been an easy week."

Marin has been fully vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine since mid-April, and Kate, also with the Pfizer vaccine, since mid-June. Both Marin's 48-year-old husband and 14-year-old son, who are both fully vaccinated, tested negative Friday.

Marin said she isn't quite sure how she and her daughter contracted the virus. Her family still frequently wears masks when going to the grocery store, only having walked into a store a few times without one.

The positive tests have put a wrench into their plans for the near future, which, to a certain extent, were rewards for their good behavior. In addition to the cherry pie Kate and her grandmother planned to make together for Kim, there was the overnight camp that Kate was supposed to attend next week, and the memorial service for an uncle next weekend.

"I just feel like this is a wake-up call for my loved ones, I really thought I just had a bad cold," said Marin, a soon-to-be middle school social studies teacher. "I think we need to not make assumptions about our illnesses these days."

Health officials have yet to contact to Marin and her daughter for contact tracing, she said. But Marin immediately notified her doctor and the family's pediatrician about their results. Marin said her nurse told her she was getting more of these calls from vaccinated people, and told her to go back to wearing masks full time.

Officials in the Washington region haven't moved to reinstate mask restrictions, though that shouldn't be off the table yet, especially as the highly contagious delta variant continues to spread across the country, said Neil Sehgal, an assistant professor of health policy at the University of Maryland School of Public Health.

"The mandates and the phases that were in D.C., Maryland, Virginia were never meant to be like an exit-only door," Sehgal said. He said the goal has always been to "match the level of precaution that we're taking in public with the level of transmission that we're seeing."

The delta variant has already become the dominant strain in Maryland and Virginia; it makes up 1 percent of cases in the District, but officials are working to increase their sequencing of specimens. While the risk of contracting the virus for vaccinated people is still low, it has increased compared to earlier strains, Sehgal said.

"The delta variant is much more infectious than the alpha variant was, and than the wild type was before that, and so a better understanding really is - in the short term, in the past 30 days - what proportion of new cases were in individuals who are vaccinated, because that gives a better picture today of what the risk is today to any vaccinated person," Sehgal said.

Los Angeles County officials, for example, look at breakthrough cases in a time-bound way and are able to say, for instance, that 20 percent of the coronavirus cases in June in the county were among vaccinated people. While time-bound figures can help show how exactly the risk for vaccinated people is increasing, officials say it's still important to note that the risk level for unvaccinated people is higher and increasing, too.

For her part, Marin plans to go back to taking the precautions she followed in the spring. She has young nephews whom she doesn't plan to be around without a mask anymore. And she no longer plans to go maskless in any public spaces. But she's still grateful for the vaccines.

"I'm struck by how much worse it could have been," Marin said. "While it's been very unpleasant, and scary, we have not felt like it was life-threatening, and the vaccine has made that possible."
Buy Photo (Lloyd Borguss/Stars and Stripes)

Ramstein Air Base, Germany, January 7, 1970: Brig. Gen. Charles E. Yeager, vice-commander of the 17th Air Force, gets a pat on the hand from Vera Starodvorsky during their reunion more than a quarter-century after she hid him from the Germans in occupied France when his plane was shot down in March, 1944. In the background are Starodvorskys daughter, Alexandra Mchanetzki, and Mrs. Yeager. Thanks to Starodvorsky and others, Yeager was able to escape to Spain, return to battle (and shoot down five planes on his first day back), and go on to become the first pilot to break the sound barrier.
Thousands of protesters gather at Place Trocadero near the Eiffel Tower for a demonstration in Paris, France, Saturday July 24, 2021, against the COVID-19 pass which grants vaccinated individuals greater ease of access to venues. (Rafael Yaghobzadeh/AP)

PARIS  Some 160,000 people, including far-right activists and members of France's yellow vest movement, protested Saturday across the country against a bill requiring everyone to have a special virus pass to enter restaurants and mandating COVID-19 vaccinations for all health care workers.

Similar protests were held in neighboring Italy.

Police fired water cannons and tear gas on rowdy protesters in Paris, although most gatherings were orderly.

Legislators in France's Senate were debating the virus bill Saturday after the lower house of parliament approved it on Friday, as virus infections are spiking and hospitalizations are rising. The French government wants to speed up vaccinations to protect vulnerable people and hospitals, and avoid any new lockdown.

Most French adults are fully vaccinated and multiple polls indicate a majority of French people support the new measures. But not everyone.

Protesters chanting "Liberty! Liberty!" gathered at Bastille plaza and marched through eastern Paris in one of several demonstrations Saturday around France. Thousands also joined a gathering across the Seine River from the Eiffel Tower organized by a former top official in Marine Le Pen's anti-immigration party.

While most protesters were calm, tensions erupted on the margins of the Bastille march. Riot police sprayed tear gas on marchers after someone threw a chair at an officer. Other projectiles were also thrown. Later some protesters moved to the Arc de Triomphe and police used water cannon to disperse them.

Marchers included far-right politicians and activists as well as others angry at President Emmanuel Macron. They were upset over a French "health pass" that is now required to enter museums, movie theaters and tourist sites. The bill under debate would expand the pass requirement to all restaurants and bars in France and some other venues.

To get the pass, people need to be fully vaccinated, have a recent negative test or have proof they recently recovered from the virus.

French lawmakers are divided over how far to go in imposing health passes or mandatory vaccinations but infections are rising quickly. More than 111,000 people with the virus have died in France, and the country is now seeing about 20,000 new infections a day, up from just a few thousand a day in early July.

More than 2 billion people worldwide have been vaccinated and information about COVID-19 vaccines is now widely available, but many protesters said they felt they were being rushed into something they're not ready to do.

Celine Augen, a secretary at a doctor's office, is prepared to lose her job under the new measure because she doesn't want to get vaccinated.

Ayoub Bouglia, an engineer, said, "We need to wait a little bit before the French people can decide ... I think a part of France is always going to be unwilling and that blackmail and threats won't work."

In Italy, thousands of protesters gathered in Rome, Milan, Verona and other cities Saturday, protesting the government's decision to require a "Green Pass" to access indoor dining, local fairs, stadiums, cinemas and other gathering places.

In the northern city of Verona, several thousand people marched down the main shopping street, chanting "No Green Pass!" and "Freedom!" They included families with young children, medical doctors who said they are risking their jobs not to get vaccinated and people who likened the Green Pass decision to decisions by fascist dictatorships.

The demonstrations proceeded peacefully and dissipated into summer evening crowds.

Despite the vocal opposition, Italy's new requirement, effective Aug. 3, has led to a boom in vaccine appointments in Italy, where so far nearly half of the eligible population is fully vaccinated.

Colleen Barry in Milan and Angela Charlton in Paris contributed.
Buy Photo Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, commander of U.S. Central Command and head of Afghan troops in Afghanistan, speaks to reporters at the former Resolute Support headquarters in Kabul, now called U.S. Embassy South, on July 25, 2021. McKenzie said the U.S. has accelerated its airstrike campaign against the Taliban in support of Afghan forces. (J.P. Lawrence/Stars and Stripes)

KABUL, Afghanistan  The U.S. will continue launching airstrikes to support Afghan troops as needed to halt Taliban attacks through at least Aug. 31, the top commander of U.S. forces in the country said Sunday.

Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, who also heads U.S. Central Command, did not say whether the airstrikes would go on past next month, when the U.S. is scheduled to complete its withdrawal after nearly 20 years of war in Afghanistan. The U.S. has already withdrawn more than 95% of its forces, CENTCOM has said.

Buy Photo Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, commander of U.S. Central Command and head of Afghan troops in Afghanistan, speaks to reporters at the former Resolute Support headquarters in Kabul, now called U.S. Embassy South, on July 25, 2021. The U.S. has accelerated an airstrike campaign against the Taliban, but it's unclear whether strikes will continue past Aug. 31, when U.S. forces are set to formally withdraw. (J.P. Lawrence/Stars and Stripes) Buy Photo Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, commander of U.S. Central Command and head of Afghan troops in Afghanistan, speaks to reporters at the former Resolute Support headquarters in Kabul, now called U.S. Embassy South, on July 25, 2021. McKenzie said the U.S. would continue to support the Afghan military with funding and advising after the U.S. formally withdraws from the country. (J.P. Lawrence/Stars and Stripes)

The United States has increased airstrikes in the support of Afghan forces over the last several days, McKenzie said. Were prepared to continue this heightened level of support in the coming weeks if the Taliban continue their attacks.

U.S. forces launched at least four airstrikes last week, including in Kandahar, which is where the Taliban was founded.

The Taliban has gained large swathes of territory in recent months, following the announcements that the U.S. and its coalition partners would withdraw its forces. Deadly Taliban offensives all over the country have encircled key cities and captured trading centers, such as Spin Boldak in the southern province of Kandahar.

McKenzie arrived in Kabul to meet Sunday with Afghan president Ashraf Ghani and his defense advisers. The visit followed a phone call from President Joe Biden to Ghani last week, in which the U.S. president said America will continue to provide billions of dollars to pay the salaries of Afghanistans troops and to keep the countrys air force flying.

After Aug. 31, the U.S. militarys focus will shift to protecting the embassy in Kabul and ensuring the citys airport remains open, McKenzie said.

The Afghan air force, seen as an important advantage Kabul has over the Taliban, will continue to receive financial support and advising, the general said, adding that aircraft in need of maintenance and repair will be flown outside the country to be fixed.

We will do everything in our power to keep that air force effective, flying and in support of their forces, McKenzie said.

The war has reached a pivotal stage for Afghan forces, McKenzie said.

I think over the next days and weeks will determine if the government is going to be able to defend the country, he said. We spent a lot of time training them, now is their moment.

Assistance to the Afghan government will continue after Aug. 31, but the U.S. will lose much of the ability to oversee how the Afghan military uses its funds and weapons, McKenzie said.

Zubair Babakarkhail contributed to this report.
Jennifer Ramirez, left, and Lourdes Lara, the sister and mother of 19-year old National Guard member Chrys Carvajal, killed over the July Fourth weekend, hold a banner with Carvajal's photo on it during a rally for peace at Riis Park in the Belmont-Cragin neighborhood of Chicago on Saturday, July 24, 2021. (Vashon Jordan Jr., Chicago Tribune/TNS)

CHICAGO (Tribune News Service)  At the start of the march in honor of slain 19-year-old Chrys Carvajal, his sister and girlfriend each held a tall stack of flyers promoting a $10,000 reward for tips that lead to who killed the National Guard member earlier this month.

By the conclusion, only about a dozen sheets remained in each of their hands after the two diligently fanned out across the sidewalk, passing them to any business owner and pedestrian in sight. They walked by several posters with the same information that were already taped onto storefronts and light poles during their route on West Fullerton Avenue on the Northwest Side.

A crowd of about 70 community leaders, relatives and friends flanked the sister and girlfriend on the street, marching and chanting, What do we want? Justice. Cars honked back.

Carvajals sister, 25-year-old Jennifer Ramirez, said her dogged quest to seek information is both to do right by his memory and to channel her grief.

All we could do now is continue to fight for his justice, Ramirez said. I just want to ask the community, if they know anything, if they saw anything, to please speak up. (It) wont bring my brother back, but it will help us find justice and it will leave us at peace.

Carvajal was fatally shot in the back and abdomen in the 2200 block of North Lockwood Avenue about 1:30 a.m. July 3 in the Hanson Park neighborhood on the Northwest Side, according to Chicago police. No one was in custody as of Saturday. He had recently completed Army basic training and was waiting to be assigned to a unit with the Illinois National Guard, a spokesman confirmed.

The 19-year-old grew up in the Austin neighborhood before his mother, who raised him and three other siblings, moved them to Portage Park out of fear of violence. Ramirez said her mother was trying to avoid Carvajals exact fate.

Carvajal, though the second-youngest child, doted on his mother and learned responsibility at a young age, Ramirez said. His chief concern was making enough money to help her retire early and pay off her mortgage. Now, the family must figure out how to access car, credit card, internet and other bill accounts because he had taken care of all the payments.

That challenge of my mom being a single parent was something that he dealt with and shaped him to who he became, and also made him care and love so much for my mom, Ramirez said.

Community members and the family of Chrys Carvajal, the 19-year old National Guard member killed over the July Fourth weekend, rally for peace in the Belmont-Cragin neighborhood of Chicago on Saturday, July 24, 2021. (Vashon Jordan Jr., Chicago Tribune/TNS)

It was bittersweet when Carvajal was accepted into the National Guard. His family was scared to let him leave so fresh out of high school, but they understood it was his passion to protect others, Ramirez said. After his service in the military, he wanted to become a Chicago police detective.

Part of Carvajals dreams came from his girlfriend of four years, Citlali Olivares. The 20-year-old said she, too, has long strived to become a detective and that he enlisted to follow her into the National Guard. When Olivares watched his swearing-in ceremony after her own, it confirmed she was on the right path, she said.

Olivares said her boyfriend, though a protector, was also sensitive and quick to tamp down conflict. He was happiest whenever he was helping someone else.

There was a point where our parents were like, You guys are so inseparable, Olivares said. It was a deep, deep connection. We didnt have to do anything. We just had to be in each others presence.

The 19-year-old had a silly side to him as well. He loved barging into Ramirezs room and checking himself out in the mirror  usually while sporting a snazzy outfit, including his royal blue Nike Jordan high-tops.

Boy, did you really spend $300 on shoes? Ramirez would tease. He responded: Yeah, look, dont you like my shoes?

The night of the shooting, Olivares and Carvajal got invited to a house party around the 2200 block of North Lockwood Avenue. They held hands the entire time so they would not lose each other in the crowd. But Carvajal remembered he forgot something in his car, so he peeled away.

Before he left, Carvajal gave Olivares a hug, gazing into her eyes and remarking at how beautiful she was. She got embarrassed, but he repeated the compliment before giving her a kiss. Ill be back, he said. He was shot outside before he could make it to the car.

Thats what his last words (were): Ill be back, Olivares said. Im still waiting to this day.

Ramirez said while she was at her boyfriends house that night, her younger sister called, saying something was wrong with their mother. In the background, their mother cried out, My son. My son. Oh, why? My son.

Thats when Ramirez knew  somehow  that Carvajal was in trouble. Her other younger brother joined them at their mothers house, pleading, Please tell me my brothers not dead.

The lack of closure is the most difficult part about losing her brother to gun violence, Ramirez said. Waking up every morning, she must remind herself that hes gone, that he wont walk in the door and exclaim, Im back!

Ramirez had briefly moved to Indianapolis earlier last year, but she returned to Chicago out of homesickness. The city, with its beautiful skyline, larger-than-life neighborhoods and the faces of those she loves, was home to her, she said. But now, she wants to move out.

Our city, theres more violence than there is love and support throughout the community, Ramirez said. Now that Im home, my brothers not there. My familys broken.

ayin@chicagotribune.com

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LAWRENCE, Kan.  A retired University of Kansas professor received Polands Medal of Valor this weekend more than 75 years after he fought with the Polish resistance against the occupying forces of Nazi Germany during World War II.

Polish Air Force Major Gen. Cezary Wisniewski who is based at the Polish embassy in Washington D.C. visited Jarek Piekalkiewiczs home in Lawrence, Kansas, Saturday to give him Polands second-highest combat honor on his 95th birthday.

Wisniewski said the honor was overlooked during the war and then the post-war communist government of Poland refused to honor the countrys wartime resistance fighters. The recommendation that Piekalkiewicz receive the medal for his efforts was recently discovered in Polands archives, according to the Lawrence Journal-World.

Piekalkiewicz joined the Polish resistance at age 16. Two years later, he was promoted to platoon sergeant and commanded 1,000 men during the bloody uprising of 1944 when roughly 6,000 resistance soldiers were killed before the resistance surrendered in October when its forces ran short of ammunition and food.

Piekalkiewicz said he then became a prisoner of war at a German labor camp, and he tried to escape three separate times before he finally succeeded. Later he served with the U.S. Army and British military.

After the war, he earned his bachelors degree and met his wife at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, before coming to the United States and earning his doctorate. He went on to teach at KU from 1963 to 2000,

Wisniewski said Piekalkiewicz continued to serve Poland after he came to America by advocating for Poland to become a member of NATO.
Dale Snort Snodgrass was killed Saturday in the crash of a SIAI-Marchetti SM.1019 in Idaho. Snodgrass was a legendary F-14 pilot with more than 4,800 hours and 1,200 carrier landings in a Tomcat. A former Top Gun instructor, he was Fighter Pilot of the Year in 1985. After retiring from the Navy, he became a noted airshow performer. (U.S. Naval Institute Facebook)

LEWISTON, Idaho (Tribune News Service)  Federal officials are investigating after a single-engine plane crash Saturday at the Lewiston-Nez Perce County Regional Airport that killed former U.S. Navy F-14 Tomcat pilot Dale Snort Snodgrass.

Snodgrass was the lone occupant of the SIAI-Marchetti fixed-wing aircraft when it crashed around noon during takeoff, according to a news release from airport Manager Michael Isaacs. Snodgrass's age and hometown were not listed.

The aircraft came down in a field and caught fire just off the airport's taxiway Charlie, according to Lewiston Fire Department Chief Travis Myklebust.

The fire department responded to a call at 12:11 p.m. Saturday that a small plane carrying one or two passengers had crashed at the airport, Myklebust said in a news release. Firefighters attacked the fire with a hose line and the airport's aircraft rescue truck and brought the fire under control in fewer than five minutes. The fire was contained to the airplane and a small area of grass next to the taxiway.

First responders confirmed that Snodgrass was alone aboard the airplane, and didn't survive.

Lewiston police and Nez Perce County Sheriff's Office deputies also responded to the scene to assist airport staff with the investigation and proper notifications.

The Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board both were on scene by Saturday night to begin an investigation into the cause of the crash.

Myklebust said the airport closed one runway because of the accident, but the facility was able to stay open to air traffic by utilizing its other runway.

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An innovative research-based approach to how New Zealand children are taught to read is to be extended across the country with a $10 million Ministry of Education contract awarded to the University of Canterbury - UC.

The Better Start Literacy Approach - BSLA, developed by a team of researchers at UCs Child Well-Being Research Institute, is being rolled out this year to over 1000 new entrant/Year 1 teachers and literacy specialists around New Zealand.

The $10m funding over the next two years will support the upskilling of approximately 5,000 teachers and literacy specialists through UCs new micro-credential professional development qualifications.

Professors Gail Gillon and Brigid McNeill have led the development of the Better Start Literacy Approach over several years. The success of the approach in developing childrens oral language, early reading and writing ability has been proven through controlled research trials as part of the Better Start National Science Challenge E Tipu E Rea.

Professor Gillon welcomes the new funding saying it will help lift the literacy skills of more than 70,000 children by 2023.

Its very exciting to be able to extend the impact of our research into improving literacy outcomes for young tamariki right across New Zealand, says Director of the Child Well-being Research Institute Professor Gillon.

This is a very significant enhancement to New Zealands current early literacy curriculum. We know that we need a more systematic and science-based approach to early literacy teaching to help reduce current educational inequities.

An independent report, produced by Wellington-based analytical firm ImpactLab, forecast that every dollar invested in the Better Start Literacy Approach will result in $30.71 of measurable good being returned to New Zealand once the approach is fully rolled out. This takes into account the association between improving reading outcomes and increasing academic achievement, obtaining employment, improving mental health and reducing risky behaviour and offending.

We want all children to experience early reading success, says Professor Gillon. Early reading success in turns sets up a positive cycle and leads to stronger educational achievement and healthy well-being.

Professor McNeill, a leader in UC School of Teacher Education, says the Better Start Literacy Approach is strengths-based and supports teachers to engage in positive ways with childrens whanau.

We know how important childrens whanau are to childrens learning and well-being so the Better Start Literacy Approach includes workshops for whanau to help them support their childrens reading development, says Professor McNeill.

The Better Start Literacy Approach builds on research-based evidence about the most effective methods to teach children letter-sound knowledge, phonological awareness, vocabulary, oral language, reading and spelling. The approach uses quality childrens story books and fun, game-based phoneme awareness activities to build these critical foundational skills.

Central to the Better Start Literacy Approach is the Ready to Read  Phonics Plus early readers, developed by the UC research team and recently published by the Ministry of Education as part of its new Early Literacy Approach.

Professor Gillon says the Better Start Literacy Approach and the new readers have been specifically designed and developed for children in New Zealand.

The new Ready to Read Phonics Plus books and activities have a distinctive New Zealand character that tamariki can relate to in their learning.
A Bay of Plenty iwi collective is working with five national research institutes to collectively develop a large scale $20 million multi-year funding agreement with the government to grow the aquaculture industry in the region.

In a virtual signing on Friday morning, a Memorandum of Understanding - MOU - was entered into by Nga Iwi i Te Rohe o Te Waiariki, Plant & Food Research, Cawthron Institute, National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) and the universities of Otago and Waikato.

The purpose of the MOU is to enable better collaboration, data sharing and funding to explore potential marine, science and technology business opportunities.

BOP Iwi Aquaculture Project Leader, Chris Karamea Insley, says he is pleased by the level of enthusiasm and commitment shown by the five research institutes.

With this MOU, we acknowledge the joint mission of improving and growing aquaculture opportunities in the Bay of Plenty.

Research institutes and iwi committing to working collaboratively on this iwi-led kaupapa is significant for Maori, our region and New Zealand as a whole.

We also acknowledge we have a better chance of securing significant Crown funding by working collaboratively towards our shared goals, which includes sharing available data and knowledge.

Securing a $10-$20m multi-year funding agreement with the government would allow the parties in this MOU to work towards building a truly sustainable aquaculture industry in the Waiariki region.

Cawthron Institute Chief Executive Volker Kuntzsch signing the MOU. Photo: Supplied.

Plant & Food Research General Manager Science  Seafood Technologies, Helen Mussely, says the MOU represents a crucial first step towards these organisations working together for a common purpose - realising the potential of aquaculture for Nga Iwi i te Rohe o Te Waiariki.

Plant & Food Research welcomes the opportunity to be involved in such an exciting and future-focused initiative and is looking forward to playing its role in the mahi ahead.

University of Otago Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research and Enterprise), Professor Richard Blaikie, says the signing is an important step forward for its Department of Food Science.

The University is proud to be part of this relationship, and it is one we believe will significantly benefit all groups involved.

We have had a longstanding relationship with Te Arawa, and this agreement is a great opportunity for us to continue that great work with Nga Iwi i Te Rohe o Te Waiariki.

University of Waikato Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research, Professor Bryony James, says the university values its relationship with Te Arawa, and all the partners of this MOU.

We are excited by this new direction and the opportunities offered by collaboration in the aquaculture sector," says Professor Bryony James.

The signing of this MOU is a significant event for Cawthron because it further recognises our relationship with all of the iwi represented by Nga Iwi i Te Rohe o Te Waiariki and demonstrates our desire to work together, both with other research partners in NZ and with iwi to get the best outcomes for Maori in this region," says Cawthron Institute Chief Executive, Volker Kuntzsch.

Our organisation wanted to be a signatory in support of matauranga and the importance of having enduring relationships with whanau, hapu, iwi, Maori enterprise.

Volker says there is no better time for science and industry to come together.

We are facing a lot of challenges but equally there are a lot of opportunities and I am thankful for Chris bringing us together.

I believe we will be able to set an example for the rest of Aotearoa of what industry and science collaboration can look like and achieve.

NIWA Chief Executive John Morgan says the MOU presented an exciting opportunity to partner with Nga Iwi i Te Rohe o Te Waiariki.

NIWA brings aquaculture, marine, fisheries and coastal science expertise to support iwi aspirations of building a sustainable world-class marine and aquaculture industry in the Waiariki region," says John.




The Ministry of Health advise that there are no cases of COVID-19 to report in the community in New Zealand today.



There are two positive cases of COVID-19 to report in managed isolation facilities and two new historical cases aboard the ship the Playa Zahara, says a Ministry of Health spokesperson.



Since January 1 2021, there have been 105 historical cases, out of a total of 689 cases



Nineteen previously reported cases have now recovered. The number of active cases in New Zealand is 58. The seven-day rolling average of new cases detected at the border is seven.



One previously reported positive case has now been reviewed and classified as not a case and a second previously reported positive case is now reclassified as under investigation. Both cases have been removed from our total tally of cases.



The total number of confirmed NZ cases is 2,506.



Taranaki Wastewater

The Ministry is pleased at the response today to the call for testing in New Plymouth as reported by the local DHB, says a Ministry of Health spokesperson.



The Ministry continues to strongly encourage anyone in Taranaki with symptoms, or recent arrivals from Australia with or without symptoms whove recently visited Taranaki to be tested.



This follows two positive wastewater results detected in Taranaki earlier this week on July 20 and 22 July, which could be due to recently recovered cases continuing to shed the virus, or could signal undetected cases in the community.



In order to determine whether there are any undetected cases the Ministry is recommending anyone in Taranaki, or who has visited recently, and who has symptoms to get tested.



Additional testing capacity has been stood up in New Plymouth to support potential demand.



The Ministry is recommending that any recent arrivals from Australia, who have symptoms, to also get tested, and anyone who has recently been in Australia who is now in Taranaki to get tested even if they dont have symptoms.



People who have recently been in Australia should continue to check the State websites for locations of interest as new locations of interest continue to be identified.



Anyone with symptoms consistent with COVID-19 should call Healthline (0800 358 5453) for advice on getting a test.



For Taranaki testing locations please visit the Taranaki DHB website.



For a list of all testing locations nationwide visit the Healthpoint website.



Testing numbers for Taranaki will be provided tomorrow. Results are also expected tomorrow from further and wider wastewater sampling carried out over the weekend in Taranaki. ESR undertakes regular wastewater testing across the country, as an additional surveillance tool in the fight against COVID-19.



While the mariners aboard the Playa Zahara and Viking Bay vessels recently docked at Port Taranaki, in New Plymouth, the dates of their brief visits, and the activity of the crew, do not appear to be a factor in these wastewater detections.



Additional testing for a small number of port workers and nurses, who have been in possible contact with the mariners, have all been negative to date.



New border cases in New Zealand

Arrival date From Via Positive test day/reason Managed isolation/quarantine location 12 July* USA Direct Day 12 / routine Auckland 13 July** Mariner Playa Zahara Surveillance testing Lyttleton Port - Lyttleton 13 July** Mariner Playa Zahara Surveillance testing Lyttleton Port - Lyttleton 24 July United Kingdom United Arab Emirates Day 0 / routine Auckland

* Day 12 cases are routinely investigated as a check against possible transmission within the facility

** Cases 2 and 3 are historical and onboard the ship Playa Zahara.



Contact tracing



Contact tracing have identified 45 contacts associated with cases in Australia and who are currently in New Zealand. All 45 have been tested and returned negative results.



Mattina

Health and border authorities continue to manage the situation around the Mattina.



The health and welfare of the crew are being overseen by Southern DHBs Medical Officers of Health, who are working closely with maritime, port and other government agencies.



There are 15 positive COVID-19 cases. Five crew, who have tested negative, have been transferred to managed isolation facilities onshore, the remainder remain isolated on board the vessel at this time, where they will maintain the minimum functions on the vessel.



They will not have direct contact with any port staff while maintaining these functions.



These plans have been put in place to ensure the safety and wellbeing of the negative crew members at the same time as the health and wellbeing of members of the community. In both instances, the public health risk to the community has been deemed low.



Playa Zahara

The crew of the Playa Zahara are now all recovered and are back on board the vessel in quarantine in Lyttelton. One other crew member, also recovered, has now left the country to return home.



Viking Bay

Ten crew members are now in quarantine onboard the Viking Bay fishing vessel at Queens Wharf in Wellington following crew members from managed isolation being transferred back on board the vessel once it was determined safe for them to do so. The crew members are continuing to be tested during their quarantine.



Ten crew members remain in isolation in a Wellington managed isolation facility onshore.



Testing

The total number of COVID-19 tests processed by laboratories to date is 2,438,807.



On Saturday, 5,432 tests were processed across New Zealand. The seven-day rolling average is 5,851.



For all testing locations nationwide visit the Healthpoint website.



NZ COVID Tracer

NZ COVID Tracer now has 2,905,178 registered users.



Poster scans have reached 311,795,801 and users have created 12,190,453 manual diary entries.



There have been 638,518 scans in the last 24 hours to midday yesterday.



While we are currently in Alert Level 1, remember that doesnt mean Alert Level none, says a Ministry of Health spokesperson.



Please continue to do everything possible to keep New Zealand free from COVID-19, such as keeping track of where you have been  scan QR codes wherever you go and turn on Bluetooth tracing in the app dashboard.
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Leslie Williams is the author for a new book, We Did Something About It, which was released this weekend.
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Maruti, Hyundai, Kia & SAIC | Why they succeeded when other marquee brands failed | A brief analysis



I believe rather than look at why xyz brands fail(ed), we should look at what makes a successful brand, successful in India.



One way to understand this is, is to plot it on the Price Benefit grid from which we would get the customer value proposition.



https://chsorens.wordpress.com/princ...e-proposition/



There are 2 ways a brand can be successful in offering a compelling value proposition, or as one infamous Godfather said, "make you an offer you can't refuse".



1- Offer more benefits for less price, this is also known as "the steal"

2- Offer more benefits for a higher price, this is the brand premium.



The only exceptions here would be married to the Dussenbery effect aka the demonstration effect, but these too need a compelling value proposition.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Duesenberry



To break the Step 1 or 2 as listed above, a brand needs to establish a halo product, and penetrate enough in the market that just by its presence it can scale up the price / value proposition. One brand that does this very well would be Apple (world over and in India too) or even the 1+ brand.





So moving back to the 2 options available.



There are some key elements that anyone in the none luxury end of the market looks for, and these are brand agnostic.



1 - Peace of mind. Now this is largely subjective and market driven. The average lay car buyer does not spend hours in auto forums like this, do research etc. They go by market consciousness or a wide unspoken belief system. Here for instance, a MS is known to give you absolute peace of mind. Right or wrong, this is an absolute belief and other brands can break this (not unless say MS themselves score self goals)



2 - Accessibility to dealers, and consequently ASS networks - No one likes driving 1 hour just to give your car for a service, at least no layperson will.



3 - Cost of ASS - Again, the average customer services the car in authorised service centres during the warranty period and possibly shifting to the nearest Garage (not some exclusive F(n)G). So distances again come into play here. And things like DIY for simple or complex fixes are absolutely ruled out.



These are not directly related to the product but tangential to it, the product needs to be,



1 - Cost Effective! NOT CHEAP. Ask Tata and the failure of their Nano to understand just how this phenomenon works. You CANNOT market something as cheap, it just wont work because the demonstration effect (see above) kicks in. You can't be seen in something "cheap", so cost effective is the key word.



2 - Features - I have not studied other markets, but the Indian market likes to consume VFM products, be it cars or underwear and a feature list, which will be compared against its competition is a vital element here.



3 - Then comes in, with much smaller weightage things like displacement, engine tune etc etc.



All of the above are considered features, not just the features you might find in your car.



Don't forget, the buying of a car in India is not a personal affair but a family affair (As many in our own forum will testify), so you can wax eloquent on the DSG autobox or the torque etc, and if you are on the right side of 40, you will get shut down by whatever your mom, wife, dad, elder bro, uncle have to say about it.



Plot all this on a Maslowian hierarchy of needs,



Aspects like say the GNCAP would be right on top, far removed from baser day to day requirements.



MS Operates on the Less Price, More Features area of the grid. Their dealer network is unmatched, they are legendary for their peace of mind, bullet proof reliability, ASS is a given, be it Ladakh or some remote village near Kanyakumari. And the Dussenbury kicks in here, you see your friends, neighbors own a MS, it then becomes that much more easier to pick up a MS.



Hyundai got this very early on in the game, they are basically MS v 2.0 but with a wider spread of products (MS usually CANNOT sell in the B segment and above category, and don't even make cars for the D + category).



The likes of VAG, Ford, Toyota are neither here nor there. So in the price benefit grid they would be in the More price, lesser benefits or same price, same benefits areas.



So a product like a Figo, quite a compelling product no doubt but it is in the highly competitive same price, same benefits area which its competition has saturated.





New entrants like SAIC have studied this market and come up with a product that far exceeds the less price, more benefits segment which is why they move so many units of a 20L average OTR sticker price product. Nissan after a dismal performance in the High price, less benefits segment of the grid, has knocked it out of the park with its Magnite which is entirely in the less price, more benefits (though things like dealer network remain poor, but that is how compelling this product is).



Blaming abstract elements like tax policies (SAIC and Kia have the same tax policies a Ford or VAG have don't they?), or worse, the "market" is just inexplicable to me.



If OEM's like VAG, Ford etc want to succeed? And they can, the Indian auto market has been growing at a crazy clip and will continue to do so for the next few decades, they have to take a page from the likes of Nissan and reinvent themselves.



Offering products that do not resonate with the market would be the shortest way to Harakiri. Every auto forum, enthusiast conversation these days when it comes to 4 wheeler brands devolves ultimately into "why the tin can makers thrive while huge brands like Toyota, VAG fail".I believe rather than look at why xyz brands fail(ed), we should look at what makes a successful brand, successful in India.One way to understand this is, is to plot it on the Price Benefit grid from which we would get the customer value proposition.There are 2 ways a brand can be successful in offering a compelling value proposition, or as one infamous Godfather said, "make you an offer you can't refuse".1- Offer more benefits for less price, this is also known as "the steal"2- Offer more benefits for a higher price, this is the brand premium.The only exceptions here would be married to the Dussenbery effect aka the demonstration effect, but these too need a compelling value proposition.To break the Step 1 or 2 as listed above, a brand needs to establish a halo product, and penetrate enough in the market that just by its presence it can scale up the price / value proposition. One brand that does this very well would be Apple (world over and in India too) or even the 1+ brand.So moving back to the 2 options available.There are some key elements that anyone in the none luxury end of the market looks for, and these are brand agnostic.1 - Peace of mind. Now this is largely subjective and market driven. The average lay car buyer does not spend hours in auto forums like this, do research etc. They go by market consciousness or a wide unspoken belief system. Here for instance, a MS is known to give you absolute peace of mind. Right or wrong, this is an absolute belief and other brands can break this (not unless say MS themselves score self goals)2 - Accessibility to dealers, and consequently ASS networks - No one likes driving 1 hour just to give your car for a service, at least no layperson will.3 - Cost of ASS - Again, the average customer services the car in authorised service centres during the warranty period and possibly shifting to the nearest Garage (not some exclusive F(n)G). So distances again come into play here. And things like DIY for simple or complex fixes are absolutely ruled out.These are not directly related to the product but tangential to it, the product needs to be,1 - Cost Effective! NOT CHEAP. Ask Tata and the failure of their Nano to understand just how this phenomenon works. You CANNOT market something as cheap, it just wont work because the demonstration effect (see above) kicks in. You can't be seen in something "cheap", so cost effective is the key word.2 - Features - I have not studied other markets, but the Indian market likes to consume VFM products, be it cars or underwear and a feature list, which will be compared against its competition is a vital element here.3 - Then comes in, with much smaller weightage things like displacement, engine tune etc etc.All of the above are considered features, not just the features you might find in your car.Don't forget, the buying of a car in India is not a personal affair but a family affair (As many in our own forum will testify), so you can wax eloquent on the DSG autobox or the torque etc, and if you are on the right side of 40, you will get shut down by whatever your mom, wife, dad, elder bro, uncle have to say about it.Plot all this on a Maslowian hierarchy of needs, https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html Aspects like say the GNCAP would be right on top, far removed from baser day to day requirements.MS Operates on the Less Price, More Features area of the grid. Their dealer network is unmatched, they are legendary for their peace of mind, bullet proof reliability, ASS is a given, be it Ladakh or some remote village near Kanyakumari. And the Dussenbury kicks in here, you see your friends, neighbors own a MS, it then becomes that much more easier to pick up a MS.Hyundai got this very early on in the game, they are basically MS v 2.0 but with a wider spread of products (MS usually CANNOT sell in the B segment and above category, and don't even make cars for the D + category).The likes of VAG, Ford, Toyota are neither here nor there. So in the price benefit grid they would be in the More price, lesser benefits or same price, same benefits areas.So a product like a Figo, quite a compelling product no doubt but it is in the highly competitive same price, same benefits area which its competition has saturated.New entrants like SAIC have studied this market and come up with a product that far exceeds the less price, more benefits segment which is why they move so many units of a 20L average OTR sticker price product. Nissan after a dismal performance in the High price, less benefits segment of the grid, has knocked it out of the park with its Magnite which is entirely in the less price, more benefits (though things like dealer network remain poor, but that is how compelling this product is).Blaming abstract elements like tax policies (SAIC and Kia have the same tax policies a Ford or VAG have don't they?), or worse, the "market" is just inexplicable to me.If OEM's like VAG, Ford etc want to succeed? And they can, the Indian auto market has been growing at a crazy clip and will continue to do so for the next few decades, they have to take a page from the likes of Nissan and reinvent themselves.Offering products that do not resonate with the market would be the shortest way to Harakiri.
Artificial intelligence and its not-so-positive reputation have always stemmed from one thing: its apparent superiority over human intelligence. Compared to a very smart person, a computer is simply faster in a lot of aspects. What would take human years to process will only take minutes for AI, and that's a fact.

As such, comparing the two types of intelligence yields proof that they are, indeed, quite different from each other. But just how different, exactly?

Artificial Intelligence 'Learns' In A Distinct Way

When you talk about a machine's learning capabilities, artificial intelligence can only learn one way: if it is fed a certain amount of data. According to AnalyticsSteps, the biggest differentiator between AI and human intelligence is the fact that humans can think and learn from past mistakes.

People learn to improve because of trial-and-error because they can look back into past events and infer the best solutions from there on out. Artificial intelligence simply cannot do that and can only focus on the data being fed into it at the moment. This also leads to another major difference, which is...

AI Is Strictly Objective, While Human Intelligence Can Play Both Sides

Since artificial intelligence can only "infer" about the data being presented to it at a certain moment, their decisions are limited to being strictly objective. An AI will never make a decision without strictly consulting numbers, writes GeeksForGeeks. On the other hand, humans can be both objective and subjective, which gives them a wider perspective on things before making a decision.

Read also: Artificial Intelligence Creates an Entire Game From Scratch

AI Doesn't Adapt to Changes Well

The main advantage of artificial intelligence is that it's extremely good at keeping a routine. It can do the same thing over and over again without getting tired or frustrated, because it physically can't. As a result, it can only maintain a routine and can never adapt to change as quickly as a human would. It can only adapt once a human operator programs it with new instructions. That's it.

Artificial Intelligence's Processing Speed Is Off the Charts

Humans can adapt to sudden changes much quicker, sure. But the human brain can only focus on one thing at a time, thereby increasing the amount of time they need to solve a problem. A human brain can never beat an AI's level of focus, and this is why artificial intelligence programs such as DeepMind have been able to achieve things such as predicting 350,000 protein structures in minutes when a human scientist can only deal with one structure in a span of months.

AI Can Never Think in Abstract

You can train an AI to play the piano from a music sheet almost as well as a human player. Or, you can train it to make a playable video game by feeding it pre-existing data. That's because of their data processing capabilities. However, artificial intelligence can never be able to just create a tune out of thin air like a human pianist or an entirely new video game like human game dev.

In other words, you can never ask a machine to create art because it can't "think" in an abstract way. An AI can only see the superficial, but never something between the lines. It doesn't understand hidden meanings, nor can it interpret them.

Related: Artificial Intelligence to Hunt for Dark Energy Using this INSANELY POWERFUL Supercomputer

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by RJ Pierce

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Ransomware victim, Kaseya, has successfully obtained a decryption key for the cyberattack, but the company is reportedly requiring its customers to sign non-disclosure agreements before giving it away.

The Florida-based IT company was caught in a ransomware attack, which REvil, a notorious hacking gang, allegedly orchestrated.

The incident coincidentally occurred as the United States was on the advent of celebrating its 245th Independence Day. The extent of the Kaseya attack is significantly damaging, initially totaling about 200 companies in the whole world.

The ransomware attackers have successfully planted malware to the clients of Kaseya to encrypt their files.

It is to note that it is not the first time that such an incident devastatingly happened. However, the scale of this attack is monumental in terms of the direct victims, which is at about 1,000.

Kaseya Ransomware Decryption Key

Meanwhile, on July 22, Kaseya successfully got hold of a universal decrypting tool that it touts as "effective at unlocking victims." Additionally, the IT company further claimed that there have been no issues or problems with the quick fix.

The Verge reported that NBC's Kevin Collier has three speculations as to where did the decryptor tool come from: either from the U.S or the Russian government or possibly from REvil. It was also theorized that Russia helped in the recent incident after U.S. President Joe Biden pressured the other country. Thus, providing the quick fix.

Kaseya only disclosed that the decrypting tool came from a "trusted third party," but the company never really specified it, remaining privy about it ever since.

Also, Kaseya has never revealed if it actually paid the rumored $70 million ransom to the Russian ransomware gang. And it is also worth noting that REVil interestingly disappeared completely upon claiming credit from the large-scale cyberattack.

Read Also: Ransomware Payments Can Now Be Deducted From Your TAX - Government's Response to Ransomware Attacks

Kaseya Requires Customer to Sign Non-Disclosure Agreement

Now that Kaseya has the decrypting tool in their hands, they are gradually giving it away to their clients--but there is a catch.

As per Gizmodo, the Florida-based IT firm only allows their customers to obtain the universal tool upon signing non-disclosure agreements.

The outlet noted that such a move would propel the cyberattack to remain a mystery.

CNN further added that non-disclosure agreements are a common part of the cybersecurity industry. However, the news company reiterated that it is a hurdle that makes the attack even more difficult to unravel or understand.

Nevertheless, Kaseya never confirmed nor denied that it was indeed requiring their clients to sign the non-disclosure agreement to obtain the necessary tool for recovery.

The information reportedly came from cybersecurity experts close to the incident.

Related Article: US Businesses Hit by Colossal Ransomware Attack as Country Prepares for Independence Day Weekend

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Teejay Boris

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
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Jared Nolen deployed to Afghanistan after the 9/11 terrorist attacks with a sense of purpose.

A generation later, as the U.S. withdraws from what's become its longest war, the retired Louisiana National Guardsman and commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 3693 in Gonzales said it's hard to know how to feel.

"No doubt it's long overdue for the soldiers to come home from Afghanistan," said Nolen, 47, who in 2002 was stationed in Kandahar as a staff sergeant with the National Guard's Company C, 769th Engineer Battalion. "I don't know if what we set out to accomplish has been accomplished though. I'm kind of torn."

In Afghanistan, he said, he saw people who wanted a better life.

"I've looked the men in the eye, I've looked the children in the eye," he said. "These children didn't ask for war, but they'll probably be fighting in one someday."

News that the 20th anniversary of the war would mark the end of U.S. involvement inspired mixed reactions and deep introspection among Louisiana's veterans and their loved ones.

President Joe Biden initially set Sept. 11 as the deadline, a reminder of why American troops went to Afghanistan in the first place. A few weeks ago, he said the end would come even sooner: Aug. 31.

Retired Lt. Col. Markus Lueder, 56, who led the Louisiana National Guard's 415th Military Intelligence Battalion in Afghanistan before retiring in 2013, worries about those who might suffer after the U.S. leaves. Like, for example, the thousands of Afghans whose work with American troops as translators, fixers and drivers now puts them and their families in danger.

"Hopefully," Lueder said, "Afghanistan can figure out a way to be at peace with itself."

Because after 20 years, he said Americans, too, need to move on.

"I think at one point or another we have to exit," Lueder said. "Some families here have endured great losses."

Looking back

President George W. Bush launched Operation Enduring Freedom in October 2001, weeks after nearly 3,000 people died in terrorist strikes on the Pentagon and World Trade Center.

American troops invaded Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, where militant jihadist group al-Qaida found safe harbor to plot the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center.

A decade of grueling counterinsurgency passed before U.S. Special Forces caught up to al-Qaida founder Osama bin Laden  who was hiding in Pakistan when he was killed in 2011.

Even then, the war marched on.

In December 2014, President Barack Obama announced plans to withdraw most U.S. troops by 2016 and limit American military presence to training Afghan police and security forces and fighting "the remnants of al-Qaida."

President Donald Trump reversed course in 2017 with an Afghanistan policy that called for open-ended military commitment to avoid leaving "a vacuum for terrorists." A few years later, the Trump administration agreed to withdraw troops if the Taliban cut ties with al-Qaida and stopped attacking U.S. soldiers.

Finally, the drawdown began. The deadline: May 1, 2021.

In the month leading up to that date, Biden said he'd need a little more time. Now, it appears the troops  all but a few hundred to guard the airport, U.S. Embassy and diplomats in Kabul  will come home by the end of August.

Once he chose to end the war, Biden said, his generals advised a swift exit. "The mission is accomplished in that we got Osama bin Laden," he told reporters earlier this month, "and that terrorism is not emanating from that part of the world."

All told, more than 800,000 U.S. troops served in Afghanistan. According to the Department of Defense, 2,218 of them died.

Though the DOD doesn't break those deaths down by state, researchers at icasualties.org say 31 of them hailed from Louisiana.

Of those, 17 died from roadside bombs.

Fallen, but not forgotten

John Michael Hennen was a junior at Vinton High School when he joined the Louisiana National Guard, which assigned him to the Lake Charles-based 3rd Battalion, 156th Infantry Regiment.

After graduating, he went on to serve the guard in Iraq. And in May 2007, he volunteered for a second tour of duty, this time with a mission to train the Afghan army and police forces.

Not a month later, on June 14, 2007, Sgt. 1st Class Hennen became the first Louisiana National Guardsman to die in Operation Enduring Freedom when his vehicle struck a roadside bomb in Panjway. Two other U.S. soldiers died in the same blast.

Hennen was 26. He left behind a young son, a tight-knit family and cherished memories.

Kathy LeJeune, one of his sisters, remembers her brother as "an all-around good guy" who wanted "to make people laugh and smile." He was also determined, and generous.

"He worked for everything he had," LeJeune said, "and would give you the shirt off his back."

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Another sister, Ashley Fancher, remembers how Hennen, before he left, asked what she wanted when he came home.

"I told him a truck," she recounted. "He said he would do one better and pay for me to finish college. He wanted to go to college also and had asked me to get his transcripts from our high school."

After she got the call about her brother's death and learned his funeral would take place on June 25, 2007, her 21st birthday, she resolved to get a truck and go back to college.

"Obviously, it was important to him for me to finish," said Fancher, who's now a school counselor with a master's degree.

If only he survived to see it.

"Its been 14 years," Fancher said, "and nothing about time has healed the void he left."

But his legacy persists.

Fancher said her brother's son, John Michael Hennen II is 18 now. And just this month, he left for Marine Corps boot camp.

Christopher O'Bryan Grant, too, came from a military family  one that's mourned his loss for eight years since a makeshift bomb made him another wartime casualty.

After graduating from Richwood High School near Monroe, he continued the Grant tradition by joining the Marines, his mother LaShonda Grant said. Her own stepfather was a Marine, she said, and two of her son's uncles joined the military  one remains in the Marines and another retired from the Army.

"It was in the family," LaShonda Grant said.

Still, she wasn't too thrilled when Christopher Grant  a gifted athlete, Junior ROTC leader and the eldest of her eight children  announced his military aspirations.

"I wasn't fond of it," she admitted, "but it was his decision, so I supported it."

The war in Afghanistan was already a decade underway when Christopher Grant joined the II Marine Expeditionary Force. On Oct. 20, 2013, while on a combat mission in southern Afghanistan's Helmand Province, Marine Lance Corporal Christopher O'Bryan Grant died from wounds inflicted by an improvised explosive device. He was 20 years old.

In the years since, his mom said, "the heaviness comes and goes."

"But I can't do anything but smile now," she said, "because that's what he'd want me to do."

And she learned to accept his fate, she added, "because it's what he wanted to do."

At least now there's an end in sight for the troops who remain.

"Being a mom," she said, "I just want them home with us."

The homefront

For Baton Rouge native Mike McNaughton, the longest war was the one waged in service of other veterans when he came back.

An Army veteran, he left retirement after 9/11 to serve as a staff sergeant with the Louisiana National Guard's 927th Engineer Co., 769th Engineer Battalion. The company's mission: to find roadside bombs and safely detonate them with armored bulldozers.

McNaughton led mine-clearing ops in northern Afghanistan until Jan. 9, 2003, when he stepped on one. The blast took his lower right leg and two fingers from his right hand.

In the 18 years since, he's walked, run and biked with a prosthetic limb. He said he harbors no regrets and feels honored to have met presidents and generals who thanked him for his sacrifice.

"I just felt everything was meant to be," McNaughton, 49, said. "I wouldn't change anything for the world."

But the war marked more than just his body. It left in him a deep-seated conviction to help soldiers transition back to civilian life.

When McNaughton returned, he found new battles to fight working with a growing population of homeless veterans through Volunteers of America Greater Baton Rouge.

As an outreach specialist for the nonprofit, he said, he's grateful to get to "help people with traumatic injuries."

+5 Land mine explosion hasn't stopped Mike McNaughton from helping Baton Rouge's homeless veterans When a land mine took Sgt. Mike McNaughton's right leg in Afghanistan, the explosion was still ringing in his ears as he warned fellow soldier

Yet he's conflicted about the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan.

"I think we should always have someone there," he said, "because I believe it was the right thing to go there."

Then again, staying would mean more casualties, more trauma, more broken people to help here at home.

"As long as we're over there," he said, "we're going to be a target."
When Nathalie Burguet first left her home in Dordogne to teach French to Louisiana schoolkids in the early-to-mid-1990s, the lessons relied largely on textbooks and rote grammar.

Three decades later, shes coming back as part of the same program through the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana  only this time with a more immersive approach.

The children pick up really fast because their hearing can catch all the sounds, said Burguet, who will teach her native tongue to pre-kindergarten students in Lafayette this school year. The little ones, their hearing is still open.

This week, the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana, known as CODOFIL, and the Louisiana Department of Education welcomed Burguet as one of 80 international teachers hired to teach French and Spanish immersion programs in public schools across the state in the coming year.

John Bel Edwards called school spending bill an 'unfunded mandate.' Will lawmakers override him? Gov. John Bel Edwards' veto of a bill touted as a way to ensure taxpayers can see how local school boards are spending their money will be one

CODOFIL  a collaboration between the Consulate General of France in New Orleans and the Ministry of Education in Spain now in its third decade  hews to Louisianas larger aim to preserve the states French-language roots while preparing students for an increasingly globalized economy.

Traditional language education is really hard to do well, CODOFIL spokesman Matt Mick said. A lot of it ends up being conjugating verbs and learning grammar rules, stuff thats not necessarily practical in a real-world setting. The research is starting to (show) that neuropsychologically, (immersion) is how humans learn languages  by being dropped into them and letting them learn that way.

Hailing from 10 nations, including France, Spain, Canada, West Africa, Mexico and Guatemala, teachers selected for the three-year program are certified educators in their home countries who went through extensive background checks.

Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser appeared at the Hilton Baton Rouge Capitol Center Wednesday afternoon to exhort the teachers at an event marking the end of their four-day orientation.

These immersion teachers coming from all over the world to teach our kids is so important, especially today, he said. When children learn a second language, it opens up the doors to the world for them. Everything is international now, so I just wanted to be here to say thank you to (these teachers) and let them know were going to continue to do everything we can to encourage young students to take foreign languages that will give them opportunities beyond the borders of America.

CODOFIL was created in 1968 by state lawmakers to help Louisiana preserve its French-speaking roots.

According to the 2000 census, the most recent available data, about 198,784 Louisianans over the age of 5  about 3.5 percent of the population  reported speaking French or French Creole as their primary language at home.

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The analogy I often use is that the French language in Louisiana is like a tree, Mick said. It has roots that are very deep that go far back into the history of Louisiana, across lots of different populations that wound up in Louisiana, and it really anchors us to a sense of place here.

BR.foreign.072221 TS 285.jpg Betsy Barnes, left, press secretary for the office of Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser, photographs a tablefull of some of the French and Spanish teac

Growing up and out of those roots, of course, are the branches.

The French immersion system is a huge part of what feeds those branches as they spread, he said, because so many of the young people here have that heritage where they have French-speakers in their familys past, but the language may have been lost to a certain generation.

For many families, he said, pride in that French-speaking heritage sparks an interest in passing it on to their children.

In 2018, Louisiana was formally accepted into the International Organization of La Francophonie  a group that represents French-speaking parts of the world. And this past February, Lt. Gov. Nungesser signed renewed accords with France and Belgium to enlist more teachers from those countries.

Many young Louisianians who attend these immersion schools are functionally bilingual by the third grade, Mick said. The language programs welcome applications from all children from kindergarten through middle school.

By the time these students come out of eighth grade, he said, they are fully equipped speakers who can go out into the world and use that language as young people.

Today, more than 5,500 students are enrolled in 26 French immersion schools across eight parishes. In all, nearly 100,000 students across the state study French, according to CODOFIL.

Its not just something thats beautiful and unique in our history  its something we can carry into the future thats practical and that presents really significant, concrete opportunities for Louisianas young people, Mick said. We like to say its not a question of revival or even renaissance, but a question of maintenance, because that stuff never fully disappeared. Its always been here.
As authorities target illicit tobacco imports, criminal groups are turning their attention to farming their own crops across regional Australia.

Illicit Tobacco Taskforce Australian Border Force Commander Greg Linsdell said that in the past 12 months there had been a significant increase in seizures involving the domestic growth of illicit tobacco as criminal groups look to maintain their supply after COVID-19 impacted imports.

Some of the seized cigarettes in Perth. Credit:ABF

My message for those communities where illicit tobacco is grown is that these are not struggling farmers who are trying to make a few dollars, these are people coming in and exploiting regional areas, taking water, damaging soil, using foreign labour and giving nothing back to the community, Commander Linsdell said.

He added that foreign workers were often offered little to no protection if anything went wrong and put their visas in jeopardy by working on illicit tobacco farms.
Senior students are calling for the right to take one or two no-questions-asked mental health days each term and want the number of hours of VCE class time they must attend cut to help ease what they warn is a mental health crisis in schools.

Peak student body the Victorian Student Representative Council has urged state Education Minister James Merlino to do more to ease the mental burden on students who have had VCE studies thrown into chaos by unpredictable moves in and out of lockdown this year.

Linh Dang from the Victorian student council says the stress effects of lockdowns have accumulated over the past 18 months. Credit:Chris Hopkins

Key among their recommendations is lowering the attendance pass rate for VCE subjects from the current 50 hours per unit.

Doing so would let students take more time out from study to safeguard their mental health, student executive advisory committee member Linh Dang said.
There was great anxiety among the relatives and friends of passengers on board the Lund Blue Anchor liner Waratah yesterday at the news that the vessel was overdue at Capetown, and that fears for her safety were entertained.

The owners of the Waratah are without any news as to the whereabouts of the missing vessel.

Throughout the day Messrs. John Sanderson and Co., the local agents, were besieged with inquiries as to whether they had received any news of the steamer. Early in the morning they despatched cablegrams to Capetown and Durbin, asking for information immediately, and in the evening they received a reply simply stating that there was no news of the vessel.

Among nautical men who know the South African coast well, no fears are entertained as to the vessels safety. They argue that nothing short of rocks or collision with a derelict would sink her; and if she was wrecked on the coast, news must have reached Durban or Capetown long before this.

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The general impression is that, having met rough weather, Captain Ilbery, always a most careful navigator, has steered for open sea, not caring to be too near the coast. At the time of the year the South African coast is almost continuously beset with heavy gales from the west and north-west, which rage in sudden angry gusts, unsteady both in direction and in force.

Battling southward in one of these to escape coastal dangers, with heavy seas striking her and propellers racing, it would be a simple matter for the Waratah to strain her engines or break one of her shafts. The result in the first case might mean a delay of days for repairs, while the vessel drifted with the ocean currents; in the second case it would mean that after the gale she would wallow northward at a miserable speed, over one propeller, to the Cape.
NEAT Implementation Will Increase Motorist Demand For "Grown In America" Ethanol Fuels - Just Give It A Chance!







The Practical and Sustainable Transportation Solution

For more than a decade The Auto Channel, the web's first interactive automotive interest publication has focused its alt-fuel editorial efforts on delivering the truth about ethanol fuel.

As an enthusiastic advocate for ethanol fuel The Auto Channel applauds more research into innovations for the production, distribution and consumer benefits of the only realistic near term green alt-fuel solution.

The Auto Channel believes that its ethanol expertise and decade's long communications efforts has made us a media model to help increase understanding, acceptance and enthusiasm of ethanol fuel by consumer/motorists.

We all agree that ethanol is the most misunderstood and lied about "best thing," and that without a truthful understanding of ethanol it will remain what it is today, just an octane booster, or garner a 10% or 15% drop-in-the-bucket share of the liquid mobility fuel universe, much less than it deserves to be given with all the problems that ethanol corrects.

Many times during the past decade we have proposed that the ethanol industry support a natural expansion of our ethanol communications reach, but unfortunately there is a secret roadblock actively preventing any support needed to expand consumer understanding and a desire to fill-up with ethanol fuel.

The Auto Channel has seemingly been pigeonholed by persons and entities within the ethanol industry sphere as an adversary instead of the only consumer facing main-stream automotive publication that is promoting and supporting the use of ethanol.

The Auto Channel owners are not farmers or ethanol distillers, we get no grants or support from the EPA or anyone now, we just choose to continue to support our "just cause." Sadly, our economic reality will shortly curtail our ability to continue helping an industry that has taken but has not given us anything, we chose to keep-on-keeping-on without any monetary support because it was and is the right thing to do for America.

We believed that our editorial support of distillers, farmers and their multi-billion dollar corn ethanol industry could not remain unsupported forever, right for everyone but not fair to us. All we have asked for were a few crumbs from their advertising or lobbying budget to help us continue The Auto Channel's pro-ethanol media and promotional outreach.

But no matter how "just-the-cause," or beneficial the product NEAT needs funding to help us counter the mainstream media silence and decimation of mistruths about ethanol. We need funding to help us overcome today's ubiquitous cacophony of media driven EV fairy-tales, lies, exaggerations and overstatements, which every day diminishes ethanol's potential share of the consumer's mind and pushes it even further away,

Then Along Comes N.E.A.T.

Should brave thinking ever take hold in the leaders of the Ethanol Industry and they recognize the benefits of providing economic support for an Ethanol Truth communication effort, The Auto Channel is ready to launch NEAT. An organization designed to supercharge ethanol marketing communication and education.

NEAT will focus on correcting the most egregious lies and miss-understanding's about ethanol fuel...observed and documented by Auto Channel journalists during the past decade.

NEAT will establish national, regional and local ethanol action teams, formed from experienced hands-on auto technicians, energy company scientists, automotive educators, motor-sport crew chiefs, auto company engineers, hot-rod and race car designers and other on the ground ethanol under-standers,

NEAT members will bring the truth about ethanol and move it to a front-burner anticipation, and create motorist enthusiasm for the near future's ubiquitous availability of clean, green renewable ethanol fuel from abundant diverse sources before it even shows up at fuel pumps across the country.

NEAT's Initial Targets:

 Auto Journalists

 Automotive Educators and Students

 Automotive Technicians

 Fuel Retailers (Convenience Stores)

 Auto Part Retailers

 Auto Dealers

 Consumer Organizations

The first tranche of a NEAT investment will be based on geographic roll-out. Current plans call for starting slowly with highly targeted entities, to be visited by the core master action team that will develop, test and fine tune NEAT curricula.

We are confident that with real support we can affect meaningful changes to ethanol perception for tens of millions of motorists. If your organization has interest in pursuing support of NEAT, and wishes to discuss our plans and qualifications please contact us.

Bob Gordon, President

bgordon@theautochannel.com

Marc Rauch Exec.VPmjrauch@theautochannel.com
2021 Toyota Sienna Owners Manual Goes Digital

New Toyota Drivers Companion feature with the Joya virtual assistant leverages Googles AI to bring interactive, real-time experiences to drivers

PLANO, Texas (July 22, 2021)  Toyota is bringing even more perks to 2021 Sienna owners thanks to the all-new Toyota Drivers Companion feature in the Toyota App. Powered by Google Cloud, the app-based feature includes a voice-activated virtual assistant  Joya. Designed to transform the owners manual experience into a digital one, Toyota Drivers Companion will be offered as a pilot program exclusively on 2021 Sienna models, providing new drivers with an interactive tool that guides them through the right vehicle information at the right time.

Our Sienna customers lead multi-faceted lives, which is why we are constantly looking for ways to simplify even the most basic tasks. We understand that even trying to determine what that button does can be a daunting question to answer during a busy week, said Joe Moses, general manager, Toyota Vehicle Marketing and Communications. Toyota Drivers Companion, offered exclusively on the all-new 2021 Sienna, will allow Sienna drivers to access information about their vehicles in a seamless way thanks to the technology powered by Google.

Hosted within the Toyota App through Toyotas Connected Services, the Toyota Drivers Companion helps with tasks such as setting up personal driving settings, locating button controls, exploring various features and safety information and many other tasks.

Toyota Drivers Companion highlights how cloud computing can support interactive, engaging consumer experiences in a natural, accessible formatvoice, said Dominik Wee, Google Manufacturing and Industrial managing director. By elevating and personalizing the car manual through the power of cloud, our goal is to help foster more thoughtful interactions between Toyota and Sienna drivers, such as responding to real-time inquiries.

Built with Google Cloud Dialogflow , the Toyota Drivers Companion lets Sienna drivers ask personalized questions and provides real-time assistance in the moments that matter. The artificial intelligence-powered, voice-activated feature also has interactive enhancements such as exploring the vehicles dashboard, providing instructions on interior and exterior car details and educating drivers about Dynamic Radar Cruise Control, Lane Departure Alert and other safety features.

Key Google-powered highlights include:

An easily accessible virtual voice within the Toyota Drivers Companion lets drivers ask personal questions about their specific Siennasuch as, Whats the height of my car? and receive immediate answers via voice, display and interactive input.

A completely personalized experience, curated for the driver automatically using the vehicles VIN number. For example, if the check engine light is on, the Toyota Drivers Companion can help identify the light meaning.

Interactive hotspots throughout the vehicles interior over the dashboard allow drivers to explore the cabin virtually. Drivers can discover button functionalities, find specific dials and learn more about car functions, such as how to slide seats or open doors, to become acclimated with their new vehicle.

Toyota called the third-generation Sienna a swagger wagon, but the 2021 model takes it to a whole new level. Aiming to redefine the segment, the fourth-generation Toyota Sienna reimagines the minivan to support a wider array of life stages and activities. With a standard hybrid powertrain across all trims and an array of new tech and amenities, the 2021 Toyota Sienna raises the bar for style, safety, comfort, versatility and fuel efficiency in its segment.

Over the years, the Sienna has augmented its excellent outward visibility and sightlines with technology to help see more of whats behind and around the vehicle. The 2021 model has the latest generation of that tech available:

Every driver could use a little magic now and then, and the Sienna has it with an available digital rearview mirror. It functions as a standard mirror most of the time. But, if rear-seat passengers or some cargo block the view to the rear, the touch of a switch makes all obstructions disappear, replaced by the cameras image from behind the vehicle. The digital mirror also integrates a HomeLink  transceiver to conveniently operate garage doors and other compatible devices.

The available birds eye view camera with perimeter scan is the next-best thing to launching a camera drone to look around the vehicle, but it is a lot easier to use. This tech provides a live, 360-degree view to help the driver see potential obstacles. This is especially critical for seeing children or small animals that might be close to the vehicle. Curb view can help prevent scuffing those beautiful 20-inch wheels.

The 2021 Sienna Platinum comes standard with a 10-inch color head-up display, controlled with steering wheel switches. The display projects vital information at eye level, such as speed, navigation directions and Toyota Safety Sense 2.0 functions.

2021 Sienna owners can exclusively access Toyota Drivers Companion by downloading the Toyota App.
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In this July 21, 2021, file photo workers repair a park near the Capitol in Washington. Senators working on the infrastructure plan hope to have a bill ready to be voted on next week. President Joe Biden has made passing the bipartisan plan a top priority, the first of his two-part $4 trillion proposal to rebuild, but a Senate test vote failed this week after Republicans said they needed more time to finish the package and review the details. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
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Russian and Turkish military armoured vehicles and armoured personnel carriers drive together in a joint patrol along the M4 highway, which links the northern Syrian provinces of Aleppo and Latakia, near Ariha in Syria's rebel-held northwestern Idlib province, on July 7, 2020. (Omar Haj Kadour/AFP via Getty Images)

2 Turkish Soldiers Killed in North Syria; 2 Others Wounded

ISTANBULTwo Turkish soldiers were killed and two others were wounded in an attack in northern Syria, Turkeys defense ministry said Sunday.

The ministry wrote on Twitter that a Turkish armored vehicle was attacked. The assault occurred Saturday in the so-called Euphrates Shield area, which consists of a region between the Turkish border and northern Aleppo, including the towns of Jarablus and al-Bab.

The ministry said it struck terror targets in retaliation. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that dozens of Turkish rockets were fired at northern Aleppo, with no reports of injuries. Turkey, however, said seven fighters were neutralized.

The statement didnt say who attacked the soldiers but called them terrorists. Turkey has been fighting the Syrian Kurdish militia Peoples Protection Units, or YPG. Turkey considers them an extension of a Kurdish group which has waged a decades-long insurgency inside Turkey.

Turkey launched its first cross-border operation into Syria in the summer of 2016 with the aim of clearing out the ISIS terrorist group after several deadly bombings in Turkey. The operation was called Euphrates Shield. Turkey conducted three other operations in northern Syria, a majority of them to fight the YPG.

Turkey has been infuriated by American support for Syrian Kurdish fighters who formed the backbone of a unit that fought ISIS.
3 Ways Executive Leaders Can Cultivate a High-Performance Team

The way you extend your capabilities is through a team committed to growth

To create a company that experiences consistent growth, youll need to duplicate your efforts and drive forward to build the business. As a performance-focused leader, you understand that you cant wear all the hats on the org chart if youre going to experience exponential growth.

When you can cultivate a high-performance team thats engaged, it creates systems that intentionally grow businesses.

Building this high-performance team allows you to be the business leader, and not always working in the business. High-performance-focused executive leaders foster a healthy corporate culture and give their team everything it needs to help build the company.

Here are three practical ways any executive leader can cultivate high performance, build an independent team and leverage growth strategies to build any company effectively.

Related: What Cultivating a High-Performance Company Culture Means to 8 Business Leaders

1. Give Your Team All the Training and Support It Needs to Understand Growth

One of the best investments any company can make is in the training and education it provides for its team. The more your team understands growth and areas of improvement, the more they can implement training that helps build a business.

Employee education is an underutilized area of growth. The good news is that you can give your employees education and training through digital means. You can create courses, use an internal podcast, and have private videos on a wide range of topics that give your employees the tools they need to succeed. This training helps build your company.

One intelligent and modern strategy is creating a library of training content and educational support that helps employees understand the vision of your company and the way to be successful at their jobs.

Investing in outside training from professionals is a great way to jumpstart this process. It could be you turning on zoom and documenting various areas relevant to your employees growth. It also means every member of the executive team is consistently training themselves.

Use todays tool and access to the Internet to create a network of training thats easily accessible to employees and that gives them all the tools and strategies they need to become successful.

2. Hire Based on Where Your Company Is Goingnot Where Its at Currently

Two people shake hands during a job interview in this stock photo. (Pixabay)

The natural inclination is to hire team members and employees based on your companys growth trajectory. A high performance-focused strategy is hiring based on where your company is going.

The goal is growth, and to grow, youll need to put the systems and team members in place that could foster change at the next levels. You need a future vision when creating a strategic plan that leads to the building of any company.

When youre hiring, think about what your needs will be going forward. Look for team members that are self-motivated and hungry to be the best at their jobs. Look for employees that have already demonstrated their ability to foster growth.

If a team member isnt working out, you cant be afraid to make the hard decisions or make decisions from a place of scarcity. There are great self-motivated and high-performance-focused employees that will ultimately help your company grow.

Related: 4 Ways Market Leaders Use Innovation to Foster Business Growth

3. Be Intentional About Leading Through Consistency

One of the best forms of leadership is modeling the behaviors you are seeking to instill. Your team will learn from what they see, not what you tell them. A high-performance focused leader leads by example.

If youre going to foster and cultivate a team committed to your companys growth, you must be intentional about your consistent growth. You have to continue to educate yourself and be committed to being a student of your craft.

Create routines and schedules that help you grow as a person and as a leader. Invest in your education and then any necessary outside professionals that help you understand how to be better at what you do. Make decisions from a place of authority, and be clear about your boundaries. Dont let outside circumstances and other peoples agendas dictate how you spend your time and the ways you invest in your growth.

Its a great time to build the kind of team that helps your company grow. The digital information age has created opportunities for growth and the ability to cultivate a team thats focused on high performance.

Use these three strategies to build a self-motivated team committed to self-education, and all of this ultimately helps the bottom line of a company. Be the example of what high-performance looks like, and your team will follow.

Related: The Daily Schedules of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Oprah Winfrey and Other Famous Business Billionaires
Against All Odds: The Courage of Washington Crossing the Delaware

Reaching Within: What traditional art offers the heart

We are often encouraged to realize our dreams over the course of our lives. Some want to start a business; some want to be mathematicians or scientists; and others want to play music, act, or create. Quite often, however, we are bombarded with difficulties when we try to reach our goals.

I recently came across a painting I often went to visit when I lived in New York: Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze. Leutzes depiction makes me consider the importance of freedom and how vital courage is when we wish to achieve something great.

An Inspired Leutze

Despite being considered an American painter, Leutze was actually born in Germany. He spent his youth in Philadelphia with his father until the age of 25, at which point he returned to Germany to enroll in the Royal Art Academy in Dusseldorf. By the time he had returned to Germany, he had already grown to appreciate the ideals of freedom that so many Americans held dear.

Back in Germany, governmental restrictions on liberty caused Leutze to compose an enormous homage to George Washington and the exemplary spirit that declared independence for the British colonies in North America, according to the book Washington Crossing the Delaware: Restoring An American Masterpiece, published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Leutze decided that he would portray, as accurately as possible, a historical rendition of Washington crossing the Delaware River. It was Christmas night when Washington attacked the Hessians (German soldiers supported by the British). Before this point, the American troops were being beaten badly. The Christmas night of 1776, however, would prove to be a turning point in the war.

Inspired by this story, Leutze employed his American friends to be models for the group of men depicted in his painting, including Col. James Monroe, who is holding the flag, and Gen. Nathanael Greene, who is depicted in the foreground as leaning over the boats edge. The others represent the loyal ranks of local fishermen and militiamen cast into service for the dangerous trek across the river, the website states.

Leutze went so far as to acquire replicas of the uniforms from the U.S. Patent Office to get as accurate a depiction as possible. He also used Jean-Antoine Houdons sculpted bust of Washington as a reference for his painting.

George Washington, circa 1786 by Jean-Antoine Houdon. Plaster. National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. (Public Domain)

Leutze painted two versions of Washington Crossing the Delaware, with the first being damaged by a fire in 1850 and then destroyed during World War II. The second is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The paintings popularitydue to its scale, theme and iconic subject matterensured that the image was emblazoned on the minds of mid-19th-century Americans, the museum states. And it continues to endure as a staple of the American art historical canon, and as one of the most recognizable images to the museum-going public.

Washington Crossing the Delaware

In the painting, Leutze depicts Washington as the focal point, with his sword sheathed but revealed. The general stands courageously at the front of the boat, which is traveling to the left, and so he faces the danger ahead of him.

Three men at the very front of the boat and two men toward the back help navigate the boat through the icy waters. Some of the other men toward the rear of the boat seem worried, which reveals the danger of the event and contrasts with the calm confidence of Washington.

Detail of Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851, by Emanuel Leutze. Oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. (Public Domain)

Behind Washington is Monroe, who holds the flag, and Greene, who leans over the boats edge. They both stare intently toward their objective.

Detail of Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851, by Emanuel Leutze. Oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. (Public Domain)

There are several boats in the distance that accompany Washingtons in the icy waters of the Delaware. The cool colorsblue, green, purpleadd to the sense of cold that Leutze depicts.

Washington crosses the Delaware at night. Leutze chose to depict the planet Venus, the morning star, at the top left of the composition, which suggests the coming dawn.

According to the Metropolitan Museum, The star plays an important role in the composition, both in setting the time of the event during the hours just before dawn and as a symbol of the dawn of hope during the darkest days of the American Revolution.

Against All Odds

Initially, the American troops were losing the Revolutionary War. The British were proving both strong and efficient. Because of these difficulties, the new nation could have redacted its Declaration of Independence and given up, but the emerging nation didnt, and herein lies the risk and reward of freedom and success.

Freedom and success are cherished because they dont come easily; they require sacrifice and the ability to navigate hardship and difficulties with the type of cool confidence and courage exemplified by Washington.

Washington faces the difficulty ahead; he doesnt run from it or worry about it. He has a goala goal of freedomand the significance of accomplishing his goal seems to fuel his courage.

Interestingly enough, in a nation founded on individual freedom, Washington cant accomplish this task alone. He needs the help of all of the others depicted. They all must secure their individual freedom by working together.

All of the soldiers must confront the dangers ahead and the icy waters that are right in front of them. Both the journey and the destination of this night are riddled with danger, difficulty, and complications. Even the darkness on the right side of the sky suggests the soldiers past challenges.

Whats important, however, is the end goal of freedom, which is represented by the morning star. Without letting the difficulties stop them from moving forward, the soldiers move toward the morning star; the soldiers move toward success and freedom.

As we move throughout our lives and try to accomplish our goals, this painting and the event it captures can serve as a reminder of the courageous state of mind often required to achieve our everyday goals and the deep appreciation we should have for freedom itself.

The traditional arts often contain spiritual representations and symbols the meanings of which can be lost to our modern minds. In our series Reaching Within: What Traditional Art Offers the Heart, we interpret visual arts in ways that may be morally insightful for us today. We do not assume to provide absolute answers to questions generations have wrestled with, but hope that our questions will inspire a reflective journey toward our becoming more authentic, compassionate, and courageous human beings.

Eric Bess is a practicing representational artist and is a doctoral candidate at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA).
(LR) Vera, Emma, Ezra, and Soren Ranz; Audrey and Andrew Matheson; and Saoirse the sheepadoodle in front of the Bow Hill farm store in Bow, Wash. (Courtesy of Bow Hill Blueberries)

Blueberry Fields Forever: How a Farming Family Is Continuing a 74-Year-Old Legacy

At Bow Hill Blueberries, a new family is continuing the legacy of the storied farm and its 74-year-old heirloom bushes

Standing in an old-growth blueberry forest, Ezra Ranz is demonstrating the two-finger tickle method for picking ripe berries from clusters dangling on 7-foot canes.

Pretty simple, he says. Hands underneath the berries, gentle fingertips brushing toward your palms, presto. Like tickling a baby.

He grins mischievously. In two shakes of a lambs tail, 9 fat berries roll into his palms and down to the professional pickers bucket, which is hanging from a neck strap.

Ranz is one of the new owners of Bow Hill Blueberries, a venerable five-acre organic farm in Washington states Skagit River Valley. With his sister Audrey Matheson and their respective spouses, Emma and Andrew, the family bought the farm last fall, when the pandemic turned several of their salaried jobs to dust. Ranz and Matheson were born and raised in a ranching valley in Northeastern California and had long mused about owning a farm. What the heck, they said upon learning Bow Hill was for sale, and decided to take the plunge.

Since then, with mentoring from the previous owners, Susan and Harley Soltes, theyve been learning organic berry production at a pace almost as rapid as that at which the robust heirloom bushes grow.

We jumped into a fast-moving stream, Ranz says of the familys quick immersion in organic farming, which, in the world of blueberries, is peaking right now.

Deep Roots

One thing not unique about Bow Hill is that its a Washington state blueberry farm: The Evergreen State leads in total production of blueberries, with an annual harvest of just under 100 million pounds. Next on the list are Georgia, Michigan, Oregon, and New Jersey, the last being the original homeland of high-bush blueberries such as those at Bow Hill. They were first adapted from wild varieties that developed their great height to compete with tall marsh grasses in the bogs that are their native habitats. Their descendants are classified by federal agriculture officials as tame blueberries, to distinguish them from the wild low-bush blueberries of Maine.

Beyond that, though, Bow Hills distinctions go on. Just 10 to 15 percent of Americas 650 million pounds in annual blueberry production is Certified Organic, and Bow Hills 70,000 pounds each year are among that modest percentage. The blueberries there are heirloom varieties planted in 1947. Yes, theyre 74-year-old bushes, a venerable distinction exceeded in U.S. agriculture only by old-vine Zinfandel grapes in California and a few heirloom tree fruit orchards across the country.

Bluecrop blueberries. (Courtesy of Bow Hill Blueberries)

Bow Hill is the oldest blueberry farm in Skagit County, dating back to that 1947 first planting by the farms founders, Ane and Severin Anderson. The Andersons bought the land in 1933, and initially planted strawberries and raised mink. Then, a traveling agricultural salesman from the East Coast convinced them to switch to blueberries. Yep, a real traveling salesman, Ranz marvels about Bow Hills backstory. Sounds like an old movie, doesnt it?

The Andersons sold the farm to the Soltes family in 2008. The Soltes converted it to an organic farm and incorporated the value-added products that are now key to the farms success. Online sales are a major share of the business, and Bow Hill thus seems thoroughly millennial. But the Bluecrop, Stanley, Jersey, and Rubel bushes all date back generations, and, as these varieties were first developed in the late 19th century, their old-growth root balls literally carry the deep roots of blueberry farming.

Look at that bushs root crown, Ranz enthuses as we walk through rows of Rubel bushes. This bush is older than meway older. I plan for them to outlive me, too. And theyre as robust as ever: This new growth will be bearing berries over my head next summer. I ask about the name of the bush. Descended from wild bushes collected in the late 19th century by some guy named Rube, I gather, he says with a laugh.

Siblings Audrey Matheson and Ezra Ranz, with Ezras son Soren, standing in old-growth Rubel blueberry bushes. (Eric Lucas)

Treading Lightly

Ranz and Matheson consider their ancient bushes as living companions, rather than food-making machines. Remember the Bibles injunction regarding dominion over the Earth? Ranz muses. We see that not as control, but responsibility and guardianship.

Part of that mission means practicing low-impact farming that embraces whats here, Matheson says. The morning I visit, theyre meeting with an expert to learn how to boost natural pollinators, such as native bumblebees, with methods like adding indigenous flowering plants that draw the bees to the farm. They encourage purslane, a volunteer edible succulent, to grow as a ground cover, and harvest and sell it as a gourmet salad green.

As organic farmers, they use no industrial pesticides or herbicidesthe fungicide spray they use is organic and made predominantly from oregano leaves. They utilize organic mulch for fertilizer and weed control and simply drop old pruned-out canes in the middle of the row to be shredded by mowers and return to the soil. Most weeds are removed by hand by Ranz and a couple of long-term Bow Hill workers.

The fresh harvest, happening now, is first undertaken by local professional pickers, mainly Mixteco people of Mexican heritage who have been living in the Skagit Valley and doing this work for decades. A few weeks later, once the best berries have been hand-picked, towering mechanical pickers crawl the rows to bring in the majority of the harvest (90 percent).

These berries are frozen and used throughout the year to make the value-added products from which Bow Hill derives most of its revenueblueberry juice, powder (made from skins leftover from the juicing process), dried and pickled berries, marinade, and confiture (jam), among other delights that the farm ships to customers across the country.

Bow Hills Organic Blueberry Juice, Organic Heirloom Pickled Blueberries, and Organic Heirloom Blueberry Powder. The juice and pickled blueberries are 2021 Good Food Awards winners. (Courtesy of Bow Hill Blueberries)

Blueberry production is a big deal in the 21st century, as the berries arent only prized for their unique flavor, but for their immense nutritional benefits as well. Theyre packed with antioxidants (highest in flavonoids of all major fruits), immune boosters (anthocyanins), vitamins (36 percent of the daily vitamin K recommendation), and more. They help lower blood pressure, prevent diabetes, limit the free radicals that cause agingyou get the idea. These little blue wellness capsules have been ushered into the superfoods club with great fanfare. The juice, especially, is a hugely popular nutritional supplement; Bow Hill has several hundred subscribers to its juice club who receive regular monthly shipments.

Last, but not least: U-pick operations are open to the public on weekends in August, so anyone can try out the two-finger tickle. I have a go and discover its as easy as Ranz says. And does a palmful of two-finger-tickle berries picked two seconds earlier taste as good as you would imagine? Totally.

The Thrill of Blueberry Hill

I found my thrill

on Blueberry Hill

The moon stood still

On Blueberry Hill

And lingered till

My dream came true

So sang Fats Domino in his 1956 hit.

I ask Ranz if he knows the song. He does, but can he sing it?

Well, I doubt it. Maybe I should learn. He grins wryly.

Set along a side road amid the Skagit Valleys potato, wheat, and cabbage fields, in a farming district that dates back at least 150 years, with its namesake low ridge shouldering the blue sky just northeast of the farm, Bow Hills serene aura is palpable. A natural slough wraps around the property, draping its boundary with gossamer silvery willows, and the moist organic mulch cradling the root balls is redolent of old woodlands.

Bow Hill summer workers are building a wattle fence out front using blueberry canes pruned from the bushes last year. In the farm kitchen, workers are marveling over the glistening new stainless steel hydraulic bladder press that turns, on average, 1,000 pounds of frozen berries into juice for bottling each week.

The new juice press illustrates the fact that, while organic farming is a business with a mission, its still a business.

Believe me, Bow Hill products are in demand, says Ben Goe, long-time produce manager at the Skagit Valley Food Co-op in Mount Vernon, Washington. Some of their value-added items are at pretty high price points, like the juicebut they sell very well.

Were getting our first shipment of fresh berries Monday [July 26], and we cant wait. This is an important part of community life here.

Fats Dominos Blueberry Hill dream come true was actually a love song. But then, organic farming is a love song as well. Farmers such as Ranz and Matheson sing it for all of us.

RECIPE: Blueberry-Basil Pie

Learn more about Bow Hill at BowHillBlueberries.com. To find an organic blueberry farm near you, consult your local farm market guide or cooperative extension service.

Eric Lucas has a picture of himself as a toddler picking wild blueberries (low bush) in the Pennsylvania woods. Hes a retired associate editor at Alaska Beyond Magazine and lives on a small farm on a remote island north of Seattle, where he grows organic hay, beans, apples, and squash.
China Runs the Show: Milton Ezrati on the Risks of Doing Business With a Communist Regime

In this special episode, we sat down with Milton Ezrati, chief economist at Vested, and Steven Shaerer, China policy expert and author of Surviving Chinese Communist Detention. They gave their insights into the dangers of doing business with a communist regime.

Ezrati said, If China gains the upper hand, it is going to be effectively a, forgive me for being blunt, almost a situation with an empire where China runs the show, and everyone else pays tribute or, and gets what they can. But everything is done out of Beijing. And now a lot of people might say the United States did that. And Im not saying the United States is always equitable in its dealings with people. But the United States primarily was pushing for free trade until recently.

Schaerer said, The biggest kind of problem right now is that were funding our own demise through these kinds of channels that go back into the Chinese coffers. And that money is then used to attack us through all the different mediums that were originally written about and discussed in books like Unrestricted Warfare that were written by the PLA [ Peoples Liberation Army] to literally destroy and replicate the United States  And also being kind of well-read on the subject, whether thats my book, but thats other books, that are kind of written about the issues that are happening with China, the ongoing relations with the United States and China. But really kind of curbing that investment and putting that money into other free countries, democratic countries that value human rights, like India, like Japan, like South Korea, like Singapore, or other countries outside of Asia, that kind of mirror the same philosophythats a huge thing that we could be doing right now. We have to all advocate for that.

Have other topics you want us to cover? Drop us a line: chinainfocus@ntdtv.org

And if youd like to buy us a coffee: https://donorbox.org/china-in-focus

Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more first-hand news from China.

For more news and videos, please visit our website and Twitter.
Chislic is typically skewered cubes of lamb or mutton, either deep-fried or grilled, served with garlic salt and saltine crackers. (Jeremy Waltner/Waltner Media + Studios)

Chislic: Meat on a Stick, South Dakota-Style

How deep-fried, skewered cubes of lamb became the state's most iconic regional dish

Chislic is the most delicious traditional dish youve never heard of  unless youre from South Dakota, in which case, its the center of your social life. In 2018, the state legislature passed a bill, subsequently signed by the governor, to make chislic the states official nosh.

Within the southeastern corner of South Dakota lies the Chislic Circle, which has the small town of Freeman as its center, and encompasses the area that falls roughly within a 30-mile radius. Freeman is commonly believed to be the point of origin of the dish in the U.S., and now holds an annual festival in its honor.

What Is Chislic?

A variation on the concept of the shish kebab, this skewered dish is quite specific in its geography, but as with all things, the faithful may be divided over how exactly it should be prepared.

Eaten as either an appetizer or a main dish, chislic is typically skewered cubes of lamb or mutton, either deep-fried or grilled. A typical stick is six to eight inches long and includes four to six cubes of meat. Some restaurants might serve the cubes loose on a plate with a toothpick stuck in each, like hors doeuvres, but thats liable to raise the hackles of a purist.

Andrea Baer, a small-business consultant, is a board member for the annual South Dakota Chislic Festival in Freeman. She was born and raised in Freeman and still lives in the house her Danish forebears lived in when they immigrated. Shes a diehard fan of chislic, and her son even raises lamb.

If I am going out to have chislic, I expect it to come on a skewer, she said. Garlic salt, saltine crackers, and thats it.

Lamb or mutton?

Its about 50-50 around here, Baer said. While lamb is fattier and more tender, mutton has more flavor, she said. Venison is also an option, as is beef. But as Baer points out, those are just beef tips. But people work with what they have or prefer; she notes the appearance of fish-lic and chicken chislic. Over in Sioux Falls, a restaurant called Urban Chislic serves several varieties of meat, with dry rubs and some sauces on the side.

If you leave South Dakota, though, even to places where sheep are raised, no ones heard of chislic. How did it happen to land right here in the Circle?

From Russia, With Lamb

In the late 1800s, chislic arrived in the United States with a particular group of immigrants: Germans from Russia.

German Mennonites and Hutterites initially fled religious persecution in the 16th century, and migrated farther and farther east over the years, toward the Russian Empire. After 1763, German-born Russian Empress Catherine the Great called on Germans to settle the Russian lands along the Black Sea, as she sought to westernize where her domain pushed back against the Ottoman Empire. Her grandson, Tsar Alexander I, encouraged the same settlements deeper into the Caucasus in the early 1800s.

Those two religious groups, along with more than 100,000 other Germans, eventually settled in agrarian communities throughout the grassland plains or steppe. Sheep were the ideal livestock in the region, and skewering the meat in smaller pieces over a fire was a quick, easy way to prepare it. Shashlik, the name given to the dish, is a word for skewer, originating in Turkic languages in Central Asia, and shares its root with shish kebab, a dish perhaps most commonly associated with the Turks (who also traditionally use sheeps meat, but also chicken, shish tavuk). Shashlik still survives in Russia today.

But the political climate changed once again, and the second Tsar Alexander pushed Russian nationalism. With the German language and culture of these communities under threat, it was time for another migration. But to where?

The U.S. Congress created the Dakota Territory in 1861, and enacted The Homestead Act of 1862 during the Civil War, making 160-acre plots of public land available to any adult citizen or intended citizen who had never taken up arms against the U.S. government. The vast prairies of the West would be quite familiar terrain to these German Russians, and following some investigating settlers in 1872, many of them made one more big move.

Johann (John) Hoellwarth, born in 1849 to a German Lutheran family in the Crimea, settled just outside of where Freeman is today (and later moved to Freeman itself, where hes buried). Surely more than a couple of the new immigrants continued to cook the foods that were familiar to them, but in local lore, Hoellwarth is generally credited for bringing chislicor shashlikto America.

Adaptations

Besides grilling the meat, a tradition of deep-frying emerged, which called for tallow, rendered lamb fat (as opposed to cooking oils or lard, rendered pig fat).

While saltine crackers werent a thing for anyone in the Caucasus, nor for the German Russian settlers, they did often use a piece of flatbread to fold around a hot skewer and pull off the meat. Crackers functioned as a readily available substitute in the U.S., and are now considered an appropriate companion to the dish.

Fried onions on top is common. Garlic salt is still the preferred seasoning in Freeman, although other areas might go for Lawrys Seasoned Salt (near and dear to my Wisconsin heart). Hot sauce is offered in Sioux Falls; eateries in Pierre might even batter the meat before frying.

For all the talk of tradition, everybody does it a little differently. Even in the traditional circles, most chefs and families have special ways of cutting and preparing the meat, making for variation, even if subtle.

Chislic Fest

Three months after chislic was declared the state nosh, a group in Freeman decided such a dish needed to be celebrated as a community. The South Dakota Chislic Festival is now celebrated annually on the last Saturday in July; this year, it falls on July 31.

From the festivals website: The tradition of chislic comes not from cities, the wealthy, or the privileged, but from the rural, hardworking farm tradition of the Germans from Russia people. We thrive on the rural, while building the region through vibrant community.

But they may have underestimated the size of that community.

We put together what we thought would be a small main-street festival, Baer said of the first festival in 2018. We expected maybe 1,500 people just from our hometown to come. When we realized the interest was bigger than that, we adjusted and found a larger space. The day of the fest, we had planned to open around 4 and close at around 10, and an enormous wave of people came from every direction. We had between 8,000 and 10,000 people show up that first night.

The next year, they moved to the Freeman Prairie Arboretum, a 40-acre park at the edge of town with much more space, and made it a 12-hour festival. The pandemic put the 2020 festival on hold, but its returning for 2021.

Activities begin with the Mutton Run, a 10K/5K run and 1-mile walk sponsored by the Salem Mennonite Home for the elderly. There is a Kids Zone, all-day bingo, raffles, a wood-pellet grill giveaway, plus live music, including local band Mogens Heroes and three others. This year there are even helicopter rides.

Freemans Heritage Hall Museum and Archives, next to the arboretum, puts on a historical presentation about chislic and the community. Vendors serve abundant chislic sticks, plus ice cream, funnel cakes, and kuchen (kugen), another German-from-Russia dish similar to a fruit custard pie with a sweet dough base. This year, Bens Brewing, a craft brewer from 30 miles south in Yankton, is bringing Slic, a blonde ale, made especially for pairing with chislic. The local fire department is also on hand serving domestic beers as a fundraiser.

Finally, theres a chislic competition. A panel of seven judges, including celebrity chef Keith Breedlove this year, will seek the best chislic among the various secret recipes in two categories: Traditional and New Age Nosh, which allows alternative meats and ingredients.

And most importantly, the festival has ordered 60,000 sticks for the chislic fans.

Kevin Revolinski is an avid traveler, craft beer enthusiast, and home cooking fan. He is the author of 15 books, including The Yogurt Man Cometh: Tales of an American Teacher in Turkey and his new collection of short stories, Stealing Away. Hes based in Madison, Wis., and his website is TheMadTraveler.com
Heavy equipment is seen at a site where sections of the Dakota Access pipeline were being buried near the town of St. Anthony in Morton County, N.D., on Oct. 5, 2016. (Tom Stromme/The Bismarck Tribune via AP)

Dakota Access Pipeline Operator Faces $93,000 in Fines, Transportation Department Says

The operators of the Dakota Access pipeline will face $93,200 in fines due to safety violations, according to a Friday Department of Transportation Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration notice.

Energy Transfer, the company that operated the Dakota Access pipeline, violated regulations in at least six locations because the valves used for drainage of stormwater werent accessible from outside, according to the notice. The company also did not correct hazards into at least one valve used for nitrogen release.

At an inspection of Johnsons Corner pump station it was found that there were changes in the relief valves nitrogen pressure, which affects the safety of operating a pipeline, the notice said.

The pipeline had outdated references in its manuals, and the company didnt update an integrity management program, the notice said. The letter does not say anything about oil leakage from the pipeline.

The letter we received from PHMSA contained the results of a standard audit that was completed in early 2019. All but one of the items identified have already been addressed (or are in process of being addressed), Energy Transfer told the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF). DAPL (Dakota Access Pipeline) will address shortly the one remaining issue that PHSMA responded to for the first time this week.

This all reflects the continued commitment to safely operating the Dakota Access Pipeline, including the crossing at Lake Oahe, Energy Transfer told the DCNF. As always, we appreciate PHMSAs focus on the safety of pipelines across the country.

Multiple celebrities including Scarlett Johansson and Chris Evans signed a letter to President Joe Biden calling for the end of the Dakota Access Pipeline in February. We urge you to remedy this historic injustice and direct the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to immediately shut down the illegal Dakota Access Pipeline while the Environmental Impact Statement process is conducted, consistent with the D.C. District Courts decision and order, the letter said.

Former President Donald Trump signed a pair of executive orders in January 2017 that advanced the building of the Dakota Access oil and Keystone XL pipelines.

Biden revoked the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline in an executive order in January on protecting public health and the environment. The pipeline was criticized for being harmful to the environment but applauded for creating union jobs.

By Steven Hall

From The Daily Caller News Foundation

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
Southern California Charity Distributes Free Wheelchairs Across the World

Don Schoendorfers perspective and faith took a 180-degree turn when a family member was diagnosed with bulimia in 1994.

An MIT-trained engineer by trade, he had encountered a problem in his life that he couldnt fix with his technical knowledge. Up until that point, everything elsehis job, finances, and relationshipswas under control, Schoendorfer said. He believed in God and said he had finally encountered a problem only God could solve.

Suddenly it made me start to look much differently at the world and my role in the world, Schoendorfer, of Santa Ana, California, told The Epoch Times. I got the message from him [God] that Im an engineer. Why cant I use my engineering talents to help him?

Schoendorfer recalled a scene from a Moroccan vacation nearly 20 years earlier. He saw a woman crawling across a busy dirt road, bloodied from dragging her legs behind her, hoping that no one would step on her. It was dehumanizing, he said.

It was humanity. You cant let a human live this way, Schoendorfer said.

The idea for Free Wheelchair Mission, which has distributed more than 1.2 million wheelchairs in 94 countries since its 2001 inception, was born. Schoendorfers organization, which he founded from his garage with 100 wheelchair prototypes, distributes between 55,000 to 65,000 wheelchairs every year. The nonprofit has perfected the process of making cheap yet durable wheelchairs that cost less than $100 to manufacture, ship, and deliver.

Schoendorfer delivered his first wheelchair in 2001 in Chennai, India, after spending two years perfecting a design process that was both useful and cheap. That first generation from 20 years ago was simple: He attached a plastic lawn chair to a frame with two bicycle wheels and casters.

His first idea was to do a clinical trial, which he had familiarity with as an engineer in biotechnology, having worked for Texas Instruments, then in transdermal diagnostics and biometrics.

To conduct the trial, he would need thousands of chairs, but he could only afford 100 at a cost of about $50 each. His initial trip to India convinced him that people would donate to a cause that would help some of the estimated 75 million people in the world in need of a wheelchair.

If I could share what I felt in that process to other people, I dont know how they could not donate money, Schoendorfer said.

His first delivery, near a card table clinic in a Chennai suburb through a missionary located there, filled a need for a family carrying a boy with a severe case of cerebral palsy. It was a memorable moment for Schoendorfer.

They just basically put their son in a wheelchair and away they went, he said. And that changed the attitude quite a bit of my peers in India.

It was the second delivery during his India trip that really brought the mission part of the organization to life. He traveled to a small rice patty slum with his companions and found a family with a disabled son, which forced them to take turns working, allowing them barely livable wages as a result. Now they could wheel him out while they worked and double their income, improving their quality of life.

When Schoendorfer returned from that trip, he discovered the company he was working for had declared bankruptcy. The timing allowed him to put his full effort into building Free Wheelchair Mission. Today, the nonprofit raises $10 million to $11 million per year through individual donors and events, such as the virtual Miracle of Mobility.

Schoendorfer said that although his organization isnt evangelistic, its charity helps open the door to Christianity.

Were like a Bible printer company: We dont go out and preach the gospel; we provide a tool for other people [partners] where they can give that message, Schoendorfer said.

Our ultimate goal is to provide a wheelchair for everybody in need in the world. Weve got a lot of work left in our hands.
William J Amelio (L), president and CEO of Lenovo Group, Yang Yuanqing, chairman of Lenovo Group (C), and Mary Ma, senior VP and chief financial officer at a press conference in Hong Kong, on May 23, 2007. (Mike Clarke/AFP via Getty Images)

Exposing the Red Elites Behind Chinese Uber Didi (Part 3)

Didi's ties with Boyu Capital and Jiang Zemin's family

Editors note: This article is part three of a three-part series. Part 1 looks at Beijings crackdown on Didi and introduces the companys ties to the Chinese military and state-owned businesses. Part 2 looks further into Didis ties with Chinas business elites, the Chinese military, and Lenovo Group.

Chinese investment firm Boyu Capital and its late co-founder Ma Xuezheng have contributed to Didis success. Under Mas direction, Boyu Capitalwhich has ties to Lenovo Group and the family of former Chinese leader Jiang Zeminbecame one of Didis major investors.

Chinas largest ride-hailing platform Didi Global Inc. listed on the U.S. stock exchange at the end of June. After five days, the Chinese authorities ordered a cybersecurity review and the removal of all Didi apps. On July 5, Chinese media Multi-Dimensional News cited a source close to the financial regulator who claims that top CCP officials are punishing Didi for ignoring the request to not list the company in the United States. The source said Didis punishment will be much worse than Alibabas.

On Sept. 2, 2019, Lenovo Group announced that Ma Xuezheng (also known as Mary Ma), passed away on Aug. 31, 2019, at the age of 66. Ma was an independent non-executive director on the board of the company and also served as the deputy to Lenovos founder, Liu Chuanzhi, for 17 years. Liu once joked, I work for Ma Xuezheng. This statement alluded to Mas influential role in the company.

Lenovo Capital and Ma Xuezheng

Ma was once the youngest director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). CAS founded Lenovo in 1984 and it is the largest shareholder of Lenovo.

In 1990, Ma was promoted to assistant general manager of Lenovo in Hong Kong and then to vice president of Lenovo Group in 1992. In 1997, she became an executive director and senior vice president of Lenovo Group; and in 2000, she served as the chief financial officer of the company, according to Chinese news portal Sina.

Ma oversaw major events, including Lenovos IPO in Hong Kong in 1994; the merger of Lenovo Hong Kong and Lenovo Beijing in 1997; and the spin-off of Lenovo Group and Digital China from Legend Holdings in 2001. Ma also played an important role in Lenovos acquisition of IBMs personal computer business (PC) in 2005.

Ma was involved in Lenovos early investments in Sohu, Kingsoft, and other companies, according to a 2010 report by 21st Century Business Herald.

Boyu Capital and Ma Xuezheng

In September 2007, Ma stepped down as Lenovos chief financial officer and joined Texas Pacific Group (TPG), a top U.S. private equity firm, as managing director. She was responsible for the companys branch in China.

In 2011, Ma resigned from her executive position at TPG to join Boyu Capital, one of the largest private equity firms in China and established by Jiang Zhicheng (Alvin Jiang), Jiang Zemins grandson. Boyu Capital is known for staying out of the spotlight. But when it made its first public debut in 2011, the media focused on Ma instead of Jiang Zhicheng, according to a 2014 Reuters report.

After Ma joined Boyu Capital, its co-founders continued to grow, including Louis Cheung, a former executive director of Ping An Insurance Group of China, and Sean Tong, a veteran of Providence Equity Partners and General Atlantic, a U.S. private equity firm, the report said.

Under Mas direction, Boyu Capital invested in Didi and several companies, including Alibaba; Tongcheng Travel; WeBank, the first internet bank established by Tencent; iQiyi; NetEase Music; WuXi AppTec, a pharmaceutical company; CStone Pharmaceuticals; COFCO Meat, a subsidiary of Chinas largest food producer COFCO Group; and Ikang Guobin, a medical center.

Boyu Capital and Jiang Zhicheng

Jiang Zhicheng is the son of Jiang Minheng, the eldest son of Jiang Zemin. Like his father, Jiang is one of the red princelings of the CCP. Red princelings refer to the children of former and current senior Communist Party officials.

According to a special report published by Reuters in April 2014, Princelings have played central roles in businesses involved in finance, energy, domestic security, telecommunications, and the media. Private equity, featuring deals that are often by their nature opaque, has proven to be a natural haven for them.

After graduating from Harvard University with a B.A. in Economics in 2009 and working as an analyst in the private equity division of Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong, Jiang resigned nine months later and founded Boyu Capital.

On Sept. 21, 2010, Jiang filed the incorporation papers in Hong Kong, listing himself as the sole director of Boyu Capital.

Boyus earliest investment was to help Alibaba founder Jack Ma buy back his stake in Alibaba from Yahoo in 2012. At that time, Boyu Capital joined a consortium led by China Investment Corporation (CIC) to raise $7.1 billion, which was needed to buy back Yahoos 40 percent stake in Alibaba Group.

As a result, CIC received a 5.6 percent stake in Alibaba. Alibaba was valued at about $38 billion in 2012. By April 2014, analysts estimated Alibabas value to be at least $140 billion. This means that Boyu Capital, as part of the CIC consortium, has increased the value of its investment by more than 3.5 times over an 18-month period.

Alibaba was listed on the New York Stock Exchange on Sept. 19, 2014. Reuters revealed on Sept. 8, 2014 that Boyu Capital sold 1.28 million shares before Alibabas IPO, cashing in $84.31 million.

Boyu Capital is also one of the investors behind Alibabas Ant Group. Ant Group was scheduled to be listed simultaneously in Shanghai (A-share) and Hong Kong (H-share) on Nov. 5, 2020. However, on the eve of the IPO, Ant Groups controller Jack Ma, chairman Jing Xiandong, and president Hu Xiaoming were asked to meet with the four major regulators of the CCP on Nov. 2, 2020, and the listing of Ant Group was subsequently suspended on the grounds of significant matters such as changes in the regulatory environment, according to Xinhua. It is alleged that Xi Jinping personally called off the public listing of Ant Group.

Over the past few years, Boyu Capital has participated in financing more than a dozen companies, covering high-tech, biopharmaceutical, banking, and retail sectors, and is almost pervasive in Chinas capital markets.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Feb. 22 that a source disclosed that two co-founders of Chinas Boyu Capital have relocated to Singapore with a share of the companys operations from its Hong Kong headquarters.

According to the source, the purpose of the relocation is to avoid the potential scrutiny or adverse action by authorities in Beijing and Boyus Singapore office provides a potential refuge from political intrigue within the party.

Boyus backers include Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing and Singaporean state investor Temasek Holdings.
Dr. Anthony Fauci pushes back on statements by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) during a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, on July 20, 2021. (J. Scott Applewhite/Pool/AP Photo)

Fauci: CDC Looking at Changing Mask Guidelines for Vaccinated People

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci said federal health officials are considering recommending that fully vaccinated people wear masks in public again.

This is under active consideration, Fauci told CNN in response to a question about whether masks should be used again despite individuals COVID-19 vaccination status. Fauci, who serves as President Joe Bidens chief medical adviser, added, If we dont vaccinate people, the model is going to predict that were going to be in trouble as we continue to get more and more cases.

Some areas, including Los Angeles County and Chicago, recently said that everyone, regardless of vaccination status, should wear masks in public settings. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), additionally, recommended that all children who are not vaccinated wear masks when they return to class in the fall.

Thats a local decision thats not incompatible with the CDCs overall recommendations that give a lot of discretion to the locals, Fauci said Sunday regarding the local policies. And were seeing that in L.A. Were seeing it in Chicago. Were seeing that in New Orleans, because the officials there, many of them are saying, Even if youre vaccinated, its prudent to wear a mask indoors.'

During the Sunday interview, Fauci didnt provide a specific reason why vaccinated people should wear masks.

Some officials, including New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, said that the reimposition of mask-wearing would cause people to develop a lack of confidence in COVID-19 vaccines and would question why both should be required.

Another, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, said Florida would not impose any mask mandates at public schools during the pandemic regardless of the CDCs guidance.

Theres been talk about potentially people advocating at the federal level, imposing compulsory masks on kids, DeSantis said during a bill signing event in Fort Pierce on July 22. Were not doing that in Florida, OK? We need our kids to breathe.

A Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) study published in April found that children are at low risk of developing COVID-19 and also dont play a significant role in the spread of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, also known as the coronavirus.

Throughout the pandemic, Fauci appeared hundreds of times in the media to discuss the COVID-19 pandemic. Republicans have said, citing emails of Faucis leaked earlier this year, that hes given conflicting advice and made inaccurate predictions about the trajectory of the virus, including calling masks ineffective in one email in early 2020.

Fauci has also received blowback from GOP lawmakers over his agencys decision to fund a third-party research organization that worked with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. In response, Fauci categorically denied that his agency funded risky gain-of-function research at the lab.
FBI Assistant Director Engaged in Inappropriate Romantic Relationship: DOJ Watchdog

A senior FBI official violated the agencys policy by not reporting a romantic relationship with a subordinate, the Department of Justices (DOJ) inspector general stated in a report last week.

A summary of the report (pdf) from Inspector General Michael Horowitz, which didnt identify the official, states that the official allowed the romantic relationship to negatively affect an appropriate and professional superior-subordinate relationship and to disrupt the workplace by interfering with the ability of other FBI employees to complete their work.

In violation of the FBIs policies, the official failed to report the relationship in a timely manner, the report also states.

The official, whom the report identified as an assistant director of an FBI sub-agency, participated in a hiring or organizational decision involving the subordinate, which violates the bureaus policy.

The inspector generals office said it has completed its investigation into the official. The report was sent to the Justice Departments Office of Professional Responsibility to determine what additional steps may be taken regarding the matter.

It isnt known if the FBI official will face any punishment following the publication of the report. The summary doesnt suggest that the subordinate was harassed or mistreated.

The Washington Post, which cited current and former law enforcement officials, identified the official as Jill Tyson, the assistant director of the bureaus Office of Congressional Affairs since 2019.

The latest report is another black mark against the FBI. Horowitz found in July that the agencys Indianapolis office mishandled sexual abuse allegations against former Team USA gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar and said that agents lied to investigators.

Horowitzs office has also revealed that a senior FBI official improperly took gifts from journalists on several occasions and had unauthorized contact with them. According to reports, the inspector generals office said that the official had received items of value from members of the media and had numerous unauthorized contacts with the media between 2014 and 2016.

When later contacted by the [inspector generals office] for a voluntary interview, the Senior FBI Official declined to be interviewed, the office wrote.

It also noted that it has the authority to compel testimony from current Department employees upon informing them that their statements will not be used to incriminate them in a criminal proceeding. But the office doesnt have the authority to compel or subpoena testimony from former Department employees, including those who retire or resign during the course of the investigation, according to the inspector generals office.

Former President Donald Trump and his allies have long accused the FBI of colluding with mainstream media outlets by leaking sensitive information to them on a variety of issues, including unsubstantiated claims that his 2016 presidential campaign coordinated with Russia to win the election. Horowitz found in December 2019 that former Trump campaign aide Carter Page was the subject of improper surveillance beginning in 2016 and identified 17 significant errors and omissions related to the case.

The DOJ didnt respond to a request for comment by press time.
Federal Court Rules Against California Gov. Newsoms Order Barring Private School In-Person Classes

Gov. Gavin Newsom acted in an unconstitutional manner when he implemented COVID-19-related mandates barring private school children from in-person classes, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has ruled.

A July 2020 lawsuit filed by the Center for American Liberty and 20 plaintiffs challenged the Democrat governors order that barred in-person teaching in 32 of Californias counties. Several of those plaintiffs said Newsom had overstepped his authority and acted illegally by denying parents control over their childrens education.

Californias forced closure of their private schools implicates a right that has long been considered fundamental under the applicable caselawthe right of parents to control their childrens education and to choose their childrens educational forum, Judge Daniel Collins ruled on July 23, regarding the case Branch v. Newsom.

Because Californias ban on in-person schooling abridges a fundamental liberty of these five Plaintiffs that is protected by the Due Process Clause, that prohibition can be upheld only if it withstands strict scrutiny, he said.

Californias lockdown mandate doesnt survive such scrutiny, the judge wrote.

But the court essentially upheld the states decision to keep public schools closed to in-person instruction amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

California had a legitimate and compelling interest in preventing COVID-19 by requiring the closure of schools in counties that had a relatively high number of cases of the virus. The California-based circuit court also noted that the state has the right to implement different closure rules on child care centers, public schools, and similar facilities.

Newsoms office has long defended its private school lockdown policies and pushed back against the appeals courts ruling.

Throughout this once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, the state was guided by science and dataprioritizing the health and safety of students, staff, and their families while supporting schools to meet the needs of students and return to in-person learning quickly, Newsoms office said in a statement to the Los Angeles Times on July 23. All students are returning to full, in-person instruction next year, and the state is focused on ensuring that return is successful.

Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the Center for American Liberty, said the 9th Circuit Court decision is a victory for parents rights in the state. She said the court affirmed that only parents and not Gavin Newsom or faceless bureaucrats  have the right to decide how best to educate their children.

However, Dhillon said she was dismayed by the courts ruling to keep the public school COVID-19 lockdown mandates, suggesting that her group will continue to appeal against the public school decision.

While we are thrilled for our clients whose rights are vindicated by todays decision, we are disappointed the 9th Circuit did not rule that all students, including those in public school, have a basic right to an education. We will continue to advocate for the educational rights of all students, she said in a statement.
Four members of the 2021 Bay to Brooklyn team in front of the trailer on July 20, 2021. (Cynthia Cai/The Epoch Times)

Firefighters Plan to Bike Across Country to Honor 9/11 First Responders

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. To honor the first responders who lost their lives that day, a group of firefighters is preparing for a bike ride that will take them from the San Francisco Bay Area to the Brooklyn Bridge and Ground Zero in New York.

The 3,800-mile bike ride began as an idea shared between Darrell Sales, lead organizer for Bay to Brooklyn, and his son. A group of motorcyclists planned to ride to New York in 2011 for the 10th anniversary of 9/11. However, Saless son didnt own a motorcycle.

[My son] said, Well, Ill just ride my bicycle. And I said, Thats kind of a crazy idea, but So it spawned initial planning to see if this was actually possible. It was going to be a father-son ride, Sales told NTD News.

Sales said that his son was unable to participate at the start of the 2011 ride, so Sales rode with a coworker.

The significance was to really remember what happened at that time, 10 years ago, and now were looking back at 20 years ago and remembering not just the firefighters and their families that suffered the tragedy, but also the military and their families who now continue to strive, to fight for whats right and whats good, Sales said.

This year, the team has expanded to 10 cyclists, all of whom are either current or retired firefighters or military veterans. The cyclists said they each have their own reasons for riding, but the underlying drive is to honor those who lost their lives serving the country.

Gary Wiley, U.S. Navy veteran, told NTD News: Since that time [9/11] and the War on Terror, weve lost over 7,000 men and women who are trying to prevent this from happening again. I dont want them to be forgotten. So Im riding for their memory, as well as the memory of all those that perished on that day.

Wiley said he looks forward to the fellowship and friendship of the ride and to meeting with local communities. He wants to honor those who serve the country and let them know that their service is remembered.

For the cyclists, the ride is a time for remembrance, reflection, healing, and building the community.

David Lombardo, Air Force veteran, firefighter, and EMT with the Santa Clara Fire Department, rode in 2011 and will be riding again this year. Looking back on the 2011 ride, he described the moment when the team arrived at the Brooklyn Bridge as somber, reflective, tearful, joyful.

He told NTD News that they met up with other bikers and motorcyclists who did similar rides across the country to honor the individuals lost in 9/11.

Lombardo shared that the most memorable part of the previous ride was hearing the personal stories of the local townspeople he met during the ride.

Its about building the community from coast to coast. Those that sacrificed on 9/11 and those that have sacrificed ever since have been serving our community and that heart for community. So I think the greatest way that we can honor them and memorialize them is building relationship[s] from coast to coast and building that community in their memory, Lombardo said.

A Bay to Brooklyn graphic with the names of the 343 firefighters lost in 9/11, on July 20, 2021. (Ted Lin/The Epoch Times)

The team will bike approximately 100 miles per day, stopping in towns and cities along the way to meet with local communities. A trailer with the names of all the firefighters who lost their lives in 9/11 will accompany the riders.

Sales said that during the 2011 ride, one of its most memorable moments happened in Jackson, Wyoming.

One of the workers for the city of Jackson Hole had walked up to the trailer, and he started looking for names. He found one of his friends on the trailer, he said. So what we do now is we carry all those names on this trailer, and we have T-shirts with names on the back of the T-shirt, so we can carry them with us every day that we ride.

According to a memorial report by the New York State Intelligence Center (pdf), 71 law enforcement officers, 343 members of the New York City Fire Department, and more than 2,800 civilians were killed at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

On Aug. 1, the firefighters will set out from the Santa Clara fire station in California. They plan to arrive in New York on Sept. 9, in time to attend the memorial events.
How a Tiny Communist Party Took Over the Politics of a Whole American State

Trevor Loudon outlines the influence that the pro-Beijing Communist Party USA has in Connecticut. Almost every prominent politician in the state has a working relationship with the Communist Party USAyet Connecticut voters have virtually no knowledge of these relationships.

Counterpunch is an Epoch Times show available on Facebook, Gab, and YouTube.

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Jaco Booyens: Trafficking Epidemic Fueled by Lockdowns, Police Cuts, and a Porous Border

Sex trafficking has spiked during the pandemic, as kids and teens in lockdown spend much of their waking hours on social media where traffickers and pimps can easily reach them, says anti-trafficking activist Jaco Booyens.

Near the U.S.-Mexico border, traffickers are exploiting U.S. border policies and children are being sold like cattle, Booyens says.

Police funding cuts have compounded the crisis. Departments targeting trafficking tend to be small and highly specializedand theyve been the first to go in the defund the police movement, Booyens says.

In this episode, Booyens breaks down the causes of the child sex trafficking crisis in America and the links he sees between sex trafficking, the pornography industry, and the spread of comprehensive sex ed curricula across the United States.

Jan Jekielek: Jaco Booyens, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Jaco Booyens: Its an honor to be back. Thank you. You do such a phenomenal job. Thank you, Jan.

Mr. Jekeliek: Well, thank you. We interviewed, last time, about a year ago, and you told me some pretty difficult, difficult things about the realities of your workbasically, fighting sex trafficking. Tell me a little bit, today, about the scope of this problem here in America.

Mr. Booyens: The scope of human trafficking, look, we made progress, and this is not a political standpoint. We made progress.  We are turning the clock back at the moment.

When you start shutting organizations down, when you target certain religious organizations in the fight to get federal funding and say, Unless you denounce your religious affiliation in rehab, like, for instance, if an organization said, Look, our trauma informed therapy is based on a Judeo-Christian principle, theyre struggling to get federal funding. Theyre profiled. Youre stifling those who fight against it, and youre emboldening those who fight for it.

We have seen an epic increase in the last 10 months. Id say the largest group of collateral damage in COVID has been the youngster being trafficked. Theyre at home, with more time online. Theres a direct connection between the buyer of sex and the victim, eliminating the need for a pimpthe pimp has become Facebook.

Its the social media platform where now the buyer can speak directly to the child, directly engage in pornographic imagesarranging meetings, etc., preconditioning the child, desensitizing him.

We saw the same spike in teen suicide and domestic violence during COVID. The lockdown was really, really bad for trafficking. It was atrocious because online is predominantly where the first encounter happens today. Its not in a red light district, right, Jan? Its online. And so the numbers are epic.

Look, its already a $32 billion industry in the U.S., 79,000 kids per day in the state of Texas alone. Thats American born children. Were not talking about, now, an issue on the border. Were not even talking about, Well, what happens with an influx of people?

Its my opinion, Jan, that it is the number one problem in our society today. Its the fact that children truly are not safe. Theyre not, because its now infiltrating the school system.

The most sickening part of this fight is, as there are many of us fighting against it, theres an equal amount of fighting for the sexual exploitation of children. Theres over 13 states at the moment that are moving towards lowering the age of consent to 14.

When statutory rape is 17, when the law in that state says, 17 and under is a sex traffic victim, we dont have to prove force, fraud, coercion; he or she is a victim. No, the states want to lower the age of consent to get around the anti-trafficking laws.

In these proactive movements, NAMBLA [North American Man/Boy Love Association]a man-boy love organization, very, very prolific in fighting for the exploitation of childrenis saying, Pedophiles should have rights. Love is love. Whats the problem if a man wants to have sex with a child? Well, lets look at it from a childs perspective.

Now, were getting into comprehensive sex ed, a curriculum that was funded and founded by the World Health Organization, UNESCO United Nations, SIECUS [Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States], and Planned Parenthood.

These guys wrote a sexual manifesto for the worlds youth thats now resulted in the curriculum for kids in kindergarten, Jan, teaching masturbation in California, in kindergarten, to middle schoolers, talking about things that husbands and wives dont talk about, sexual slang in a classroom.

Its feeding the beast, and were trying to eliminate the beast, right? Its a battle, its a war like never before.

Mr. Jekielek: Youve covered so many things here. Okay, I want to kind of dig into a number of these, actually.

Mr. Booyens: Please, please.

Mr. Jekielek: But lets just start with the scope. I think you said 79,000 children per day, in Texas alone, where we are now.

Mr. Booyens: Texas, alone.

Mr. Jekielek: So, what does that mean, exactly? Explain that number to me, and then tell me a little bit about nationally.

Mr. Booyens: That number means, in any given day, theres 79,000 children in the state of Texas that are in the system of being sexually exploited. Does it mean all 79,000 that day had to, against their will, give sex for safety, security, whatever? No, nobody would know, but theres 79,000. This is a Ken Paxton, attorney general of Texas, number. Our number in the industry is higher than that, but were going to go with the number that the AGs office publishes.

So, think about that for a second. Youve got 79,000. I live by the notion that one is too many. Thats the state of Texas. We have over half a million kids in America thats in that situation today. And heres a stat for you: only 1 percent of the crime is reported, and we have those numbers. When you see an Amber Alert, for instance, thats 1 percent, right, because victims dont self identify as victims, Jan.

Were not just a talking head, talking politics. Were on the ground. Were working with the families. I was in a field a number of weeks ago looking for a body. We are there. We know what families go through. We understand the horrific reality of this crime. Its real to people.

But victims dont identify as victims. They learn that they were victimized because its a programming, its an indoctrination, its a lifestyle. Its an acceptance of, This is my value. This is my contribution to this family, whether its an artificial family or a real family, right? So, its a very, very difficult fight to fight. But, yes, 79,000 per day in Texas.

Mr. Jekielek: Something that recently happened, actually, that maybe a lot of the country is aware of, there was this Operation Not Forgotten. I think almost 20 children were rescued. You were somehow involved in this, right

Mr. Booyens: Yes, and so many nonprofits are involved, always, working with law enforcement. What a lot of people dont know is law enforcement cannot do this by themselves. They just physically dont have the resources on what we call on the street or on the track. Yes, it involved a lot of apprehensions, a lot of rescues. A lot of those are active cases going on at the moment.

But there were a number of those operations, and they really, Jan, stemmed from the White House that signed an executive order to say, Look, interdepartmental agencies have to communicate.

It released the U.S. Marshal service, which was very involved there, ICE, and the FBI to collaborate with local law enforcement police departments because the strange occurrence is that they dont communicate. They dont share cases yet. The traffic victims are transient. Theyre being moved throughout the country.

So if you build a case in Dallas, Texas, and all of a sudden, the child, like our most recent rescuethe child is now in Las Vegasthose police departments didnt used to communicate with one another. So you start over.

The traffickers knew this, and thats why Not Forgotten and some of the other huge sting operations that happened in recent history were very successful because departments could communicate, and funding was appropriated for it.

Mr. Jekielek: Whats the status of that communication, as we speak?

Mr. Booyens: At the moment, its broken down and its all about funding. Its going to be a directive, because, look, its federal, right? So, youve got federal agencies, a U.S. Marshal service, and any FBI domestically. Then, youve got local sheriffs departments, task forces.

Unfortunately, weve seen a lot of anti-trafficking task forcesthese are law enforcement individuals with a specific training towards how to profile and rescue a childa lot of task forces have been shutting down. We just lost our vice unit in Dallas, Texasshut down completely.

Thats part of the defund the police movement, and sadly, in the defund the police movement, the first community that suffered, honestly, was those abused sexually, because those are very specific departments, normally very small, five, six members in a unit, and its special funding.

When that funding is cut, theyre back into a different department. Now, all of a sudden, you have a huge burden that shifts back on the non-government organizations without the necessary law enforcement resources. Its a chain, and if you break a link in the chain, it is broken.

We cant, as an NGO, go arrest people. We cant go through doors and rescue a child without a warrant. You have to work with law enforcement. Does law enforcement have the manpower in that community? Do they have the training in that community on how to rescue a child? Do they have the victim services in the community? If theres a rescue, now what? Where does the child go? Thats the largest problem, to be honest with you. Its big.

Mr. Jekielek: This is really troubling to hear. I imagine the people, these small units, actually have some very, very specific skills and experience.

Mr. Booyens: Yes.

Mr. Jekielek: When this defunding happens, what happens to these people?

Mr. Booyens: They go back into the normal law enforcement department. The units get disbanded. The anti-trafficking task force, the unit, the special response team specifically towards traffickingwhich means they wake up in the morning, and all they do is protect children, find children, place children, work with NGOsnow, that officer goes back and becomes a normal officer, with a great case load that could range from drug to traffic stops, to domestic violence, disturbance, all the other things, and physically dont have the manpower and the time to build these cases.

Once we recognize a child is missing, or even more difficult, more important when its a familial trafficking situationwhich is the fastest rising trend, family members trafficking their own childrennow, the child is not missing. The childs not lost, Jan. The child lives at home, but is trafficked. The childs on the soccer team, but is being trafficked. Thats deep investigation; it needs manpower and finance.

Thats why Im saying non-government organizations, such as our own and many others, do the brunt of that work and then kind of hand the baton in partnership to a law enforcement organization.

But to ask law enforcement today, in our country, to do that job? Theyre understaffed. Theyre underfunded. The units just dont exist.

Mr. Jekielek: I want to go back to the police for a second, but something you just said made me a little ill, which is this idea that theres this traffic happening within families. So youre aware and working on cases like this?

Mr. Booyens: Most of our cases today are familial trafficking. Now, its not always a father, but it is a familiar membera coach, a teacher. It could be someone in the clergy, a pastor, a priest, but its someone very close to the family, someone the family trusts.

Psychologically, in the world of pedophilia, theres graduating forms of pedophilia. Theres a stage a pedophile reaches where they want to perpetrate and harm a child in public. They want to harm a child in the open. Its kind of a bravado of saying, I can traffic children. I can harm them in front of your face, and you dont know it.

Theyd be friend, family members, or a father. Most of them are fathers, to be honest with you. And its for financial gain, its because they get hooked on porn, it graduates radically into buying sex from an adult, and its a drug. Then, they go younger and younger. Unfortunately, the fastest rising trend of trafficking in our country, Jan, is familial, a hundred percent.

Mr. Jekielek: I dont even know how to respond to this, because

Mr. Booyens: Its the most difficult to fight. You can imagine. When its a kid thats running away, and also, most of the runaways, most of the foster children being trafficked dont have family members that are looking for them. Theyre already destitute.

Now, the kid that is kidnapped, and 2 percent of the situation is kidnappingthis is not the movie Taken, this is real life2 percent are kidnappings. But lets say theres a child thats kidnapped or taken by a trafficker, right? Still, there may be somebody looking for that child. When its a child thats trafficked by a family member, its concealed, its hidden.

When an authority figure sexually abuses a child, its very different than when its a stranger because when its an authority figure, its a different kind of imprinting. Theres a whole different kind of trauma that sets into that child because now its like, The person I would run to to defend me is the one harming me. I got nowhere to go.

Mr. Jekielek: Tell me a little bit about the reality around trafficking at the border, then.

Mr. Booyens: For me, the border issue is not a political issue. I just kind of talk about children. We have to understand the last 50 miles on the Mexican side of the border is a hundred percent controlled by the cartels.

Theres massive pressure on families to release childrenthe promise of a child having a future in Americathat most of the children, by the time they get to the border, theyve already been sexually exploited. Theres already been an indoctrination, not even our side of the border.

Not to mention that its almost impossible to rescue a child or fight for a child thats being trafficked in America who doesnt have a social security number. Theres not a birth certificate. Its a ghost. Were looking for ghosts, and were finding them in Maine, in Chicagokids who dont have family members.

But lets go one step further. We talk about 80 percent of the people, the human beings, that are coming across the border at the moment. Arguably, 180,000, in the most recent months are young men under the age of 20adolescents.

We know that MS-13 [gang] recruits at 12. We know that, at the age of 15, the boys are trafficking girls in Mexico, in Mexico City, the kidnapping capital of the world.

Were now by default, no question, also allowing MS-13 members at age 15, 16, 17, were finding, enter the country under the guise of, Well, wheres your humanity? Well, wait a second. We got to pause. Weve got to make sure at the border that theyre not affiliated with a gang that traffics children, that theyre not actually the groomer and the trafficker, themselves. Well yall, come on, thats ridiculous. Theyre 17. The gang recruits at 12, the gang trains them at 13. They start trafficking children at 15.

The real conversation, Jan, is not being had in our culture today about, Hey, what is the danger to American youth with an open border? Lets have that conversation. Lets not talk about policy and trade, the taxation on the health care system, and all the other things.

I just want to have the conversation about the child that comes over thats now in your childs school. Whats that mindset thats migrated in? Or the child thats 17 that was the trafficker in Mexico, that was complicit in Mexico.

Does that mean its every child? Of course not, but it means we have to prove and verify. We have to be able to see because we are now apprehending youth in the country who are part of trafficking rings, who are the traffickers, the abusers, who are here undocumented. Its just a fact.

Is that all of them? No, but its enough to say, Whoa, caution, red flag. We got to stem the tide here, right? Thats a hundred percent the occurrence on the border at the moment.

Thats why Im for a controlled borderto protect that child, not even the American child, but the child thats being lied to, lured to the border, whos from Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico City, wherever, right? That child is in danger.

So, Im saying this publicly, and this is me. Shame on the Mexican president for not having a policy to protect his own nations children and on his side of the border because theyre being exploited and sold like cattle, sold like slaves, sold like objects by some parents who have the hope that they have the American dream.

But whats the reality? That child shows up in America, right? When you cross the Texas border, youre in the desert. Youre a very long way from a civilization that can actually help that child. When we have members of our administration make a promise to the world that, When a child crosses the border, we guarantee them a safe family, thats a lie.

How can I prove that? Our own foster children arent safe in this country. Our own foster children are being sexually exploited. Sixty percent of American foster children have had a sexual encounter against their will.

Were having a hard time protecting our own children, but were going to promise the world that, Bring your children and we can keep them safe. Its a lie. We cant. We dont have the resources.

Mr. Jekielek: Just what kind of numbers are we talking about, that youre aware of, of these children that have basically been turned into traffickers?

Mr. Booyens: Our number is 30 percent of children that cross the border, 30 percent will be sexually exploited. Am I saying all 30 percent will be in a perpetual cycle of sex trafficking? Its impossible to know that number. Nobody knows that number.

But about 30 percent is our number that we work on, as NGOs: 30 percent of their children that cross the border, at some point very soon after they cross, if not prior to crossing, will be sexually exploited.

And a sexually exploited child, one time, is so vulnerable, Jan, to a predator. So who knows that real number? I mean, were drinking from a fire hose ourselves in real time. Weve never seen 180,000 people approach the border in a 90 day cycle, with 80 percent of men under the age of 21. We dont even know.

We wont know for the next five years what that does to a society, a culture. Were learning day by day. But I can tell you what were seeing on the ground. Its not good. Its terrible. And its under false pretense and false promise.

Mr. Jekielek: One thing you said a little bit earlier was about how you view pornography as part of the process, almost like a drug, leading from this stage to something like pedophilia. How documented is this, in studies and so forth?

Mr. Booyens: Very very documented.

Mr. Jekielek: Explain to me how that works.

Mr. Booyens: Dr. Judith Reisman, recently deceased, rest in peace, an amazing woman, at Liberty University, great school, was the foremost scholar and writer on Alfred Kinsey. We have to roll the clock way back, Jan, to give perspective to this.

In the fifties, Kinsey was hailed as the greatest American scientist. He was supported by presidents. He was funded by the federal government, and he did studies, sexual studies, on children as young as six weeks old, based on orgasm, a hundred percent real issue. Do your homework. Alfred Kinsey.

Kinsey wrote the sexuality of the human race doctrine for America. Everything we have today stems from Kinseys work. The sexual revolution in the sixties came from Kinsey. The love is love movement came from Kinsey, and his opinion was: children are sexual beings, and you should be able to engage with sex with children. And he was hailed as the greatest scientist.

Let me remind everybody that theres not a civilization in history that survived, that embraced sex with children and with minors. The Greeks fell because of sexual immorality. So did the Romans, right?

We embraced the sexual revolution in the sixties, and it birthed this massive explosion of porn in our country. People would think they should have access to porn if they want to, and Surely, it hurts nobody.

It hurts everybody. Do you know, Jan, proven scientifically, porn is a drug, its the most violent drug of them all, and its the only drug that retraces the neuro pathways in the brain. It actually changes how you operate cognitively.

Cocaine doesnt do that. Cocaine influences you while youre under its influence. It doesnt permanently change brain chemistry. Permanently, porn does that.

Theres not a single pedophile thats not a porn addict. Theres not a single child abuser thats not a porn addict. They start living life daily for the sexual high.

Well, heres your problem. An opioid high can last three hours. If youre really good at using drugs, you can ride it up, down, up, down, and have a days worth of high. A sexual high lasts 30 seconds. So you have more frequency of use. So you progress down the chain of the drug much faster.

Think of it this way, if sex is a set of train tracks, you cant say porn is on a different track, child abuse is on a different track, prostituteno, its one track. Where are you on the track? Were all sexual beings. Are you on the track at and I stopped where thats healthy? A relationship with one partner, where you say, for me, its marriage, right?

Or are you further down the track where you engage in pornography, or maybe a little further down the track where its hardcore pornography, or youre purchasing sex down the track, or youre far enough down the track where now, youre purchasing sex from minors. Its the same track.

Porn feeds the beast, any engagement in porn, Jan. This is not a judgment. It is a scientific fact. Any engagement in porn, even social, casual porn, feeds the beast that ultimately exploits children. Thats the ultimate price for people. They want to go younger, younger, pre-puberty. Right. Right? The virgin pre-puberty.

Its the same set of tracks. Pornography is the entry drug that results later on into sex trafficking. Am I saying anybody that watches porn traffics children? No, but youre on the track. And the red light is flashing. Youre heading in the wrong direction. Youre too far down the track. Its time to get help and come to a healthy sexual mindset and environment.

Mr. Jekielek: Ive done some reading about this, about how pornography alters brain chemistry, but this whole idea about the logical conclusion of a track is obviously a very highly contentious issue.

Mr. Booyens: And you can contend it, if you dont really know and interact with the community. If I would say, okay, 50 percent of pedophiles watch porn [that would be one thing]. No, 100 percent are addicted to porn100 percent. This is a critical element in our society that were normalizing, but its an action that violates human rights. Its an action that violates people.

When people say, Well, in this porn video, nobodys getting hurt. She wants to do it. Do you know that over 60 percent of women in porn are placed in that video by their pimp because theyre not making enough money on the track? Theyve got a quota. The porn industry is 100 percent complicit and infiltrated with sex trafficking.

People watch a porn video. Then, they expect their husband or wife to produce that kind of a performance for them. But its an artificial performance. Its a film; its take number 27. Theres drugs involved. Theres exploitation involved. Theres indoctrination involved. Theres pressure. Its artificial. It can never be recreated in a healthy relationship.

Its a drug; its a drug. Look at the other things, the [side effects.] Look at alcoholism, and divorce and alcoholism. Trace those two things, right? And its a high correlation. Alcoholism leads to divorce. Porn use, a higher rate of divorce. Disassociation with family members, porn is higher than alcohol.

Theres not a single drug that alienates and breaks apart more violently than porn, because the drug is so violently progressive. You cant slow it down. Do you know that today our number one segment of society with erectile dysfunction disorder is 18 to 23 year olds? Why 18 to 23 year olds?

Because the average age of porn entry in America today for boys is age eight. Now, you have self-stimulation on porn, desensitization, the porn needs to be more violent, more graphic, or more risque, to get the dopamine effect, to get the high, to get the climactic sexual experience.

Youre desensitizing a child through their puberty years. Weve got college students that have to go on medicine to function properly. Thats the result of porn, a hundred percent.

Mr. Jekielek: Since the advent of the internet, theres been a shocking [trend]. When I say shocking, I mean a shocking change to society. Because even I remember when I was a kid, you had to go to the video store if you wanted to touch the forbidden fruit of pornography.

Mr. Booyens: Buy the magazine that was behind the black cover.

Mr. Jekielek: Right, that kind of thing

Mr. Booyens: Right, they asked your age. Man, I had to get a friend that was older to buy it.

Mr. Jekielek: Somehow in this time period from then to here, its basically on demand available to anybody.

Mr. Booyens: And its free. This is the shocking part, because we have to talk big tech. We have to talk the responsibility. We have to talk Section 230. You cant tell me that you should be able to access free pornography on YouTube. Because if you can access it, a five-year old can access it, because they dont ask the five-year old. You shouldnt be able to have child porn on Facebook. You shouldnt be able to access free porn.

But those who produce porn understand. Well give you your trial sample for free, because its violently addictive. Weve got 12 year old boys were working with, Jan, that are addicted, that watch two and a half hours of porn a week. That childs life is destroyed.

The amount of rehab for that child to just reset, in that child, the purpose of women, the value of women, the value of men, the value of love. Everything is destroyed. Whats love? What is consent? What is consensual? Whats risque? What is socially acceptable, now?

That child is in a tailspin. And, now, we want that child, when theyre 21 or 22, to be able to fight for their first amendment right? That child will not fight for anything.  If hes 21 and he can survivea sexually compromised human being is a broken human being that cant fight.

Ill argue, and this is my opinion, and Im not speaking for the community: its by design. Its by design, because I can show you policies that are being written in Congress to promote the exploitation of children. I can show you. It has to be by design.

My argument is you dont break America with war. You dont break America with the stock market or with financial crisis. Weve lived through recessions. I was at the Hoover Dam the other day and just relived the ingenuity that took to put our labor force to work.

You break America was sexual immorality. Thats how you break this country. And if you touch the youth, boys age eight, the average age to enter porn. Porn is free on the internet. Its on social media. Do you know that over 65 percent of middle school girls today in our country have sent a nude picture of themselves through social media, through TikTok, or a text message, a sext?

Youve got Vogue, Teen Vogue Magazine, training them. This is public, literally a 12-page publication, telling girls whats the right lighting, the right camera angle, how to take a nude selfie, the value its going to give you, the affirmation its going to give you. That is proactively moving children towards desensitizing themselves for sex with adults, ultimately. Its evil.

Mr. Jekielek: This is a big allegation. Youre saying you believe that there are policies, there are actual policies that you looked at, that have to be deliberately trying to hurt the American people through their youth. Direct me to these policies that youre talking about.

Mr. Booyens: [We have to] understand the progression of where this came from. The World Health Organization was part of writing what I would call a sexual manifesto for the worlds youth. They brought in UNESCO, which is a United Nations organization. They brought in SIECUS, which is a U.S. government organization over curriculum. They brought in the International Planned Parenthood Foundation.

That mindset, that manifesto, its not a curriculum, that mindset, saying, This is where sexuality should go with youth, went to Africa and went to Scotland. It got incorporated in Scotland in the form of a curriculum called Comprehensive Sex Ed.

And then, Gavin Newsom was the first governor in our country to sign an executive order to bring Comprehensive Sex Ed into the public school system of California. Go look at State Bill 1-45. Go look at Assembly Bill 22-18.

Go look at these bills that are highly controversial, bringing in sexual content under the guise of the 1970 Obscenity Exemption Statute, where you can have nude pictures in the library, nude pictures in the museum, and now in curriculum. Its illustrated, but its porn. For 10 year olds, age 10. Where a child opens up [the book], and its full frontal nudity, bent over, of a girl.

Theyre discussing sexual slang in the classroom. They get a thing called the Genderbread Person, which is a non-sexual stick figure. They pin on sexuality. They use sexual slang. Theyre told that consent is their choice. Children are by law given sexual agency in the state of California, to get puberty blockers at age three.

Now, we have a Comprehensive Sex Ed curriculum thats being taught in classrooms. It started in Austin, Texas, for crying out loud. Because independent school district superintendents can opt in. Right? So, they opt in to Comprehensive Sex Ed. They may bring it under another name, but its Comprehensive Sex Ed; its the curriculum. Its perfectly normal. Whats Happening to My Body for Boys, Whats Happening to My Body for Girls, and Sex, Puberty and Stuff are books children are reading in the classroom.

Now, I told you earlier, familial trafficking is worse than any other form because its an authority figure that says its okay. So, what do you think happens to a boy in a classroom, when hes talking, engaging in conversation, about sex, about sex with the same gender, about sex with adults? About experimenting with sex, and hes 10, and its a teacher thats teaching him this class.

Do you know that if a teacher refuses to teach it, the school district will bring in a Planned Parenthood representative to teach the class. This is fact, well-documented. These bills are rampant around the country.

Governor Inslee, in the State of Washington, signed it in, executive order. Were working with these state school boards, that are saying, We didnt even have a choice, to vote on this; it was an executive order.

Radical policy, Jan, through our country. It came to Texas. It got voted down in the State of Texas, but independent school districts opted in. This is all about having a sexual conversation with a child in the classroom.

What for? People were arguing, Well, we need to help children because teen pregnancy is out of control. No, youre not teaching them about safe sex. Youre introducing sexual concepts to a brain thats not capable. Were having a hard time, as men in our forties or whatever we are, handling sex in sexual relationships and conversation. I mean, its complex.

A five-year old? Do you know that its in kindergarten? A five-year-old. We now have, in two states in the U.S., handing out condoms to fifth graders in the classroom. Why would I hand a condom to a fifth grader? Because theyre already teaching Comprehensive Sex Ed.

Youre activating a young mind to think sex. The second you do that, Jan, the pedophile online can spot that child. He can find a needle in a haystack because he knows which child has had sexual conversation. He knows which child is open to sexual conversation.

The minute you open it in the classroom, you cant shut it off when the kids now on Facebook, on TikTok. You cant shut it off when the kid now sees a sexual image on Facebook. Oh, thats wrong? Its not wrong. I saw it in the classroom. So, its desensitization. Thats a fact. And its rampant in our country, rampant.

Mr. Jekielek: Your contention, basically, is that this is contributing massively to creating a bigger pool of children that are susceptible to the sex trafficking.

Mr. Booyens: A hundred percent, because you now have a child who, two weeks ago, was not thinking as a sexual being and is now introduced to this concept of sex, variety of forms of sex, right? Same sex relationships, different sexual positions, different methods.

Like I said, Teen Vogue [is writing about] how to send nudes of yourself. Its by an authority figure, so its okay. Its a stamp of approval. My teacher had this conversation with me, who was an adult.

Now, when another adult spots that child online and engages in the conversation of sex, even at a little level, the child doesnt resist because, Im having this conversation with an adult, in the classroom. Its radical.

It raises the class thats available to pedophiles to exploit. Its desensitization, where in the past, the pedophile had to do all the desensitization. The pedophile had to groom the child, over a period of time, before they could get the child to engage in a real sex conversation or in sex talk.

The pedophile doesnt have to do the grooming anymore. The grooming is happening in the classroom. And so thats why Im telling you, it has just exploded the amount of online trafficking situations, because the child no longer sees a red flag when an adult wants to talk to him about sex.

Mr. Jekielek: Youre basically saying that COVID was a perfect, terrible storm, so to speak, because you have all these kids that are spending so much more time online. And at the same time, over how long a period have these curriculums or these ideas been in play?

Mr. Booyens: Gavin Newsom signed his into effect six months before COVID hit. Governor Inslee signed his order into effect March 19th, during the shutdown when no parents could protest, signed an executive order. It literally coincided with COVID. COVID [lockdowns] were the worst timing possible for this issue, because what happened, Jan?

Moms had to homeschool. They were pulling their hair out of their head. My kids are home. I dont know what to do with them. They pacified their children with what? With the cell phone, with the iPad, online. Kids now had seven hours a day [online]. Their time wasnt occupied; theyre not in class; theyre not in extracurricular activities. The more frequency of use on a platform, the more accessibility to the pedophile, to find the soft target.

Mr. Jekielek: How are you actually seeing this explosion that youre describing? How is that manifesting?

Mr. Booyens: That was a direct contributor to the spike in familial trafficking. We saw an absolute connection, down to the month and the day. Familial trafficking has always been there, but you saw a hockey stick curve during COVID. You saw fathers engage in sexual activity with their own children at home, because they couldnt go anywhere, and they used to go somewhere.

You saw men that bought sex outside of the house start enacting sexual violence in the home on their wives. Just talk to the ERs. Talk to nurses today and say, Hey, what happened during COVID with domestic abuse and domestic violence? Skyrocketing. How many of them were sexually affiliated? Most of them. Right. 

The worst thing that could have happened was the lockdown because, one, it pushed people online, but it also trapped families, and it trapped the perpetrator. Now, if he was not trafficking his own childrenor sexually exploiting, because its not always trafficking, it could just be child abuse hes started turning his sights to his own family members.

Theres an absolute correlation, scientific correlation, mathematical correlation, of what happened in that time. How long did it go? A very long time.

Now, that guy or woman that changed their method of abuse, do you think when we said, Well, the countrys back open, they just go, Well, Im going to go back to my old method. No, this is a drug. They now are going to continue to want that type of activity. Right? So, theres an absolute correlation.

Mr. Jekielek: Fascinating. What Im trying to figure out is did you see this through these online type- relationships, as opposed to the internals?

Mr. Booyens: Oh no, through the cases, through the actual rescues, through apprehension, through the sting operations. Like so many of the operations weve seen, because, remember, there are interviews with pedophiles, there are interviews with victims, theres conversation with women that come what we call off the track. And its not just children.

Adults are being trafficked. Adults can be trafficked. Remember, its under force, fraud, or coercion. If their lifes at stake, if its their livelihood, if theyre threatened, if they were exploited as a child and then they aged out of the system.

A childs trafficked at 16. The law changes at 18, that child cant just all of a sudden flip a switch and go, Okay, Im 18. Now, I need to be responsible, and this is wrong. Theyre still in the life.

When you look at the city of Las Vegas, when you look at the movement towards legalizing prostitution in our country, thats another move thats coming. Watch: legalizing prostitution. Decriminalizing prostitution is very different than decriminalizing the prostitute but criminalizing the buyer.

Its time that we criminalize the purchaser of a sex. Its time that we go after the demand. Because you can fight supply all you want. If theres demand, somebody will supply. I always argue, the minute they removed El Chapo, the drug trade didnt stop. There were three guys that thanked us, too: Thank you. Now, I can step up and take more territory.

Youve got to go after demand. Theres a sick, twisted, disproportionate demand for sex with children in our country. Someone will supply, unless we go after demand.

Things like legalizing prostitution is on the docket. Its a real thing. The second you legalize prostitution, you no longer call it prostitution. You call it sex work. Now, labor laws come into effect. Now, the pimp is an employer. Its an employee. Now, theres rights. Now, you can litigate. Now, theres precedent. Right?

Mr. Jekielek: But those same abusive relationships are still in play exactly like before.

Mr. Booyens: Its actually going to escalate. Theres not a single country in the world that legalized prostitution where child trafficking didnt skyrocket. For example, Denmark. Its like any other drug. Look at Boulder, Colorado. They legalized marijuana.

Go talk to any of the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] about Boulder. Every illicit illegal drug is present in Boulder, Colorado. Because a junkie, someone whos an addict, will go to Boulder to get any kind of a fix.

Now all of a sudden, because you legalize one drugand Im not saying this to be anti-marijuana, but its an examplepeople who consume, who are an addict, will go to where they can get supply.

Look at Las Vegas. There are only nine counties in the state of Nevada where prostitution is legal. The strip of Vegas is not one of them. Yet, theres trafficking and prostitution on the strip of Vegas. Its all illegal.

Its because the few entities that have a legal license to run as brothels cannot supply the avalanche of the demand of the world that comes to Sin City, Vegas. So, the pimps flocked to Vegas. This is why we just rescued a child in Vegas, from Dallas. They take them to Vegas because men want to buy sex on the strip.

Its not legal on the strip. Its not legal with a minor. But its present. So when you create an environment where you legalize the sex trade, it will be an avalanche that I dont know how we could stop in this country. Our real politicians in senior administration, this is a policy for them, to legalize prostitution. And theres massive support for it. And it will break our culture.

Mr. Jekielek: Youre saying in the trends that youre seeing right now, one of them is this familial trafficking.

Mr. Booyens: Yes.

Mr. Jekielek: Which I find so horrifying, frankly. The second one is a push to legalize prostitution more broadly than it is currently. What else are you seeing, right now?

Mr. Booyens: The third one is the infiltration in the school system: a curriculum, a comprehensive sex ed curriculum, thats in the school system, thats desensitizing children. Thats making themits putting a target on their forehead for any predator. Its putting a target on their forehead. Those three things are absolutely critical to combat, in our culture today.

And then, theres the movement of gender, the gender conversation, because the sex trafficking conversation touches the gender conversation a hundred percent. Of course, because its another form of indoctrination.

In the state of California today, age three and up, a child can get a puberty blocker. Now, that child may say, Hi, I think Im a boy, but Im a girl. That child gets sexual agency by state law. The parents cant combat it. They can get a puberty blocker. They give most of them a drug called Lupron. Lupron is a drug for men who have prostate cancer that will sterilize you. Its permanent sterilization.

You need to understand, Jan, how this works. Theyll bring a bill to the table, mostly. And theyll position that bill in front of a Senate or a House committee under some sort of a health care actyou know, the Gender Equity Fund or the Transgender Equity Fund or the Diversity Healthcare Plan. And, then, when you look into it, its comprehensive sex ed. Its a curriculum in the school.

What most Americans dont know is once a curriculum is in a school, the process it goes through to get approved. When you write volume two, volume three, volume four, you dont go through the process again. So once its in, you can shift it radically because its in the system and its being taught, and its already radical just to be in there.

Those are the key three things I want your viewer to understand. We cannot legalize prostitution. Children will suffer a hundred percent. We have to fight comprehensive sex ed. Its not the teachers job. They need to teach math, science, English, and creative arts.

They dont need to be talking to your 5-year-old or your 10-year-old about sexual positions, slang for the womens body, how to give consent. Thats the parents job. They do not need to have that conversation.

Then lastly, we have to understand that if we run with this notion that law enforcement is not necessary, its impossible for us to rescue a single child. If I go down the street today with the intel I have todaywere working 13 cases at the moment. Personally, I know where some of these children are. If I go through that door without a warrant, Ill get arrested. Right?

Now, I need district attorneys. I need judges. I need local law enforcement. I need the police chiefs. I need all those people to be educated on the issue. One of our critical issues in this country, while we dont see any convictions, the district attorneys wont take the cases. They wont take the case as a trafficking case to court.

Its a really difficult case to fight, so its always played down to a misdemeanor or a drug charge or an illegal arms charge, because they always run hand-in-hand, or a tax evasion charge or something else. All of a sudden, the 30 year sentence for trafficking children, gets down to 13 months, 1,000 hours of community service.

The issues we have in our societypeople need to understand why its important to appropriate funding to the cost, specifically, so that people can get the right training, so that when they deal with the child that was exploited, that childs not a prostitute. Right?

But the law is predominantly written for prostitution. Even at a federal level, at the point of arrest, were trying to reform the arrest period, so its not logged as a prostitution case, because now theres court precedent for it. Its not, This is child sexual exploitation.

Its very technical, at times, with legislation. Ill be with the governor of Oklahoma in a couple of weeks. Hes signing a bill I helped co-author with Congressman Russ about every college student in the state of Oklahoma, in their orientation week, getting awareness training on online trafficking and how it works, because we have to raise the level of awareness to the child and the parent.

Mr. Jekielek: Theres so many things that are so incredibly troubling from everything youve told me today.

Mr. Booyens: And it touches every family. You can no longer in our country say, Well, its not in my neighborhood. Its in every zip code. Well, we know what a pimp looks like. No, you dont. You know, the U.S. gymnastics team head coach and the Boy Scouts of America, 83,000 lawsuits. Who would have thought in your right mind that in the Boy Scouts of America, there would be child abuse.

It has taken on every face, in every form, of society. So ultimately, Jan, the onus and the responsibility [is on us]. Im a man of faith, so for me, in the word of God, Ezekiel 33 says that the watchman on the wall needs to warn of the atrocitiesIm paraphrasingand, if you dont, the blood is on the hands of the watchman.

Be careful that the bloods not on our hands for not warning the community, saying, Hey, its in your community. The onus falls back on the father, on the nuclear family, on reuniting the American family, on bringing people together.

When people say, Jaco, I want to fight sex trafficking, lets go charge Capitol Hill. I say, Please, dont. Fight in your zip code, on your street, your school board, make the fight local and make it real. If we do that, well win the battle.

Mr. Jekielek: Jaco Booyens, its such a pleasure to have you on again.

Mr. Booyens: Thank you, Jan. Youre amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you Epoch Times, the best. Thank you very much.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

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Josh Hawley Proposes Love America Act to Ensure Schools Teach Basic Truth

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) announced that he will introduce a bill that requires schools receiving federal funding to teach children the basic truth about the United States as expressed in the nations founding documents.

Speaking with Fox News on Thursday, Hawley said his legislation, titled the Love America Act, would combat the misinformation the Left is spreading that the United States is systemically evil and racist.

Thats not true. This is a great nation. Were a nation of liberators, he told host Tucker Carlson. Its time to reclaim that and to teach our children who we are, who they are, and thats why my bill would say, Listen: If a school district gets federal money, youve got to teach the basic truth about the countrythe Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration [of Independence], the Pledge of Allegiance.

These are the things, the documents, that express the ideals that unite us as Americans, the senator continued. Youve got to replace the lies with the truth, and thats what Im trying to do.

The idea that the United States is systemically racist is being pushed by critical race theory (CRT), a quasi-Marxist ideology that interprets society through the lens of a racial struggle between white and non-white people who are assigned the roles of oppressors and oppressed, respectively. Critical race theorists see inherent racism in the foundations of Western societies, such as legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and constitutional law, and seek to fundamentally transform those societies to end this claimed racial oppression.

An effort to incorporate CRT in American schools has been pushed by progressive politicians, activists, and major teachers unions. Facing backlash from parents and state governments, CRT proponents are now simultaneously claiming that CRT isnt being taught to K-12 students, while defending the presence of the ideology in the classroom.

Earlier this week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) echoed this talking point, saying that although CRT is taught only in some law schools, teachers should be armed with CRT and become fluent in how to dismantle racism.

Ocasio-Cortez, the face of the Democratic Partys progressive wing, said in an interview with CNN that teachers need to be fluent in anti-racism so that they can train children away from racial biases, which she claimed to start accumulating since infant age.

So your childs teacher is anti-racist and is actually fluent in how to dismantle racism and the dynamics of racism in a classroom. That is something that teachers should know how to do and Republicans are trying to ban this, are trying to ban us from knowing our own history, she said.

Opponents of CRT have said that the effect of teaching the ideology is an increase in racial division.

Call it critical race theory, call it woke agenda, call it the new left, Jonathan Butcher, a Will Skillman Fellow in Education at the Heritage Foundation, previously told The Epoch Times. But the idea that we should treat people differently based on the color of their skin is an idea that should be in the dustbin of history.
Lebanon's Energy Minister Raymond Ghajjar, speaks to journalists upon his arrival from Iraq at Rafik Hariri international airport after he signed an agreement with the Iraqi government, in Beirut, Lebanon, on July 24, 2021. (Hussein Malla/AP Photo)

Lebanon Signs Deal to Sell Iraqi Fuel in Move to Ease Crisis

BEIRUTLebanon signed a deal Saturday to broker Iraqi fuel sales in hopes of alleviating a crippling financial and energy crisis in the small Mediterranean country, Lebanese and Iraqi media reported.

The deal allows Beirut to resell 1 million tons of heavy fuel oil from Iraqfuel that Lebanon cannot use in its own power plantsto companies who would then provide useable fuel to Lebanon over the next year.

Lebanon would offer Iraq services in exchange, Energy Minister Raymond Ghajjar said, without offering details. Local media said Iraq would benefit from Lebanese health services and agriculture consultancy.

The swap, which Ghajjar estimates is valued at between $300-400 million, could offer a brief respite to Lebanons worsening power cuts and bring funds to its cash-strapped government. But a structural power solution, in a sector steeped in corruption and political interference, is far from sight.

Blackouts have been a fixture in Lebanon since the end of its 15-year civil war in 1990, and the small country relies on imported fuel. But the problem has intensified as the government grapples with unprecedented financial problems, and considers lifting fuel subsidies.

The Iraqi state agreed to open an account in Lebanons Central Bank in exchange for this fuel. This account is managed by the Iraqi Finance Ministry through which it buys services inside Lebanon in Lebanese pounds, Ghajjar said. Then Lebanon resells the fuel in exchange for fuel it can use in its plants.

We hope other Arab countries follow suit and give us this opportunity because it is really a golden opportunity for us, Ghajjar said at Beirut International Airport upon his return from Baghdad.

A statement from Iraqs Prime Ministers office said the 1 million barrels of fuel oil would be offered to Lebanon in exchange for services and products, although neither side immediately mentioned what these were.

Lebanons state electricity company has most recently been providing no more than four hours of power a day, leaving private generator operators as the main providers. Diesel supplies have dwindled, and long queues stretch outside gas stations each day.

Government officials have also complained of widespread smuggling to neighboring Syria, which is also facing an economic crisis following a decade of war.

Lebanon defaulted on its foreign debt last year and struggled to pay suppliers. The Central Bank has been limiting credit to purchases of basic supplies, including fuel and medicine.

The energy crisis has reached unprecedented levels in Lebanon. Generator operators warned Friday they would have to turn off their engines as diesel shortages have worsened and prices on the black market have reached exorbitant levels.

Hospitals are rationing their consumption, shutting off air conditioning in waiting areas, while bakeries in some parts of Lebanon have stopped their ovens altogether. Supermarkets have warned that the power shortages threaten their merchandise and endanger food safety.

The U.N. childrens agency, UNICEF, has warned that most water pumping will gradually cease across the country in the next four to six weeks, putting more than four million people, including one million refugees, in immediate risk of losing access to safe water.

By Sarah El Deeb
A flooded section of road in Zhengzhou, Henan Province, China, on July 21, 2021. Picture taken with a drone. (China Daily via Reuters)

Mother Looks for Missing Daughter as Death Toll for China Floods in Question

Its been four agonizing days for Lus mother, whose 18-year-old daughter is now missing after devastating floods swept through central Chinas Henan Province.

Lu Yanghan, who is about 5 feet, 4 inches tall, had been sheltering in their second-floor home in Cuimiao Town when she was washed away by the floods, Lus mother told The Epoch Times in an interview. The town is about a 40-minute drive west of Henans provincial capital, Zhengzhou.

On July 20, there were heavy rains, Lus mother said. The floods reached the third floor of our building. My daughter was alone in our second-floor home before she was swept away.

She said her neighborhood was badly hit by floods, and many houses had been damaged as streets turned into rivers.

Zhengzhou, with a population of 12 million, has been one of the worst-hit areas since heavy rains began to fall in the region on July 17. Over the next four days, the city received 617.1 millimeters (24.3 inches) of rainfall, which is almost equivalent to the annual average of 640.8 millimeters (25.2 inches).

Troubling images and videos of people being swept away or drowning in the floodwaters have emerged online, some related to a tragedy on July 20 when Chinese officials claimed that at least 12 people died inside an inundated metro line in Zhengzhou, after authorities said they evacuated more than 500 trapped commuters.

Severe flooding was also reported in several nearby cities, including Gongyi, which is about an hours drive west of Zhengzhou; and Xinxiang, which is over an hours drive northeast of the capital.

Lus mother attributed the floods to the poor drainage system in her area.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to relocate as a result of the floods, including Lus mother, who is now staying with a relative.

People wade through a flooded street in Zhengzhou, in Chinas Henan Province, on July 22, 2021. (Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images)

Lu is hardly the only missing person due to the floods. Chinas state-run media have published missing people reports, and families have taken to Chinas social media seeking the whereabouts of their missing relatives.

Another missing person is 32-year-old Li Li, who is nine months pregnant. According to local media, she was thought to have been at her home in the town of Baisha on the morning of July 20 before she went missing. Baisha is about 10 miles east of Zhengzhou.

Death Toll Unknown

In late afternoon on July 24, Chinas state-run media Xinhua announced that 58 people had died in the rain-ravaged province. However, Wang Ying, a Henan resident, questioned the official statistics in an interview with The Epoch Times.

He said he expects official announcements on the deaths at different locations, but that the deaths wouldnt add up to the true death toll. This includes deaths in the underground metro and in the Jingguang Road Tunnelan underpass in Zhengzhou that was also flooded on July 20, which Chinas state-run media reported had trapped hundreds of vehicles inside.

The flood wasnt a natural disaster, Wang said, but a man-made disaster, because Chinese officials failed to issue public announcements before discharging water from overflowing reservoirs. The Chinese regime has blamed the floods on once in a thousand years rains.

Local authorities began discharging water from the Changzhuang Reservoir, which sits upstream from Zhengzhou, at around 10:30 a.m. local time on July 20. Hours later, Henans capital was inundated, but the public announcement on the discharge wasnt released until the early hours of July 21.

Wang Dejia, an online writer who goes by the pen name Jing Chu, told The Epoch Times that the actual number of deaths and missing persons will be a mystery.

To the Chinese regime, it is not so much about rescue efforts, it is more about imposing an information lockdown, and the importance of peoples lives is trivial, the writer said.

Li Yun contributed to this report.
NSW has reported two more deaths, including a woman in her late 30s, and 141 new locally acquired cases of COVID-19.

The other death was a woman in her 70s from southwest Sydney.

Forty three people are in intensive care in NSW, 18 of whom require ventilation. Only one of these patients had received one dose of vaccine, while the remaining 42 are unvaccinated.

At least 62 of the 141 diagnosed people in the 24 hours to 8 p.m. on Saturday were circulating in the community for all or part of their infectious period, Premier Gladys Berejiklian says.

Some 163 cases were diagnosed in the 24 hours to 8 p.m. on Friday, despite the government ratcheting up restrictions in the four weeks since Greater Sydney entered lockdown.

Greater Sydney and surrounding regions are in lockdown until at least July 30, while three local government areas in regional NSW are in lockdown until at least 28 July, as health authorities attempt to contain an outbreak of the virulent Delta strain.

Berejiklian said the woman in her 30s who died had no pre-existing conditions, demonstrating the severity of the virus.

Eight people have died amid the current Sydney outbreak.

If anybody thinks this is a disease just affecting older people, please think again  younger people without pre-existing conditions can also fall victim to this cruel disease, she said.

The 141 cases came from a record of more than 102,000 tests.

It comes as the NSW treasurer calls for the reintroduction of the JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme amid Greater Sydneys COVID-19 outbreak and Labor demands a summit to discuss the health crisis.

But the federal government has said it believes that its current support payment structure is simpler and more flexible than Dominic Perrottets suggestion.

Disquiet over the lockdown erupted dramatically on Saturday afternoon, as very large crowds marched through Sydneys CBD as part of a World Wide Rally For Freedom.

At least 57 people have been arrested over the protest action and 90 issued infringement notices, which Berejiklian said left her disgusted.

This type of activity during lockdown will not be tolerated and the full force of the law will be brought against anyone who engages in this type of illegal activity, she said.

A number of police officers were injured as they were attacked by some protesters, who threw plastic bottles and pot plants seized from the roadside at them.

Two men have also been charged with allegedly striking a police horse and failing to comply with public health orders, while one of the men was also charged with assaulting a police officer. They will appear in Parramatta Local Court on Sunday.

A team of more than 20 detectives is working to identify more of the protesters and either charge or fine them. NSW Police Minister David Elliott said he wants to see thousands of infringements issued.

The latest lockdown escalation has prevented all but the most essential workers in Cumberland and Blacktown local government areas leaving those areas, joining Fairfield residents.

Berejiklian has described vaccination as the way out of the outbreak. NSW has been allocated 50,000 more Pfizer doses from the federal governments national stockpile given the outbreak.

The premier also urged unvaccinated residents in the state to consider the AstraZeneca vaccine given the new medical advice from the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) on Saturday that recommended AstraZeneca among other vaccines for those 18 years and above in greater Sydney.

The risk of infection in NSW combined with the scarcity of Pfizer supplies means all adults should consider the benefits of earlier protection, ATAGI said.

Three regional NSW local government areas in the states central west are also under stay-at-home orders until at least July 28.

Local elections across NSW have also been postponed by three months to Dec. 4.
Pakistan-India Ceasefire a Response to Developing Situation in Afghanistan

News Analysis

NEW DELHIThe emerging situation in Afghanistan with the drawdown of U.S. troops calls attention to the ceasefire agreed to by India and Pakistan a few months ago, said experts.

India and Pakistan announced a ceasefire for the first time in two decades on their heavily militarized, disputed border in late February.

The ceasefire cant be seen as an independent incident and theres a regional context to the situation thats determined by the larger border disputes that have persisted in the region since British colonial times, the crisis situation in Afghanistan, and the terrorist machinery that operates across borders between India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, said experts.

Abhinav Pandya, a strategic analyst and the CEO of the India-based think tank Usanas Foundation and the former advisor on terrorism and radicalization to the governor of Jammu and Kashmir during the political reorganization of the state in 2019, told The Epoch Times over the phone that there are many motives behind the ceasefire, and one of them is linked to Afghanistan.

Pakistan wants to create for itself the image of an economic powerhouse and a responsible diplomatic player and wants to come out of the grey list of FATF (Financial Action Task Force) for which it has to convince the global anti-money laundering watchdog that it has stopped terror financing from its soil, said Pandya.

Now since Americans are withdrawing and a lot of other countries are taking interest in Afghanistan, this is the time when Pakistan would want a very smooth and clear transition to the Taliban. For that, it needs to create an image where its seen in a good light by Western powers like America or maybe Russia, or even China, that it is a country that can be used to create a good, stable, and efficient functioning government in Afghanistan, a responsible Taliban in Afghanistan, said Pandya.

Vicky Nanjappa, an Indian reporter who has covered some major terrorist attacks in India and also the rise and fall of the Indian Mujahideen told The Epoch Times on the phone that Pakistan would have likely been downgraded to the FATF black list if the ceasefire wouldnt have happened and if there were more violence on the India-Pakistan border.

Pakistan is under a lot of pressure from China and the U.S. to play a bigger role in ensuring peace in Afghanistan. The ceasefire pact was only a larger message by Pakistan to the rest of the world that it is perfectly capable of ensuring peace in the [Kashmir] valley which has been the biggest contentious point between India and Pakistan, said Nanjappa,. This message allows Pakistan to make others believe that it wants peace in the region, she said.

Pandya said, Pakistan isnt focusing on Kashmir these days and has instead shifted its focus to Afghanistan.

There was news that 10,000 cadres have infiltrated from Pakistan to Afghanistan. So maybe theres a strong possibility that cadres of the Pakistan-sponsored, Kashmir-focused terror groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LT), Jaish-e-Mohammed(JeM), and Al-Badr are being diverted to Afghanistan, said Pandya whos the author of the book, Radicalization in India: An Exploration.

Pandya, whos researching terror financing in Kashmir for his next book, was referring to Afghan President Ashraf Ghanis claims at an international conference in Tashkent on July 16 where he said 10,000 takfiri terrorists have entered Afghanistan from Pakistan. Takfiri are Muslims who accuse other Muslims of apostasy.

Contrary to repeated assurances by Prime Minister Khan and his Generals that Pakistan does not find a Taliban takeover in Afghanistan in Pakistans interest and short of the use of force will use its power and influence to make the Taliban negotiate seriously, networks and organizations supporting the Taliban are openly celebrating the destruction of the assets and capabilities of the Afghan people and State, said Ghani at the Central and South Asia connectivity conference. Pakistan denied the allegations.

Pandya said in addition to announcing the ceasefire with India, Pakistan has also created terrorist organizations inside Kashmir with regular sounding names like The Resistance Force (TRF) and the Peoples Anti-fascist Force with an aim to wash its hands of terrorism in the region.

They are new terrorist organizations who are like the proxies of the earlier front organizations. They arent different from them. They are linked to them. They are the front organizations but the purpose is to show that these groups are the local groups in Kashmir and the local people are involved, and Pakistan has nothing to do with that, said Pandya.

Hafiz Saeed (R), the founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba, talks to media representatives as Maulana Samiul Haq (L), chief of the Defense Council of Pakistan, and dubbed the father of the Taliban, looks on during a press conference in Rawalpindi on April 4, 2012. (Aamir Qureshi/AFP/Getty Images)

A research paper by the European Foundation for South Asian Studies (EFSAS) called the TRF Old Wine in a New Bottle and said that the sense of disarray that prevails due to the pandemic has been hijacked by terrorist organizations like the TRF in Kashmir.

TRF came into existence after the political reorganization of Jammu and Kashmir in 2019 and since then has been involved in a series of violent attacks in Kashmir including the killing of five Indian soldiers along the disputed border in April 2020 in which five terrorists were also killed, two of which were Pakistanis, according to the intelligence reports quoted by EFSAS.

The paper alleged that Pakistans military establishment and its intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), have an ongoing strategy of diverting attention from Rawalpindis trusted terrorist proxies such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Hizbul-Mujahideen (HM), and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), for the purposes of giving them space for recalibration and ostensibly changing the character of the violent extremism in the region.

EFSAS cited intelligence reports about Pakistan elements and LeT involved in terrorist activities carried out by the TRF in Kashmir against the Indian forces and political and elected leaders.

A consensus forming between intelligence forces and analysts dealing with violent extremism in J&K [Jammu and Kashmir] has concluded that the TRF is yet another terrorist front created by the Pakistani Military establishment and the ISI, in their pursuit of using Kashmiri youth as proxies against India. Its formation was particularly intended to lift international pressure and scrutiny over Pakistans sponsorship of terrorism, which is also the reason why the Lashkar-e-Taiba, Hizbul Mujahideen, and Jaish-e-Mohammed have remained rather on the low since the Pulwama attack in 2019, said EFSAS. In February 2019 in the Pulwama district of Jammu and Kashmir a vehicle-borne suicide bomber attacked Indian security personnel.

The paper said the secular sounding names of the terrorist fronts is to help conceal the tag Jihadist movement and to gain sympathy and traction from global left-liberals and human right activists. This will help Pakistan come clear against the allegations of being the incubator of terrorism, said EFSAS.

The Taliban have denied ties with Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, and its spokesperson in an exclusive interview with the Indian broadcaster, Zee News on July 18 said that it wouldnt allow any international terrorist organizations to use Afghan soil for terrorism.

Pandya said this is a diplomatic tactic. He cited reports last year about Afghan forces seeking to intercept Taliban fighters in Afghanistans Nangarhar Province and instead finding Jaish-e-Mohammed cadres.

In the bloody conflict in which Afghan forces lost four soldiers, ten of the fifteen men they killed were Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists being trained for operating in Jammu and Kashmir, according to varied Indian media reports.

Last years report from the UN Security Councils analytical support said that both LeT and JeM have hundreds of armed fighters co-located with the Taliban forces in Nangarhar. Both the groups were named as terror groups for the first time in the BRICS summit in Xiamen, China in 2017.

Much has been written about the ceasefire between India and Pakistan since it was jointly announced on Feb. 25 with some reports even claiming that for the first time ever India could participate in a joint military exercise later this year in Pakistan amid the fresh peace initiative between the two nations.

Defense sources based in New Delhi told The Epoch Times on Friday that the government of India hasnt yet taken any decision about sending the Indian military for the joint exercise in Pakistan.

A graph of the fatalities in Jammu and Kashmir due to terrorism from 1988 to 2018 gives an analysis of how the situation is correlated to the situation inside Afghanistan. (Courtesy Satoru Nagao)

Political Reorganization of the Region

The withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan is one of the factors that compelled the Indian government led by Narendra Modi to revoke Article 370, a constitutional provision that determined the status of Jammu and Kashmir that acceded to India in 1947, according to an analysis by Sarral Sharma, published on the South Asian Voices, an online policy platform by the Washington DC based Stimson Center.

New Delhi is likely worrying that if the United States withdraws from Afghanistan and the Taliban returns to power, Pakistan-backed terror groups might get training in Afghanistan and turn their attention to J&K, said Sharma after the reorganization happened in 2019.

The erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir before accession to India in 1947 shared borders with Pakistan, a narrow stretch with Afghanistan, and a larger tract with whats now Xinjiang and Tibet.

Since then India and Pakistan have fought four wars with each other over the region and the controlled boundaries have shifted while the disputes and heavy militarization have continued.

India no longer has a functional border with Afghanistan and portions of the Jammu and Kashmir state are controlled by Pakistan and China. In 2019 India enacted special laws to bifurcate its administered region into two federally governed territories of Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh.

A map of Jammu and Kashmir (not on scale) shows how the state that in 1947 acceded to India is currently under the control of India, Pakistan, and China. In 2019, the Indian administration bifurcated the state into two federally governed territories of Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh. (Map adapted by Venus Upadhayaya)

The region has increasingly become the central focus of India and Pakistans foreign policies and covert and overt military strategies with each other.

China and Pakistan are building the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor through the disputed territory much to Indias displeasure, while Pakistan has announced that Gilgit-Baltistan, which India claims as a part of its federal state of Ladakh, will be its new province. Gilgit-Baltistan has been administered by Pakistan as an autonomous region since the first ceasefire between India and Pakistan in 1949.

Satoru Nagao, Ph.D., a non-resident fellow at the Washington DC-based Hudson Institute told The Epoch Times over the phone that there are many references in the past to how the situation inside Afghanistan greatly affects the terrorism situation inside Jammu and Kashmir. Indias constitutional decisions over the region are determined by these wider regional contexts, he said.

Since 2011 when the U.S. killed Osama Bin Laden, the U.S. wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had realized this situation and he started to prepare for the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan [when he came to power in 2014]. He understood the connection between Afghanistan and Jammu and Kashmir, said Nagao. Modis decision to divide Jammu and Kashmir into two federally governed territories is influenced by this context, Nagao said.

Federal government can impose strong security measures to prevent terrorists from Afghanistan from entering Jammu and Kashmir, he said.

Nagao has tabulated data on the overall fatalities in Kashmir since 1988 in a paper thats published on Asan Forum and it shows a drastic decrease in numbers as the United States entered Afghanistan after the 9/11 terror attacks.

After the 9/11 terror attacks, the large-scale operations of the U.S. forces in Afghanistan could be seen as exerting some impact, adding to the times when pacification was undertaken against terror activities in Kashmir. Now, amid the impending withdrawal of these forces, the Kashmir situation has begun to heat up, one factor prompting Indias strong move, wrote Nagao in his paper.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) speaks during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on July 20, 2021. (Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters)

Pelosi Selects GOP Trump Critic Kinzinger for Jan. 6 Committee

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), a frequent critic of former President Donald Trump, said he accepted House Speaker Nancy Pelosis (D-Calif.) appointment to a House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol breach.

Today, I was asked by the Speaker to serve on the House Select Committee to Investigate January 6th and I humbly accepted, Kinzinger said in a July 25 statement. I will work diligently to ensure we get to the truth and hold those responsible for the attack fully accountable.

The Illinois representative said the panel would allow lawmakers to provide a transparent look into the Jan. 6 Capitol breach, echoing claims from Democrats that it was an attack on our democracy.

Earlier on July 25, Pelosi said in a statement that she would appoint him to the body, saying because of his prior military experience, he brings patriotism to the Committees mission.

Pelosi on July 21 barred Reps. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) from joining the committee after they were appointed by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). Republican House members said Pelosis move was nakedly partisan, and McCarthy pulled the other Republican picks from the committee.

McCarthy and other Republicans had wanted an investigation into the widespread and deadly riots across the United States following the death of George Floydas well as a probe of the Jan. 6 incident.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) speaks to the media after attending the weekly House Republican conference at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Oct. 29, 2013. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

With respect for the integrity of the investigation, with an insistence on the truth and with concern about statements made and actions taken by these Members, I must reject the recommendations of Representatives Banks and Jordan to the Select Committee, Pelosi said last week about her decision.

Some Republicans characterized the committee as an attempt to keep the Jan. 6 incident in the media in a bid to denigrate Trump, who has been publicly mulling a 2024 presidential bid, and Republicans ahead of the 2022 midterms. Several weeks ago, Republicans in the Senate blocked a mostly House Democrat-backed bill that would create a 9/11-style commission to look into the incident.

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) told CNN on July 25: We have a lot of investigations underway now, there are Senate committees that have completed some, there are others still in progress, we have many criminal investigations. I would favor a truly bipartisan commission, but I think there, we should be candid about the fact that it is politically to the advantage of Democrats to try to keep this issue in the forefront.

In the interview, Toomey cited comments from longtime Democrat strategist James Carville, who publicly urged Democrats to not let the election be about Joe Biden and his policies in 2022, make that election about Jan. 6, then Donald Trump.

Previously, Pelosi selected Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who was recently ousted from her leadership position within the GOP, to the panel.
A protestor waves a French national flag during a demonstration against compulsory vaccination for certain workers and the mandatory use of the health pass called by the French government, in Marseille, southern France on July 24, 2021. (Clement Mahoudeau/AFP via Getty Images)

Protests Rage Across Europe as Lockdown, Vaccination Mandates Start

Anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine-passport protests erupted across Europe on July 24, according to media photos and videos.

Thousands upon thousands of demonstrators came out in London, Dublin, Paris, Rome, Athens, and other cities across Europe, according to footage and news reports.

The demonstrations in France appeared to be the most tense, with riot police firing tear gas as clashes erupted in central Paris.

Police sought to push back demonstrators near the capitals Gare Saint-Lazare railway station after protesters knocked over a police motorbike ridden by two officers, news footage showed. Scuffles between police and demonstrators also broke out at the Champs-Elysees thoroughfare, where tear gas was fired and traffic was halted, it showed.

Frances Interior Ministry said that about 160,000 people partook in the protests on July 24sharply up from 114,000 the previous week, Reuters reported.

JUST IN  Massive anti-vaccine passport protest in London. Follow @insiderpaper pic.twitter.com/fq3S2b9Ezk  Masa (@GHClc1ahp6RlhOg) July 24, 2021

The reason for the protest, in part, was due to pending legislation in Frances Parliament that would set up a vaccine passport system as well as a vaccination mandate for all health care workers. The passport bill would force people to show proof of COVID-19 vaccination or a negative test result to enter restaurants and other public areaswhich critics have described as needlessly draconian.

Protesters railed against the proposed legislation, saying, No to shameful pass, while denigrating French President Emmanuel Macron as a tyrant.

#BREAKING: The anti-vaccine protests in Paris have turned violent. Police are clashing with protesters. Tear gas deployed. pic.twitter.com/Se6637t8bU  Election Wizard (@ElectionWiz) July 24, 2021

We need to wait a little bit before the French people can decide.  I think a part of France is always going to be unwilling, and that blackmail and threats wont work, protester Ayoub Bouglia, an engineer, told The Associated Press.

Thousands of Italian demonstrators gathered in Rome, Naples, Verona, and Milan on July 24, according to videos and photos published online.

In Verona, thousands chanted, No Green Pass, referring to the Italian governments decision to implement a vaccine-passport-like system for people to enter local fairs, stadiums, theaters, and other gathering areas.

Protesters hold placards and banners during a demonstration against Frances COVID-19 restrictions in Paris on July 24, 2021. (Benoit Tessier /Reuters)

Also on July 24, demonstrators in Dublin, Ireland, emphatically called on the government to rescind lockdown and mask measures.

London also drew significant anti-vaccine passport and lockdown demonstrations, with protesters waving flags and singing songs.

About 4,000 people appeared outside of the Greek Parliament in central Athens to protest against mandatory vaccinations, DW and other news agencies reported. Greek authorities used tear gas on some protesters.

Reuters contributed to this report.
Russia's President Vladimir Putin and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu attend the Navy Day parade in Saint Petersburg, Russia, on July 25, 2021. (Sputnik/Aleksey Nikolskyi/Kremlin via Reuters)

Putin Says Russian Navy Can Carry Out Unpreventable Strike If Needed

MOSCOWThe Russian navy can detect any enemy and launch an unpreventable strike if needed, President Vladimir Putin said on July 25, weeks after a UK warship angered Moscow by passing the Crimea peninsula.

We are capable of detecting any underwater, above-water, airborne enemy and, if required, carry out an unpreventable strike against it, Putin said, speaking at a navy day parade in St. Petersburg.

Putins words follow an incident in the Black Sea in June, when Russia said it had fired warning shots and dropped bombs in the path of a British warship to chase it out of Crimea waters.

Sailors line up on a deck of the nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine K-549 Knyaz Vladimir before the Navy Day parade in Saint Petersburg, Russia, on July 25, 2021. (Sputnik/Aleksey Nikolskyi/Kremlin via Reuters)

Britain rejected Russias account of the incident, stating that it believed any shots fired were a pre-announced Russian gunnery exercise and that no bombs had been dropped.

Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, but the UK and most of the world still recognize the Black Sea peninsula as part of Ukraine, not Russia.

Putin said last month that Russia could have sunk the British warship, the HMS Defender, which it accused of illegally entering its territorial waters, without starting World War III. He also said the United States played a role in the provocation.

By Andrey Ostroukh
Rewind, Review, and Re-rate: Pink Cadillac: A Late 80s Eastwood Vehicle You Should Avoid Taking a Ride In

Funny how our tastes change. When I saw Clint Eastwoods Pink Cadillac back in 1989 when it came out, I thought it was the bees knees (huge Clint fan here). I thought it was exceptionally hilarious.

My main memory was of Clint in a gold lame suit and pencil moustache, with his hair slicked back, saying lines like: Well I can dig it. I mean, the very concept alone sounds fun, does it not? And that particular bit is pretty fun, upon rewinding. Its also got the memorable line, Never mess with a mans vehicles.

Tom Nowak (Clint Eastwood), in Pink Cadillac. (Malpaso Productions/Warner Bros.)

Its got the type of romantic imagery that resonates with Americans. Case in point: the actual pink Cadillac, of the vintage, pre-1970s years; they are things of great beauty. We must pay homage to them. And we do: Elvis drove a pink Cadillac, Aretha Franklin sang a song about a pink Cadillac, Clint made a movie called Pink Cadillac, and Jason Momoa made a motorcycle movie where he meets a beautiful woman who drives a pink Cadillac. So theres that.

Lou Ann McGuinn (Bernadette Peters) and Tom Nowak (Clint Eastwood), in Pink Cadillac. (Malpaso Productions/Warner Bros.)

Theres a bunch of other stuff in there that goes well with pink Cadillacs, Thelma and Louise type stuff, like tumbleweeds, dusty highways, and Ry Cooder-ish musical musings. Its in this setting that Clint plays Tom Nowak, skip-tracer. And you know we Americans love our skip-tracers, bounty hunters, and tales of runnin from the law.

What Goes On

This is a mid-career Eastwood action-comedy, directed by his long-time-collaborator Buddy van Horn (who also directed the Clint-acts-with-an-orangutan comedy Any Which Way You Can).

Tom the free-lancing skip-tracer works for Buddy (Gerry Bamman), a bail bondsman, in Sacramento, California. Toms schtick is befuddling his prey by using disguises and speaking in accents. He variously pretends to be a rodeo clown, a cop, a fake radio-prize game host, and the owner of a Reno casino.

Tom Nowak (Clint Eastwood) as a rodeo clown, in Pink Cadillac. (Malpaso Productions/Warner Bros.)

Tom gets wheedled by boss Buddy into tracking down one Lou Ann McGuinn (Broadway musical star Bernadette Peters), who skipped bail when she inadvertently got caught up in her loser-husband Roys (Timothy Carhart) counterfeit money scheme.

Lou Ann goes on the lam, baby in tow, to visit her sister (Frances Fisher) in Reno, absconding with Roys 59 pink Cadillac thats parked in front of her trailer park home. She also inadvertently absconds with a big bag of bills stuffed behind the convertible hood. When the wind starts blowing dollars all over the highway like confetti, she thinks its $250,000 counterfeit, but its in fact a quarter of a million bona fide buckaroonies belonging to Birthright, the white supremacist group Roys a bro of.

Birthright is of course immediately on her trail for taking the money and running and maybe telling on them too. Tom spots her pink Caddy in front of a Reno casino, but before you can blink an eye, the ordinarily very professional Toms in love and trying to help Lou Anns cause, clear her name, and get all that cash to the DA. Very convincing.

Tom Nowak (Clint Eastwood, L) and Lou Ann McGuinn (Bernadette Peters), in Pink Cadillac. (Malpaso Productions/Warner Bros.)

But when they get to her sisters house to pick up the baby, Roy and his crystal meth-head buddy Waycross (John Dennis Johnston) throw a monkey-wrench into the proceedings and take the baby.

John Dennis Johnston (L) and Michael Des Barres play white supremacists in Pink Cadillac. (Malpaso Productions/Warner Bros.)

Cut to the chasethe baby ends up in supremacist stronghold in the Sierra Madres, overseen by cult leader Alex (Michael Des Barre)and the Birthright hold the baby hostage. Will Tom prevail against the odds? Will Lou Ann get her baby back? Will Tom and Lou Ann make a nice couple?

Skip This Skip-Tracing

You want a good skip-tracer movie? Watch Midnight Run. Pink Cadillacs silly antics might have worked in a sillier movie like Rango, but its supremacist subplot is too heavy-handed and ponderous a topic for this fluff and only serves to weigh the proceedings down.

Also out of place is Clint attempting to play the opposite role that he usually plays in the classic clown-straight man dichotomy. Eastwood is one of the best straight men in the business. Hes at his funniest when hes stone-faced, quietly apoplectic, and deadly serious.

The thing about playing the clown is you have to have a preternatural ton of extrovert energy, like a Molly Shannon, a Robin Williams, or a Jim Carrey. Its a talent unto itself, that kind of energy. Speaking of Jim Carrey, the then unknown Carrey has a cameo in Pink Cadillac, playing what looks to be a bit about Elvisif Elvis had been born a Thalidomide baby. Or maybe its a Thalidomide guy doing an Elvis impression. Thaaats  not funny. Thats just bad taste on Jims part and Clints for putting it in the movie (to be fair, its probably guilty-pleasure-hysterical seeing Carrey do it in-person). But as mentioned, white supremacy is not generally chock full of joke material either, so its odd as a choice for a little lighthearted action-comedy.

The then unknown Jim Carrey playing a standup comedian, in Pink Cadillac. (Malpaso Productions/Warner Bros.)

Anyway, certain actors are not cut out to do certain actor-y things, and at this point in his career, Eastwood apparently still wasnt yet entirely clear about his range; didnt maybe realize yet that a role that calls for frenetic energy and, say, speaking with a lisp, was not the best use of his taciturn talents. Straight men who try the clown role know subconsciously that theyre out of their element, trying to gin up that excess energy, and theres a certain self-consciousness that leaks. Life is better when Clint is mean and manly. But speaking of bad acting, the entire movie is rife with it, to the point where you wonder if Gerry Bamman ever acted in his life. I swear Ive seen him be good in something but I cant recall what it was now.

Tom Nowak (Clint Eastwood, L) and Lou Ann McGuinn (Bernadette Peters), in Pink Cadillac. (Malpaso Productions/Warner Bros.)

What else? Bernadette Peters is very cute. Verrrry cute. Yup. Shes obviously absolutely killer on a Broadway stage. Here, not so much, but she might be the best thing about the movie. But basically, this is one of Clint Eastwoods lesser  vehicles. Id recommend you dont mess with it.

Pink Cadillac

Director: Buddy Van Horn

Starring: Clint Eastwood, Bernadette Peters, Timothy Carhart, John Dennis Johnston, Michael Des Barres, Gerry Bamman, Frances Fisher

Running Time: 2 hours, 2 minutes

Rating: PG-13

Release Date: May 26, 1989

Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

Mark Jackson is the senior film critic for The Epoch Times. Mark has 20 years experience as a professional New York actor, classical theater training, and a BA in philosophy. He recently narrated the Epoch Times audiobook How the Specter of Communism is Ruling Our World, and has a Rotten Tomatoes author page.
Police hold up a warning banner and instruct people to move on during the 24th anniversary of Hong Kong's handover from Britain to Chinese rule in Hong Kong on July 1, 2021. (Peter Parks/AFP via Getty Images)

The Drastic Makeover of Hong Kong: Dark Days Ahead

Commentary

The sinking of Hong Kong officially started on the eve of June 30, 2020, with the enactment of Beijings national security law. Hong Kong has lost its glory, and the defenders of our old core values have either fled the city, been detained, or been imprisoned. Hongkongers have used peaceful means to tell Beijing to leave their city alone and to honor Deng Xiaopings version of one country, two systems. However, the two systems model has failed.

With the drastic makeover in the electoral system and the ambiguous terms of the national security law, Hong Kongs rule of law is merging gradually into communist Chinas opaque legal system. And worse, professional associations have also been stripped of their powers. The communists in Hong Kong and China are in full control of the citys education, medical, financial, and legal sectors.

The revised Immigration Law will come into effect on Aug. 1. The Immigration (Amendment) Bill 2020 would empower the Hong Kong government to bar a passenger or a member of a crew from boarding a transportation carrier to enter or leave the city. You might see immigration officers carrying guns and steel batons inside and outside of the restricted airport area.

The Hong Kong Bar Association raised their concerns pertaining to the measure in early February in a letter to the Legislative Council, saying that provisions would result in arbitrary and unjustified immigration detention in circumstances that are incompatible with fundamental human rights and long-standing common law principles. Airlines are required to submit information on their crew and passengers before arrival, through an Advanced Passenger Information system.

Now comes the bombshell that will take Hong Kong down completely. Chinas top leadership, the Standing Committee of the National Peoples Congress (NPCChinas rubber-stamp legislature) approved the Anti-Sanctions Law in June, which will give Chinese authorities the legal power to impose countermeasures against foreign sanctions.

Critics believe that the Anti-Sanctions Law can be used as a powerful weapon to punish organizations and individuals who impose sanctions on China and Hong Kong, including their relatives. To make matters worse, some analysts believe that China will use the law as a form of retaliation and will pressure institutions, businesses, and other nations to side with Beijing. The economic and political implication is huge for Hong Kong, and corporations might quickly leave the city in droves to avoid any political uncertainty.

Hong Kong used to give most people a level playing field to run their businessesmany entrepreneurs can survive in Hong Kong, and a few can become very successful. Hong Kong isnt just a financial city; there are also long-established tradesmen and craftsmen.

Beijing has clearly tightened its grip over the city by implementing draconian laws. The forced closure of Apple Daily and Next Magazine was surreal. The national security law is a lethal weapon used to punish any institution or individual for committing acts that Beijing deems as secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces.

An employee holds up the latest copies of the Apple Daily newspaper outside at the offices in Hong Kong on June 24, 2021. (Anthony Kwan/Getty Images)

Hong Kongs drastic transformation puts a lot of pressure on the citys financial industry and businesses. The laws imposed by the Chinese regime on Hong Kong are meant to silence the so-called opposition and suppress every citizen. The DNA of Hong Kong is now being changed forever, and even my friends who support the establishment have told me that they dont want to see the next generation grow up in a place where theres no free speech and the laws are ambiguous. Simply put, no one wants to live under tyranny.

With all the abrupt changes in Hong Kong, an increased exodus of capital outflow is happening. Those who leave might not want to come back in the near future. This time, it isnt just the highly skilled middle class that will leave the city.

The 11 Hong Kong and mainland officials who were sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department under the Trump administration last year have been criticized for destroying the city. The officials, including Chief Executive Carrie Lam, were sanctioned for undermining Hong Kongs autonomy and restricting the freedom of expression or assembly of the citizens of Hong Kong, according to a statement from the Treasury Department. The Chinese regime was also criticized by other countries for encroaching on Hong Kongs freedoms.

Beijing retaliated by sanctioning U.S., Canadian, and EU officials. Its sad to see that Hong Kong has been the biggest loser in the sanction wars between China and the Western superpowers.

Recently, one of my business contacts in Hong Kong expressed concern and asked me, Do you think Carrie Lam and these sanctioned officials are still in their right mental state of mind to administer Hong Kong?

I didnt know how to respond.

With Apple Daily now gone, most people would doubt whether Hong Kong can still be intact and free from Beijings influence. I believe the political massacre of the citys freedoms hasnt stopped yet, and I see more turmoil in the near future. Lets defend Hong Kong as best we can, even though we all know that it will be dark days ahead.

Edward Chin runs an investment company. Chin was formerly country head of a UK publicly listed hedge fund, the largest of its kind measured by asset under management. Outside the hedge funds space, Chin is the convenor of 2047 Hong Kong Monitor and a senior adviser of Reporters Without Borders (RSF, HK & Macau). Chin studied speech communication at the University of Minnesota and received his MBA from the University of Toronto. Twitter: edwardckchin Youtube: Ed Chin Live Facebook.com/edckchin Email: edckchin@gmail.com

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
A man walks past the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street in New York on May 10, 2021. (Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images)

The Great American Weakness

Commentary

A recent headline in The Wall Street Journal calls attention to a great American weaknesslove of money over the country.

The headline says: Chinas Huawei Hires Democratic Lobbyist Tony Podesta. By itself, that may not mean much to the vast majority of readers. So let me explain. Tony Podesta is the brother of John Podesta. John is a longtime Washington political veteran of the Democratic Party. He served as chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, has been a prodigious fundraiser for the Democratic Party, and founded the very liberal-leaning Center for American Progress think tank in Washington.

Hes a constant adviser to President Joe Biden, with more or less instant entree to the Oval Office at any time.

All of this makes Tonys brotherly relationship something of potentially extreme value. I mean, a message can go from his lips to Johns and then to the presidents in a few seconds if not micro-seconds.

In the past in America, it was deemed unseemly and a matter not only of poor manners but of poor personal character to attempt to take advantage of high-level personal relationships for the low purpose of making money. It was seen as akin to selling ones soul merely to gain filthy lucre. It was understood to be dishonorable and something that people of character simply did not do.

After leaving the White House, President Ulysses S. Grant was destitute and dying. To support himself and his family financially, he wrote Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. He died of cancer of the throat shortly after finishing the manuscript. President Harry Truman retired from the Presidency to return to his very modest home in Missouri. He had no government pension and lived on modest savings and donations from friends.

Neither he nor any of his relatives took money in exchange for political lobbying efforts.

Huawei is nominally an independent Chinese corporation making telecommunications and other high-tech equipment. In fact, its founder and chief executive is a former high-ranking officer in the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA), and the company is closely aligned with and tied to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Indeed, so much so that it operates effectively as a state-owned enterprise. It is one of Chinas champion high technology corporations heavily subsidized and promoted by Beijing.

In becoming a lobbyist for Huawei, Tony Podesta is also becoming a lobbyist for the Chinese regime and for the CCP, whose objectives and values are at nearly complete odds with the objectives and values of the United States. Not only has he made himself a foreign agent in America, but he has made himself a foreign agent for a client who aims to undermine and displace American values, power, and influence.

In short, he has made himself a traitor to his country.

It would be bad enough if this were an exception to the standard rule. Alas, it is not. Major U.S. corporations and CEOs have set the example Podesta is now following. To get around U.S. laws on handling customer data, Apple has made a deal with ceding legal ownership of its customer data to a Chinese state-owned corporation. If youre an Apple customer, you might be surprised to now find out that, without telling you, Apple has given all its data on you to Beijing.

When he appears in Washington and testifies before Congress, Apple CEO Tim Cook presents himself as the American head of an American corporation. In fact, he is working a lot harder for Beijing than he is for Washington.

Then theres Wall Street. Recently, the Chinese regime has acted to halt several financing and investment efforts by major Chinese corporations such as Alibaba and DiDi. This is clearly a matter of the CCP showing the rich leaders of Chinese private corporations whos really in charge. The value of these companies and of many related corporations has fallen dramatically as a consequence, and many private investors have had significant losses forced upon them.

Yet major Wall Street leaders like Steve Schwarzman of Blackstone and Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates continue to tell global investors that their future is in China. Worse, many pension funds, without any significant knowledge of the reality of the Chinese regime, are automatically allocating substantial portions of their portfolios to investments in China, thereby effectively promoting and strengthening the efforts of the CCP to displace the United States and its free world allies as the global leaders.

In their embalmment in Beijing and Moscow, Mao and Lenin are laughing.

Clyde Prestowitz is an Asia and globalization expert, a veteran U.S. trade negotiator, and a presidential adviser. He was the leader of the first U.S. trade mission to China in 1982 and has served as an adviser to Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. As counselor to the secretary of commerce in the Reagan administration, Mr. Prestowitz headed negotiations with Japan, South Korea, and China. Mr. Prestowitzs newest book is The World Turned Upside Down: China, America and the Struggle for Global Leadership, published in January 2021.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
To Solve Homelessness, the Underlying Reasons Must Be Addressed

Commentary

The scenes were shocking as activists clashed with police officers who were dismantling a homeless encampment in Toronto on July 21. Officers were compelled to use pepper spray and force as activists linked arms and attempted to block the efforts of the police. In the end, 26 activists were arrested and the encampment was removed.

This scenario is becoming all too common as every major city in Canada grapples with the growing problem of urban homeless encampments.

Contrary to what activists may claim, cities and police forces have been using an incredible amount of patience and restraint in dealing with encampments. Housing options are available and offered along with counselling. Weeks of warnings preclude any police actions against encampments, and residents are given plenty of time to relocate if they choose to. Physical action to dismantle camps is a last resort after all other efforts to resolve the issue have been attempted.

Its not the case that the residents of these camps had nowhere else to go. They chose to remain in the camps despite warnings and often with the encouragement of activists, who appear eager to see conflict at times.

Urban homeless encampments are not sustainable, nor are they any kind of long-term solution to the issue of displaced people. Explosions rocked a homeless camp in Nanaimo last December as a fire ignited propane tanks kept by residents. Also last December, murder charges were laid after a man was found dead in a Surrey, B.C., homeless camp, and in April of last year a 15-year-old boy was sexually assaulted in a Victoria homeless camp. We cant pretend that the residents of these encampments are harmless. They are troubled people and they put each other as well as the surrounding communities at risk.

Health hazards due to uncleanliness in encampments are real as well. City parks simply werent designed for long-term camping. While many cities try to mitigate issues with the placement of extra trash disposal and portable washroom facilities, feces and garbage remain problems. Drug paraphernalia is often found discarded, while rats have even become an issue in some parks as municipal crews cant safely access the areas for maintenance and cleanup. People in the camps are distressed and dont see the use of syringe disposal bins, trash receptacles, or washroom facilities as immediate priorities for themselves.

The hard reality that most people do not want to face when it comes to handling those who reside in homeless encampments is that many of them need intervention and treatment. While activists like to claim that the issue is merely a lack of housing, that simply isnt true. Cities provide many kinds of transitional and long-term housing options for the impoverished. When a person is deep in the throes of drug addiction or has serious mental health challenges, they cant be placed in shelters or low-income housing units. Untreated addicts and people with mental health issues put fellow residents in housing facilities at risk along with staff and volunteers. These people need specialized care, and they are falling through the cracks. That is why they often find themselves in tent cities.

While dismantling homeless encampments is unavoidable, if we dont address the underlying reasons that people reside in these camps, nothing will change. The camps are but a symptom of a larger problem.

Seriously addicted individuals and people with mental health challenges cant simply heal themselves. They need assessment and treatment, and this often means an in-patient system. We have to accept that some people may need to be institutionalized and, yes, at times against their will. The other alternatives are for people to end up within our prison system or in our hospitals, which are already under stress due to capacity issues.

Secure treatment centres dont have to be prison-like. And the days of the old mental institutions such as the one depicted in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest are a thing of the past. Secured treatment is not a punitive measure. The goal needs to be the rehabilitation of the patient rather than permanent housing. While some may view forced institutionalization as cruel, is it any more cruel than leaving people to live on the streets? The people in homeless encampments, while being technically free, are living miserable and often short lives.

Chronic homelessness wont solve itself. Those who tend to reside in tent camps are unable to take care of themselves. We have a tough choice to make: Do we intervene and try to treat them? Or do we simply keep chasing them around from camp to camp?

Currently, we are trying to convince ourselves that these are people who have simply hit a road bump in life and will eventually pull themselves out. The reality is that this problem isnt going anywhere until we intervene in ways beyond dismantling tent camps.

Cory Morgan is a columnist and business owner based in Calgary.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Former President Donald Trump applauds supporters prior to speaking at a Turning Point Action Summit in Phoenix, Ariz., on July 24, 2021. (Ross D. Franklin/AP Photo)

Trump Hails Arizona GOP Senate for Election Audit at Phoenix Rally

Former President Donald Trump hailed the Arizona state Senate on July 24 for its months-long audit of Maricopa Countys 2.1 million ballots and election equipment, while pressing Arizonas attorney general to investigate the audits findings.

Speaking at an event in Phoenix called Rally for Election Integrity, Trump said the state Senate did the right thing when it authorized an audit of the county, a process thats still ongoing.

We will fight for truth, transparency, and accountability, and we will not stop until we have restored our American birthright of honest, free, and fair elections, he said in his speech. Were gathered here in Phoenix to show our support for election integrity and for the brave and unyielding conservative warriors in the Arizona state Senate.

Trump praised Arizona Republican Party Chairwoman Kelli Ward, who has frequently posted about alleged election fraud since last November, describing her as someone who is really a fighter.

I called up Kelli recently. I said, Why wouldnt the governor want an audit? Maybe everything will prove to be correct, which we know wont happen, Trump remarked, referring to Gov. Doug Ducey. Why wouldnt somebody want election integrity? Why wouldnt they want to know? And I would be very happywont happenbut I would be very happy if they did it and everything was perfect. But youre not going to find that.

Former President Donald Trump applauds supporters as he arrives to speak at a Turning Point Action Summit in Phoenix, on July 24, 2021. (Ross D. Franklin/AP Photo)

Trump, who has clashed with the Arizona governor in the past, noted that he wouldnt be supporting Ducey in the future.

Hes not getting my endorsement.

Trumps speech also applied more pressure on Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, who is running for one of Arizonas U.S. Senate seats.

Hopefully, hes going to do what everybody knows has to be done, Trump said, referring to Brnovich.

The attorney general didnt attend the Arizona event because of a family commitment, local news website AzCentral reported.

Former President Donald Trump makes an entrance at the Rally To Protect Our Elections conference in Phoenix, Ariz., on July 24, 2021. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

Brnovich and Democrat Secretary of State Katie Hobbs are currently embroiled in a battle over whether to investigate and prosecute alleged voter fraud in the state. After Brnovich issued a request to Hobbss office, she responded in turn by saying that the attorney general should investigate state Republican Rep. Mark Finchem.

President Joe Biden became the first Democratic presidential candidate to be certified as the winner of Arizonas election since 1996, defeating Trump by less than 1 percentage point. Biden also defeated Trump in Maricopa County, the most populous county in the state, by about 2 percentage points.

Brnovichs office didnt respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment by press time.
UK Taxpayers to Face COVID Bill for Decades to Come, MPs Warn

Taxpayers will be facing the costs of COVID-19 for decades while an inquiry will not come quickly enough to learn the lessons needed from the pandemic, MPs have said.

Two reports from the Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) released on Sunday slammed the Governments spending on unusable personal protective equipment (PPE) and said a public inquiry expected next year was not soon enough to fix some issues.

The PAC said the taxpayer would be exposed to significant financial risks for decades to come, and already the estimated cost of the government measures had reached 372 billion ($511 billion).

The committee also remains concerned that despite spending over 10 billion ($14 billion) on supplies, the PPE stockpile is not fit for purpose.

The PAC said that as of May this year, out of 32 billion items of PPE ordered by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), some 11 billion had been distributed, while 12.6 billion are stored in the UK as central stock.

Some 8.4 billion on order from other parts of the world have still not arrived in the UK.

But MPs were concerned the stockpile was costing around 6.7 million ($9.2 million) a week to store, with potential waste levels unacceptably high.

The report said there were 10,000 shipping containers of PPE still to be unpacked by May this year, but 2.1 billion items of PPE had already been found unsuitable for use in medical settings.

The committee said this cost more than 2 billion ($2.75 billion) of taxpayers money and over five times the estimate of PPE unfit for purpose given to MPs by DHSC in January 2021.

For the excess PPE that was suitable for medical use, the MPs were concerned the government is yet to create any robust plans for repurposing and distributing this essential stock in a way that ensures value for money and protects staff and patients.

Nurses changing their PPE on Ward 5, a COVID Red Ward, at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley, Scotland, on Jan.27, 2021. (Jane Barlow/PA)

Dame Meg Hillier, chairwoman of the Public Accounts Committee, said: With eye-watering sums of money spent on COVID measures so far, the government needs to be clear, now, how this will be managed going forward, and over what period of time.

The ongoing risk to the taxpayer will run for 20 years on things like arts and culture recovery loans, let alone the other new risks that departments across government must quickly learn to manage.

A promised public inquiry into the pandemic is not expected to start until spring next year, and will likely be long-running, and the PAC report said it was clear that government cannot wait for the review before learning important lessons and must instead present a COVID recovery plan in the autumn spending review.

Dame Meg said: If coronavirus is with us for a long time, the financial hangover could leave future generations with a big headache.

A DHSC spokeswoman responded: There are robust processes in place to ensure that government spending always provides value for money for the taxpayer.

We have worked tirelessly to source life-saving PPE to protect health and care staff, and we have delivered over 12.7 billion items to the frontline at record speed.

But Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner said the cross-party report is more evidence of the Tories failures during the pandemic that she says resulted in tens of thousands of avoidable deaths and saw eye-watering sums of taxpayers money wasted on unsafe PPE and contracts handed out to their mates.

We cannot wait until next year for the public inquiry to start and ministers cannot kick it into the long grass and cover up their failures by refusing to hand over information hidden in personal email accounts, she added.

The public inquiry must start immediately and the inquiry must have full access to all ministerial correspondence, contracts, and documents, including all government business carried out on personal email accounts.

By Geraldine Scott
A student studies outside the closed Wilson Library on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Chapel Hill, N.C., on Aug. 18, 2020. (Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images)

UNC Journalism Professors Protest Objectivity in News Reporting

Journalism professors at UNC Chapel Hill are protesting a core values statement that upholds objectivity as a key tenet of news reporting.

Faculty members of UNCs Hussman School of Journalism and Media converged last week to bemoan a statement of values thats etched in granite and is found in the lobby of their school.

The core values statement, installed two years ago, touts objectivity, impartiality, integrity and truth-seeking, and after their session that statement was reportedly scrapped from the schools website, the News & Observer reports.

In 2019, Walter Hussman, a UNC alumnus and owner of a media conglomerate of newspapers and other media outlets, donated $25 million to the UNC journalism school. Part of the donation contract installed those values into the schools wall and mission, according to UNCs website.

But Hussman had expressed concerns over the hiring of Nikole Hannah-Jones, the architect of the New York Times 1619 Project, and she cited the journalism magnate as one reason she rejected the UNC job.

Faculty say the display gives the impression those statements are values of the school and its faculty, and in a draft of a statement  faculty wrote it should be removed or given more context. The draft also said Hussmans actions had been harmful to the schools reputation, the News & Observer reported.

The journalism school dean, Susan King, told attendees she would explore options with lawyers about what the school can do with the display in the lobby.

Hussmans full statement of core values reads:

To give the news impartially, without fear or favor. (Adolph Ochs, 1858-1935)

Impartiality means reporting, editing, and delivering the news honestly, fairly, objectively, and without personal opinion or bias.

Credibility is the greatest asset of any news medium, and impartiality is the greatest source of credibility.

To provide the most complete report, a news organization must not just cover the news, but uncover it. It must follow the story wherever it leads, regardless of any preconceived ideas on what might be most newsworthy.

The pursuit of truth is a noble goal of journalism. But the truth is not always apparent or known immediately. Journalists role is therefore not to determine what they believe at that time to be the truth and reveal only that to their readers, but rather to report as completely and impartially as possible all verifiable facts so that readers can, based on their own knowledge and experience, determine what they believe to be the truth.

When a newspaper delivers both news and opinions, the impartiality and credibility of the news organization can be questioned. To minimize this as much as possible there needs to be a sharp and clear distinction between news and opinion, both to those providing and consuming the news.

A newspaper has five constituencies, including first its readers, then advertisers, then employees, then creditors, then shareholders. As long as the newspaper keeps those constituencies in that order, especially its readers first, all constituencies will be well served. (Walter Hussman, 1906-1988)

At least one top official at UNC has balked at the journalism professors demands.

I feel like Walter Hussman has been unfairly maligned, Charlie Tuggle, senior associate dean for undergraduate studies, told ABC 11. Hes truly worried about the state of journalism in todays world, as am I. I share those concerns with him.

When Tuggle asked what about the core values statement is so problematic, he said the response he received came down to one wordobjectivityand that no journalist can be truly objective.

Are we saying that because we cant be perfect at it, we dont even try? Tuggle said to ABC 11. We just give it up? Thats what I teach my students is, you cannot be unbiased. Your lived experience is your lived experience. And thats going to color everything you do and say. And what you believe. But, try. Please try.

By Jennifer Kabbany

This article was originally published on The College Fix.
Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas addresses demonstrators with a bullhorn during a protest at the Country Club Plaza on May 31, 2020 in Kansas City, Missouri. (Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images)

Young Men of Color Are Weak Point in Boosting COVID-19 Vaccination Rate: Kansas City Mayor

The mayor of Kansas City, Missouri, said he wants to boost the citys COVID-19 vaccination rate by attempting to dissuade young men of color from being hesitant to get the shot.

Mayor Quinton Lucas, a Democrat, said that part of the citys outreach will be giving away free items at rap and country music concerts in a bid to boost vaccinations.

Young men of color is a place where we have incredible weakness right now. Thats why were not only being as creative as possible in how we reach out through traditional media, but also concerts, Mayor Quinton Lucas, a Democrat, told CBS News on July 25. Well be appearing and giving away tickets at hip hop concerts, country music concerts, any number of things that say to people that the vaccine is around, the vaccine is safe, and its important for you to take.

After the interview, Lucas wrote on Twitter that vaccines [are] coming to the Gucci Mane concert.

Kansas City, he said, currently has a painfully low vaccination rate against COVID-19, the illness caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.

According to the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, about 38.8 percent of the population was fully vaccinated, which is lower than the nationwide vaccination rate. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that about 49 percent of the population is inoculated.

Lucas later added in the interview that the city might rethink its policies about vaccination mandates but said theyre not needed so far. A mask mandate, he said, also isnt needed now.

In terms of compulsion, we are giving more consideration to requiring all of our 5,000 city employees to be vaccinated, he said. I think that is something. I do encourage more American businesses, more American local and state governments to consider that as an important step for how we can show how important it is to our jurisdictions.

His remarks come as nearby St. Louis County announced it would reimpose an indoor mask mandate for both unvaccinated and vaccinated individuals and strongly encouraged masking outdoors.

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in 2022, soon after announced he would file a lawsuit against the countywide mask policy.

The citizens of St. Louis and St. Louis County are not subjectsthey are free people. As their Attorney General, Ill be filing suit Monday to stop this insanity, he wrote in a tweet on July 23.
NORWALK  Apartment buildings, vacant plots of land, strip malls and a Long Island Sound mansion are among the properties that will be put up for auction in the coming weeks if the owners dont pay thousands of dollars in back taxes.

After postponing last years biennial tax sale due to the coronavirus pandemic, city tax collectors are now hoping to recover more than $2.8 million in unpaid property taxes by late September.

According to the city tax collectors office, more than 60 property owners, including several commercial real estate developers and local homeowners, are behind on their property taxes.

The whole point of the tax sale is to compel payment, said Lisa Biagiarelli, Norwalks tax collector. Its not necessarily to sell anybodys property. We do the sale as an enforcement measure, so that the threat of the auction compels taxpayers to bring their accounts current.

The threat has paid off so far, according to Biagiarelli. Since the city began asking delinquent property owners to pay their taxes, officials have collected more than $6.2 million from 182 accounts.

Biagiarelli said that number will likely grow in the lead up to Sept. 20  the day of the auction is scheduled to be held. In past tax sales, only about a dozen to 20 properties ultimately go up for auction.

Still, with just two months to go before the auction, dozens of property owners currently face the prospect of losing the legal right to their home or business. As of last week, a total of 66 accounts were behind on their taxes.

The largest tax bill is owed by the owner of a 16,000-square-foot Tudor-style mansion in Rowayton. The owner, who could not be reached for comment Friday, owes more than $320,000 in back taxes on the home. According to city property records, the home was appraised at more than $4.7 million in 2018.

The vast majority of the delinquent property owners owe more than $10,000, though a handful owe less than $2,000. The average property owner, according to a review of the city records, owes $43,000 in unpaid taxes.

Some of the owners, including out-of-state property owners, have owed money to the city for several years. Biagiarelli said her office has issued a series of public notices in an effort to reach people who may not be aware their property could go up for sale.

In some cases, we are trying to reach owners who may not be in Norwalk, she said. They may own property, but be elsewhere and we dont have a valid address for them. So were hoping somebody will see this and get in touch with them.

Connecticuts towns and cities were barred for several months last year from holding tax sales as part of an executive order issued by Gov. Ned Lamont in the early days of the pandemic. The suspension was lifted late last year, in part to allow cash-strapped municipalities to recoup lost revenue.

The delinquent properties will be sold to the highest bidder at the upcoming public auction. The bidding will start at the amount of taxes owed on the property, which could lead to massive windfalls for the winning bidder. Many of the properties are valued at more than 10 times than what they owe in taxes.

Biagiarelli said between 50 and 60 bidders generally attend the auction, which is normally held every two years. She said bidders must be able to pay the full bid on the week of the auction to secure the property.

Were not giving people the opportunity to go out and secure financing or anything like that, she said. You cant get a mortgage on a potential tax sale property in that amount of time.

After the auction concludes, Biagiarelli said, the original property owners will still have another six months to pay off their tax debt before the property title is officially awarded to the winning bidder.

The auction will be held Sept. 20 at 4 p.m. at the Norwalk Concert Hall at 125 East Ave. Biagiarelli said individuals interested in attending the auction are encouraged to purchase a packet explaining the tax sale process at the tax collectors office in city hall.

richard.chumney@hearstmediact.com
WINDOW ROCK, Ariz. (AP)  The Navajo Nation on Sunday reported six new COVID-19 cases and four additional deaths.

The latest numbers released brought the total number of coronavirus-related cases on the vast reservation to 31,297 since the pandemic began more than a year ago.
On this weeks episode of Segue, Southern Illinois University Edwardsvilles weekly radio program exploring the lives and work of the people on campus and beyond, College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) Dean Kevin Leonard, PhD, interviews Nancy Huyck, PhD, associate professor and chair of the Department of Public Administration and Policy Analysis.

This episode of Segue airs at 9 a.m. on Sunday, July 25. Listeners can tune into WSIE 88.7 FM The Sound or siue.edu/wsie.

An SIUE alumna, Huyck earned a bachelors of speech communication in 2001. She later earned a masters and doctorate in public administration from the University of Illinois Springfield (UIS). She has served on the SIUE Faculty Senate as the Master of Public Administration (MPA) internship director and is currently chair of the SIUE Committee for Higher Administrator Performance Appraisal.

Welcome to Segue, Dr. Huyck, begins Leonard. How did you become interested in public administration?

I have been an educator for SIUE since 2006, responds Huyck. I have wanted to be involved in education in some capacity since I was a child. The U of I Springfields MPA program caught my eye as I was graduating with my bachelors at SIUE.

While attending UIS, Huyck enjoyed participating in a paid internship with the Illinois Department of Transportation, where she served as a highway operations intern for two years.

I assisted with projects that related to the maintenance and inspection of highways within Illinois, explains Huyck. I made lifelong friends while strengthening my skill sets and earning my masters degree.

Huycks internship led her to a full-time position as purchasing manager for the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency in Springfield.

At that point, were you interested in going back and earning your doctorate? inquires Leonard.

Yes, answers Huyck. I was pursuing my options to continue my education and found that there were resources as a full-time State of Illinois employee to pay for my tuition. I chose to return to UIS to continue pursuing public administration.

Was there a pivotal moment in which you decided to devote your career to public administration education? asks Leonard.

While in Springfield, I continued to gain experience working as a public administrator and began to embrace the applied practitioner side of the field, says Huyck. I enjoyed actively working for the government. As I was developing leadership skills, I became certain that I enjoyed the field both practically and academically.

Were there any important individuals who encouraged and supported you as you pursued your career both in public administration and higher education? asks Leonard.

One constant in my life has been the unwavering support of my family, especially my parents and grandparents, responds Huyck. Their sacrifices and contributions to my life continue to help me every day.

While teaching graduate communications courses at SIUE, Huyck chose to direct her dissertation work in the communications field while narrowly focusing projects on applied public administration. Huycks professional research interests include radio interoperability, public HR management, and environmental and sustainable practices for public agencies. She has previously presented research at professional annual conferences such as the American Society for Public Administration, Teaching in Public Administration, and the Western Social Science Association.

What are some of the questions you explore in your research? asks Leonard.

I have published articles in the area of interoperable radio communications, which seeks to understand how radios hold the ability to communicate emergency response messages across equipment. My primary research question examines the implementation of a federal grant and improving the interoperability of radio communications in certain public safety jurisdictions.

My secondary research question examines the effectiveness of specific grant funding to improve radio communications for the purpose of mutual aid between neighboring districts. My interest in radio communications developed as I was looking for areas to explore which connected elements of public policy, government administration and communication.

Whats next on your research agenda? inquires Leonard.

This upcoming academic year will be my third year chairing SIUEs Committee for Higher Administrator Performance Appraisal, explains Huyck. My current research focus is derived from this work. Specifically, I am developing an article which will focus on the process by which employee performance reviews are conducted in the public sector.

Tune in at 9 a.m. on Sunday, July 25, to WSIE 88.7 The Sound to hear the entire conversation.
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Sixteen months into the pandemic, testimonies of people suffering from long-term effects of COVID-19 are multiplying, but knowledge in this regard remains limited. A new transdisciplinary, multi-centre prospective cohort study of adults previously infected with COVID-19 in Quebec aims to fill this gap.

Winner of an international competition, the IMPACT QUEBEC COVID-19 Long Haul Study is supported by a grant from Pfizer Inc. Led by Dr. Thao Huynh, a researcher at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) and an epidemiologist-cardiologist at the MUHC, the study will assess the health of 200 participants over a one-year period.

According to statistics from the Johns Hopkins University, the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide approaches 200 million. Of these, a significant but unquantified proportion is experiencing long-term symptoms. Considering the magnitude of the current pandemic and the exponentially growing number of people with persistent symptoms suggestive of long haul COVID-19 and a possible heart problem, it is crucial to acquire in-depth knowledge of the extent and duration of cardiovascular and other complications from COVID-19 infection, says Dr. Huynh.

While the primary focus of the study is to measure cardiovascular complications, researchers will also look at the impacts of the infection on the neuro-cognitive, gastrointestinal and urinary systems. In addition, they will compare the severity and type of symptoms in older versus younger participants, as well as by sex and gender. They will record and analyze all major adverse events such as deaths, acute coronary syndromes, hospitalizations for heart failure, influenza or respiratory disease, strokes, thrombosis and acute kidney injuries requiring dialysis or hospitalization.

By conducting this long-term follow-up study, we hope to develop our capacity to detect and mitigate potential long-term complications of the viral infection," adds Dr. Huynh, who is part of the Cardiovascular Health Across the Lifespan Program at the RI-MUHC and also an Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine at McGill University.

The investigators aim to recruit adults who have been diagnosed with COVID-19 in Quebec and have experienced symptoms suggestive of cardiac dysfunction such as shortness of breath, palpitation, dizziness or chest pain during or after COVID-19 infection. Participants must have been diagnosed with COVID-19 at least two 2 months before enrollment in the study.

At a participants first visit, researchers will obtain their medical history, body mass index and blood pressure. They will also collect information about their cognitive function, quality of life and nutritional habits, and take certain renal, hematologic and immunologic measurements. In addition, participants will undergo non-invasive tests such as an electrocardiogram, cardiac imaging, and chest x-ray. Except for the cardiac magnetic resonance imaging, all other tests will be repeated one year after the initial visit.

The IMPACT QUEBEC COVID-19 Long Haul Study is being conducted in collaboration with researchers at McGill University, Universite de Sherbrooke and the Clinical Research Institute of Montreal. It was designed as a pilot study to collect data for a future larger cohort study.

The Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC)

rimuhc.ca
Citizen science is just what it sounds like, community members like you contributing to science. Data collected from backyards and greenspaces across the country help to build our knowledge about wildlife and can even help inform conservation actions.
ALTON  Weekly screenings, optional facial masks and layered COVID-19 mitigations comprise the Alton School Districts proposed 2021-22 School Opening Plan.

We realize these are extraordinary times and circumstances, Alton Superintendent Kristie Baumgartner said in a letter to parents. However, above all else, we remain thankful for our district students and families during these challenging times.

It will be critical for our families and schools to work together in navigating these uncertain times again this year, she said. High degrees of flexibility and fluidity will likely be necessary throughout the year. These important decisions must be carefully weighed using district, community and regional COVID data.

Through July 29, the school district is inviting parents to provide comments and questions via parentquestions@altonschools.org.

Baumgartner said the plan will be highly subject to change and dependent upon COVID metrics and updated guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Illinois Department of Public Health and the Illinois State Board of Education.

For example, we may have portions of the year where masks are optional for students, she said. Yet at other times, masks may be required.

The district plans to use in-person learning five days per week. Alternate learning options will only be available for non-vaccinated or vaccine-ineligible students who are also under an order to quarantine as directed by the Madison County Health Department.

The district is partnering with SHIELD Illinois to provide weekly COVID screenings for all Pre-K through 12th grade students. The non-invasive, saliva-based PCR tests take about five minutes and will require students to spit or drool a small sample of saliva into a testing container. Results will be sent to parents and the school nurse within 24 hours. Families can opt their children out of the screenings.

Masks will be optional for non-vaccinated students if families elect for their student to participate in COVID screenings each week. Non-vaccinated students  whose families opt them out of the weekly COVID screenings  will be required to wear a mask.

Mask use will be optional for vaccinated students and staff. Families of vaccinated students will need to provide proof of vaccination or have their students participate in weekly COVID screenings for mask use to be optional.

District officials noted the mask requirements are subject to change. Per the current CDC and IDPH guidance, the district said wearing a mask is highly recommended indoors for students and staff not vaccinated or ineligible for the vaccine. Mask use is also highly recommended outdoors for non-vaccinated students and staff when the activity involves sustained close contact with other individuals who are not fully vaccinated.

Under the proposed opening plan, masks should be worn by all Pre-K through 5th grade students and any non-vaccinated students at the middle and high school levels.

Cohorting, or keeping students together in smaller groups throughout the day, will also be used. Nonessential visitors, volunteers and activities will be strictly limited.

The district plans to keep at least 3 feet of distance between students in all areas, including the spacing of desks, food service and restroom lines and marked entrance and exit paths. Other safety measures  such as Plexiglas separators, seating charts and forward-facing desks  will remain in place for the start of school.

Regular handwashing and handwashing techniques will be emphasized, with hand sanitizing stations in all classrooms, hallways and common areas. At the middle and high school level, desks will be sanitized between each class. Schools will be cleaned and disinfected at higher levels and frequencies.

Families must screen their children for COVID symptoms daily before placing them on a bus or sending them to school. Children who have COVID-like symptoms or are otherwise ill must stay home. Students who present symptoms at school will be sent home and must be picked up within 30 minutes of being contacted.

District officials said students who are not fully vaccinated should quarantine after an exposure to someone with COVID-19 and be tested. Fully-vaccinated students who were exposed to an individual with COVID-19 but are asymptomatic do not need to quarantine or be tested.

Any student absences related to COVID-19 isolations or quarantines will be entered as excused. Instructional supports, related services and assignments will be provided to students via remote methods when required.

Daily school schedules include:

 Alton High School: 8:45 a.m. to 3:15 p.m.

 Alton Middle School: 8:45 a.m. to 3:15 p.m.

 East, North and West Elelmentary Schools: 8 a.m. to 2:25 p.m.

 Eunice smith,Gilson Brown, Lewis and Clark and Lovejoy Elementary Schools: 8:15 a.m. to 2:40 p.m.

 Mark Twain School: K-8, 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.; 9-12, 8:40 a.m. to 2:22 p.m.

 Early Childhood (Lewis and Clark and Gilson Brown sites): A.M. Session  8:30-11 a.m.; P.M. Session  12:30-3 p.m.

 Early Childhood (Eunice Smith and Alton High sites): A.M. Session  8:20-10:50 a.m.; P.M. Session  12:20-2:50 p.m.
EDWARDSVILLE  Three people were indicted Thursday by a Madison County grand jury.

Corvis D. Johnson, 36, of Bel Ridge, Missouri, was indicted July 22 for unlawful possession of weapons by a felon, a Class X felony; offenses relating to motor vehicles, a Class 2 felony; and unlawful possession of methamphetamine, a Class 3 felony.

The case was originally presented by the Pontoon Beach Police Department.

According to court documents, on Oct. 6, 2020 Johnson allegedly was found to be in possession of .45 caliber ammunition and body armor, a stolen 2006 Toyota Solera and less than five grams of methamphetamine.

Johnson has a 2016 Buchanan County, Missouri conviction for possession of controlled substance, making him ineligible to possess weapons, ammunition or body armor.

Bail was originally set at $150,000.

Aaron F. Duey, 34, of Alton, was indicted for offenses relating to motor vehicles, a Class 2 felony, and unlawful violation of an order of protection (second subsequent offense), a Class 4 felony, in separate cases

The cases were originally presented by the Alton Police Department.

According to court documents, on April 22, 2020, Duey allegedly was found to be in possession of a stolen 1997 Pontiac Grand Prix. On May 27, 2020 he allegedly violated an order of protection by being at a protected residence.

Bail was originally set at $50,000 for the vehicle charge, $15,000 for the violation of an order of protection charge.

Paul W. Bollinger, 32, of Alton, was indicted for unlawful possession of methamphetamine, a Class 1 felony.

The case was originally presented by the Alton Police Department.

According to court documents, on Oct. 2 Bollinger allegedly was found to be in possession of between 15-100 grams of methamphetamine.

He was also charged last week with unlawful possession with intent to deliver methamphetamine after a month-long investigation by the South Roxana Police Department. Several other people were also charged in that incident.

Bail for the original methamphetamine charge and his latest charge were both set at $50,000.
BERLIN (AP)  Around 65,000 revelers marched for LGBTQ rights at Berlins annual Christopher Street Day celebration on Saturday, more than three times as many as expected.

It was the biggest demonstration in Berlin since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

The parade started with a call from Klaus Lederer, Berlins senator for culture, to make the city a queer-freedom zone in response to deteriorating safety for gays and lesbians in Hungary and neighboring Poland.

LGBT-free zones have been declared in parts of Poland, while Hungary recently passed a law banning the depiction of homosexuality or gender reassignment to minors that has been denounced as discriminatory by human rights groups.

Lederer said the situation in the two EU members sends shivers down my back.

The senator also noted that the pandemic had been particularly hard for some gays and lesbians at home as shelters were closed. He said there is still much work to be done.

Police spokesman Martin Dams initially told The Associated Press that an estimated 35,000 people were taking part in the parade, but this figure was revised upwards later Saturday. Organizers put the figure at 80,000.

They had been expecting around 20,000 people amid social distancing rules and a ban on alcohol to combat the risk of new coronavirus infections.

There was no parade last year due to the pandemic so many people took advantage of the warm sunny weather and relatively low rate of infections to take part in the last major gathering for Berlins Pride month.

Nearby, the United States embassy flew a rainbow flag under the American flag.

The parade was led by five trucks that were spaced apart to give demonstrators more room as they danced their way to techno beats past the city's iconic Brandenburg Gate. Organizers made repeated calls for revelers to put masks on and keep their distance  though it wasnt always possible due to the sheer number of people.

The celebrations were preceded by an apparent homophobic attack on a male couple in a Berlin subway late Friday. Police said the men were sitting in a train when they were approached by a stranger who insulted them and then punched one of the men several times. Other passengers intervened and he was apprehended after fleeing briefly.

Also Friday, Bishop Christian Stablein asked during a service at Berlins Marienkirche for forgiveness from the LGBTQ community for the suffering caused to them by the evangelical church.
St. Thomas Aquinas Church, Archbald, was the setting April 17 for the wedding of Angela Lucci and Douglas P. Solomon, both of Mechanicsburg.

The bride is the daughter of Robert and Kathleen Lucci, Jefferson Twp. The bridegroom is the son of Douglas and Molly Solomon, Mechanicsburg.

The Rev. Brian Clarke officiated at the 1:30 p.m. ceremony.

Felicia Lucci, Washington, D.C., sister of the bride, was maid of honor. Laura Solomon, Dillsburg, sister of the bridegroom was bridesmaid.

Jason Solomon, Mechanicsburg, brother of the bridegroom, was best man.

A reception was held at Arcaro and Genells, Old Forge.

The bride earned a bachelors degree in history and international studies from Muhlenberg College, and a masters degree in public administration from The Pennsylvania State University. She also earned a juris doctorate from Widener Universitys Commonwealth School of Law. She is a prosecuting attorney for the Pennsylvania Department of State, Bureau of Professional and Occupational Affairs. She specializes in prosecuting professional licensees for misconduct for the State Board of Accountancy, States Architect Licensing Board, State Real Estate Commission and the Bureau of Elections and Notaries.

The bridegroom earned an associate degree in elementary education from Harrisburg Area Community College. He is a legal assistant for the Pennsylvania Department of State, Bureau of Professional and Occupational Affairs. He specializes in providing legal support services to the Office of Chief Counsels Counsel Division.

The couple, who met online, took a wedding trip to Las Vegas and Grand Canyon West Rim, Peach Springs, Arizona.
Lackawanna and Luzerne counties rank among the top 10 counties in Pennsylvania for the number of animal cruelty and neglect court cases filed in the past several years, data recently released by the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts show.

Between late August 2017  when Libres Law took effect and improved animal protections  and Dec. 31, law enforcement filed 182 court cases in Lackawanna County, including 73 for neglect, 97 for cruelty and 12 for aggravated cruelty to animals. The number of cases ranks Lackawanna sixth highest statewide.

In Luzerne, there were 166 cases filed, including 96 for neglect, 51 for cruelty and 19 for aggravated cruelty. Luzerne ranks 10th.

I dont know what motivates or what possesses people to neglect animals the way they do. I dont understand them, said Wayne Harvey, a humane officer for the Luzerne County Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. I dont think they look at an animal as a living, breathing creature that feels pain just like we do. The threshold of pain in these animals is the same as us. They hurt.

Ashley Wolo, executive director of Griffin Pond Animal Shelter in South Abington Twp., partly attributed the two counties high rankings to having proactive humane officers who investigate cases of cruelty.

Were fortunate  (in Lackawanna and Luzerne counties) to have some amazing humane officers, she said. We have animal control as well. Some other counties surrounding Luzerne and Lackawanna, they dont have that luxury. It may not feel like a luxury, but having these humane officers allows us to prosecute and to investigate these cruelty and neglect cases.

In some neglect cases, Wolo said she thinks people start off thinking they will be able to care for an animal and then find themselves in over their heads.

But then in some situations you see things where there are just no explanations, such as the Nova case, Wolo said.

Nova is a pit bull mix that was abandoned in Pittston last month and found to be abused and emaciated. Since her rescue, Nova has been steadily gaining weight and is doing exceptionally well, Pittston Police Chief Neil Murphy said.

Shes been in the car with us on patrol, and shes been here in my office. The guys take her outside for walks, he said. So shes been quite the fun family member for all of the department.

The department has taken up Novas cause, holding a fundraiser to help Maxwells House Resort, where Nova resides, and training her to help with community engagement and to work as a therapy dog for abused children.

When our detective has to go down to the Childrens Advocacy Center in Luzerne County and interview these children for sexual and physical abuse, or whatever type of abuse theyve had to endure, the dog will be there to help afterward, to ease their stress and anxiety, Murphy said.

More resources need to be put into staffing for law enforcement to work animal cruelty cases, he said.

The SPCA, the Humane Society, I think theyre overworked, Murphy said. I think they have a very large caseload, and I think it becomes very daunting, at times, for them to try to keep up with everything.

Since Libres Law took effect on Aug. 28, 2017, more than 25,000 animal abuse offenses have been filed statewide  54% of which were for animal neglect, according to the AOPC data. Inspired by a Boston terrier puppy who was badly abused and neglected in Lancaster County, the law improved tethering conditions for outside dogs, added protections for horses, increased penalties for animal abuse and required convicted abusers to forfeit animals.

Harvey said Libres Law expanded felony-level animal offenses, which previously were limited to cases of animal fighting or killing a zoo animal. Now, humane officers can file felony charges for lack of veterinary care that results in death or serious injury, he said.

Were never going to be rid of animal cruelty even though the sentences and punishment on the books are more severe than they used to be, Harvey said. Our problem is the court system. We need more judges who will hand out stiffer sentences once theyre convicted.

He said judges hands are tied in some cases because the states sentencing guidelines dont call for time behind bars. He said he would like to see minimum sentencing requirements for higher-level cruelty offenses.

If you dont have a deterrent out there, if youre not going to show that people are going to get into serious trouble for cruelty, well, theyre going to continue to do it because they know theyre just going to get a slap on the wrist, Harvey said. You can hand out felonies all day long, but if theyre not going to hand out a seven-year sentence or whatever, then were right back where we started.

Wolo said she thinks Libres Law has had a positive impact and urges people unable to care for their animals to reach out  despite the fact that many area shelters are already at capacity.

Well figure it out, she said. Well help. We dont want the animals to suffer.
Editors usually do their work from a desk in a newsroom, but in the mid-1880s, the editor of The Scranton Times briefly worked from a jail cell.

A.A. Chase was sent to Lackawanna County Jail for 60 days in the summer of 1885 after W.W. Scranton, the general manager of Lackawanna Iron and Coal Co. Works, sued him for libel.

The lawsuit arose from a story published first in The True Labor Advocate, a newspaper published in the same office as The Scranton Times.

In 1878, Lackawanna County was in the process of breaking off from Luzerne. Scranton was one of the supporters of the break, while Chase fought the new county ... tooth and nail, according to news clippings.

The True Labor Advocate often targeted new county supporters, an Aug. 1, 1899, Scranton Times article recalling the case reported. The story in question labeled Scranton a murderer for his actions during labor troubles in 1870 and 1877. According to a History of Lackawanna County, Scranton was instrumental in quelling the riots that arose as a result of the great strikes of those years, personally heading a posse who met and disbanded the rioters on Lackawanna Avenue.

The story in The True Labor Advocate and later published in The Scranton Times called Scranton, the grandfather of Gov. William Warren Scranton, a murderer for the part he took in the riots during the labor unrest.

Scranton sued for libel. When Chase didnt back down, he found himself a target of both a criminal and civil case.

In early 1879, a series of hearings in front of a panel of arbitrators were held to decide the libel lawsuit. Several Times employees were called to testify about their work at the paper, as well as what  and who  they saw in the days leading up to the articles publication in The True Labor Advocate.

Robert Enbody, a Pittston resident who said he was sent to Scranton to work against the county, said he was in Chases office when part of the article in question was written.

Chase, Judge Stanton and myself were present in the back room, Enbody testified, according to The Scranton Times article published Jan. 18, 1879. Judge William Henry Stanton wrote this article; at least, he was reading (excerpts) ... I next saw the article in the True Labor Advocate.

But other Times employees testified on Jan. 25, 1878, that Chase was not in the building when the newspaper was set up and printed and didnt know who wrote the article in question.

In the end, it didnt matter who wrote it. In the criminal case, Chase was sent to jail but was freed quickly after pleading insolvency, according to a June 2, 1885, Scranton Times story.

In a civil case, he was fined $1,400. He appealed the fine to the state Supreme Court and was given the choice to pay the fine or serve a 60-day prison sentence, the same newspaper article reported.

Chase ... will edit his paper from the Lackawanna county prison for the next 60 days, the June 2, 1885, Wilkes-Barre Times Leader reported. It is well known that by a manly retraction he could have escaped nearly all the litigation, expense or personal inconvenience he endured. He preferred to fight it out to the end, taking his chances.

Much like his legal fight, Chases opposition to the new county was futile, too. Lackawanna officially became a county on Aug. 13, 1878, after an overwhelming majority of residents supported the formation of Lackawanna County, according to news clippings.
1936: This photo from the Scranton Republican marks the grand opening of a new American Stores grocery in downtown Scranton. Part of a Philadelphia-based grocery chain, the store was one of 33 located in Scranton alone, under the management of Lloyd Weller, the Scranton area superintendent. The new store at 229 Wyoming Ave. was described as the most beautiful of the companys more than 3,000 stores across seven states. It featured the latest in refrigeration, as well as large ceiling fans to cool the 7,000-square-foot space. Shoppers could choose from a full range of dry groceries, fresh vegetables, pastry, meats and dairy, including cheeses from around the world.

2021: The store was soon subject to mergers and name changes but remained a thriving grocery outlet for almost 30 years. It was briefly an Acme in the early 1940s, and operated as a Giant market from 1946 to 1971. After the Giant closed, the space housed Helen Schwartz gifts until 1980. The building served briefly as the Sherman Hotel and was torn down around 1985. Its now a parking lot.

 Research courtesy of Lackawanna Historical Society
The Wright Center for Community Health is making back-to-school shopping a little easier for families in need.

The health care provider will begin a series of backpack giveaways for students in kindergarten through 12th grade Tuesday at its Scranton practice, 501 S. Washington Ave., from noon to 2 p.m.

The giveaways continue through mid-August at other locations in Blooming Grove Twp., Jermyn, Kingston, South Abington Twp. and Pittston. Each backpack will contain notebooks, folders, pencils and a pencil case.

Wright Center for Patient & Community Engagement Co-chair Bill Waters, Ph.D., expects the giveaway to especially benefit students as theyre returning to regular instruction after school closures from the COVID-19 pandemic.

This year, its very important because of the fact that kids are getting back to a regular school experience, and with all the challenges of the hybrid and virtual instruction, I think the backpack will be a very important medium to help kids get organized for the new school year, he said.

Last year, the Wright Center gave away 1,000 backpacks, and officials predict an increased need since not all students required them while learning from home. They ordered 2,000 backpacks to give away but plan to buy more if theres a greater need.

There are no income requirements for the giveaway, and preregistration isnt necessary. The Wright Center asks people coming to the giveaways to wear a face mask.

Were hoping to make a large number of backpacks available to anyone in the community who needs one so when they start school, they can be prepared and organized and get a good start to the school year, Waters said.

The Patient & Community Engagement Council focuses on addressing the social and economic determinants of health, Waters said. For instance, people without access to quality education may be less healthy than others with access, he added.

Lakeland School District Superintendent Marc Wyandt said he appreciates the generosity of the Wright Center, as some parents in the district struggle to purchase school supplies for their children.

Its a great service to our students and our school community, Wyandt said. We know that there are families who struggle, and the willingness of the Wright Center to provide these items to our students is something that most definitely helps to ensure they can begin school on a positive note.

For information, visit thewrightcenter.org.
In politics and sewage, flow sometimes exceeds capacity.

On Thursday, crews were wrapping up plumbing repairs in and outside the Lackawanna County Government Center. Backed-up toilets in the seat of county power led to the discovery and replacement of a constipated sewer main. Clogs bedevil every bureaucracy.

In the ongoing you-know-what match between county and city officials over the collection of delinquent Scranton taxes, execrable discharges continued to stream freely.

Near the end of Wednesdays commissioners meeting, solicitor Frank Ruggiero announced the countys intent to flush an agreement that has returned more than $3.3 million to city coffers since April. The no-bid contract awarded without public announcement or an official vote shoveled $330,000 in legal fees to a politically connected local law firm.

The old-school, backroom business-as-usual way this agreement was hatched naturally cast suspicion on a partnership that produced an astonishing windfall for the city and attorney Joseph Joyce, of Joyce, Carmody & Moran. The Scranton firm banked $287,626 in tax collection fees in April and May alone  more than 2 times the $104,537 it was paid for tax claim bureau work in 2020, county records reveal.

Joyce made so much money in such a short time, Ruggiero dropped Joyces cut to 5% and tucked the remaining 5% in the county treasury. The split did nothing for delinquent taxpayers still stuck paying 10%.

Ruggiero set a 60-day expiration date on the program, accusing Mayor Paige Gebhardt Cognetti and others of pushing a false narrative that seeks to shield city officials from political blowback while they reap the benefits of the agreement.

Efforts to work through this false narrative have unfortunately been unsuccessful, the solicitor said, claiming that the situation has become so politically toxic, its draining time and energy away from other vital county business.

Ruggieros blast of rhetorical flatulence was backed up by Democratic majority Commissioners Jerry Notarianni and Debi Domenick, who raised a stink about what they characterized as Cognetti and Companys insufficient gratitude for the countys selfless help.

I think Jerry said it best when he said, We are handing them a check and they are taking it and beating us over the head with it,  Domenick said, inadvertently invoking an image of Cognetti menacing the majority commissioners with an oversized check printed on plywood.

Republican minority Commissioner Chris Chermak was also at the meeting.

The latest clash of Team Notariannis throwback politics and the mayors agenda of transparency and accountability is another case of Paige against the Machine. Because it was a professional service, no bidding or vote was required to hire Joyce.

Joyces hiring was legal, and mere legality has been the standard in Northeast Pennsylvania government since the first patronage contract was quietly awarded to a buggy whip maker with a cousin on council.

Legal doesnt always pass the smell test, however, and Joyce and Ruggieros decision to charge taxpayers an unconscionable 10% fee as the economy claws its way out of a pandemic naturally drew pushback from the mayor and other officials elected to serve the public interest over private enterprise.

Ruggiero and the rest of Team Notarianni insist the mayor and other officials involved in the negotiations were made aware of the 10% surcharge. It was referenced in the final agreement, which Cognetti signed off on.

We have an intergovernmental agreement, and they were part of the drafting process, Ruggiero told me Friday. They were part of the meetings and discussions regarding the drafting of the document, and not just the administration.

Ruggiero said city council solicitor Kevin Hayes and council President Bill Gaughan were also intimately involved in the process.

So when the city says, Well, we didnt know about the 10%, or the city says the county was not forthright about it, theyre either being disingenuous, or theyre saying they did not read what they entered into, Ruggiero said.

Ruggiero pointed specifically to a section of the agreement that references county ordinance 244 of 2016, which set a 10% rate for fees incurred in the collection of any delinquent account...

Cognetti told me again Friday that there was no discussion of the 10% surcharge during negotiations. She again acknowledged that the ordinance is referenced in the agreement, but said it was written to address a small subset of taxpayers, not all. She said it doesnt afford the county legal authority to apply it to all delinquent taxpayers.

Overall, Cognetti said shes for the program and hopes it can be salvaged, but cant accept a surcharge that hurts people trying to recover from the economic damage of the pandemic. She said a city analysis of accounts found that 57% of delinquent 2020 accounts were newly delinquent; 43% of delinquent 2019 accounts were newly delinquent.

We think that shows that many people with delinquencies from 2020 and 2019 were not habitually delinquent in paying taxes, Cognetti said. Those accounts became delinquent during a pandemic.

Ruggiero acknowledged that some delinquent taxpayers arent hardcore scofflaws, but the program is catching up with long-term deadbeats. He said the average on-time taxpayer likely doesnt care what the surcharge is, as long as we collect.

In hindsight, Ruggiero acknowledged that transparency in hiring Joyce might have saved the arrangement some shade. He said Joyce was hired for his experience and defended the 10% fee as reasonable, the standard set by law.

I asked the solicitor if he was prepared to defend the surcharge in court, when some taxpayer inevitably files a lawsuit targeting the fee as excessive.

I cant stop someone from doing that, Ruggiero said. I think based on what Ive looked at and my understanding of what other counties do, we are right in the mix of where we should be and its a fair and reasonable fee.

Cant wait to hear that narrative.

CHRIS KELLY, the Times-Tribune columnist, does a lot of reading on the throne. Read his award-winning blog at timestribuneblogs.com/kelly.
Our nation and the major political parties are seriously and bitterly divided and finding common ground upon which to unite our country is challenging and will take time.

Couple these divisive issues with a national pandemic and Americans have legitimate reasons to feel stressed and uneasy.

The pandemic has exposed serious concerns regarding the manufacturing of U.S. pharmaceuticals. COVID-19 and the manufacturing of Americas prescription drugs off shore has highlighted our countrys dependence on foreign countries, including China, for the manufacturing of pharmaceuticals. Nearly 80% of active pharmaceutical ingredients  drugs that are formulated into tablets, capsules and injections  that are used in the manufacturing of our countrys medicines come from other countries. How could the most resourceful and powerful country in the world find itself in such a vulnerable position? More important, how can we return pharmaceutical manufacturing back to the United States?

Returning the manufacturing of prescription drugs to the United States should be a bipartisan priority. Manufacturing pharmaceuticals here is an issue that should allow elected officials in Washington and elsewhere to set aside political differences and do whats best for America. Perhaps this issue can provide common ground to begin the healing of a polarized nation.

Reasons for manufacturing pharmaceuticals offshore include cheap labor, relaxed environmental standards and regulations and tax incentives. Competing with the low wages of countries like China will be extremely challenging. In fact, most studies and research indicate that using traditional pharmaceutical manufacturing technology will not be enough for U.S.-based manufacturers to offset Chinas labor and cost advantages. The FDA, however, believes that United States-based pharmaceutical manufacturers could be competitive and more productive by using advanced technologies and ensuring a secure supply of medicines for all Americans.

With regard to relaxed environmental standards and regulations, I believe most Americans would be willing to pay a little more for their blood pressure medicine if they knew that it was manufactured in a safe and controlled U.S. environment. The U.S.  China Economic Security Review Commission found that active pharmaceutical ingredients from China are produced without sufficient quality control and efficacy.

Dependence on China for something as vital as medicine is unacceptable. Moreover, it is a national security threat. With rising tensions between China and the United States, the Chinese could easily threaten to cut off their shipments to us of active pharmaceutical ingredients. That could have devastating consequences for our military and our country.

Legislation pending in Congress includes tax incentives and credits to return manufacturing pharmaceuticals to the United States. The legislation should include low-interest loans and grants to revitalize our manufacturing base and create good-paying, family-sustaining jobs. The legislation should also encourage public-private partnerships to ensure significant domestic production. Manufacturing pharmaceuticals in America will give us the quality control we deserve, reassure Americans that there will be no shortage of vital medicines and stimulate our economy.

Imagine if we started to produce active pharmaceutical ingredients here in Scranton. We could put our local trades to work in the construction of high-tech manufacturing plants. In addition, the industry would create hundreds of good-paying jobs that our area hasnt seen in decades. Such manufacturing would result in substantial economic benefits to our local distressed economy.

Logistically, Scranton as the home to manufacturing pharmaceuticals is a no-brainer. Scranton is located within 300 miles of 30% of the entire U.S. population. Scranton also has an international airport, a highway system second to none and access to rail. Locating manufacturing plants in our area could serve as a blueprint for securing the U.S. pharmaceutical supply chain.

U.S. pharmaceutical manufacturing would reduce transportation costs substantially. It typically takes 30 days for a cargo vessel of active pharmaceutical ingredients to reach the United States from China. Then the cargo needs to be transported to its destination inland. Manufacturing products in the United States would eliminate the shipping costs from China, which could hopefully be passed on to consumers.

There is no reason why federal elected officials should not move with a sense of urgency on the pending legislation to address this very serious problem. Working on this issue in a bipartisan manner should be the start of the reunification process of our elected officials and our great country. Manufacturing of pharmaceuticals in the United States just might be the medicine our nation desperately needs.
Shirley P. McNeil, age 85, of Corbin, KY, passed away on Wednesday, July 28, 2021 at St. Joseph Health in Lexington, KY. Born in Corbin, she was the daughter of the late Raleigh and Nancy Mitchell. In addition to her parents, she is preceded in death by her sister, Zelda Patterson; and three
London, KY (40741)

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In My Own Shoes: I missed the flight and I cant re-book
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Cresaptown, MD (21502)

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ALBANY  In early December 2020, every resident of a 120-bed nursing home in Delmar had been potentially exposed to COVID-19.

Two staff members who worked with over a dozen residents at the Delmar Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing were infected with the virus, and one resident had subsequently tested positive. Test results for the rest of the residents were pending.

Yet, when a government inspector visited the facility in Delmar at the time  some nine months into a pandemic that had already claimed 290,000 lives nationwide, including nearly 110,000 nursing home residents  the inspector found some nursing aides were not washing their hands or wearing protective equipment, including gowns and gloves, while interacting with residents. Two months later, the facility was again cited for additional violations.

The Delmar center is far from unique, according to a Times Union review of federal data. Across the country, many nursing homes have continued to violate infection-control procedures, including basic measures intended to stop the spread of COVID-19. Even as the pandemic has waned in the first half of 2021, facilities have continued to be cited for flouting routine protocols, such as failure to wash hands, conduct testing and wear masks.

The violations accelerated during the pandemic despite the fact that the federal government invested over $2.75 billion to help nursing homes with infection control.

Nursing homes struggled to follow infection control rules for years prior to the arrival of the novel coronavirus. But for the first time during the pandemic, every nursing home in the country received an infection control inspection and some were visited multiple times. The more inspections they conducted, the more violations they found.

Some experts say they are alarmed at the rate nursing homes continue to be cited for violations deep into a global health crisis. As the Delta variant of COVID-19 gains traction in the U.S., vulnerable nursing home residents and staff  particularly those who are unvaccinated  are at risk.

Its critical, extremely critical, to have robust infection prevention and control principles and practices in any health care setting, said Lona Mody, professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Its a concerning thing for not only nursing homes, but all health care centers.

She said some research has found other health care settings like hospitals have had some issues with measures like proper hand washing during the pandemic. But infection control is even more important in nursing homes where staff must have frequent close contact with residents to help them with daily activities, she said.

Improving infection control practices are now getting unprecedented attention from policymakers, Mody said. A new law in New York will require annual infection control audits in nursing homes starting in October.

Widespread deficiencies

Federal regulations have required nursing homes to have an infection control and prevention program and a written emergency preparedness plan since 2016. Nursing homes received fines and citations if they lacked such a program or failed to follow it.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office found in May 2020 that infection control deficiencies were widespread and persistent in nursing homes prior to the pandemic, leaving their residents vulnerable.

From January 2015 through February 2020, nursing homes nationwide were cited by the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) 17,049 times  about 275 times per month  for various infection control violations, a Times Union analysis of CMS data found.

Roughly two out of every three nursing homes had a violation in that five-year period, according to data from CMS and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Nursing homes must submit a "plan of correction" following a citation, demonstrating that they have addressed the issue, according to the American Health Care Association (AHCA), a national nursing home industry group.

During the pandemic, CMS and state health officials issued detailed guidance to nursing homes on proper infection control and safety measures for COVID-19, and added new protocols to their infection control checklists.

Officials also conducted about 30,000 more infection control inspections in 2020 than they did in 2019, CMS data shows. Inspectors performed twice the number of inspections in late 2020 than they did in the early part of the year.

With more scrutiny, they found more than triple the previous rate of violations.

Almost half of all nursing homes were cited at least once during the pandemic for an infection control violation, CMS data shows.

This year, CMS has already imposed approximately $35 million in fines associated with infection control deficiencies, an agency spokesman said.

The AHCA said the violations showed public officials were focused on fining nursing homes instead of helping them during the pandemic.

CMS issued approximately three times more enforcement actions in 2020 than in the prior two years, an AHCA spokesperson said. Meanwhile, nursing homes were left begging for personal protective equipment, testing, and staffing support while grappling with an enormous amount of new and conflicting government guidance on how to respond to the crisis from various levels of government.

Like other health care facilities, nursing homes faced shortages of personal protective equipment at the beginning of the pandemic. According to numerous experts, theyve struggled to adequately staff their facilities due to workers falling sick with COVID-19, job stress, low wages and other factors.

But the federal government has also provided billions of dollars in grants to nursing homes during the pandemic, including more than $2 billion earmarked for infection control. Nursing homes are largely taxpayer-funded through Medicare and Medicaid, and theyve argued for years their reimbursement for services is insufficient.

A CMS spokesman said their fines for violations is an important part of their oversight responsibilities and theyve increased the penalties for facilities that dont meet the basic requirements. But the spokesman added the agency previously equipped nursing homes with the tools to ensure compliance  such as guidance documents, technical assistance webinars, weekly calls with nursing homes and other outreach efforts.

29 percent of New York facilities cited

In New York, the state health department has conducted 3,840 unannounced onsite Focused Infection Control Surveys with at least one visit to every nursing home and adult care facility since the beginning of the pandemic, said Jeffrey Hammond, spokesman for the agency.

New York nursing homes were cited for infection control violations about 17 times per month on average during the pandemic, up from 6 times per month in the five years prior to the pandemic, CMS data shows. During the pandemic, 29 percent of New York nursing homes were cited for at least one infection control violation.

Their violations included failing to perform proper COVID-19 testing on residents and staff, failing to report information about COVID-19 cases at the facility to residents and their families, and failing to have an infection prevention and control program.

Milly Silva, executive vice president of 1199SEIU United Health Care Workers East, a union that represents thousands of nursing home workers in New York, said that before the pandemic her members regularly experienced a lack of transparency about viruses present in their facilities, were not educated on infection control, and sometimes didnt have access to basic supplies like soap.

They were often being asked to go from room to room, for example, wearing the same PPE, which is not appropriate, Silva said. Staff in some cases saw improvement after conversations with management, she said, while at other homes workers and their union made reports to the state about ongoing infection control problems.

Correlation with COVID-19

Several studies have found that past infection control deficiencies were not highly correlated to the number of COVID-19 cases or deaths in a nursing home.

The primary determinant of COVID outbreaks is community prevalence, said Vince Mor, a professor at the Brown University School of Public Health. Just like people in crowds transmitting it, the intimate work done by staff living in communities where COVID is prevalent and predominantly asymptomatic staff made it easy to transmit.

Tamara Konetzka, professor of public health sciences at the University of Chicago, testified before Congress in March that these results do not mean that nursing homes and policymakers should ignore the importance of infection control measures, however.

Rather, they suggest that high quality and good infection control are not enough, she said. Addressing infection control was one of Konetzas five recommendations for improving nursing home care during the pandemic.

Mody said infection prevention is usually overseen by a part-time nurse, and nursing homes are not typically incentivized to spend more money to maintain excellent infection control practices. Staff turnover in nursing homes is high, and employees often do not get in-depth training in the protocols.

We should expect health care workers to follow all guidelines. Its part of their job, Mody said. But at the same time, health care providers have to get more encouragement rather than always being dinged for it.

We lost lives

The Grand Rehabilitation and Nursing at Barnwell, a 236-bed nursing home in Valatie, had the most infection control violations during the pandemic of any nursing home in New York with five violations found, according to CMS data.

Inspectors found in May 2020 that staff entered the rooms of multiple residents, some of whom were infected with COVID-19, wearing the same personal protective equipment, CMS records show. When inspectors returned to the Grand Rehabilitation and Nursing at Barnwell eight days later, the nursing home had residents residing in the same room even if one was positive for the disease.

In January, inspectors found a nurse did not don a surgical gown or protective eyewear to interact with a patient suspected of having COVID-19. They observed a staff member who reported having a cough entering the building.

Two months later, staff working with COVID-19 residents were still not wearing N-95 masks as required, inspectors found. And two months ago, amid what was likely one of the worst nursing home COVID-19 outbreaks in the nation at the time, inspectors found multiple people working at the Grand did not properly wash their hands or wear gloves when working with patients, including some with possible COVID-19 exposure.

In nearby Kinderhook, town Supervisor Patsy Leader said a couple dozen people called her during the pandemic to complain about the conditions at the Grand Rehabilitation at Barnwell.

Its a business for them, she said. They cut corners on the quality of care.  Unfortunately we lost lives.

A total of 26 residents from the Grand Rehabilitation and Nursing at Barnwell  a facility also known as Barnwell  have died due to COVID-19 related causes as of July 13, the state reported.

CMS has fined Barnwell $650 during the pandemic, and the state health department fined the operator $28,000.

Asked about the violations, Bruce Gendron, vice president for the Grand Healthcare System, said it is disappointing when staff make mistakes, but management retrains them to improve care.

All the time, we have turnover of staff, Gendron said. Some human beings, they may make mistakes when they are doing their protocols. We do education and we retrain them any time a problem is identified. Sometimes problems are identified by the Department of Health; sometimes they are identified internally.

Prior to the pandemic, Barnwell was cited during infection control inspections three times since 2015.

Cindy Bevins is a nurse who worked for years at the home when it was under prior management two decades ago. Her mother lived in Barnwell for several months in 2019. Bevins said the facility was short-staffed and dirty, and shed often arrive in the morning to find her mother in night clothes in a soiled bed.

I have very fond memories of Barnwell back in my day, she said. Nowadays, I wouldnt recommend anybody going in there.

Not prepared

Centers Healthcare, one of the largest for-profit nursing home chains in New York, had seven nursing homes cited for multiple infection control violations during the pandemic, including the Delmar Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing, and the Schenectady Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing in Schenectady.

The Schenectady Center was cited three times for failing to follow infection control protocols during the pandemic. When inspectors last visited in February, they found staff were not properly washing their hands or wearing personal protective equipment. Not all staff were being tested for COVID-19 weekly, inspectors found, according to CMS reports.

Nearby, the Delmar Center has been cited four times since the pandemic began in March 2020 for failing to meet basic infection control standards and COVID-19 guidelines. The facility passed some inspections with no health deficiencies, while on other visits inspectors identified multiple violations. In February, inspectors cited the nursing home for failing to properly segregate COVID-19-positive patients.

As with many nursing homes and rehabilitation facilities throughout the country, there was some instances during state survey periods at some of the heavy stressful times of COVID-19 inspection that a particular infection control instance happened and was observed, said Jeffrey Jacomowitz, spokesman for Centers Health Care. After receiving the report of what was observed, those facilities were visited by Centers Health Cares re-education personnel to give them a brush-up on infection control, as well as learning new tools of infection control. The incredibly hard work that Centers (certified nursing assistants, licensed practical nurses) and nurse practitioners have done over the past 15 to 16 months should not be ignored and ... these ifnstances were far and few between.

Jacomowitz noted that nursing homes were subject to changing regulations and expectations from the CDC, CMS and state health officials during the pandemic.

It wasnt until the fall where things really slowed down and we were able to master our processes, he said.

New laws for nursing homes

New York passed several laws this year aimed at improving conditions in nursing homes.

In October, they'll undergo new annual state health department audits for infection control proficiency. Facilities that fail to meet at least 85 percent of the criteria will face biannual or monthly follow-up inspections. (Massachusetts and New Jersey approved similar legislation.)

DOH declined to provide details on how it will implement the audits, including whether they plan to hire additional staff. 1199SEIU's Silva said state health departments in New York and other states have previously lacked enough inspectors to provide rigorous and regular oversight of facilities.

Silva said the union  which advocated for the changes  is hopeful that regular monitoring of infection control measures, examination of the training given to staff and rewarding good institutions with more funding could improve the system.

AHCA said similarly that it advocated for a system where nursing homes are incentivized to provide quality care. It said the current survey approach is too punitive and should be replaced.

New York also established a minimum staffing standard for nursing homes, requiring that next year a daily average of 3.5 hours of care per resident per day by a certified nurse aide, licensed nurse or nurse aide.

In addition, New York mandated that nursing homes will have to put at least 70 percent of their revenue toward direct care and 40 percent of revenue toward paying nurses.

Nursing home industry trade groups contend the legislation will limit their budgets and make it difficult to find enough staff to comply with the new requirements.

Nursing homes have also received protection from a state law during the pandemic that shielded them from legal liability from medical malpractice and negligence claims from the spring of 2020 until April, when it was repealed by the state Legislature. Supporters argued that the law allowed nursing homes to provide care during an unprecedented global health emergency without fear of liability.

That temporary immunity is being challenged in federal court by Vivian Zayas, a woman whose mother died in a West Islip nursing home during the pandemic.

All they want is for a jury to be able to decide whether or not the care that was given to their loved ones was reasonable care, said Nicholas Warywoda, one of the lawyers helping to represent Zayas in the case. A jury can take into account what was going on at the time, and whether or not that was reasonable.
SCHENECTADY  Emma Anderson has spent several years volunteering at Bellevue Womans Center in Niskayuna.

Anderson, 17, has witnessed C-sections - some of which have included tubal ligation, a surgical procedure that prevents future pregnancies.

Now Anderson says she worries the planned merger between Ellis Medicine and St. Peter's Health Partners will result in the loss of some reproductive health services under a Catholic hospital system  including the practice of cutting or tying fallopian tubes to prevent pregnancy.

It jeopardizes accessibility and is a discriminatory practice that has no role in our community, Anderson said.

Anderson was among the dozen-plus speakers who delivered comments at a rally hosted by Schenectady Coalition for Healthcare Access in downtown Schenectady on Sunday to highlight concerns surrounding the proposed merger of Schenectady-based Ellis Medicine with St. Peters Health Partners, an Albany-based company that is now owned by nationwide corporation Trinity Health.

Attendees - including leaders from some of the countys most influential nonprofit, healthcare. clergy and social justice organizations - also discussed what they contend is a lack of transparency surrounding the deal.

Their motto? Silence takes away choices, said Arthur Butler, executive director of the Schenectady County Human Rights Commission.

The Rev. Nicolle Harris, pastor at Duryee Memorial A.M.E. Zion Church and president of the Schenectady NAACP, was among the community leaders who say theyve been frozen out of the process.

Discussions must unfold on street corners, church basements and backyards  not solely in corporate boardrooms, she said.

These meetings need to happen with transparency where you and I can attend, Harris said. When you close that door in the boardroom, theres no guarantee that there will be somebody who represents me.

National advocacy groups have said access to care can be jeopardized when an organizations religious doctrine or moral beliefs interfere with medical decision-making.

Hospitals may ban certain treatments that conflict with those beliefs, said MergerWatch, including abortion, contraception and sterilization, as well as fertility services to certain individuals because of their gender or sexual identity.

State Assemblyman Phil Steck, D-Colonie, said previous hospital consolidations have led to other negative impacts  including the termination of the St. Clare's pension plan, which was eliminated when the hospital was folded into Ellis Medicine as part of the statewide hospital consolidation program a decade ago.

You are definitely right in being vigilant of a takeover of Ellis by a Catholic hospital system, Steck said. In keeping up this action, I believe you can have a very positive effect on what Ellis does.

Roughly 100 people attended the Sunday event.

Im really very concerned about people who dont have the means to travel to Albany Med, said Kyra Zonderman, 51, an illustrator who lives in Niskayuna. Its a real social justice issue to not connect with community leaders because the people of Schenectady will be losing services if religious rules restrict services.

The hospital systems announced the intention to merge last fall.

While Ellis is currently locally owned, St. Peters answers to its parent company in Michigan, the Catholic health system Trinity Health.

Attendees pushed for any promises to retain services be made in writing.

To limit them is absurd, said Ed Bein, 69, a retired chiropractor who lives in Niskayuna.

The hospitals announced last October they had signed a non-binding letter of intent to merge operations, and estimated it would take roughly four months to vet plans and reach a final agreement.

After that, they pegged the government approval process at an additional six to seven months.

Yet opponents said the timeline has been accelerated, including Schenectady County Legislator Michelle Ostrelich, who previously likened the process to a backroom deal.

Activists held a public forum in March, and said they were told that official plans would not materialize for at least one year, which would enable the communitys concerns to be studied and addressed.

Now we are hearing that agreements are being finalized, Ostrelich told the Times Union last week.

Ellis and St. Peters have not yet confirmed where exactly merger talks stand or when a deal might be finalized, saying only that discussions are ongoing and will involve many steps and government approvals.

They also did not respond to questions about the process for public input, or whether any assurances will be made regarding continuity of care.

Both Ellis Medicine and St. Peters referred to previous statements following Sundays rally, but underscored commitments to be transparent and responsive to community needs.

St. Peters, said spokesman Robert Webster, wants to emphasize the intent of this proposed relationship is to enhance the availability of high-quality health care services in the Capital Region. We continue to listen to our community and work through the issues important to them, and welcome new opportunities to hear their concerns. In the end, we are confident the community will see both improved care and expanded access to care as a result of this partnership.

Ellis Medicine spokesman Philip Schwartz said discussions are continuing and we look forward to providing our community with an update as soon as we have something meaningful to report.

Ellis and St. Peters, he said, share a common goal of ensuring the long-term availability of high-quality health care for the people of Schenectady and the surrounding region and believe that partnering toward that goal is the best approach for everyone.

We also understand the importance of these affiliation discussions to everyone who relies on Ellis Medicine for care and we are committed to keeping everyone updated as we move along.
ALBANY  About a sixth of the criminal cases that went before a judge in New York in 2020 led to the person being rearrested before the case concluded, according to new data from the state's court system, which was mandated to be collected after the Legislature passed controversial bail refinements a year earlier.

That number, nearly 31,000 people out of more than 184,000 cases last year in New York, is underpinning the current concerns over gun violence and its connection to the bail changes, some of which were rolled back last year. It is an often polarizing debate that is likely to only get louder as the political campaign season heats up.

The specific data, which the state was directed to collect by the Legislature, includes whether someone was rearrested, when it happened, but not what they were charged with upon the second arrest, a data point that could be useful in defusing some of the charged political discourse.

The review of the data comes following Senate Minority Leader Rob Ortt's recent call for the state to collect, review and report back on whether, as the North Tonawanda Republican asserts, bail reform is to blame for the increase in gun violence. The renewed conversation around bail reform comes on a feverish 2022 campaign season, punctuated by a race for governor that is already, in part, being framed around a conversation on crime.

In interviews with the Times Union last week, people on various sides of the bail debate noted that the data itself, although extremely thorough in what it does collect, stops short of giving enough nuance to allow researchers and politicians to say just how many shootings or gun possession crimes were committed after someone was released from custody for another crime.

Additional data, like rearrest charges, were generally welcomed by both bail-change advocates and opponents, but advocates cautioned that the extra data, while it may be helpful, could easily be manipulated to portray a negative, and, more so, a distracting portrait of the changes to bail laws. Critics were more welcoming of the additional data point, contending it would show the issues bail "reform" has caused, although there is limited to no similar data to show what were the prior standards.

Absent of a concrete, independent number that can say gun violence crimes associated with people who were released on bail that previously would not have without the law changes, people on both sides point to their respective share of facts and anecdotes. Advocates note the rise in gun violence across the nation during COVID-19 and opponents point to cases that show violent crimes that previously would not have happened if a person had remained in custody.

Advocates and criminal justice researchers often note it is essential to the debate to first highlight the underlining goal of the bail changes: to afford equal opportunities for people, regardless of economic status, to not sit behind bars awaiting adjudication of their cases, while assumed innocent until proven guilty. More equity in bail policies could mean less trauma, like financial, social and health, to people who are poor, which, in New York, often overlays with people of color. Advocates who support the changes argue they are one piece toward rooting out systemic flaws in society that cause racial disparities and upend the stability of families.

Critics of the policies point to what they say was overly broad legislation that included mandatory release  or low cash bail  for crimes considered violent. Condition of release may include maintaining or seeking employment and housing, or electriconic monitoring, which may be key to preventing gun violence. The opponents say the concept is fundamentally wrong and should be rescinded immediately so that the state is immediately safer, an argument oftentimes tinged with politics.

What does the data say?

Criminal justice data in the first full year, which, albeit came during a pandemic that upended many societal trends and norms, shows how often people returned to court after being granted a certain type of bail. They often made their court appearances, which is a primary objective of bail.

The data shows racial disparities on who was afforded reduced or no bail, which some advocates say in fact have gotten worse under the changes. It also shows racial disparities in not only who is being charged and convicted with crimes, but also who is rearrested before case case was adjudicated  not all of which shows the same trend.

While 41 percent of the 184,000 cases that went before a judge involved people who are Black, more than half of the people rearrested were Black, according to a Times Union analysis of the data.

In just a handful of rape or other sex offense cases that led to rearrest, about 200, they were overwhelmingly by people who are Black, although people who are white committed a greater share of those crimes. People who are white, who were arraigned on criminal possession of weapon, saw their share of rearrests go up relative to people who are Black.

Several criminal justice groups are studying the data over several months, looking to come away with more granular conclusions. In the data set from the state's Office of Court Administration and Division of Criminal Justice Services, it includes 1,313 different charges with which people were arraigned and is further broken into 20 categories, including homicide, robbery and driving while intoxicated.

The politics of data

Ortt, in a statement to the Times Union, said the data was not detailed enough to sort by offenses that fall under the dense laws prescribed under the 2019 bail changes. Many of those offenses are available to be viewed through the state's data file, but it would require sorting through more than a thousand types of crimes and figuring out which are bail eligible.

"The key data point we need is how many offenders commit offenses that are now not eligible for bail (to be set) and then go on to reoffend while awaiting trial," Ortt said.

The court administration's spokesman said their office is reviewing Ortt's request. DCJS, through a spokeswoman, pointed to the increase in gun crimes across the country, the coroanvrius pandemic's stresses on mental health, finances and isolation that is causing a reduction in social services typically used to mitigate crime.

"Pointing solely to bail reform as a reason ignores the complex, confluence of factors," said Janine Kava, a DCJS spokeswoman.

The Republican Party has routinely railed against bail law changes, both in and out of the halls of the Capitol. U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin, a Long Island Republican, and the GOP's "presumptive nominee" for governor, has focused his rhetoric on a tough-on-crime approach. He jockeys that he is the governor for a safe New York.

Meanwhile, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who was outraised for the first time while governor, recently pivoted to a focus on gun violence. On July 5, he declared gun violence a state of emergency and said the state would focus its attention and resources to it in a similar way it did to COVID-19, an issue for which his leadership received accolades but now is the subject of multiple investigations.

He recently appeared in Brooklyn with lawmakers who previously called for his resignation, but they stood side-by-side with him to say they were tackling the epidemic of gun violence. Cuomo appeared with the Democratic nominee for mayor in New York, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, a former police captain, who secured the vote of Black communities in the city, where they say their top issue is violence.

"Instead of trying to just cast blame on bail reform for political reasons, I think people need to look at a holistic view, what's happening in communities and too many guns and access to guns," Assembly Speaker Carl E. Heastie said. The conversation should be around social issues plaguing poor communities and how to financially support those places, he said, "instead of playing the political blame because next year is an election year and you think this is something that you can use."

Views from those most involved

Albany County District Attorney David Soares, a Democrat, had a different perspective, based on the cases he's been seeing through his door over the last 19 months since bail changes were made.

"I'm so exhausted of people blaming COVID for the rise in gun violence," Soares said.

He noted that before 2019, New York was the largest safe state in the country and New York has not recently seen the same issues seen in places like Baltimore, Los Angeles and Chicago.

Soares ran through a scenario of a person who shoots someone on Friday, and under bail reform, may be released and out on the street on Saturday. He said the person who was targeted may now try to acquire a gun to protect themselves because they may feel they are "better off being caught by the police" than "being caught empty-handed by the person who took a shot at me on Friday.'"

"So the people who are saying things like COVID, you do not understand the streets. That's not conservative, that's not liberal, that's not Democrat, that's not Republican. You do not understand the streets and street culture and how violence works on the street," Soares said. "We have people who are 22, 23 years old, who have never been charged with any crime, no criminal history, but all of a sudden they are being apprehended and charged with possession of a firearm. Why do you think that is?"

Soares called the bail measures of 2019 well-intentioned from people who want to see meaningful changes, but done in a way that has caused serious issues, many of which, based on his own internal information, have disproportionately hurt Black and brown communities.

He compared it to "another group of well-intended legislators who came to power" in the 1970s, when they passed what's known as the Rockefeller drug laws, which Soares said were also overly broad.

"It devastated Black and brown communities. We went back and undid that," Soares said. Today's legislators, who came to power under a Democratic super majority, "have made the same mistake."

Some advocates noted that bail changes have in fact led to disproportionate disparities among minority communities. The issue, though, is more in the fact that watchdogs have seen many judges not following the letter of the law in offering affordable bail options to Black people. Others say it has exposed the systemic issues in communities that should have an equal, if not greater, focus from lawmakers.

For example, releasing a poor person to a poor community that is already afflicted with violence, could set someone up for a difficult situation. Soares said he wouldn't have an issue with the bail changes if they removed certain violent crimes that were included in the legislation and gave judges more discretion. If it was limited to misdemeanors and non-violent felony charges, the issues seen in communities, particularly around spikes in gun violence, could be less acute.

"The rise in gun violence should not be seen as a reason to slow down the reform movement," said Laruen-Brooke Eisen, director of the justice program at the Brennan Center for Justice in New York. "But it should be seen as a reason to reduce sentences and cut back on the punitive powers of the state. This is a call to continue to care about young people, care about communities."

Eisen said her research showed violence was beginning to creep up in 2019, prior to bail changes or the pandemic.

Eisen, like others, including Soares, noted that the Legislature's call for overhauling the bail system came with unfunded mandates and half-fixes. The changes without providing more access to good-paying jobs and reliable housing can short circuit the efforts and the positive results seen from them, the advocates said.

"It would be a mistake to double-down on the punitive policies of the past, when the evidence shows that those policies don't work" Eisen said. "Use today as an opportunity to say there are ways to increase public safety, to keep the public safe. There are ways to hold people accountable for creating harm, without creaming more harm."

Advocates for the bail changes have focused on the need to keep the conversation centered on ensuring it is not only the wealthy that are afforded an opportunity to spend their pretrial time outside of a jail cell. The purpose of bail, they note, is to ensure a person returns back to court.

People are turning to court at a higher rate, said Jared Trujillo, policy counsel for New York Civil Liberties Union. Part of it is the incentives to avoid going to jail, even before convicted of a crime, because it could mean losing a job, housing, childcare or immigration status.

"Even 24 hours waiting to see an arraignment judge can ruin your life in real, tangible ways," Trujillo said, pointing the conversation back to the goals and intent of bail changes."I'm not going to pretend the legislation that passed is the panacea, because it's not. But at the end of the day, as far as reducing some of those inequities, as far as actually incentivizing people to go back to court, it certainly does that."

Trujillo looks at the strong, politicized statements the New York Police Department and its unionized officers have released on bail reform, which disparages it and highly associates it with the spike in gun crime as "inaccuracies" and "frankly blatant dishonesty."

Vera Institute of Justice was founded upon a mission of reforming inequities in bail reform, which it calls an issue of racial justice and poverty. New York's bail changes, while imperfect, have reduced the number of people held in pretrial cases, said Jullian Harris-Calvin, program director in New York for the institute. The racial disparities in court have continued though.

It's a question instead on the deployment of police and how law enforcement chooses to enforce. The focus of lawmakers, Harris-Calvin said, can also be on community-based, public health response. It's an issue that should think about how putting people in prison can disrupt nuclear families and lead to intergenerational poverty, she said, something that is more complex than increasing public safety tomorrow and seeing crime numbers reduce the next day.

"That's a harder response, right?" Harris-Calvin said. "All of these intellectual, academic conversations around what works and the complexities of social networks and social safety nets  nobody wants to talks about that in a sound bite."
ALBANY  New York could soon lose out on $2.4 billion it was allocated in federal relief funds for tenants and landlords due to administrative delays at an executive branch agency, U.S. Sen. Charles E. Schumer warned Sunday in an open letter to the head of the state Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance.

Included in the omnibus COVID-19 relief package that was signed into law earlier this year was a $46 billion relief fund for people who have been economically harmed by the pandemic and are struggling to pay rent or avoid foreclosure. New York was entitled to $2.4 billion of that total.

New York was the only state that had given out $0 from that fund by July 21, Schumer wrote in his letter, and since then has distributed $117,000. That works out to about 0.005 percent of the total. Texas has distributed more than $450 million, the Associated Press reported earlier this month, and Virginia about $155 million. Nationwide, the total percentage distributed is about 12 percent, ODTA said.

Thousands and thousands of New York tenants could be deprived of critical rent relief checks if the state doesnt move more quickly on getting this money out, Schumer wrote in a news release accompanying his Sunday letter. Today, I am formally asking OTDA to move heaven and earth to fix the mess, pick up the pace and get this federal money out the door before its too late for tenants and landlords. The message today is: tenant relief now. No more delay.

The state set up an online portal to apply for the funds at the beginning of June. Almost half of Americans struggled to pay rent due to economic hardship last year, Schumer's office said, so demand for the rental relief funds is enormously high. The Associated Press reported that the website has repeatedly crashed and thousands have experienced glitches while attempting to apply.

OTDA recognizes the need to help New Yorkers as quickly as possible and is working with the vendor to disburse payments more efficiently, including streamlining the initial review, consolidating certain processing steps, developing an expedited payment process, and identifying additional resources, including staff with accounting backgrounds to more quickly review financial information," wrote Anthony Farmer, spokesman for OTDA in an emailed statement.

While for the first month applications were considered based on the degree of their need, now applications for rental relief are evaluated first-come-first-serve.

If the funds don't get into the hands of New Yorkers promptly, the state could forfeit the $2.4 billion as soon as the end of September, Schumer said, with the federal government distributing the money to other states and municipalities. The state's eviction moratorium is also scheduled to end Aug. 31, Schumer noted, meaning there could be some tenants who face eviction while awaiting money they are entitled to.

How it works with federal funds is that if you dont use them, you could potentially lose them, and that would be very bad, Schumer wrote. New York already sends enough money to the feds. These dollars are meant for New Yorkers."
Farmington, WV (26555)

Today

Partly cloudy in the morning followed by scattered thunderstorms in the afternoon. High 76F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 50%..

Tonight

Mostly cloudy with scattered thunderstorms mainly before midnight. Low around 60F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 50%.
Republican Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi says installing massive pumps to drain water from the south Mississippi Delta would be a way to fight environmental injustice
[July 24, 2021] Anthem, Inc. Invests in Nearly $90 Million in Affordable Housing in Indiana as part of Commitment to Improving Lives and Communities

Anthem, Inc. has invested in affordable housing funds totaling $87.9 million across the state of Indiana as part of its continuing efforts to improve lives and communities. The funds support the whole health needs of local individuals, families and communities providing 1,139 affordable housing apartment units, townhomes and single-family homes in Avon, Bloomington, Columbia City, Culver, Fort Wayne, Gary, Kokomo, Lawrenceburg, New Castle, Spencer and Vincennes. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210724005011/en/ Anthem's statewide affordable housing investment was announced on July 24 at a ribbon-cutting ceremony and community health fair in Culver with Lt. Gov. Suzanne Crouch at the recently completed Paddocks project. The Paddocks six buildings encompass 48 units, providing housing for more than 20 children under 18 years of age. Representatives from Anthem, The Paddocks and the Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority join Lt. Gov. Suzanne Crouch at the ribbon-cutting. (Photo: Business Wire) Anthem has committed over $410 million to affordable housing in 45 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and Guam. The multi-year effort will address and create a more stable housing environment for many vulnerable individuals, families and even those who are living with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities. Anthem will continue to be part of these developments and communities providing on-site health and support services to help residents monitor and promote an active and healthy lifestyle. Anthem's statewide affordable housing investment was announced on July 24 at a ribbon-cutting ceremony and community health fair in Culver with Lt. Gov. Suzanne Crouch at the recently completed Paddocks project. The Paddocks sx buildings encompass 48 units, providing housing for more than 20 children under 18 years of age.



"I am pleased to join Culver and the surrounding community to celebrate this Stellar milestone," said Lt. Gov. Suzanne Crouch. "The Paddocks is the perfect example of local leaders working together to meet the needs of residents. Indiana continues to attract new jobs and new workers to the state, making housing a critical component to our state's infrastructure. With this affordable housing development complete, Marshall County is addressing its workforce housing needs. I want to commend Anthem on its continued local efforts that will positively impact so many across the state and provide access to affordable and reliable housing opportunities." Social drivers of health, including homelessness, affordable housing, and a safe, stable social and physical environment, continue to be barriers to positive health outcomes and overall wellness. Anthem remains focused on addressing these barriers through deep community relationships and developing real-time and impactful solutions that meet the needs of the local community.

Anthem's partnerships and housing sustainability initiatives include the following properties across Indiana: Avon: Thornbury Pointe Senior Apartment Homes - 94 units

Bloomington: Union At Crescent - 3 buildings, 146 units

Columbia City: The Flats - 1 building, 25 units

Columbia City & Fort Wayne: Biggs Workforce Housing - 48 homes

Culver: The Paddocks - 6 buildings, 48 units

Fort Wayne: Centennial Apartments - 88 units

Fort Wayne: 25 homes, 12 of these for people with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities

Fort Wayne: East Central Towers - 166 units

Gary: Gary Manor Apartments - 197 units

Kokomo: Trailside Townhomes - 9 buildings, 45 units

Kokomo: Water Tower Place at Kingston Square - 68 units

Lawrenceburg: Waterview Apartments - 64 units

New Castle: Willow Glen Apartments - 51 units

Spencer: Greenbriar Senior Apartments - 30 units

Vincennes: River View - 23 buildings, 44 units "We are thrilled that Anthem has made an investment in The Paddocks project. The Paddocks will have a tremendous impact on the outcomes we set to achieve with our Stellar Communities Strategic Investment Plan," said Culver Town Manager Ginny Bess Munroe. "In a tourism-based economy like ours, it's a challenge to find affordable rentals and single-family homes. We believe this development is one of the solutions that will meet our needs now and into the future." "When we embarked on this mission, we knew that affordable housing was an issue that surfaced in Culver's Comprehensive Plan. We formed an Entry Level Housing Committee and listened to our local employers," said The Paddocks Developer and President of Easterday Construction Kevin L. Berger. "Culver Academies, our largest employer, told us that 90 percent of their staff lived in Culver in the 1980s and that had dropped to less than 40 percent. Elkay (now ACPI), our second largest employer, told us that less than 25 percent of their employees lived in Marshall County and of those, few lived in Culver. We recognized the need to reverse that trend. The Paddocks is the result of those efforts and we thank Anthem for stepping up to help us make this possible." "Anthem is committed to increasing access to affordable housing in the communities where our members live and work," said Dr. Kimberly Roop, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield's Medicaid Plan President in Indiana. "This investment in our community provides economic opportunity for thousands of low and moderate-income families, creating and achieving long-term housing stability for residents. Particularly in this time, homelessness continues to be a critical component in addressing the whole health of individuals, families and communities. These developments will create a safe housing option that's affordable to our local residents and workforce, and Anthem is honored to provide direct community action through affordable housing initiatives to improve lives." About Anthem, Inc. Anthem is a leading health benefits company dedicated to improving lives and communities, and making healthcare simpler. Through its affiliated companies, Anthem serves more than 110 million people, including approximately 43 million within its family of health plans. We aim to be the most innovative, valuable and inclusive partner. For more information, please visit www.antheminc.com or follow @AnthemInc on Twitter (News - Alert) . View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210724005011/en/

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[July 25, 2021] Field Programmable Gate Arrays Sourcing and Procurement Report with COVID-19 Impact Analysis, Segmented by Type, Distribution Channel, End User, and Region | SpendEdge

NEW YORK, July 25, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Field Programmable Gate Arrays market size is expected to grow by USD 2.59 Billion by 2025, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 7.39% during the forecast period. To know more about this market. Request For a Free Sample Report Field Programmable Gate Arrays Market Analysis Analysis of the cost and volume drivers and supply market forecasts in various regions are offered in this Field Programmable Gate Arrays research report. This market intelligence report also analyzes the top supply markets, market opportunities, challenges and the critical cost drivers that can aid buyers and suppliers devise a cost-effective category management strategy. The report provides insights on the following information: Regional spend dynamism and factors impacting costs

The total cost of ownership and cost-saving opportunities

Supply chain margins and pricing models

Competitiveness index for suppliers

Market favorability index for suppliers

Supplier and buyer KPIs Get detailed insights on the COVID-19 pandemic crisis and recovery analysis of Field Programmable Gate Arrays Market www.spendedge.com/report/field-programmable-gate-arrays-sourcing-and-procurement-intelligence-report Related Reports on Electrical Components Include: Solar Panels- Forecast and Analysis: The solar panels will grow at a CAGR of 10.72% during 2021-2025. Prices will increase by 4%-6% during the forecast period and suppliers will have a moderate bargaining power in this market.

Contact Center Infrastructure Sourcing and Procurement Report: This report evaluates suppliers based on ability to provide customized services, system capable of call blending, capability to improve end-user customer experience, and real-time reporting.

Electric Car Chargers - Sourcing and Procurement Intelligence Report: The electric car chargers will grow at a CAGR of 25.62% during 2021-2025. Prices will increase by 5%-10% during the forecast period and suppliers will have a moderate in this market. Speak to our analyst to detect blind spots in your revenue decisions by analyzing interconnected unknowns around the "Field Programmable Gate Arrays Market."







Report Metrics Details Base year considered 2021 Forecast period 2021-2025 Forecast units Value (USD Million) Geographies covered North America, South America, Europe, Middle East and Africa, and APAC Leading Field Programmable Gate Arrays suppliers Xilinx Inc., Intel Corp., Microchip Technology Inc., Lattice Semiconductor Corp Top Pricing Models Volume-based pricing and unit-based pricing

This report can be personalized according to your needs. Our analysts and industry experts will work directly with you to understand your requirements and provide you with customized data in a short amount of time. Speak to an Analyst This procurement report answers help buyers identify and shortlist the most suitable suppliers for their Field Programmable Gate Arrays Market requirements following questions: Am I engaging with the right suppliers?

Which KPIs should I use to evaluate my incumbent suppliers?

Which supplier selection criteria are relevant for?

What are the workplace computing devices category essentials in terms of SLAs and RFx? Table of Content Executive Summary

Market Insights

Category Pricing Insights

Cost-saving Opportunities

Best Practices

Category Ecosystem

Category Management Strategy

Category Management Enablers

Suppliers Selection

Suppliers under Coverage

US Market Insights

Category scope Appendix About SpendEdge: SpendEdge shares your passion for driving sourcing and procurement excellence. We are the preferred procurement market intelligence partner for 120+ Fortune 500 firms and other leading companies across numerous industries. Our strength lies in delivering robust, real-time procurement market intelligence reports and solutions. Contact

SpendEdge

Anirban Choudhury

Marketing Manager

Ph No: +1 (872) 206-9340

https://www.spendedge.com/contact-us View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/field-programmable-gate-arrays-sourcing-and-procurement-report-with-covid-19-impact-analysis-segmented-by-type-distribution-channel-end-user-and-region--spendedge-301340234.html SOURCE SpendEdge

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[July 25, 2021] ZumVet launches first virtual veterinary platform in Hong Kong

HONG KONG, July 26, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Singapore-based pet telehealth startup ZumVet today announced the launch of its platform in Hong Kong, a remote care solution offering a full suite of home-based health and wellness services for pets. This is the first pet-centric app of its kind in Hong Kong, combining a customer first experience, set to the highest standard levels of safety in healthcare. It offers pet owners with an immediate touchpoint to veterinary professionals, through video consults, an e-pharmacy and home-based testing. Founded by animal lovers Athena Lee and Dr Grace Su, the startup has grown quickly over the last six months with more than 700% increase in the number of users. Ms Lee was formerly the CEO of Doctor Anywhere, a Singapore telehealth startup wich has raised more than US$25 million in funding. Dr Su worked at both government and private healthcare institutions, before consulting on Doctor Anywhere. With their combined expertise in digital health, finance and medicine, they have identified technology as a solution to improving access to healthcare. Their mission is to modernise the way veterinary medicine is delivered, to improve pets' quality of life.



"While pet ownership is on the rise, yet the number of resources available to pet parents are still limited and it remains difficult for pet owners to sift through all the conflicting information that can be found online," said Athena. "It can be especially stressful when unexpected behaviours or conditions suddenly arise and there's nowhere to turn to at a moment's notice. This is why we founded ZumVet  as pet owners ourselves, we wanted to create a care solution that can be accessed anytime, anywhere." "ZumVet looks to expand the pet healthcare ecosystem rather than compete with existing players. The common belief amongst pet owners across Asia is that vets are inaccessible, and oftentimes ineffective. As a result, most people don't go to a vet often enough. Lack of regulatory oversight contributes to this problem and unlike human health, there are no pricing controls or strong veterinary accountability in place. What we want to do is to become the first natural touchpoint for pet owners, and use concrete data to create more cost effective and efficient treatments for common conditions," added Athena.

The COVID-19 pandemic has catalysed the rapid adoption of telehealth services. ZumVet, with its consumer centric approach and market leadership position in Singapore, has been well positioned to ride the tailwinds. ZumVet plans to accelerate the development of remote care solutions for pets and fuel its growth across the region. COO and co-founder Dr Grace Su adds, "Technology has transformed the way we consume healthcare for both humans, and for our pets, and ZumVet is at the frontier of championing change in the telehealth veterinary space. Our objective is to promote more responsible pet ownership, and are excited to bring our patient-centric solution to more countries/regions in Asia Pacific.'' ZumVet aims to modernise veterinary care by taking a data-driven approach to understanding medical outcomes, and connects pet owners with local, qualified veterinarians through video consultations and house calls. The platform also provides pet owners with access to digital medical records, and home delivery services for medication. For more information on ZumVet, visit https://www.zumvet.com. Contact: Anita Chan

Mobile: +852 9484 3173

Email: anita@zumvet.com SOURCE ZumVet Limited

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In a testament to the dearth of support for Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas within the urban core, a rising star council lady has been assembling a campaign team with her eye on the top job at city hall.

To wit . . .

COUNCIL LADY MELISSA ROBINSON'S SQUAD OF ENTHUSIASTIC SUPPORTERS HAVE BEEN TALKING VERY LOUDLY ABOUT AN UPCOMING CHALLENGE AGAINST MAYOR Q!!!

But this post is about more than just idle chatter . . .

In fact, it was by way of outreach to Jackson County political denizen Lisa H. that the brazen plan to compete for the mayor's job because obvious to Democratic party insiders.

There's more to this story but for Saturday afternoon we simply want to take a moment to imagine KCMO life under the 3rd District Council lady whose main accomplishment has been subjecting city hall workers and her political opposition to "implicit bias training" in order to correct any inappropriate gestures or offensive thoughts.

Developing . . .
So, last night we offered a supportive view of the homeless problem and the people at the ground level, here's a more practical consideration and a question for our KICK-ASS TKC BLOG COMMUNITY . . .



ARE KANSAS CITY 'HOMELESS ADVOCATES' WORSENING THE URBAN CAMPING CRISIS?!?!



First, a peek at the new digs as locals are rushing Gatorade, food, ice and other supplies to this spot . . .



Despite the signage, that's not a "free campground" and it's nothing new. In fact, the location has been inundated by homeless campers for about a year.



And so . . .

We leave the question to Sunday readers as the Mayor's largess with taxpayer cash and the public conversation have FAILED to develop any solutions other than giving away Prez Biden's stimmy without improving quality of life for these folks very much.

Developing . . .


Right now we notice a couple of worthwhile reads on the topic of faith in action.

Both of these items should remind our AWESOME TKC BLOG COMMUNITY that political conversations can be divisive but they exist in a larger context.

First, a glimpse at native faith perceptions by way of white dude blogger Bill . .

Native American View of Faith Celebrates Connections With All That Surrounds Us No doubt many people don't know or remember this, but the Indigenous people of this land - variously called Native Americans or American Indians - did not get legally recognized religious freedom until Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978.

And then a peek at what healthcare workers believe given their their job takes them to the front line betwixt life & death . . .



Faith in KC: KU Health System doctor on COVID-19 front lines discusses faith Dr. Steven Stites of the University of Kansas Health System is one of the front line faces in KC's fight against COVID-19. In this edition of Faith in KC, he talks with Taylor Hemness about how he's used his faith as a guide during the pandemic.

Finally, we share a look at local, old-time religion . . .

Remembering The 'Prophetic Voice' Of Kansas City's Rev. Dr. Robert H. Meneilly Editor's note: Bill Tammeus is a former columnist for The Kansas City Star and writes columns for The Presbyterian Outlook and formerly for The National Catholic Reporter.

You decide . . .
Inspired by the legacy of angels and hottie Taylor, our AWESOME TKC BLOG COMMUNITY shares a peek at pop culture, community news and top headlines . . . Check-it . . .



Downed power lines temporarily close I-35 OLATHE, KS (KCTV) -- Around 10 a.m. Sunday, downed power lines caused I-35 to shut down near the Sante Fe exit in Olathe. Both north and south bound traffic was diverted onto side roads so that crews could clear the road. The road was reopened about 30 minutes later, but power wasn't immediately restored to the area.

Kansas City Burnout Aftermath

4 people safe, 2 dogs dead in house fire in KCMO fire OLATHE, Kan. -- Olathe police have shut down both directions of I-35 near Santa Fe Street due to downed power lines over the interstate. Police are working with Evergy to repair the downed lines and do not currently have an estimated time of when it will re-open.

Show-Me Latest COVID Vaxx Numbers

COVID-19 LIVE UPDATES: 47% of population in Missouri has received at least 1 vaccine dose Here are the latest COVID-19 updates around the Kansas City metro area, and in Kansas and Missouri.What you need to know:The Kansas Department of Health and Environment said Friday the state has 327,267 confirmed cases of COVID-19, and there have been 5,239 deaths since the outbreak started.

Rock Chalk Collective Winning

Kansas labor unions rally in support of sweeping reform bill, workers' rights TOPEKA, Kan. - Kansas labor unions are rising up in support of the "PRO Act," a sweeping labor reform bill that's moving through Congress. Labor union leaders joined in an ongoing strike held by Frito-Lay workers in Topeka on Friday. The company produces popular snacks, like Doritos and Cheetos.

ANGELS FORSAKEN!!!

Victoria's Secret scrubs the Angels from its stores in revamp When Victoria's Secret's three-story flagship in midtown Manhattan reopens at the end of July, it will be scrubbed of any evidence of its former pride and joy: the Victoria's Secret Angels.

Promised Land On Earth

Vatican reveals it owns more than 5,000 properties The Vatican has released information on its real estate holdings for the first time, revealing it owns more than 5,000 properties, as part of its most detailed financial disclosures ever. The information released on Saturday was contained in two documents - a consolidated financial statement for 2020 for the Holy See and the first ever public budget for the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (Apsa).

Top Doc Sends Warning

Fauci: 'We're going in the wrong direction' on Covid Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday that the US is "going in the wrong direction" as the number of Covid-19 cases continues to rise, particularly among unvaccinated Americans.

Cynicism Grips Americans

Americans' optimism about country's direction over next year drops nearly 20 points since May: POLL As President Joe Biden completed 100 days in office, the country was optimistic about the coming year, but now, just after hitting the six-month mark, Americans' optimism about the direction of the country has plummeted nearly 20 points, a new ABC News/Ipsos poll finds.

Life Or Death Choice Confronts Nation

What U.S. abortion access looks like, in graphics States have also enacted the most restrictions in any single year since 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided, according to the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion-rights research organization. This year, many of the laws ban abortion at a certain point in pregnancy, for a specific reason, or altogether.

Ginger Prince Rebuked

Prince Harry, Meghan Markle's Daughter Lilibet Still Not Recognized By Royals Nearly 2 months after the birth of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle 's daughter ... she's still MIA from the official Royal line of succession. Lilibet Diana Mountbatten-Windsor was born June 4 and would seem to make her 8th in line for the throne ...

Teachable Moment For Parents

How to attend, watch or comment at your local school board meeting A donation to The Beacon goes beyond the newsroom. We amplify community voices, share resources and investigate systems, not just symptoms. The Beacon in your inbox. In-depth reporting delivered every Tuesday and Thursday morning. The COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect how some school boards conduct their meetings, while in other districts things are returning to normal.

Cash For Summer Jobs

Initiative to employ at-risk KC youth provides jobs for 427 teens, raises $600K for stipend fund A community's most impactful investment is in its youth, Mayor Quinton Lucas said Friday during a media event for the Working for Youth anti-violence and youth employment initiative. In April, the mayor's office announced a partnership with KC Common Good , and Entrepreneurship KC to establish the Working for Youth program that would train and employ teens most at risk of violence in Kansas City.

Quick Break From The Heat

Not so hot: Spotty showers in forecast for Kansas City on Sunday Hide Transcript Show Transcript HOT IT IS OUTSIDE IT IS AND TODAY WON'T BE AS HOT AS I'M NOT SAYING IT'S GOING TO BE A NICE COOL DAY, BUT YOU WIL NLOT HAVE THE TRIPLE DIGIT 104 DEGREE HEAT INDEX LIKE IT DID YESTERDAY AFTERNOON A LITTLE BIT ACTIVITY TONHE RADAR THOUGH THIS MORNING EARLY THIS MORNING BEFORE SUNRISE.

Aretha Franklin - I Say A Little Prayer is the song of the day and this is the OPEN THREAD for right now . . .


Kansas City 'faith matters' takes center stage on Sunday as political opposition against Mayor Quinton Lucas has become a 'higher calling' amongst his growing number of detractors.



Moreover . . . Mayor Q has amassed so many adversaries that constituents are turning to a man of God in order rise above the current culture war which has forgotten/forsaken residents of the urban core impacted by crime.



Translation . . .



SUPPORTERS OF KANSAS CITY POLICE COMMISSIONER BISHOP TOLBERT HOPE THAT PUBLIC SAFETY CONCERNS FOR THE URBAN CORE CAN RISE ABOVE THE PROGRESSIVE ADVOCACY OF MAYOR Q!!!



Special thanks to KICK-ASS KANSAS CITY INSIDERS who offered this perspective on the power player who has a strong base of support amongst not only his urban core followers but also supporters of police and centre-right urban voters i.e. white people . . .

"In many ways, the challenge from Bishop Tolbert represents the same kind of victory that Eric Adams has won in New York . . . And a moment of realization for Democratic cities that aren't as 'woke' as elite progressive would like to believe . . ."

An important reference . . .

New York Daily News: What the left should learn from Adams



Money line . . .

"It is long past time for the left to learn the hard lesson: Calls to #DefundThePolice that picked up steam after George Floyds murder were not only politically unwise, but also a poor policy match for the moment. Increasing investment in social services and communitarian alternatives to policing are critical long-term approaches to solving the root causes of violent crime, but predicating this investment on a dollar-for-dollar divestment from policing is a false choice that unnecessarily adopts a framework of austerity. New Yorkers should not have to choose between public safety in the short term and a robust social services down the road."



This distinction might be lost on reactionaries from both sides but it's important.

More interestingly and something to consider for Sunday . . .

The constant reliance on legalese and progressive/activist support for Mayor Q has undoubtedly disappointed the majority of Kansas City voters and now it's worthwhile to notice many residents turning to a faith leader in a desperate search for truth and peace during this violent and divisive era in American history.



You decide . . .


Johnstown, PA (15901)

Today

Partly to mostly cloudy. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 78F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Mainly cloudy. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 61F. Winds light and variable.
PRINCETON - John Edward Barbour, of Princeton, IN and formerly of West Terre Haute, passed away on July 7, 2021 while on vacation in a bowling tournament in Las Vegas. He was born on October 19, 1956 to Daniel C. Barbour and Margaret Rhyan Barbour. John was a 1974 graduate of West Vigo High 
Hello, my DH and I will be spending a few days in Iceland and I would like to know if the itinerary below looks reasonable or if it is insane:

Day 1: Arrive at 3 pm. Rent 4x4 and drive to Blue Lagoon + Lava Restaurant reservation. Spend the night in Reykjavik.

Day 2: City tour (possible visit to Perlan). Begin private overnight tour to the Golden Circle at noon. Spend the night - I am not sure where, this is the Bubble Hotel.

Day 3: Drop off in Reykjavik at 9am. Drive to Hofn stopping throughout the day to see waterfalls Seljandasfoss, Skogafoss (visit Bistro), and Diamond Beach. Sleep in Hofn (expected arrival at 8ish pm).

Day 4: Kayak tour (Glacier Lagoon) from 9 -12. Depart for Egilsstair at noon (3 hour drive). Visit the canyon (approx. 3 hr hike). Drive to hotel in Akureyri (3-hour drive).

Day 5: Depart at 7 am to arrive at Thingvellir (4 1/2 drive) for a 3-hour Silfra snorkeling tour at 1:30 pm. After tour, drive 45 minutes back to Reykjavik. Viking dinner in the city.

Day 6: Fly back home at 8 am.

Based on my research, it looks like we will be covering most of the popular sites. Are we missing a "must" tour in here? I really wanted to sneak somewhere in there a snowmobile tour, but there is no time :( . Any advice/recommendation would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you!

Straight away, I must thank all the regulars on this forum for the invaluable service and advice you provide to all the lurkers out there of which I am one.

I cant begin to tell you how many days out of the past year I have been surfing posts and researching and learning. I bow to you all and thank you!

My wife and I are planning our very first trip to the Maldives and we have narrowed it down to February and March. I know the weather can never be a guarantee but at least this gives us a shot at some nice sunny days, I think my wife would actually burst into tears if we had stretches of bad weather and gray overcast days! I hate that the prices jump up spectacularly at that time but oh well what can one do? I believe we are finally ready to get off the crazy Maldives merry go round of deciding and then re-deciding and then yet re-deciding again on where we should go! I value any and all input from all of you experienced Maldives travelers and pray you wont find this post too laborious. We really want our first trip to be special and we would love it to have that very Maldives feel to it.

This actually could be our one and very only trip to the Maldives so we are willing to go for it and make memories that will be forever dear in our heart. The upper end of our budget is US$24,000 (20,388, 17,465) -oh and a bonus if the travel agent can provide airfare as well!

Just some random information on what we are seeking, what we enjoy in order of importance:

- Food!!!! for us food really can make or break the trip! We are total foodies!

- Color of the lagoon, Beaches and swimming! We are definitely seeking the powder white sand and the shallow crystal clear blue lagoon to swim about! No rocks or seagrass! We love walking out through our stretch of powder white sand at intervals throughout the day to jump in the ocean and just putter and float about! Good snorkeling is an added bonus for us but we are not diehard snorkelers. Who knows after this trip we may be!

- Wed love the island to have a tropical feel, very lush jungle like vegetation. Not a fan of the scrubby, shorter sparser vegetations some island have. Ayada sometimes concerns me here although the pictures may be misleading. We love the thought of walking about the island interior surrounded by the lush picturesque vegetation and flowers and then exiting onto wonderful beaches!

- We really love the concept of barefoot luxury. We dont want to have to dress up to the nines like you might have to do at say, One and Only. Dont get me wrong, we dont want to be slobs and wear tank tops to dinner, but we dont want it overly stuffy either. The thought of being barefoot with some nice shorts and a casual button-down shirt would be perfect for dinner.

The resorts we have narrowed it down to are Ayada, Vakkaru, Milaidhoo, Anantara Kihavah.

1. We love the look of Milaidhoo and the Beach villas are to die for but we are wondering if maybe 10 days on this small island might be too long? Or else might it be perfect for just totally unplugging and unwinding?! Too boring only having three restaurants to choose from?

2. Kihavah sounds just about perfect in every regard, but it doesnt seem quite as barefoot as is Milaidhoo. Also the villas in our opinion are a step below Milaidhoo considering what you are paying. But we love the interior of the island, and think that the walks through the manicured picturesque jungle would be wonderful over the course of 10 days! It really does seem to have the most beautiful interior of all the islands!

3. Vakkaru seems to strike a balance between the other three resorts but it does seem that is not quite as relaxed and casual as we might like. We really like the villas here!

4. Ayada sounds like it would be the ultimate chill atmosphere and total Maldivian experience! We love that it is so remote, and yet we hate that it is so remote! We feel that by going here we will turn our 10 day stay in to only eight days because of the travel at either end. Traveling from the US we feel that we would have to add another day to what is already two days of travel At the beginning and end of our trip. But what a treat it would be to see the starry sky from such a remote location!

5. We are thinking of splitting the 10 days between AK and Milaidhoo. The transfer day is the only thing that worries us, having to give up a day to travel. But maybe the benefits of seeing two extraordinary resorts in one trip would outweigh that day of travel! The questions are how would you arrange the transport between the two and what would the cost be? Would you stay in the beach villa at Milaidhoo and then overwater Villa at AK so you could experience both accommodations? Which one would you go to first?

So As an aside, just playing and dreaming- our perfect island would have the villas of Milaidhoo , the interior lushness and beauty of Kihavah along with their underwater restaurant and stargazing observatory, the service of Gilli, the food offerings of Soneva Fushi including the chocolate and ice cream rooms and dining in the trees, the lagoon of Anantara Dhigu, the palm studded beaches of One and Only (I know its artificial but still beautiful with those tall swaying palms!), and the price point of Ayada! SOLD! Lol
Hello,

My partner and I are due to connect through Oslo next week, from Serbia to Iceland. We are US citizens and vaccinated. It is not remotely clear to us whether we can actually pass through Norway, or whether we'll be required to quarantine inside of a hotel for 10 days. We've checked the airport website, SAS, and a few other sources--none of them are clear as to whether international transfers can simply pass through to their connecting flight, or whether they must meet Norwegian entry requirements to avoid a quarantine. Note that, as US citizens, it is not possible for us to meet entry requirements.

We're at the point where we might have to cancel a leg of our trip. Can anyone help us clarify? Any pointers to official documentation clarifying what will happen to us if we take this flight would be super appreciated.

Thanks!

Pearl
Although the pandemic disrupted family life across the U.S. since taking hold in spring 2020, some parents are grateful for one consequence: They're now opting to homeschool their children, even as schools plan to resume in-person classes.

The specific reasons vary widely. Some families who spoke with The Associated Press have children with special educational needs; others seek a faith-based curriculum or say their local schools are flawed. The common denominator: They tried homeschooling on what they thought was a temporary basis and found it beneficial to their children.

Thats one of the silver linings of the pandemic  I dont think we would have chosen to homeschool otherwise, said Danielle King of Randolph, Vermont, whose 7-year-old daughter Zoe thrived with the flexible, one-on-one instruction. Her curriculum has included literature, anatomy, even archaeology, enlivened by outdoor excursions to search for fossils.

The surge has been confirmed by the U.S. Census Bureau, which reported in March that the rate of households homeschooling their children rose to 11% by September 2020, more than doubling from 5.4% just six months earlier.

Black households saw the largest jump; their homeschooling rate rose from 3.3% in the spring of 2020 to 16.1% in the fall.

The parents in one of those households, Arlena and Robert Brown of Austin, Texas, had three children in elementary school when the pandemic took hold. After experimenting with virtual learning, the couple opted to try homeschooling with a Catholic-oriented curriculum provided by Seton Home Study School, which serves about 16,000 students nationwide.

The Browns plan to continue homeschooling for the coming year, grateful that they can tailor the curriculum to fit their children's distinctive needs. Jacoby, 11, has been diagnosed with narcolepsy and sometimes needs naps during the day; Riley, 10, has tested as academically gifted; Felicity, 9, has a learning disability.

I didnt want my kids to become a statistic and not meet their full potential, said Robert Brown, a former teacher who now does consulting. And we wanted them to have very solid understanding of their faith.

Arlena Brown, who gave birth to a fourth child 10 months ago, worked as a preschool teacher before the pandemic. Homeschooling, she says, has been a rewarding adventure.

In the beginning, the biggest challenge was to unschool ourselves and understand that homeschooling has so much freedom, she said. We can go as quickly or slowly as we need to.

Race played a key role in the decision by another African American family to homeschool their 12-year-old son, Dorian.

Angela Valentine said Dorian was often the only Black student in his classes at a suburban Chicago public school, was sometimes treated unfairly by administrators, and was dismayed as other children stopped playing with him.

As the pandemic eased, the family decided to keep Dorian at home and teach him there, using a curriculum provided by National Black Home Educators that provides content for each academic subject pertaining to African American history and culture.

I felt the burden of making the shift, making sure were making the right choices, Valentine said. But until were really comfortable with his learning environment, well stay on this homeschool journey.

Charmaine Williams, who lives in the St. Louis suburb of Baldwin, also is using the National Black Home Educators curriculum as she homeschools her 10-year-old son, Justin, and 6-year-old daughter, Janel.

Williams said she and her husband tried two previous stints of homeschooling for Justin after school officials complained about his behavior. Now  with the new curriculum and an accompanying support network  they feel more confident about choosing it as a long-term option.

At school, children have to follow a certain pattern, and theres bullying, belittling -- compared to being home where theyre free to be themselves, Williams said.

Theres no turning back for us now, she added. The pandemic has been a blessing --an opportunity to take ownership of our childrens education.

Joyce Burges, co-founder and program director of National Black Home Educators, said the 21-year-old organization had about 5,000 members before the pandemic and now has more than 35,000.

Many of the new families experienced difficulties, including lack of internet access, that limited their childrens ability to benefit from virtual learning during the pandemic, Burges said.

It got so they didnt trust anything but their own homes, and their children being with them, she said. Now theyre seeing the future  seeing what their children can do.

For some families, the switch to homeschooling was influenced by their childrens special needs. Thats the case for Jennifer Osgood of Fairfax, Vermont, whose 7-year-old daughter Lily has Down syndrome.

Having observed Lilys progress with reading and arithmetic while at home during the pandemic, Osgood is convinced homeschooling is the best option for her going forward.

She has made the same decision for her 12-year-old son Noah, who didnt like the remote classes offered by his public school in the spring of 2020, and did homeschooling throughout the 2020-21 school year. It went so well that they want to continue for at least a few more years.

He told me he was learning so much more at home than he ever did in school, Osgood recalled. He said, School is just so chaotic -- we dont get very much done in any particular class. Here, I sit down, you tell me what to do, and minutes later Im done.'

Heather Pray of Phoenix, Maryland, says homeschooling has been a major success for her 7-year-old son, Jackson, who has autism. The family made the switch because Jackson was struggling with the virtual learning that his school provided during the pandemic.

My son did great (with homeschooling), even with just two hours of schoolwork a day, Pray said. I got him into piano lessons, taught him to read.

Pray is also homeschooling her daughter, Hayley, whos going into 7th grade and had been attending a Christian school.

I had no idea how this was going to go  I just dove in headfirst, said Pray. I felt God was holding my hand.

The Gonzalez family from Appomattox, Virginia  who are devout Catholics -- opted to homeschool their three sons, ages 9, 13 and 15, after their Catholic school in Lynchburg closed in 2020 due to falling enrollment.

Theyre using the Catholic-focused curriculum from Seton Home Study School, which Jennifer Gonzalez, the boys mom, described as rigorous but well-organized.

My kids have just excelled, she said. Were able to be home and be together.


Longtime Artist Friends Finally Stage A Group Show At Davis Dominguez Gallery. By Margaret Regan FOLLOW THE ROCKS in the new Mini Blockbuster show at Davis Dominguez Gallery. If you read them right, they tell the story of a longtime relationship among three pioneering artists up at Oracle's Rancho Linda Vista. James G. Davis has painted a big gray boulder set against a blue-green landscape in "Friends," an oil on paper. The rock is the backdrop for two men affectionately posing arm in arm. You'll find the same rock, a half-circle flattened out on the bottom, in Bruce McGrew's "Colorado Pond," an oil on canvas. McGrew's rock is in one of his characteristically transcendent landscapes, a deep-green pine forest split in two by a shaft of light. There's the rock again in Davis' "Beaver Pond," jutting above dark waters in a forest. This painting looks even more like a McGrew than "Friends" does, and it's set in a clay frame by Joy Fox, who also contributes a frame or two to works by McGrew, her husband. Nobody familiar with their work would mistake a Davis painting for a McGrew, but it's easy to read the uncharacteristic Davis rocks as homages to his friend McGrew, who has long painted the local landscape and made something of a trademark of rocks. The Davis collaboration with Fox honors her familiar works in clay, colored in the reds and beiges of the Oracle earth, and it echoes the more familiar Fox-McGrew collaborations in clay and paint. The three artists, all gallery regulars, have never before shown their works together there. This charming show is a big one for Davis Dominguez, with some 39 works by the three artists squeezed into the small space (more on that later). In common they have their friendship, long-time tenancy at the ranch and some level of inspiration from the Oracle terrain--Davis less than the others. But naturally all three have distinctive artistic styles. Davis, for instance, who has spent a good deal of time in cosmopolitan Berlin as well as in the lovely Oracle boonies, brings a kind of urban tension to his landscapes that the other two don't have. Unlike McGrew, Davis almost always sets figures into his depictions of land and sea, and the uneasy relationships between the people are reflected in nature. Two little gems, "Coffin Island/Red Sea" and "Jealousy," both oils on canvas, trace out complicated interactions among three people at a lake, which by turns is blood-red and envy-yellow. Davis flattens out his terrain too, compressing foreground, background and horizon into a solitary plane that can be claustrophobic, even foreboding. McGrew, on the other hand, is more like the 19th-century painters who found in the infinite land a source of redemption. In fact, McGrew's startling shafts of light, beaming into the forest in "Colorado Pond" or illuminating the land where it meets the water in "Lady of the Lake," have a distinctively 19th-century quality. His light makes of the earth a thing sublime. His colors are wholly contemporary though, in a mostly light palette that takes in pale pinks and yellows and lavenders to deep greens and blues. If there's anything awkward about his lovely works, it's the classical-style nudes that McGrew occasionally introduces into them, a naked Adam and Eve, for instance, or a mysterious lady on the shore. He does much better when he keeps people out of his land altogether. The large "Oracle Afternoon," a watercolor/collage, is as good as McGrew gets: Its hillside is lit up by the sun, but its yellow desert trees and red clay earth shine with a radiant light all their own. That same red earth is what makes Fox's clay works such a visceral delight. Her floor pieces, some as high as four feet, are sensuous sculptures in clay, twisted into fantastic desert creatures that owe as much to Native American legend as to real-life Sonoran fauna. Half-human, half animal, they are wholly of their place, tinted in the red and beige of the desert dirt, blackened by fire, and etched like petroglyphs. "Imaginary Friend," in clay and metal, is a typically witty cross between woman and rabbit. Her face is a black ceramic fragment of a face mask, with wire eyes made from found coils, and her body is an amalgam of wild clay shapes bolted together and tinted in pink, beige and yellow. After this show closes, there will be only three more in the current Davis Dominguez space, located in an office park on North Oracle. Gallery co-owners Candice Davis and Mike Dominguez are moving the business out of the foothills and back downtown, where they started more than 20 years ago. Davis said the move to an old warehouse at the corner of Sixth Street and Seventh Avenue will convert the gallery from one of the smallest in town to one of the largest. They'll go from the present 1,500 square feet to about 5,200 square feet, allowing not only for larger changing shows, but also a permanent display for their regular artists. "It's kind of exciting," said Davis. "It's a beautiful space...We wanted a larger space for a long time...And downtown is really starting to happen." Mini Blockbuster, a show of works by Joy Fox, Bruce McGrew and James G. Davis, continues through Saturday, February 14, at the Davis Dominguez Gallery, 6812 N. Oracle Road. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday. For more information call 297-1427.


Nosin' Around Slick Willie's Personal Bidness. By Jeff Smith IN A PERFECT world, men would not wag their cuties in front of women who weren't expecting it, or, if they were, would just as soon be spared the spectacle. Alas, this is not a perfect world. In the real world men on occasion do wag their cuties at women--indeed women in moments of intemperate enthusiasm have been known to flash men--and in the majority of instances this can be passed off to high spirits and low taste. Seduction can at whiles be elevated to an art-form, as evidenced by Bogart and Bacall, but transcendent moments in human relations seldom involve the sound of a descending zipper followed by the words, "Yo, Bitch: check this out." Which is in no way to imply that Gov. William Jefferson Clinton of Arkansas used these precise words to draw the attention of state employee Paula Jones to his groin that fateful night in a Little Rock hotel room...nor even to assert that such a sordid scene ever actually played out. What we have here is a classic he said-she said situation, elevated to global consequence by the status of the accused, and sunk to the status of sewage by the sordid particulars of the accusation. Paula Jones says that Bill Clinton bade his bodyguard bring her to his suite one night, and there and then, to borrow the words of Jack Nicholson, "pulled the stiff one-eye" on her. Are we to accept at face value the innocence of the accused, because he is Leader of the Free World? Are we to assume mendacity on the part of the accuser because she has big hair? Despite the temptations, so many and various and alluring, in this singular soap opera, we must not yield to the quick and easy conclusion. For one thing, Our Man Willie enjoys something of a reputation as a womanizer. As recently as last week he was accused of trifling with the affections of a White House intern. As long ago as his first term as governor of Arkansas he was accused of an extramarital dalliance with Gennifer Flowers. While none of this mud has yet stuck and dried to adobe on the presidential physiognomy, Mr. and Mrs. Clinton did at least address times of temptation and trial in their marriage, in a television interview during their first presidential campaign--an oblique admission that there were a few old flames behind the smoke. And for another thing, Paul Jones has her own reputation as a man-izer. Besides which, there are the unavoidable questions as to what she expected to encounter in the Governor's hotel room late at night, why she agreed to go there, and how come she waited so long to work up a sense of outraged virtue, and so highly public and theatrical a demand for justice. As stated at the outset, in a perfect world.... But everything and everybody involved in this sorry spectacle is so far from perfect it would be best if we could just forget the whole thing and get on with the business of running the world. Want to know what I think? Too bad. What I think is that Bill Clinton probably did pull something on Paula Jones, and that she knew what was on the agenda, only not in quite such lurid detail. I think she expected at least a bottle of blush wine and some oysters from room service, and the pretense of a quickie courtship before Willie whipped out the whitesnake. I think that with all the advantages of position and power and a fine education at the best colleges, Bill Clinton couldn't get in the pants of a trashy woman who would have liked nothing better than to ball the Big Guy and tell her girlfriends about it. And if that sounds like I'm an anti-feminist, male chauvinist pig, you're dumber than I look. I love trashy women and I hate pious-sounding hypocritical men. I just don't think this sort of extra-curricular activity is pertinent to the conduct of presidential politics. If Bill and Paula want to fuck around, okay by me--as long as they do it on their own time. One immutable fact of life is that powerful people are drawn both to leadership and to groupies. And vice-versa. I wouldn't want to live in a nation led by eunuchs. I think Paula Jones yielded to temptation when she went to Gov. Clinton's room that night, and discovered, to her chagrin, that he was even tackier than she. And in the process, discovered something kind of odd and interesting about the gubernatorial staff, so to speak. I think she yielded to temptation again when she agreed, at the urging of Clinton's political enemies, to make a federal case out of it. But I don't despise her for being human and fallible. The whole thing is way beyond her control now. I also think it's pretty silly and pretty sorry for Clinton to have to run up a $3 million legal bill to defend himself against what is really a matter of small moment. And I think it's hilarious that in the loftiest aeries of the free press and world affairs, great minds are wondering aloud what it is about the President's pecker that Paula Jones claims will be her bona fide. And why it hasn't been leaked, no pun intended. To me it seems obvious. Discard the usual issues of size, color, huge hairy moles, birthmarks, stigmata, or tattoos that say either "Wendy" or "Welcome to Jamaica: Have a nice day." Surely Gennifer Flowers or that White House intern would have corroborated Jones' discovery, were the famous feature anything commonly recognizable. Such is not the case. What's special about Big Willie's Little Willie must be something uniquely personal to Paula Jones and William Jefferson Clinton, revealed in that moment of epiphany when the principals met, tete a tete. Consider Ms. Jones. Disregard the new doo, the softer shades of lip gloss and mascara, the lower hem and higher decolletage. Study the parts of her untouched by scissors or comb, brush, pencil, needle and thread or surgeon's scalpel, the phases of the makeover that decorum dictates must wait until after the trial, after the talk-shows, after the made-for-TV movie. Ponder wisely and well and you will have your own epiphany: Bill Clinton's cutie looks just like Paula Jones' nose. Remember, you read it here first.


You Say You Want A Revolution? By Amy C. Murphy Flowers for Mei-Ling, by Lorraine Lachs (Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc.). Cloth, $24. IN LORRAINE LACHS' first novel, Flowers for Mei-Ling, she takes the words of the Beatles' song "Revolution" to heart. The questioning impulse behind the lyrics parallels the purpose Lachs defines and develops through her novel: to consider not only the efficacy of revolutionary endeavors, but also the cost, often a personal one, of maintaining civilizations and the status quo they represent. By developing the history of her character, Mei-Ling Wang, Lachs manifests a subtle critique of both revolutionary aims and the preservation of socioeconomic systems. Through the experiences of Mei-Ling and the other characters in her novel, Lachs shows that the impetus to revolt and the desire to defend the edifices of civilization are equally suspicious acts. The novel dramatizes this critique through Mei-Ling's metamorphosis: from a teenage member of the Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution in China, to a kept woman and high-class prostitute in Hong-Kong and Amsterdam, and finally into an accomplished, independent business woman living in Montreal. Lachs illustrates the wages revolution wreaks for people like Mei-Ling who are swept up in its torrent. Mei-Ling's father, an intellectual and champion of Chairman Mao, is murdered by the Red Guard, ultimately victimized by revolutionary principles that become twisted into tyranny. After surviving a gang rape by her comrades, Mei-Ling escapes to Hong Kong with her mother, Emma, who buys their freedom by bartering away their family heirlooms. While pawning the last piece of family jade at a shop, they meet the more-than-sleazy Dutch venture capitalist Verhoeven, the man who helps Mei-Ling exchange one form of servitude for another. Instead of doing the bidding of a tyrannical dictator, Mei-Ling, enabled by her mother, trades her body in order to survive. The communist ideals her mother still holds dear give way to the necessity of staying alive in a world in which the power of exchange holds sway. This is part of Lachs' keen analysis concerning the power dynamics of socioeconomic systems as seemingly diverse as communism and capitalism. Each system bases itself on ideals that ultimately become compromised by the desire for power. That the revolutionary ideals spawned in response to the oppression created by capitalist systems and social hierarchies can themselves lead to the sowing of fresh inequalities ironically bears out the truth of an aphorism the author attributes to Karl Marx's: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions," parrots the formerly devout Maoist Emma. Far from revolution leading to the experience of a paradise on the earth, the misfortunes of the Wang family testify to the abysmal nature of life during the Cultural Revolution. Emma's response to the quality of life in the capitalist milieu of Hong Kong demonstrates Lachs' notion that the attempt to put revolutionary aims into practice can easily dissolve into disutopia: "Emma is undone by the abundance. In what she sees before her, there seems no evidence at all of what her husband...once described as...'mind, spirit, and matter held fast to one another, links in the golden chain of civilization.' Hong Kong, she thinks, is all matter, a vast shrine to indulgence. Everyone worships at the golden calf. But, at the same moment, she wonders: What was it she fled from? Surely not some higher order of civilization. It had been hell!" It's impressive that while exposing the shortcomings of the implementation of communist principles in the East, Lachs does not simplistically wind up making the very Western argument that the world should be safe for democracy, and implicitly, capitalism. Lachs is equally astute at showing the casualties of the capitalistic impulse. And interestingly, she achieves this balance by illustrating that transcendent sorts of oppression characterize both of these socioeconomic systems. Through the transformations of Mei-Ling throughout the story, Lachs shows that the unequal position of women in various societies, regardless of which political system holds sway, functions as a persistent common denominator, despite dreams of revolution. Mei-Ling's violent induction into sexual experience while a member of the Red Guard attests to an inequality that persists despite the pretension of comradeship. Her survival through her occupations of mistress and prostitute constitutes a perhaps more patent symptom of women's inequality in a capitalist system. Without money to earn one's keep, one becomes kept. Without money to trade for goods and services, one trades in flesh. As Mei-Ling pragmatically explains to the man she marries after her move in Montreal, "(H)aving money means having freedom...and independence...Money is useful." Lachs refrains from offering easy answers to the problems of inequality that characterize the diverse socioeconomic systems traversing her novel. Her resistance to definitive judgments concerning the rightness of one system versus another is borne out by the fact that she concludes the action of the novel at the time of Great Britain's return of the colony of Hong Kong to the Chinese. The tenuousness of this moment of transition, the potentially destructive collision between the value systems represented by capitalism and communism "hang(s) suspended in a great anticlimax." Lachs eschews the late sixties optimism of the Beatles, resisting the impulse to join in the comforting chorus of "Don't you know it's gonna be all right. All right." Nationally recognized authors Pat Mora, Susan Power and Lorraine Lachs are the featured guests at Women Writers' Journeys: Real and Imagined, a conference sponsored by the Women's Studies Advisory Council,at 7 p.m. Wednesday, February 11, in the Doubletree Hotel, 445 S. Alvernon Way. Cost is $25 per person, and includes a dessert buffet. Tickets are available at the UA Women's Studies office, Antigone Books, The Book Mark, Borders Books and Music, or by calling 621-7338.


Developer John Wesley Miller Proposes An Ambitious Development For A Downtown Neighborhood. By Dave Devine AFTER TWO DECADES of battling proposals for land along its eastern border, downtown's historic Armory Park neighborhood may have finally found a project its residents can enthusiastically support. When developer John Wesley Miller unveiled his plans to build 99 homes on property at the corner of South Third Avenue and 16th Street--a 14-acre lot between the neighborhood and the Union Pacific railroad tracks--he was met with overwhelming approval at a recent Armory Park Neighborhood Association meeting. Miller told the 30 people in attendance that he wanted to construct single-family homes, even though the land is zoned for high-density residential development. Talk about politically correct development: Miller told the crowd he'd build homes that were architecturally compatible with the rest of the neighborhood, and even promised the development would be the "most significant all-solar project in the country." To minimize the impact of more cars in the neighborhood, he promised that parking for the houses would be at the rear of the units and front doors would look out onto wide pedestrian walkways. Little wonder that, at the end of his presentation, Armory Park residents gave Miller a round of applause. The neighborhood has rarely been so kind to developers who wanted to build on the property. In earlier days, the Southern Pacific Railroad Company maintained executive housing on South Third Avenue, but by 1967 most of the historic homes had been torn down. The 33-acre site sat vacant until 1979, when the City of Tucson spent $2.5 million to acquire and clear the land. The city adopted a redevelopment plan for the area which called for the 19 acres along its north and east sides to be zoned for industrial uses. The remainder of the property was to contain apartments or other high-density housing with up to 17 units per acre allowed. The city sold the land, at a considerable loss, and waited for someone to develop the property. Instead, a series of bankruptcies and long delays ensued. Eventually property owner Alan Levine built industrial buildings on some of the property, but the residential portion remained bare. In the meantime, Armory Park underwent a renaissance, as residents formed one of Tucson's first neighborhood associations and began renovating their run-down homes. As the neighborhood association grew in power, it began to influence proposals for the 14 acres of vacant land zoned for housing. In 1997, when developer Stan Abrams attempted to build a high-density development on the property, neighborhood resistance led him to drop the plans. But when Miller purchased the land for just over $1 million last year, saying he intended to build single-family homes at a density of seven units to the acre rather than the 17 permitted, neighborhood residents were optimistic for a change. Miller says the 99 homes should be between 800 and 1,400 square feet on lots ranging from 3,000 to 6,000 square feet. Prices will range from $80,000 to $150,000. Some Armory Park residents are still concerned the development won't be restricted to single-family homes, given the land's high-density zoning. Miller pledges to impose conditions on the land to limit the number of homes and says he'll enforce design guidelines. "Armory Park is a treasure that needs to be preserved," he says. The neighborhood association is still concerned about a promised private park that will buffer the new development from the enormous industrial buildings along the property's northern edge. Some nearby residents fear this green space could become a haven for the homeless. Residents are also concerned about additional traffic in the neighborhood. Armory Park Neighborhood Association president Ken Seasholes, who supports Miller's proposal, says some traffic-mitigation measures will be needed along Third Avenue because of the new construction. He hopes Miller will agree to help cover the cost of installing the traffic circles or speed humps. Seasholes thinks the perceived threats from the pocket park may be overstated. Miller admits the existing warehouses, along with a new one proposed for the Arizona Department of Economic Security, will affect the marketability of the lots along the northern edge of his property, but says that's just a factor which has to be considered in determining a price for those lots. Miller also promises an ambitious solar power plan. Rather than have the homes rely on individual solar devices, Miller will connect them to Tucson Electric Power's distribution system. The energy generated from the solar panels located atop of the structures in the project will be sold directly to TEP. Although ownership of these panels--homeowners or outside investors--is still up in the air, Miller hopes every house in the project will cover the costs of a monthly electrical bill through the energy exchange. It's a plan that has neighbors optimistic. As one remarked, "Before this plan, most of us were hoping the land would turn into a dog run."


Billboard Baron Karl Eller Is Trying To Budge The City Council. By Dave Devine KARL ELLER, A 1946 graduate of Tucson High School, has made millions in several businesses during his professional career. He's so successful the University of Arizona recently named its Business School after him--but that might have more to do with the $10 million donation he gave the UA than with the fact that he built a convenience store empire. When he purchased most of Tucson's billboards last year, Eller apparently thought he had enough clout to end the often bitter legalistic battles between the City of Tucson and local sign companies. He may have overestimated his muscle. Several months ago, Eller's representatives met with city attorneys to discuss various billboard topics, including four legal cases now making their way through the appeals process. Those actions concern dozens of illegally located signs, billboards with improper cutouts or extensions, and signs which don't meet the city's lighting code standards (See "Billboard Games," January 22, 1998). The discussions focused on the legal steps the city is taking against 50 other billboards. Eller's representatives also wanted to discuss "tri-vision," giant rotating signs with three faces on each billboard. Those meetings bore no fruit for Eller, because the Tucson City Council has made it clear it wants to enforce the law against billboard violations. The city also has the upper hand in most of the court cases now under appeal. Despite that, Eller later lobbied each Council member to explain his position. He says he's "trying to work with city officials to negotiate a compromise." Eller told some of those he met with that he had four votes on the City Council to negotiate an agreement in lieu of the legal battles. But at a recent City Council executive session to discuss the billboard enforcement program, Eller's addition proved to be incorrect. Only Mayor George Miller spoke in favor of the idea. Before that meeting behind closed doors, several Council members said they didn't support Eller. Ward 5 Councilman Steve Leal and Ward 3 Councilman Jerry Anderson denied they supported the plan. A staffer for Ward 4 Councilwoman Shirley Scott indicated she wasn't backing the plan. Ward 2 Councilwoman Janet Marcus said she hadn't said much of anything when she met with Eller. Eller said last week that he thought a compromise on the billboard issue was the best solution. He hopes for a plan that will satisfy everyone, but if that's not possible, his company will continue to fight the city in court. Anderson says Eller's offer is unreasonable because he doesn't want to take down obviously illegal billboards before negotiations begin. Given that, Anderson thinks the city shouldn't waste its time in trying to negotiate a settlement. And while Eller talks compromise with the Council, he's waging war on another front: the state Capitol, where he's lobbying several state legislators on a bill which would severely limit the city's ability to take legal action against billboards. This legislation, if it were to become law, would also make a mockery of the billboard enforcement inititative Tucson voters approved in 1985. Eller could not be reached for comment concerning the proposed legislation, House Bill 2671.


Our State Lawmakers Belong On A Brain Transplant List. By Jeff Smith ARIZONA IS connected to New Mexico, California, Utah, Sonora, and marginally to Colorado, Baja California Norte, and Chihuahua. Via these conduits our state also is linked to the remainder of North, Central and South America. Though the lines are less concrete, the Grand Canyon State has ties to the entire planet, all its lands and peoples, cultures, politics, needs and gifts to offer in return. Yessiree, Bob, the knee bone truly is connected to the thigh bone: we are one world, a great big ol' Coca Cola commercial. So how come the Arizona Legislature passes this law that says donor organs from Arizona dead bodies have to go to patients in need of spare parts here within our arbitrary boundaries, before someone, say, in Truth or Consequences (who might need a good used liver a whole lot worse), gets a crack at it? And it's not just the meat market that arbitrarily sets Arizona apart from the rest of our nation and our world, it's this sort of prevailing and pervasive attitude of insularity. At its worst it puts me in mind of the states' right mentality that led us into what the Confederacy still calls The War of Northern Aggression. The Civil War. Now I will readily admit that some of the starry-eyed universalist dreams of my youth have yielded to a more community-based ethos on human intercourse, but that does not mean I've gone isolationist. "Think globally, act locally" makes a lot of sense. And persons of sensibility need to give serious thought to each and every problem they confront, to decide precisely what is the most appropriate precinct in which to apply a solution. By this I mean there are some issues that demand policies and actions no broader in scope than couples, families, neighborhoods. Other issues are more general and fittingly apply to, say, school districts, cities, counties or states. Some matters, such as defense, transportation, health care and education, cry out for consistent nationwide policy and policing of standards. The organ-donor thing fits the national model, and truth to tell, if this NAFTA thing is worth a damn, we probably ought to be able to demonstrate its utility by trucking Canadian pancreases and Mexican kidneys to swap with U.S. internals. For the simple reason that we have the technology, as they said on The Six-Million Dollar Man. And what could be more apropos? Sometimes my wit astounds even me. But seriously, new national regulations pertaining to organ donor systems will, by law, supersede the various state systems and laws, some of which--like Arizona's--presume to have priority over federal requirements. It simply makes no sense, practically, politically or constitutionally, for Arizona's legislators who persevere in this bone-head attitude that nobody in Washington is going to tell us what to do, even if it makes sense. And it does make sense that available donor organs should go wherever they can be delivered on time, solely on the basis of need. Meaning to whomever needs the organ most, has the least time to live without a transplant, has been on the list longest. Political boundaries and partisan pissing contests have no business here. And it has been brought to the attention of our Legislature, unfortunately without apparent effect, that ofttimes Arizona patients are transported out-of-state to more specialized medical facilities for treatment there and to await donor organs. By giving first priority to in-state patients for in-state giblets, our new law may cut native sons and daughters trucked to out-of-state hospitals out of their helping of stuffing, so to speak. And conversely, some Californian might get air-lifted from L.A. to UMC to await a heart transplant by our own redoubtable Dr. Jack Copeland, and ace-out an Arizonan. Doesn't this all sound a trifle silly? Well, hell yes, and it should. We're all tax-paying Americans, living in an information and transportation network that functions, in this particular instance, essentially on a national basis. We all, Arizonans and whatever, will benefit by national cooperation on the basis of need. We ought to repeal our own stupid law, before the feds and the U.S. Constitution force it on us. At considerable mutual expense, one might add. Oh, and the same logic applies to the Clean Air Act, another of those global issues where Arizona seems hell-bent both on acting and thinking with no consideration beyond narrow local bounds.


Jane Candia Coleman Turns An Old-Fashioned Cattle Drive Into High Adventure. By Emil Franzi The O'Keefe Empire, by Jane Candia Coleman (Five Star, Cloth, $19.95) MOST OF THE Old West trail drives were south to north, as were the classic stories that described them, from Red River to Lonesome Dove. Jane Coleman's latest novel is based on the diary kept during a real cattle drive that began in New Mexico and went through Arizona to San Diego. Set in the winter of 1888-89, the drive happened much later than those better-known adventures. Railroads were the principal reason for the demise of those earlier drives, but the railroads were the cause of the one featured here. The late Roger MacBride liked to quote his adopted great-grandmother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of Little House on The Prairie, as saying "anybody who won't steal from the railroad can't be trusted"--a common attitude throughout the West in the late 19th century and beyond. The railroads were gouging Southwestern ranchers so badly in the late 1880s that they simply couldn't afford to ship cattle, so they had to either drive them on foot or lose their ranches. The hero in Coleman's story is 24-year-old Joanna O'Keefe. Recently widowed, she has acquired her husband's share of a large but troubled New Mexico ranch in partnership with a pair of immigrant Scottish brothers, John and Angus McLeod. Coleman populates the rest of the novel with a cast of believable characters, both good guys and bad, and there's even an Italian version of Walter Brennan at the chuck wagon--kind of like Red River in a different direction with one of the bosses as a lady. Coleman's writing makes you feel the gritty scut work of moving a herd of cattle 1,000 miles over bleak terrain. She makes it clear that nobody in his right mind did this stuff for fun; being a "cowboy" was really a scummy job. She also gives us a blossoming love interest between Joanna and one of the brothers, enough nasty bastards and unexpected obstacles to keep things interesting, and the ultimate triumph of the good guys. Fans of Cormac McCarthy will be turned off by that--there's no cavalcade of misfits, losers, victims and bad guys who never miss when they shoot. Coleman is kind of old-fashioned that way, bless her--and probably more accurate. The geography of Arizona and the Southwest are portrayed as they then were, when rivers like the Gila and the Colorado still ran. Readers who enjoy Western historical fiction that accents strong female characters without making them caricatures will enjoy The O'Keefe Empire. In another time, when the values it presents were held in higher esteem by Hollywood, it would have had a fair chance of being made into a movie. For the McLeod brothers think Randolph Scott and Jimmy Stewart with a Scottish brogue. We could do a whole lot worse. Jane Coleman will sign copies of The O'Keefe Empire at 7 p.m. Thursday, June 10, at Borders Books and Music, 4350 N. Oracle Road. For more information call 292-1331.


Broker Bill Arnold's Land Deals On Behalf Of The Amphi School District Get Court Scrutiny By Jim Nintzel FORMER PIMA COUNTY Supervisor David Yetman sued the Amphitheater School District last week, claiming Amphi violated state law when it signed contracts with Bill Arnold, a broker with Genesis Real Estate and Development, the firm that handled the district's land acquisition between 1992 and 1996. Yetman, an author who now works as assistant research social scientist at the UA Southwest Center, directed well-known local attorney Bill Risner to file the suit, which also names Genesis, Arnold, Amphi Board members Virginia Houston and Mike Bernal, and former Amphi Board member Vicki Cox-Golder as defendants. The suit alleges the district's "exclusive retainer agreement" with Arnold created a conflict of interest because it allowed Arnold to negotiate his fees with the seller, rather than paying him an hourly wage to work for the district. As a result, Arnold had a stake in the deals he was negotiating on behalf of the district. Between 1992 and 1996, Arnold brokered eight real-estate deals for Amphi, earning more than $150,000. The lawsuit demands Arnold turn over the fees he earned in the transactions to the school district. The contract between Amphi and Genesis, which was first uncovered by The Weekly last year, was never approved by the school board in an open meeting. Nor was the position ever formally advertised or put out to bid. When questioned about the selection process, Amphi Associate Superintendent Katie Frey, the official responsible for hiring Arnold, told The Weekly she couldn't remember who had recommended him for the job. The suit also asks the court to impose civil penalties on Cox-Golder, Bernal and Houston, who were on the board when the contract was approved, and to remove Bernal and Houston from the board. (Cox-Golder gave up her board seat last year in an unsuccessful bid for the District 3 seat on the Pima County Board of Supervisors. Arnold, her longtime political ally, chaired the Cox-Golder campaign.) "I decided a lawsuit needed to be filed," says Yetman. "There were gross conflicts of interest involved in that land deal. I believe the entire context in which the contract was voted on, awarded and carried out--all of that was illegal." Amphi Associate Superintendent Todd Jaeger downplayed the lawsuit. "I don't think the case has any merit," says Jaeger, who disagreed with Risner's assertion that the contract with Genesis meant Arnold was an employee of the district. He said the contract didn't need to be put out to bid because the sellers, rather than the district, were paying the broker fees. The suit comes as the Amphi Board struggles to build a new high school on one of the parcels Arnold purchased for the district. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has determined the 73-acre site is prime habitat for the endangered cactus ferruginous pygmy owl, so Amphi has had to develop a mitigation plan before it could get approval to rechannel a wash on the property. Amphi paid $1.78 million, or more than $24,000 an acre, for the parcel, which was not appraised before the sale. A Weekly investigation last year showed that similar parcels sold for thousands of dollars less per acre around the same time. Following The Weekly's series, the district decided to terminate its relationship with Genesis and develop a new land acquisition policy. "I'm convinced they paid far too much for the land," Yetman says. "The district could have saved itself a lot of grief and a lot of scrutiny if it had just gone by its own rules and gotten an appraisal done."


Jindong Cai Is Expected To Take The UA School Of Music To A Higher Playing Field. By Dave Irwin WHEN JINDONG CAI speaks, he searches for the right words. But when the Beijing-born conductor switches to gestures, he takes on the grace and perfection of a dancer, his hands articulating precise concepts of melodic motives and timing. There's no mistaking the art and beauty of his meaning. Illustrating a phrase from Brahms' First Symphony, his hands move fluidly, elegantly, and without ambiguity. It's an art he learned from masters, including Leonard Bernstein. Hired as the new acting director of Orchestral and Operatic Music at the University of Arizona, Cai is charged with taking the UA program to a higher level of excellence. It's a challenge he embraces in his quest for an artistic life. However, Cai's debut earlier this year was ambiguous. Last September, he led the UA student symphony orchestra skillfully through the treacherous rhythms of Joan Tower's 1998 "Tambor" in their first concert of the semester. But the orchestra was less than impressive on relative war horses, Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony" No. 8 in B minor, and Shostokovich's Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op 47, with anemic entrances and shaky ensemble playing. Still, he refused to fault the students. "It showed this is a promising orchestra," Cai averred. "They only had three weeks, and they really worked...They had never practiced that hard before. I really appreciate the work they did. It was not the best in my standards, but it was the best they could do in that time. I had students come to me in tears, and they said they really enjoyed the experience. I think that in music in general, especially in education, the process is more important than the result. Through the process, they understand what music means. They learn through the struggle. That is the most important thing." By the end of the semester, Cai had made clear progress with his charges, giving a much more satisfying reading of the Brahms work earlier this month. He is looking forward to even greater improvement as he continues to take an increasingly active role in the university's music program. Cai comes to Tucson after a number of international successes. He maintains relationships with the China National Symphony, the National Opera and Ballet of China, the China National Broadcasting Symphony, and the Shanghai Symphony. He will conduct concerts this spring in China and Mexico. The role of a conductor, according to Cai, is as a leader: "You ask them to do your way," he says, "and then you channel them to do your way...the one right approach to convince 80 or 100 people to the one way you think is right. "Students think they know, but you have to teach them more," he notes. "(With) professional orchestras, you have to trust that they can follow you. Everything is more technical. (With a) student orchestra, you sometimes go bar by bar, and connect (them)." By way of example, he illustrates bowing techniques from a section of Brahms--from "frog" (short bow at the base) to middle bow to tip. "When you tell them about those, they say, 'Ahhh, that's what music is about...so detailed, a different sound from the same notes,' and you feel their eyes are opening." Cai's position on the UA faculty comes after several years of unexpected instability within the school. The conductor hired after Leonard Pearlman's retirement had to resign following medical problems. Cai was hired over the late spring of 1998. Although technically in an acting position, the school's director, Gary Cook, says the university has a multiple-year commitment to Cai which will also allow him to continue his international involvements. "We were very fortunate to find him," Cook says. "He's very committed to the university program. It fits his professional development, and his artistic gratification." Indeed, one of the reasons Cai chose the UA position was that it allows him to continue work in both orchestra and opera. Professional organizations would have required him to choose one path to the exclusion of the other. His kudos in operatic works, as well as his symphonic experience, make him ideal for the position. Cai learned conducting in China after playing in an army orchestra during the Cultural Revolution. His initial conducting teacher had been trained in the former Soviet Union, China's cultural partner following World War II. After coming to America in 1986, he was selected to study with Leonard Bernstein at Tanglewood near the end of Bernstein's life. The impact of that experience infuses Cai's art. "It was fortunate that I got to spend time with him in the last year of his teaching," he recalls. "I think of what he said every day: He told us, 'Conducting is very difficult, because it looks so easy.' "
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ABU DHABI, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News / WAM - 25th Jul, 2021) Hub71, Abu Dhabis global tech ecosystem, has been selected by the Abu Dhabi Residents Office (ADRO), a division of the Department of Economic Development (ADDED), to endorse exceptional tech talent for their Entrepreneur Golden Visa from Abu Dhabi.

Hub71 will review, evaluate and issue endorsement letters to entrepreneurial talent for the Entrepreneur Golden Visa based on requirements set by ADDED and the Federal Authority For Identity and Citizenship (ICA). Once entrepreneurs obtain a letter of endorsement from Hub71, ADRO and the ICA will manage enquiries relating to final visa approval and issuance of the Entrepreneur Golden Visa.

The Visa is valid for five years and enables entrepreneurs who are foreign nationals and UAE residents to make the UAE their long-term home to build and scale technologies and innovative solutions.

In addition to the entrepreneurs, their spouses, children and up to three of the entrepreneurs executive directors could also be covered under the visa, without the need for a national sponsor.

Innovation, entrepreneurship and advanced industries are clear priorities for the UAE as part of its ambition to create a diversified knowledge-based economy in line with the UAE Centennial Plan 2071. Hub71 will review applications from entrepreneurs operating in a diverse range of technology sectors including FinTech, HealthTech, EdTech, E-commerce, AI and big data.

Ibrahim Ajami, Interim CEO at Hub71 and Head of Ventures and Growth at Mubadala Investment Company, said, "Abu Dhabi provides entrepreneurs with the infrastructure, resources and support from both the public and private sectors to enable founders to succeed in a growing market where innovation is central to its long-term future. We are calling on changemakers within our community, locally and globally, with bright ideas and a bold vision to advance sectors of national importance and make a positive difference to our society, embracing the growth opportunities the UAE presents."

For eligibility, entrepreneurs must own a successful project in the UAE with a minimum valuation of AED500,000. Projects must also relate to defined economic sectors - information and telecommunications technology, financial services, health, medical and pharmaceutical industries, tourism, agriculture and manufacturing of food and agriculture products, aviation and defence, petrochemicals, industry and education.

For entrepreneurs whose projects are focused on other sectors, Hub71 has the authority to endorse their application as an accredited organisation by ADDED.

To apply for the Entrepreneur Golden Visa, please visit: https://www.hub71.com/golden-visa/
(@FahadShabbir)

SHARJAH, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News / WAM - 25th Jul, 2021) The Sharjah Chamber of Commerce and Industry (SCCI) has discussed with the Consulate-General of the Republic of South Korea in Dubai means of enhancing economic cooperation and commercial relations between companies and investment institutions operating in Sharjah and South Korea.

They also discussed ways of supporting partnerships, along with investment opportunities available in information technology, healthcare, tourism, and culture.

This came during a visit of Moon Byung-Jun, Consul-General of South Korea in Dubai, to the SCCI headquarters, where he was received by Mohammed Ahmed Amin Al-Awadi, Director-General of the Chamber, and Fatima Khalifa Al Mokarrab, Director of International Relations Department at the Chamber.

While welcoming the visiting delegation, Al-Awadi underlined the depth of UAE-South Korea relations, where the latter is considered one of the most important trading partners for the UAE and the Emirate of Sharjah in particular.

Al-Awadi pointed out that the UAE is the largest market for South Korean exports in the GCC and the fourth largest market for South Korean imports in the region, noting that the volume of trade exchange between the two countries reached $9.4 billion in 2020.

The SCCI Director-General highlighted the services provided by the Sharjah Chamber to businessmen and investors, hoping that this visit would advance the economic and investment ties between the two countries.

He stressed that the Chamber is keen to attract investments, build commercial partnerships, and promote the rewarding opportunities available in various economic sectors in Sharjah. It also provides enormous incentives and benefits to attract businessmen from worldwide to maintain the pioneering position of the emirate as a prominent economic hub both regionally and globally.

Byung-Jun, in turn, thanked the Chamber for the warm reception and the keenness it showed to provide means of support and coordination with the Korean business community. He also lauded renaissance and economic development witnessed by Sharjah in various fields, expressing his eagerness to extend the existing cooperation with the Chamber to enhance mutual trade and investment relations.

The South Korean Consul-General pointed to the importance of South Korean companies participating in the exhibitions hosted by the Expo Centre Sharjah, such as the SteelFab, the Watch & Jewellery middle East Show (WJMES), and other cultural events hosted by Sharjah which is considered a regional leader in this field.
(@FahadShabbir)

MIRPUR (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 25th Jul, 2021 ) : Jul 25 (APP):Azad Jammu Kashmir Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Justice (Retd) Abdul Rasheed Salaria Sunday expressed full satisfaction over holding of general elections process in Azad Jammu Kashmir in free, fair and peaceful manner.

Talking to media persons during his visit to various polling stations in Kotli, Bhimbher and Mirpur districts , he expressed the hope that the overall turnout of the voting might be over 56 percent.

He was flanked by members of the AJK Election Commissioner Raja Farooq Ahmed Niaz and Farhat Ali Mir during visit to the polling stations to assess the polling process in Mirpur division.

The chief election commissioner said that although there were reports about occurrence of some unpleasant incidents of clashes among the rival groups outside the polling stations, but the overall polling process remained peaceful under the due foolproof security arrangements.

To this direction, he expressed full satisfaction over the arrangements made by the Election Commission for holding of the polls in free, fair and transparent manner.

Responding to a question of APP, he said that since polling process will continue till the stipulated 5.00 pm in the evening according to the elections schedule, voters present in the premises of the polling stations till 5.00 pm would also be able to exercise their right of vote even after passing of the stipulated polling time.

To another question, the Chief Election Commissioner said that the presiding officers would be bound to provide the copies of the unofficial results to the polling agents of the contest political parties and the independent candidates soon after completion of the counting process.

APP / AHR.
Kinshasa, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 25th Jul, 2021 ) :A Democratic Republic of Congo policeman has shot a student who was not wearing a mask while filming on the streets of the capital, witnesses said on Sunday.

"Our friend Honore Shama, a student in the faculty of arts at the University of Kinshasa, was filming a video as part of his acting practical work requirement," Patient Odia, a friend who was present at the confrontation, told AFP.

"A policeman told him to wear a mask during the filming." "Despite his (Shama's) explanations and after having showed him a mask, the policeman, who was expecting to be offered money, became infuriated, accused him of resisting and shot him at point-blank range."Other witnesses told a similar story to the popular Top Congo radio as well as several online news sites.

The policeman responsible has fled and the city's police are searching for him, the head of Kinshasa police, General Sylvano Kasongo, told AFP.
PESHAWAR, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 25th Jul, 2021 ) :Polling for two Constituencies of the Legislative Assembly of Azad Jummu and Kashmir LA XLV Kashmir Velley-VI andLA-XXXIX Jammu-VI are continued peacefully on here Sunday.

The polling was started at 8 a.m and since morning, Kashmiris voters including male and female have started arriving to polling stations in large number to exercise their right of franchise.

Long queues of voters are being observed at Shaheed Osama Zafar Government High school No 2 polling station Peshawar City besides a number of others pollingstations.

High level of enthusiasm are being witnessed among Kashmiris including young voters inside and outside the polling stations for casting votes.

Candidates have setup polling camps outside polling stations to facilitate voters where they were helping voters to get their votes' numbers in the voters lists and giving briefing to cast their vote correctly.

Kashmiris living in 21 districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are voting for LA-XLV Kashmir Valley-VI seat where close contest is expected among Ahmad Shahid Mushtaq (Independent), Abdul Majid Khan (PTI), Abdul Nasir Khan (Independent) and Noorul Bari (JI).

The candidates have visited Osma Zafar Shaheed Govt High School Poling Station and expressed satisfaction over election and security arrangements.

Kamran Bangash, Special Assistant to the Chief Minister Khaber Pakhtunkhwa for Information and Higher education visited an election camp to review security arrangements and urged Kashmiris voters to come in large number and poll their votes.

Talking to people he said Peshawar was like a flowers bouquet where people of all parts of the country including Kashmiris were playing their role for its development.

Kamran Bangash said no one would be allowed to disrupt smooth polling process.

He said all political forces were united to thwart nefarious designs of inimical forces.

In Mardan district, Kashmiri voters were also casting votes at two polling stations setup at Govt Girls High School College Chowk. Similarly in Bannu district, polling continued at Govt Degree College No 2 Bannu where each polling booth for both constituencies were setup.

Kashmiries settled in Peshawar, Nowshera, Mardan, Abbottabad, Haripur, Mansehra, Dera Ismail Khan, Bannu, South Waziristan, Swat, Batgram, Buner, Tank, Charsadda, Chitral, Shangla, Swabi, Kohat, Kohistan, Lakki Marwat, Lower Dir and Mohmand were also exercising their right of franchise for LA-XLV Kashmir Velley-XI in a free and transparent manner.

The total registered voters in the constituency are 6,951 including 3,860 male and 3,091 female for whom 41 polling stations including seven for male, nine for female and 25 combined were setup.

Likewise, 64 polling booths were established including 29 for male, 32 female and three combined.

As many as 41 presiding officers are supervising the polling process with assistance of polling officers and assistant returning officers.

LA-XXXIX Jammu-VI seat consists of 23 districts of two provinces including Rawalpindi, Islamabad, Attock, Jhelum, Chakwal, Peshawar, Nowshera, Mardan, Kohat, Buner, Charsadda, Karak, Kohistan, Mohmand, Abbottabad, Haripur, Mansehra, Dera Ismail Khan, Bannu, Swat, Swabi, Upper Dir and Chitral.

A total of 13 candidates are in the run for wining the constituency seat including Chaudhary Fakhar Zaman (PPP), Nazia Niaz (PTI) and Raja Sadeeq (PML-N) and a tough contest is expected.

The law enforcement agencies and police are deployed outside the polling stations and no arms, ammunition and mobile phones are allowed inside polling stations.

Polling will continue till 5pm without break.
RAWALPINDI, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 25th Jul, 2021 ) :The District Health Authority has urged the people to ensure proper oral, internal and external hygiene to keep diseases at bay.

Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Health Dr Faiza Kanwal appealed to the public to be careful, as the body's immunity reduced during monsoon and made it vulnerable to many diseases, which were commonly associated with this season.

Talking to APP, she said the diseases associated with monsoon were malaria, jaundice, gastrointestinal infections like typhoid and cholera.

She said that puddles of water, which gets stagnant due to rainwater becomes breeding ground for mosquitoes and cause of spreading diseases like malaria and dengue fever. Dr Faiza advised using a mosquito net or mosquito repellants like mats and coils.

She also cautioned the people to avoid walking in dirty water during the rainy season, adding this may lead to numerous fungal infections, which affect toes and nails. The CEO asked the diabetic patients to take special care of their feet and always keep them dry and clean.

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MINSK (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 26th July, 2021) Belarus is planning to open a consulate general in China's Hong Kong, which will be its fourth one in the Asian country, Ambassador to Beijing Yuri Senko has said.

"We are currently preparing a decision to open the fourth Belarusian consulate general in China.

We have them in Chongqing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, and we are currently considering China's economic hub that is of much interest to us, meaning Hong Kong," Senko said in an interview with the Belarusian broadcaster CTV, which was shown on Sunday.

Earlier in the week, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko held a meeting with senior officials responsible for the country's foreign policy, saying that the Western reaction to the 2020 presidential election showed the need to readjust the country's foreign policy approach. Later, the president demanded to bolster the country's diplomatic presence in India, Russia and China.
(@FahadShabbir)

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 24th July, 2021) Turkmenistan's President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov called his Uzbek counterpart Shavkat Mirziyoyev on Saturday to wish him a happy birthday and discuss the preparations for the third consultative meeting of the heads of Central Asian states, which will be held in Turkmenistan on August 6, the press service of the Uzbek President said.

Mirziyoyev turned 64 on Saturday.

"The Presidents separately dwelt on the preparation of the Consultative meeting of the heads of Central Asian states, which will be held on August 6 this year in the national tourist zone Avaza," the statement said.

In particular, the presidents discussed the program and agenda of the upcoming event.

In addition to that, the president of Turkmenistan also congratulated his Uzbek counterpart on the successful holding of the High-Level International Conference on Strengthening the Connectivity of Central and South Asia in Tashkent on July 15 and 16.

"It was noted that the fruitful results of this forum will serve as a good basis from promoting projects of practical interaction in a vast region," the release added.

The firstconsultative meeting of the heads of Central Asian states was held in the capital of Kazakhstan on March 15, 2018.

Last year's meeting was originally scheduled to take place in Bishkek but due to COVID-19 was postponed to this year.
(@ChaudhryMAli88)

LONDON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 25th July, 2021) At least four police officers were injured and six people were detained during anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine demonstrations in London, Commander Catherine Roper, the Metropolitan Police crime prevention, inclusion and engagement lead, said.

"The mostly peaceful demonstrations in Central London have finished. My thanks to the crowds who engaged with us and my colleagues for their hard work. There were 6 arrests for a range of offences and unacceptably 4 officers injured. I wish them a speedy recovery," Roper said on Twitter late on Saturday.

Earlier in the day, she tweeted that one demonstrator was arrested after throwing a bottle at police officers.

Coronavirus restrictions were lifted in the United Kingdom on July 19, although authorities still recommend wearing face masks and using the NHS Covid-Pass, which demonstrates proof of vaccination or a negative coronavirus test result.

On Saturday, five days after the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions, thousands of people gathered in central London to protest against vaccination and the coronavirus pass.
WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 25th July, 2021) The US military has carried out a test of the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System, successfully intercepting at least one target, the US Missile Defense Agency (MDA) said.

"The U.S. Missile Defense Agency, in cooperation with the U.S. Navy, conducted Flight Test Aegis Weapon System 33 in the broad ocean area northwest of Hawaii, July 24," the MDA informed on Saturday.

The objective was to intercept two short-range ballistic missile targets using four Standard Missile-6 Dual II missiles.

"Based on initial observations, one target was successfully intercepted. At this time, we cannot confirm the second target was destroyed," the MDA said.

These were the most complex exercises of this kind to date, according to the MDA, using two test targets and a ship (the USS Ralph Johnson) equipped with the Aegis missile defense system. It was the third flight test of an Aegis-equipped vessel using the SM-6 Dual II missile.
Valdosta, GA (31601)

Today

Thunderstorms. High 79F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%. Locally heavy rainfall possible..

Tonight

Thunderstorms likely in the evening. Then a chance of scattered thunderstorms later on. Low 72F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 60%. Locally heavy rainfall possible.
Following the social unrest that engulfed South Africa and eSwatini recently, women religious leaders in Southern Africa organised an online Day of Prayer to intercede for their countries.

Sr Phatsimo Ramokgwebana, SC  Mochudi, Botswana.

In conjunction with Radio Veritas, the Leadership Conference of Consecrated Life in Southern Africa (LCCLSA) recently organised an online Day of Prayer for Southern Africa. This was in response to the social unrest that engulfed parts of South Africa and eSwatini in the last few weeks.

Praying for healing

According to Sr Nkhensani Shibambu, CSA, a member of the Companion Sisters of St Angela, who is also President of the Leadership Conference of Consecrated Life (LCCL SA), the objective of the day was to pray for peace, healing, and an end to violence in Southern Africa.

The day of prayer was conducted virtually and was live on radio, Facebook as well as other social media platforms. Bishops, Priests, Religious Sisters and Brothers, Lay Catholic Sodalities from South Africa, eSwatini and Botswana, participated in the day of prayer. This was done in the form of scriptural readings, reflections, prayers and sharing, Sr Shibambu told the Vatican News collaborator based in Botswana.

Traumatised by the violence and looting

During the Day of Prayer, testimonies were shared by some of those directly impacted by the widespread violence.

Bishop Jose Luis Gerardo Ponce de Leon, I.M.C., of Manzini Diocese, shared his experience of the violence in eSwatini and how it left him traumatised. Ms Fikile Motsa, a board member of the World Union of Catholic Womens Organisations (WUCWO) also from eSwatini shared how two of her businesses were looted and burnt down. Ms Margaret Hirsch of Kwa-Zulu Natal, the province hit the hardest by the violence and looting in South Africa, also shared how she lost over 50 million Rands worth of stock from the looting, Sr Shibambu narrated.

A glimmer of hope

Sr Shibambu added, Though painful and sad to listen to, the testimonies proved to be inspiring and gave a glimmer of hope in the midst of the hopelessness that people are feeling. Many people were moved and touched by the initiative and felt inspired to begin the rebuilding of the country from the ashes that had surrounded them in the past weeks," she said.

Unprecedented looting in South Africa and eSwatini

Large scale and widespread looting of businesses broke out early this month, in parts of South Africa, following the jailing of former South African President Jacob Zuma. President Zuma has been found guilty of contempt of court and sentenced to 15 months in prison for defying a court order to appear before a commission of inquiry. The government said 337 lives had been lost as a result of the protests and ensuing violence.

Similarly, authorities of eSwatini (formerly known as Swaziland) have had to contend with unprecedented pro-democracy popular discontent in Africas only remaining monarchy. Protesters in eSwatini have been agitating for political reforms. There are no official records, but reports said at least 40 people died as police clashed with angry protesters.
As congressional Democrats push ahead with an inquest into the Jan. 6 Capitol Building riots, the Committees appointed Staff Director, a former CIA Inspector General, has been found to have a history of retaliating against intelligence community whistleblowers, according to a July 23 report by Yahoo News.

The U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol has carved itself as an increasingly partisan effort after Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) vetoed two key Republican Party appointments in Reps. Jim Banks (IN) and Jim Jordan (OH) on July 22.

Background

On May 19, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would have seen the creation of Jan. 6 Commission modeled after the 9/11 Commission formed from 10 non-governmental members, half to be chosen by Democrats and half to be chosen by Republicans. The proposal passed with all Democrats and 35 Republicans voting in favor.

On May 28 the Jan. 6 Commission died in the Senate when it was blocked under the Filibuster agreement, which requires some legislation to earn 60 votes. The final tally was 54-35 with two Democrat and nine Republican abstentions. A familiar chorus of Republicans voted against Party lines in favor of the Commission: Sens. Lisa Murkowski (AK), Rob Portman (OH), Mitt Romney (UT), Bill Cassidy (LA), Susan Collins (ME), and Ben Sasse (NE).

On June 30, the House of Representatives voted to create its own Select Committee to investigate the Capitol riots, passing along party lines by a 220-190 vote. Two Republicans, Adam Kinzinger (IL) and Liz Cheney (WY), crossed the floor and 16 Republicans abstained.

The House Select Committee, which has subpoena powers, allows Pelosi to appoint eight members and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (CA) to appoint five. However, Committee rules require McCarthys appointments to be in consultation with Pelosi.

Pelosi appointed seven Democrats and one Republican to her side of the Committee:

Bennie Thompson (D-MS) (Chairperson);

Zoe Lofgren (D-CA);

Adam Schiff (D-CA);

Pete Aguilar (D-CA);

Stephanie Murphy (D-FL)

Jamie Raskin (D-MD);

Elaine Luria (D-VA); and

Liz Cheney (R-WY).

On July 19, McCarthy submitted his five picks:

Jim Banks (R-IND) (Ranking Member);

Jim Jordan (R-OH);

Rodney Davis (R-IL);

Kelly Armstrong (R-ND); and

Troy Nehls (R-TX)

What bipartisan support of the Committee still remained fell apart on July 21 when Pelosi announced she would reject Banks and Jordans placements in a vaguely worded statement mentioning only concern about statements made and actions taken by these Members. On July 22 at a press conference, Pelosi, still vague, claimed the duo made statements and took actions that just made it ridiculous to put them on such a committee seeking the truth.

When statements are ridiculous and fall into the realm of, You must be kidding, theres no way that theyre going to be on the committee, she said.

According to speculation by CNBC based on comments given to the outlet by a a senior Democratic aide familiar with the deliberations, the issue at hand is Jordan and Bankss words and actions stretching over months, some as far back as before the Jan. 6 riot itself and others as recently as this week.

(L-R) Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX), Rep. Rodney Davis (R-IL), Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) depart from a press conference on House Speaker Nancy Pelosis decision to reject two of Leader McCarthys selected members from serving on the committee investigating the January 6th riots on July 21, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Image: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

In a July 19 statement accepting McCarthys appointment to the Committee, Banks said If Democrats were serious about investigating political violence, this committee would be studying not only the January 6 riot at the Capitol, but also the hundreds of violent political riots last summer when many more innocent Americans and law-enforcement officers were attacked.

And of course, the committee would not overlook the Good Friday murder of USCP Officer Billy Evans that was perpetrated by a far-left extremist.

Rep. Cheney continued to defy Republican loyalties as she defended Pelosis decision, saying Banks disqualified himself by his comments over the last 24 hours demonstrating hes not taking this seriously in statements to a press scrum.

Liz Cheney says she doesn't think Kevin McCarthy should be House Speaker.



"I think that any person who would be third in line to the presidency must demonstrate a commitment to the Constitution and a commitment to the rule of law and Minority Leader McCarthy has not done that." pic.twitter.com/jtB6BZtMjh  Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) July 21, 2021

Cheney also claimed McCarthy was unfit to be House Minority Leader when she said, I think that any person who would be third in line to the presidency must demonstrate a commitment to the Constitution and a commitment to the rule of law and Minority Leader McCarthy has not done that.

Banks is notably Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee in addition to Chairman of the Republican Study Committee, a group both highly vocal and highly critical of several of President Bidens positions and policy initiatives, especially regarding Bidens dovish position on the Chinese Communist Party and appointments of top officials who have historically had public ties and relationships to the CCP.

McCarthy was outspoken after Pelosis veto, I dont think anybody in Americaunderstand[s] what a sham this committee is and how politically driven [it is] for her to pick and choose who can serve on [the committee]. To say that the ranking member of the judiciary, who would have jurisdiction, cannot serve. When she decides that Jim Banks, who served his nation in the Navy and Afghanistan, that he cant serve here.

The Minority Leader rescinded the remaining three appointments, stating, Unless Speaker Pelosi reverses course and seats all five Republican nominees, Republicans will not be party to their sham process and will instead pursue our own investigation of the facts.

Pelosi has said she is toying with the idea of appointing Adam Kinzinger, the only other Republican besides Cheney to vote in favor of the Select Committee, in response.

On July 23, the House Freedom Caucus called on McCarthy to attempt a Motion to Vacate the Chair that would force the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives to vote on ending Pelosis authoritarian reign as Speaker.

While the move is clearly very unlikely to succeed, The Hill posits that the Caucuss call puts McCarthy in a bind as he will need their support if he wants to secure the votes required to become Speaker himself should Republicans win the house in the 2022 primaries, as many pollsters and analysts are speculating.

Staff Director David Buckley

Late on July 23, Yahoo News published an exclusive report about Select Committee Staff Director, former CIA Inspector General David Buckley, being investigated for abuse of an intelligence community whistleblower in 2019.

In a previously unpublished 36-page report by the Department of Homeland Securitys Office of Inspector General (DHS-OIG) dated June 10, 2019, which arose from a complaint filed by former CIA Office of the Inspector General (CIA-OIG) Special Agent Andrew Bakaj, Bakaj alleged Buckley retaliated against him after Bakaj provided information to the Inspector General for the Intelligence Community (IGIC) in 2014.

Bakaj said he was both berated and forbidden from speaking to the IGIC without express permission from Buckley and the CIA-OIG, in addition to material retaliation in the form of forced administrative leave and a suspension of security clearance.

Bakaj chose to retire from the CIA in response to the internal conflict, but gained further clout in the Democrat camp when he served as lead counsel for the whistleblower who alleged former President Donald Trump participated in professional misconduct in his dealings with the Ukraine, a faux-scandal that ultimately led to the failed first impeachment attempt against Trump.

The DHS-OIGs investigation ruled clearly in favor of Bakaj when it stated, the evidence establishes that those personnel actions were taken in retaliation for the Complainants protected activity.

Yahoo says a spokesperson for the Select Committee confirmed they were aware of the controversy around Buckley during the hiring process.

Dan Meyer, former IGIC source and whistleblower protection program lead, who could not speak on the Buckley and Bakaj case due to a Non-Disclosure Agreement, but could comment generally on the state of IC whistleblowers during Buckleys tenure, told Yahoo The IC whistleblowing program, from 2013 to 2018, received a number of allegations, some substantiated, that inspectors general themselves were engaging in retaliation against their own intelligence officers charged by President Obama and Director [James] Clapper with, ironically, protecting whistleblowers.

Jason Foster, former Senate Judiciary Committee chief investigative counsel, told Yahoo Buckleys history was a problem for the integrity of the Select Committee, No whistleblower is likely to trust someone with a record of opening a retaliatory investigation.

The chaos and partisanship infecting the process undermines the committees credibility, which has developed into a full-blown dumpster fire at this point.
An Iranian taekwondo athlete competing for the Refugee Olympic Team made her mark at Tokyo 2020 after she defeated two-time Olympic gold medalist Jade Jones.

Kimia Alizadeh beat Team Great Britain's Jones 16-12 on Sunday in the women's -57kg taekwondo round of 16.

She then overcame China's Lijun Zhou in the quarterfinals before losing to Turkey's Hatice Kubra Ilgun in the bronze medal match.

Had Alizadeh won that match she'd have secured the Refugee Olympic Team's first ever medal since its creation in 2016.

Earlier on Sunday, Alizadeh beat an athlete representing Iran -- Nahid Kiyani Chandeh -- in a qualifying round.

Five years ago Alizadeh became the first Iranian woman to win an Olympic medal competing for Iran after claiming bronze in taekwondo at the 2016 Rio Olympics.

Affectionately known in Iran as "The Tsunami," Alizadeh announced in 2020 she'd permanently left her birth country for Europe amid searing criticism of the Iranian regime.

"I am one of the millions of oppressed women in Iran who they have been playing with for years," the athlete wrote in an Instagram post in 2020 explaining why she was defecting

The 23-year-old was granted refugee status in Germany and now lives in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg.

Alizadeh is Germany's third refugee athlete, according to Germany's Taekwondo Union.

There are 29 athletes competing for the IOC Refugee Olympic Team in this year's Games, according to the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

IOC President Thomas Bach announced the creation of the Refugee Olympic Team -- the first of its kind -- back in 2015, as part of the committee's pledge to "aid potential elite athletes affected by the worldwide refugee crisis."

American Anastasija Zolotic won the women's -57kg taekwondo gold after beating Russian Olympic Committee's Tatiana Minina, who claimed silver.

Zolotic is the first US woman to win Olympic gold in taekwondo.

Bronze went to Ilgun and Chinese Taipei's Lo Chia-Ling.

The-CNN-Wire

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A Tennessee man is dead after a two-vehicle wreck in Decatur early Sunday morning.

Decatur Police said 49-year-old Carlson Ballentine from Pulaski, TN was killed while he was changing a tire in the southbound lane on US-31 near Hunter Ln.

Ballentine and another were in the process of changing the tire on a sedan when a pickup truck collided with the car, striking Ballentine.

The two people inside the pickup truck were taken the Huntsville Hospital and are expected to be OK. The other occupant of the sedan had minor injures.

The investigation is ongoing.
So far China has shown a desire to avoid escalation. For example, the unreliable entitites list was announced in 2019, but Chinese officials have yet to put it into effect or name any targets. Instead, they have focused on tit-for-tat responses with little tangible effect, such as visa and travel bans for foreign officials with few ties to China. Targets include former U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and others over a Biden administration warning about doing business in Hong Kong, and former Secretary of State Michael Pompeo and other members of President Donald Trumps administration over their China policy. Companies including Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co.s defense unit were hit with unspecified sanctions for selling arms to Taiwan, which China claims as its territory. Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz as well as nongovernmental organizations and think tanks such as Human Rights Watch and the Mercator Institute for China Studies were sanctioned over human rights issues. In some of these cases, Beijing explicitly prohibited Chinese citizens and institutions from doing business or having exchanges with sanctioned entities.
A lot of my inspiration and understanding that this was something that I could do came from heroic people like General McGee, said Waiz, 34, in a conference room in the terminal. Many underrepresented people question whether they can make it in aviation, she said. General McGee shows us that we can.
If I described a situation as being like something from the Keystone Cops, would you have any idea what I was talking about? Would you think the Keystone Cops were good? Bad? From Pennsylvania? Would you want to defund the Keystone Cops?
They found kids like Katrina Harpe, the real name of a student I knew then. Her parents hadnt gone to college and did not press that option on their daughter. Her African American father was a computer technician. Her Korean American mother was a retail clerk. Harpe got okay grades in elementary and middle school but was not challenged until the Trailwood High people got hold of her. She took AP and went to Yale. If you are looking for a family physician in Fredericksburg, Va., you will find Dr. Harpes website on Google.
He chose rural southwest Mississippi, the most intransigent region of the state, as his target. There, in freedom schools, he taught African Americans how to register and pass the stringent voter literacy tests. Often working alone or with one or two SNCC organizers, he was repeatedly threatened by White mobs and law enforcement officials as he accompanied Black people to courthouse registration offices.
The institute was founded in 1953 by Howard Hughes, the reclusive billionaire, aviator and Hollywood producer. For decades, it was under the umbrella of the Hughes Aircraft Co. When that company was sold in 1985 for more than $5 billion, the medical institute was suddenly one of the richest philanthropic organizations in the world. Dr. Choppin, who began as chief scientific officer, became the institutes president in 1987.
Sgt. Jessica Hite, an assistant trainer, created the training plan for the dogs. Hite said she starts training the animals with 10 drops of ethanol, having the dogs do a search pattern, sniff the alcohol and then telling them to sit. The dogs are rewarded with a ball and play time with their handler after they successfully find the alcohol. After repeating the process multiple times, Hite said it will click to them, and they begin sniffing to find the alcohol on their own.
Their stories will be familiar to those who have followed the riots fallout via related congressional investigations, ongoing federal court cases and Trumps second impeachment trial. All four have given interviews about their experience. Some were even involved in lobbying members of Congress to create an independent commission to examine the attack  an effort that failed this spring, when the Senate fell shy of a filibuster-proof majority needed to impanel what was supposed to be bipartisan group of outside experts.
This was the nightmare scenario that we were talking about to some degree. . . . To see it happen is just confirmation of just how dangerous this type of information is, said Charlie Warzel, who has since left the Times and now is also publishing on Substack, the same online newsletter platform the Pillar uses. Despite the fact that I dont think there are any ethical similarities with what we did and this, it obviously makes me feel terrible that our work was used as a justification in this.
Delegates, we ask only two things: time for experts to see first hand our commitment to the reef, its present condition and our management, and for the final climate policy to provide a consistent framework for addressing the impacts of climate change on all World Heritage properties, she said from Australia, where she in in quarantine after lobbying delegates in Europe and the Middle East on the decision.
But seasonal workers, of the sort that staff resort hotels, had to apply for normal unemployment benefits instead. And, after 16 months of on-and-off lockdowns, it is increasingly clear that many of them sought out new, and, in some cases, more stable jobs in the retail industry and other sectors. Many may not return to hotel reception desks and restaurant kitchens anytime soon, if ever.
In early 1957, while transporting an injured FLN militant in the back of a car, his family said, he saw French gendarmes installing a roadblock ahead. The car sped past them but the French military later linked him to the incident. He became one of many Algerians arrested in the capital during the brutal period known as the Battle of Algiers. He was at one point recorded as having been liberated, his family said, but he never reappeared.
Teresa May, 58, of New Johnsonville, Tennessee, passed away July 9, 2021. Teresa was born March 19, 1963, in Vincennes, Indiana, to Robert and Mary (McPherson) May. Teresa was a loving mother, grandmother, daughter, sister and friend to many. She had a love for crocheting and was an avid col
Then it emerged the killers real name would not be used in the film titled Nitram - the killers name backwards. I began to reconsider my position as the first trailers were released, one featuring a gripping performance by Judy Davis, who plays the troubled killers hapless mother. After Nitram received critical acclaim and rave reviews at last weeks Cannes Film Festival, I have now changed my mind. It is fast becoming apparent Nitram is going to be making a lot of noise in the coming months. And if it delivers, it could be one of the most important Australian films in recent memory, especially as an entirely new generation of Australians, who were not around when Port Arthur happened, see it. Nitram is sparking an uncomfortable and confronting conversation about Australia, guns and our culture, but its a discussion that is vitally important to have, even though unyielding trauma means not everyone will be able to engage in it.

The Alannah & Madeline Foundation was set up in memory of sisters Alannah and Madeline Mikac, aged six and three, who were the youngest victims at Port Arthur. Today it is a national charity with the belief that all children should have a safe and happy childhood without being subjected to any form of violence. Out of deep respect for the victims, survivors and first responders, the Alannah & Madeline Foundation has chosen not to participate in conversation about the film, Nitram, a spokeswoman told me last week. We understand the importance of exploring difficult topics; but we also know the impact this film will have on many Australians. Such deep, lingering emotional scars from the events of 1996 were unknown to Texan actor Caleb Landry Jones, whose portrayal of the killer won him the Best Actor gong at Cannes. He admits he fell into the lonely, depressive and destructive mindset of his character throughout the films 21-day shoot. Meanwhile the film - pronounced nit-ram - is due to make its Australian premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival next month. No doubt Golden Globes and Oscar buzz will follow.

But its not only the international accolades that have made me reconsider Nitrams potential merits, but the realisation that this is not actually a film about the Port Arthur massacre. Loading Nitram is a movie about parenting, mental illness, family dysfunction, bullying and social isolation. The actual events of Port Arthur - the killings - do not make it onto screen. Its creators say the film is an attempt to unravel and better understand the events and causes which led to the massacre, and maybe increase our chances of stopping a similar tragedy happening in the future. That was the clear message in Cannes from director Justin Kurzel, screen writer Shaun Grant and producer Nick Batzias, all Australians who can pinpoint exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the Port Arthur news.
An example of the finger-wagging was what they did with Channel Nine when the Today Show was flogging the products of McDonalds last year without declaring it a sponsor, and Channel Seven when the Morning Show was doing the same with Big W. But for this kind of offence? For putting out false information that threatens the lives of your fellow Australians, and makes the current crisis worse? It doesnt have the power to nail a half-million dollar fine on Skys head even if it wanted to. In its note back to me, the organisation replied: The ACMA is aware of the broadcast and has noted that Sky News has removed the item from their website and published a correction. Which sounds a lot like case closed. My friend, Paul Fletcher, Minister for Communications, this is HOPELESS. If Sky can put that kind of stuff to air with no penalty, what cant you put to air? Expensive thrills

In my book on Charles Kingsford Smith, I noted that the history of aviation is the history of how, in the space of 66 years, mankind went from three foot off the ground, to one foot on the moon. Those years from the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk in 1903, to Neil Armstrong taking one giant leap for mankind in 1969 were indeed filled with wondrous feets of derring-do to thrill the soul, and they really were a part of all of the whole world taking a giant leap forward. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and space tourism company Blue Origin, is wasting money on an indulgence. Credit:AP So where do the recent rocket flights by Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and their companions fit into that spirit? They do not. For my money, they are pure self-indulgence writ large. That amount of money spent and emissions expended for the sake of expensive thrills for a mere handful of people is an obscenity in itself, and jointly emblematic of two of the worlds greatest problems right now: the growing gap between rich and poor, and the failure to get serious about cutting our emissions. The best comment on the whole thing came from one @BaronvonKlar: Look, with this new ego-driven space race, if we wanted to boldly send billionaires where no billionaires have been before, we could have just sent them to the tax office. Joke of the Week

A small outback town is well serviced by three places of worship. A Catholic church, a Baptist chapel and a Synagogue. The three clerics desperately need a car to cover their vast territories. Given the small number of worshipers, fund raising is never going to be huge, and so they decide to pool their resources and get one car between them. A fortnight later, the new car, a station wagon, arrives. Given its proposed use, it obviously needs blessing, and in the manner of each of the three faiths. On the day, the whole town gathers to watch. The priest prays and sprinkles holy water on the vehicle. The minister prays and drives the car through the creek. The rabbi prays and cuts 100 mm off the exhaust pipe. (Oh, stop it. I checked with my mate, ex from the Jewish Board of Deputies, and he laughed heartily, and gave it the tick of approval.) Tweet of the Week So now the Gladys Government & their exceptionalism cheer squad understand why the rest of Australia is so angry. This isnt 18 months ago. We know what works Her & her governments arrogant, politicised refusal to follow the proven methods has put the entire nation in peril. @RonniSalt Quotes of the Week

F--k him. - According to Michael Wolffs latest book, Landslide, this was Rupert Murdochs counsel to his son Lachlan, on the night of the US Presidential election, when Murdoch Jnr advised his father that Fox News was about to make the call that Arizona had flipped to Biden. I copped it, because I was trying to support something I believed would make a difference. And it hasnt. It was just a box that was ticked. - Entertainer Guy Sebastian, saying that he now feels embarrassed that the government last year used him as prop for arts funding, and he went along with it. This is a Reichstag moment ... They may try, but theyre not going to f--king succeed ... You cant do this without the military. You cant do this without the CIA and the FBI. Were the guys with the guns. - According to new book I Alone Can Fix It, this is what General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest ranking military officer in the USA, said to his officers in the weeks after the US election, when Milley feared that Trump was trying to stage a coup. I think it would be hard if George Washington came back from the dead and he chose Abraham Lincoln as his vice president, I think it would have been very hard for them to beat me. - Donald Trump. And I think if Fred Flintsone and Barney Rubble had the presidency, they could not have done worse than Trump. Im writing this not as the Prince I was born but as the man I have become. Harry said in a statement, triggering such a global wave of eye-rolling that medical intervention may very well be needed. Seriously, what happened to that bloke? Hes talking the talk, but to actually walk the walk he has to renounce the whole nonsense of royal titles. And that really would be admirable. THEN you get to talk about the man I have become.

Faster, Higher, Stronger - Together. - The new Olympic motto, announced this week. Our objectives of decreasing workplace attendances, decreasing the opportunity for interactions, is what we need to achieve. The matter for how that is done is really a matter for broader government. Clearly were not the experts in logistic chains and other things and so we need that whole of government approach to determine what things are critical, what things are not. - NSW Chief Health Office Dr Kerry Chant saying that she did not advise the government to shut down the states construction industry, insisting decisions on restrictions and lockdowns were ultimately a matter for ministers. It is deeply disturbing to me that the environmental protections established by my government for the Blue Mountains have been undermined in recent years, particularly through the proposed raising of the Warragamba Dam wall. The draft decision proposed by the World Heritage Secretariat does not recognise the urgency of threats facing the property and concerns are held about its technical validity in consequence. - Bob Carr, a former NSW premier and Australian foreign minister, in a letter asking to UNESCO to send a team to survey the threats to the World Heritage status of the Blue Mountains, giving it the same urgency as a review now under way for the Great Barrier Reef. The vaccine rollout is the race that has stopped the nation. - Dan Ilic, @Danilic Best day ever! - Jeff Bezos after his short space flight, nine days later but 20 kilometres higher than Sir Richard Bransons trip.
The federal government has secured an extra 85 million booster doses of the Pfizer vaccine for 2022 and 2023, as Australias top vaccine advisory group urged everyone in Sydney to get jabbed with any available vaccine due to a shortage of Pfizer doses.

Sixty million of the Pfizer doses will be delivered in 2022 and another 25 million in 2023, in addition to the 40 million already due to arrive in Australia this year.

People wait for their allocated time slot earlier this month at the NSW vaccination hub in Homebush. Credit:Getty

But the vast majority of the 2021 allocation of Pfizer will arrive in the fourth quarter and while approximately one million doses of the vaccine are due to arrive each week  after a painfully slow start  Australia has experienced massive shortages until now.

The significant shift by the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI)  which until Saturday had advised that Australians under 60 should get Pfizer because of the extremely low risk of blood clots  came after Prime Minister Scott Morrison and the Australian Medical Association president Omar Khorshid had both called on the expert panel to shift its advice.
The death toll from monsoon-related landslides and floods in India rose to 127 on Sunday, officials said, as the military helped rescue workers search for dozens still missing.

Rescue crews in India used boats and helicopters over the weekend to reach areas hammered by days of monsoon rains - coming at two centimetres an hour at one weather station - that submerged homes and triggered landslides in the latest battle against extreme weather around the world.

Emergency teams confronted thick sludge and debris in attempts to evacuate people across hard-hit Maharashtra state, home to Mumbai. Thousands of trucks were stuck on the partly submerged highway between Mumbai and the technology hub of Bangalore on Saturday.

People watch rescue efforts after a landslide in Taliye village, in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, Friday, July 23, 2021. Credit:AP

At least 113 people were killed in Maharashtra, officials said Sunday, and at least 100 people there were still missing. More than 130,000 people had been rescued from about 900 villages across the state as of Sunday.
London: Sajid Javids debut as Britains new Health Secretary has been savaged as bloody daft after the minister was forced to apologise to Britons for saying they should not cower from COVID.

Javid, who ran to be Tory party leader in 2019, has courted favour with government backbenchers by taking a bullish approach to reopening the economy since taking on the job.

His rhetoric is in stark contrast to his disgraced predecessor Matt Hancock, who was criticised for favouring longer restrictions but ultimately quit, not over any policy differences but after he was outed by the media for conducting an affair with a staffer during the pandemic.

Sajid Javid has been obliged to apologise after health workers and their families responded angrily. Credit:Getty

But Javids tougher tone ran into trouble on Saturday when he was forced to delete a tweet from earlier in the day and apologise.
Briana Strickland reached out to LEX 18 for help with Kentucky's unemployment system multiple times since January when she originally filed for unemployment.
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AGAWAM, MA (WGGB/WSHM) -- For what seemed like the one and only day of sunshine recently, thousands of people flocked to Six Flags New England over the weekend, causing heavy traffic in Agawam and in the neighboring Connecticut town Suffield.
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The family of late singer James Brown has reached a settlement deal in the 15-year dispute over his estate, according to the Associated Press.

The attorney representing Browns estate, David Black, told the AP that the settlement had been reached on July 9, though the details of the agreement were not made public.

The estate of Brown, who died at 73 on Dec. 25, 2006, has been plagued by more than a dozen lawsuits since his death. One of the most prominent was that of Tomi Rae Hynie, Browns former partner and mother of one of his children who claimed to be his fourth and last wife. But in June 2020, the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled the marriage invalid, determining that Hynie had not been legally married to Brown and therefore did not have a right to his assets, which courts have estimated could range from $5 million to $100 million. If determined to be his widow, Hynie could have had the right to at least a third of his estate, as the New York Times reports.

According to the New York Times, Hynies marriage to Brown was deemed invalid because at the time of their marriage in 2001, Hynie was married to another man, who she had discovered had three wives in Pakistan. Hynies lawyers had argued that because Hynies former husband had several other marriages, their marriage was void  but citing a 2008 ruling, the South Carolina Supreme Court said that the marriage had not been officially declared invalid by a competent court, as the New York Times reports.

Now that a settlement deal has been reached and Hynie is not involved in the estate, Browns children are expected to gain the copyright termination rights for Browns publishing deals, according to the New York Times. This also likely gives them control over Browns desire expressed in his will to establish scholarships to underprivileged children in South Carolina and Georgia.

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP)  A prolific serial torture-slayer dubbed The Dating Game Killer died Saturday while awaiting execution in California, authorities said. Rodney James Alcala was 77.

He died of natural causes at a hospital in San Joaquin Valley, California, prison officials said in a statement.

Alcala was sentenced to death in 2010 for five slayings in California between 1977 and 1979, including that of a 12-year-old girl, though authorities estimate he may have killed up to 130 people across the country.

Alcala received an additional 25 years to life in 2013 after pleading guilty to two homicides in New York.

He was charged again in 2016 after DNA evidence connected him to the 1977 death of a 28-year-old woman whose remains were found in a remote area of southwest Wyoming. But a prosecutor said Alcala was too ill to face trial in the death of the woman, who was six months pregnant when she died.

Californias death row is in San Quentin State Prison near San Francisco, but for years Alcala had been housed more than 200 miles away at a prison in Corcoran where he could receive medical care around the clock.

Prosecutors said Alcala stalked women like prey and took earrings as trophies from some of his victims.

Youre talking about a guy who is hunting through Southern California looking for people to kill because he enjoys it, Orange County, California, prosecutor Matt Murphy said during his trial.

Investigators say his true victim count may never be known.

Earrings helped put him on death row, though Gov. Gavin Newsom has imposed a moratorium on executions so long as he is governor.

The mother of 12-year-old Robin Samsoe testified at his murder trial that a pair of gold ball earrings found in a jewelry pouch in Alcalas storage locker belonged to her daughter.

But Alcala claimed that the earrings were his and that a video clip from his 1978 appearance on The Dating Game shows him wearing the studs nearly a year before Samsoe died. He denied the slayings and cited inconsistencies in witness accounts and descriptions.

California prosecutors said Alcala also took earrings from at least two of his adult victims as trophies.

Two of the four women were posed nude after their deaths, one was raped with a claw hammer and all were repeatedly strangled and resuscitated to prolong their agony, prosecutors said.

Investigators said one victims DNA was found on a rose-shaped earring in Alcalas possession, and his DNA was found in her body.

He had been sentenced to death twice before in Samsoes murder, but both convictions were overturned. He was charged in the slayings of the four adult women more than two decades later based on new DNA and other forensic evidence.

After the verdict, authorities released more than 100 photos of young women and girls found in Alcalas possession in hopes of linking him to other unsolved murders around the country.

There is murder and rape and then there is the unequivocal carnage of a Rodney Alcala-style murder, Bruce Barcomb, the brother of 18-year-old victim Jill Barcomb, said as Alcala was sentenced to death.
MANAGUA, Nicaragua (AP)  Nicaraguan police placed under house arrest a seventh presidential contender on Saturday, meaning that almost all of those who could have challenged President Daniel Ortega in the Nov. 7 elections have now been detained.

Opposition leader Noel Vidaurre was placed under police custody at his home on Saturday, as was political commentator Jaime Arellano. Arellano had been called in for questioning regarding a commentary he wrote criticizing an Ortega speech.

Vidaurre was one of the potential presidential candidates of the Citizens for Liberty alliance. The conservative alliance announced it had chosen as its candidate Oscar Sovalbarro, a leader of the U.S.-supported Contra insurgency that fought the Sandinistas in the 1980s. It was not clear if Sovalbarro had accepted the nomination.

Half a dozen other potential candidates have been arrested in a crackdown that began almost two months ago. Almost two dozen other journalists and opposition activists have also been detained.

Almost all were arrested under treason laws that Ortega has used against political rivals. Most face vague allegations of crimes against the state. Ortega alleges the country's April 2018 street protests were part of an organized coup attempt with foreign backing.

Another potential candidate, Cristiana Chamorro, is also under house arrest.

Most of those arrested in a crackdown that began in late May are being held incommunicado, at undisclosed locations with no access to lawyers or family visits.

They include Medardo Mairena, Felix Maradiaga and Miguel Mora.

Potential candidates Juan Sebastian Chamorro and Arturo Cruz were also arrested. Candidates must register by Aug. 2.

Lesther Aleman  a former student leader who returned to Nicaragua after exile but stayed in safe houses  has also been detained.

And several of the leading Sandinista revolutionaries who fought alongside Ortega in 1979 have also been jailed by him.

Those currently under arrest include 65-year-old Dora Maria Tellez, a former guerrilla commander who later split with Ortega and became a leader of the Sandinista Renovation Movement. Another jailed former Sandinista guerrilla and Renovation Movement leader, Hugo Torres, is 73.

Another is Victor Hugo Tinoco, the leader of the political movement Unamos, is a former assistant foreign minister and former ambassador to the United Nations.

Ortega, 75, is seeking a fourth consecutive term in Nov. 7 elections.
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP)  A popular strip club that once beckoned customers off a busy highway leading into Anchorage is now a church offering salvation  instead of temptation  thanks to a daughter of a former exotic dancer.

This May 24, 2021, photo shows the remnants of a former strip club and bar, which were stacked in an unused area of the building in Anchorage, Alaska. The former strip club has been converted into a space for the Open Door Baptist Church. (AP Photo/Mark Thiessen)

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP)  A popular strip club that once beckoned customers off a busy highway leading into Anchorage is now a church offering salvation  instead of temptation  thanks to a daughter of a former exotic dancer.

Linda Dunegan believes divine intervention played a hand in transforming the building that housed Fantasies on 5th into the start-up Open Door Baptist Church, turning the show floor into a sanctuary and trading the dancers pole with a pulpit.

"This church came about because I prayed for five years, said Dunegan, who tried to buy the building before but walked away  for good, she thought  when she and the owner couldnt come to terms. Then the owner gave a real estate agent a week to sell it and suggested the agent call Dunegan. This time, the deal went through.

God has been very good to me," Dunegan said, to give me a family, a wonderful husband, food on the table, a place to live.

The journey to savvy real estate investor with 19 properties in three states seems implausible for a girl barely surviving on a daily bowl of rice in her native Vietnam.

Dunegan grew up in a small village near the Cambodian border, where most homes were on stilts and the surrounding water was everyones fishing grounds  and toilets.

This May 24, 2021, photo shows the sign for the Open Door Baptist Church along a highway leading into Anchorage, Alaska. The church has replaced a strip club that used to beckon people off the highway. (AP Photo/Mark Thiessen)

Her mother and father had an arranged marriage that Dunegan said failed when her mother didn't produce a male heir and was sent back to her village with her two daughters. With no other skills, her mother took a job as a waitress in a bar, where she met an American who would become her husband and help the family flee the war-ravaged country in April 1975 on a military transport when Dunegan was 8.

The family struggled financially and moved around a lot, flitting from Los Angeles to Hawaii, Florida, Arizona and all over the East Coast.

In the early 1980s, her mother and stepfather divorced. Friends encouraged her mother to move to Anchorage, where they said there was good money to be made working as a waitress in the bars filled with oil industry workers.

Once in Alaskas largest city, her mother quickly found out that there was better money to be made dancing at different bars, though Dunegan wasn't sure if Fantasies on 5th was one of them. She and her mother had a falling out recently, and attempts by The Associated Press to contact her for comment were unsuccessful.

As a child, Dunegan said she escaped into literature, reading a book a day. She studied hard, made the National Honor Society and went to college, eventually earning a doctorate. She also had a nearly three decade military career with service in the Air Force and Navy reserves and the Alaska Air National Guard.

Along the way, she married Gerry Dunegan, a longshoreman, and together they built their real estate holdings.

Dunegan's path to devout Christian took root when she was a child in America and a woman at one of the churches they attended ostensibly for the free food decided to take her under her wing.

This May 24, 2021, shows a sex store across the street from the Open Door Baptist Church , located inside a former strip club in Anchorage, Alaska. Pastor Kenny Menendez hopes that the church  which is also situated between a marijuana retail store and downtrodden motels  could be a start to improving the neighborhood. (AP Photo/Mark Thiessen)

I was dirty, unsightly, and she took me to Sears. She bought me three dresses, Dunegan said.

I work to pay that back today, she said of the gesture that meant the world to her.

Pastor Kenny Menendez said God called him to start a new church in Anchorage; he just didnt know he and others would have to excavate through the detritus of a strip club to find it.

The electricity was off on his first visit, but cellphone flashlights exposed black and red carpeting, booth seating, private showrooms, poles, a catwalk, a stage, huge bar tables and chairs among the Halloween decorations still displayed after the club abruptly closed a few years ago.

I looked at it as, Yeah, it could be a church, said Menendez, who gave up a career in purchasing at an aerospace industry manufacturing plant in his native Oregon for his first ministry. It just needed a facelift, which included turning a private lap dance room into the youth ministry.

Seventy-six people showed up for the grand opening, some to see what a church inside a former strip club looks like. Now they average about 45 people every Sunday, a decent crowd given its competing with about three dozen or so other Baptist churches in Anchorage.

He also believes the Almighty approves of the work they are doing.

I would say God is pleased to have a change, a transformation in the building, a place that really ultimately points more people towards him instead of away, he said.

He has hopes that the church  which is situated between a marijuana retail store, a sex shop and downtrodden motels  will help improve the neighborhood.

One would hope that, yes, this is the beginning of just putting some light right here, he said.

The church, which will have its first anniversary in October, isnt the only benefactor of the three-story building. Dunegan intends to use the second floor for fundraisers and as a reception rental location, and the third floor as a base for her Childrens Benefit Foundation.

Here, she plans to bridge the gap for Anchorage youth, setting up cultural exchanges for them to visit Vietnam. She also intends to raise funds to help provide medical professionals in Vietnam with needed supplies, with a dream of possibly someday opening a hospital there.

She said in an Air National Guard magazine article that it was her mother who planted that seed in her over two decades ago.

Were starting out small," Dunegan said, "but our heart is big.

Associated Press researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report.
PAPEETE, French Polynesia (AP)  President Emmanuel Macron is visiting French Polynesia to showcase Frances commitment to the region amid concerns about the impact of climate change on the Pacific island territory, the legacy of French nuclear testing on its atolls  and most of all, growing Chinese dominance in the region.

PAPEETE, French Polynesia (AP)  President Emmanuel Macron is visiting French Polynesia to showcase Frances commitment to the region amid concerns about the impact of climate change on the Pacific island territory, the legacy of French nuclear testing on its atolls  and most of all, growing Chinese dominance in the region.

He started his trip Saturday night in Tahiti with a visit to a hospital and an appeal to get vaccinated against the virus. With the worlds eyes on the Tokyo Olympics, Macron will also discuss Tahitis role as host of Olympic surfing competition for the 2024 Paris Games.

The trip is aimed at reinforcing France's geopolitical presence in the Pacific. Macron was greeted with an 'orero, a traditional declaration by a respected storyteller, as he arrived in Tahitis main city Papeete  12 time zones away from Paris.

He may also face protests. Local activists held two demonstrations this month over long-standing demands for compensation, and an apology, over the underground and atmospheric nuclear tests carried out from 1966-1996. A Polynesian collective angry over French government plans to require health passes at restaurants and other venues also has threatened unspecified action.

Over four days, Macron will visit four sites spread out across an ocean territory thats as large as Europe.

With a multi-ethnic population of about 300,000, the former French colony is made up of five archipelagos with a total of 118 islands. Since 2004, it has autonomous status, defined as an overseas country within the republic which is governed freely and democratically, by its representatives.

But Macron is still its head of state, and the long-awaited visit is part of what his office calls his Tour de France aimed at reaffirming our proximity to overseas territories.

For historian Jean-Marc Regnault of the University of French Polynesia, this trip is linked to Frances determination to show its power in the Indo-Pacific, and its long-term resource objectives.

The 4.8 million-square-kilometer (1.85 million-square-mile) Exclusive Economic Zone of French Polynesia has significant fishing and mineral resources, and authorities are seeking U.N. permission to extend the territorys continental shelf.

France is trying to strike back at obvious Chinese lust for Pacific resources, said Regnault, who wrote a recent book called The Indo-Pacific and the New Silk Roads.

He pointed to a French military operation in the region last month, when Rafale warplanes and other military jets zipped from Europe to French Polynesia in a show of strength.

China is the biggest trading partner for its Asian-Pacific neighbors, who are eager to profit from its appetite for industrial components and iron ore, timber, oil and food. But they are uneasy about Beijings use of access to its markets to push for political concessions. France, the United States, Japan and other governments worry China is seeking to gain influence in their strategic spheres.

Macron also plans to discuss climate concerns, and visit a port to celebrate a local fishing industry thats seen as a model of sustainability.

Macron won't be able to avoid the nuclear issue, though hes not expected to make any new promises during the visit.

He ordered high-level meetings earlier this month on the issue in an operation called Reko Tika, which means truth and justice in the paumotu language. But the Polynesian delegation reported minimal progress on their demands, including declassifying government archives and facilitated compensation over the health and environmental damage from the tests.

Joe McDonald in Beijing contributed to this report.
JERUSALEM (AP)  Two Israeli airlines launched their first commercial flights between Israel and Morocco on Sunday, less than a year after the countries officially normalized relations.

FILE - In this Dec. 23, 2020 file photo, the national flags of Israel and Morocco are projected on the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem, along with the word "peace," in English, Hebrew, and Arabic. Two Israeli airlines launched their first commercial flights between Israel and Morocco on Sunday, July 25, 2021, less than a year after the countries officially normalized relations. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo, File)

JERUSALEM (AP)  Two Israeli airlines launched their first commercial flights between Israel and Morocco on Sunday, less than a year after the countries officially normalized relations.

Israir's flight departed Tel Aviv for Marrakech with around 100 Israeli tourists, the company said, hours before Israeli national carrier El Al dispatched its first direct flight to the same destination.

Israeli Tourism Minister Yoel Razvozov said the new direct flights would help advance fruitful tourism, trade and economic cooperation and diplomatic agreements between the two countries.

Israel and Morocco agreed to normalize relations in late 2020 as part of the U.S.-brokered Abraham Accords. Morocco was among four Arab nations, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan, to establish diplomatic relations with Israel.

As part of the deal, the United States agreed to recognize Moroccos claim to the long-disputed Western Sahara region, however the Biden administration said it will review this decision. Moroccos 1975 annexation of Western Sahara is not recognized by the United Nations.

Many Israeli Jews have lineage that traces back to Morocco, which is still home to a small Jewish community of several thousand.

El Al said in a statement before the departure of its first flight that the company plans to operate five flights per week between Israel and Morocco.

We hope that now many can know Morocco better, to experience and be excited by this special country that is deeply rooted in Israeli heritage, culture and experience, said El Al CEO Avigal Sorek.

After the first flight arrived in Marrakech, the director of the Moroccan national tourism office, Adil Fakir, called it a crowning moment of the important decision taken by Morocco to resume relations between the two countries.

The head of the Israeli liaison office in Rabat, David Govrin, said it would "strengthen the existing ties between our two people. The head of the Jewish community in the Marrakech-Safi region, Jacky Kadoch, also welcomed the development.
KITIMAT, B.C. - Approximately 900 Rio Tinto workers at the company's aluminum smelting facilities in Kitimat, B.C. have gone on strike.

KITIMAT, B.C. - Approximately 900 Rio Tinto workers at the company's aluminum smelting facilities in Kitimat, B.C. have gone on strike.

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The walkout began today at one minute after midnight. Unifor Local 2301, which represents the workers, had issued a 72-hour strike notice after nearly seven weeks of negotiations.

Jerry Dias, Unifor's National President, says the strike comes down to what he calls "Rio Tinto's greed and lack of respect" for the union members working at the Kitimat smelting facilities.

The union says it has proposed the first changes to workers' retirement income and benefit levels in more than a decade, including moving younger workers to defined benefit from defined contribution pension plans.

It also says negotiations have focused on a backlog of more than 300 grievances resulting from the company's use of contractors and its refusal to hire full-time workers.

Bargaining had continued up until the strike deadline, and the company had earlier said that it was "committed to working with the union to reach a mutually beneficial outcome."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 25, 2021.
BARCELONA, Spain (AP)  Like many of Spains 20-somethings, Sergio Rosado has seen the new, more contagious coronavirus strain strike those too eager to cut loose when authorities rolled back health restrictions with vaccinations picking up pace.

People queue to be vaccinated against COVID-19 at the Isabel Zendal Hospital in Madrid, Spain, Tuesday, July 20, 2021. Spain is trying to stamp out a new wave of COVID-19 among its youth thanks to a robust vaccination program that is widely supported. Spain like the rest of the European Union got off to a slow start to compared to the United States and Britain when the first vaccines were released. But it has quickly made up ground once deliveries by drug makers started flowing. (AP Photo/Olmo Calvo)

BARCELONA, Spain (AP)  Like many of Spains 20-somethings, Sergio Rosado has seen the new, more contagious coronavirus strain strike those too eager to cut loose when authorities rolled back health restrictions with vaccinations picking up pace.

But the 22-year-old student shares the country's widespread public trust in the vaccines, and Rosado plans to get his shots as soon as his turn comes.

I have friends that have caught COVID-19 at big parties. Lots of people I know have caught it, Rosado said. I did go out too, but to places without many people and in controlled spaces, and with face masks.

Spain, like its fellow European Union members, got off to a slow start in administering shots compared to Britain and the United States after regulators approved the first vaccines. But once deliveries by drugmakers started flowing to meet demand, the country quickly made up ground.

After only fully vaccinating 10% of its adults from January until the end of April, now nearly 54% of its adults, around 25 million people, have received two vaccine jabs, making Spain one of the inoculation leaders in the 27-nation European Union.

The program is built on Spains efficient public health care system, a well-ordered vaccination plan that stuck strictly to age groups, and a populace confident in the safety of childhood immunizations and therefore largely resistant to skepticism about COVID-19 jabs.

Vaccination forms part of our genome, Amos Garcia, president of the Spanish Association of Vaccinology, told The Associated Press. Our professionals have always believed strongly in the benefits of vaccines. We have always strongly encouraged children from a very young age to get their vaccines.

Hundreds of people queue to be vaccinated against Covid-19 at the Isabel Zendal Hospital in Madrid, Spain, Tuesday, July 20, 2021. Spain is trying to stamp out a new wave of COVID-19 among its youth thanks to a robust vaccination program that is widely supported. Spain like the rest of the European Union got off to a slow start to compared to the United States and Britain when the first vaccines were released. But it has quickly made up ground once deliveries by drug makers started flowing. (AP Photo/Olmo Calvo)

He said general vaccination rates for children in Spain were over 95%.

Spains public health care system, which has suffered budget cuts in the past decade, buckled last year under the first wave of the virus, which has claimed at least 81,000 lives in the country.

But fears that the health system wouldnt be up to the job of managing a massive vaccine rollout proved unfounded. Eligibility information was widely disseminated, and people didn't hesitate to sign up when it was their age groups turn. Vaccination lines generally moved swiftly, and unlike France, there was no paperwork to get in the way when people went to their local clinics or mass vaccination points.

It also helped that no politician, not even on the fringes of the right or left, sowed doubts about the vaccines. The only political issue regarding the vaccines was when they weren't arriving fast enough, and regional health authorities in charge of administering them demanded more quicker.

This is not a question of progressives or of conservatives. It is a public health question, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez told MSNBC while on a visit last week to the United States.

Unlike Germany or France, Spain doesn't have a big anti-vaccine movement. More than 90% of Spains public health workers have been vaccinated, compared with 42% of public health workers in France.

So while France and Greece have had to pressure skeptics and procrastinators into getting their shots by making vaccines mandatory for people working certain jobs, such as paramedics and nursing home workers, Spaniards have so far needed very little prodding.

In methodically working its way from the most elderly downward, Spain achieved its first goal: stopping the most vulnerable from dying. But the emphasis on vaccines as the salvation could also have contributed to Spains young letting down their guards as curfews and face mask requirements were lifted, just as the delta variant arrived.

The result is that, despite its smooth vaccine rollout, Spain is currently one of Europes hot spots for new infections. Spain is reporting more than 25,000 new cases a day now compared with 3,400 a day a month ago, according to Our World in Data.

A month ago, when we let go of the most of the restrictions, we didnt call it Freedom Day like England, but basically it was a fairly big move toward more freedom," Rafael Bengoa, former Director for Health Systems at WHO and one of Spains leading public health experts, told the AP.

That is one of the reasons that we have the present epidemiological situation."

If you want to control the pandemic in this situation, you have to be doing both the traditional public health restrictions plus the vaccinations, Bengoa explained.

In response, some regions have put new restrictions back into place, such as a nightly curfew in the region that includes Barcelona.

Spain is counting on its vaccine program to make quick inroads with people under age 40 and it seems that the desire to get vaccinated hasn't fallen victim to a generation gap. Spains government polling bureau said last week that nearly 90% of respondents under 35 said they wanted to get vaccinated.

Still, Bengoa thinks virus restrictions will remain in place for a while.

We have to explain to the population that this is here to stay, he said. We will control it. But ... youre going to have to live with a virus that is more dangerous than the flu.

Hernan Munoz in Barcelona, Aritz Parra in Madrid, and Angela Charlton in Paris contributed to this report.

Follow all AP stories on the coronavirus pandemic at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic.
BARCELONA, Spain (AP)  Firefighters in northeast Spain were battling a wildfire Sunday that has consumed over 1,200 hectares (3,000 acres) of woodland.

A wildfire in Santa Coloma de Queralt, near Tarragona, Spain, Sunday July 25, 2021. Firefighters in northeast Spain are battling a wildfire that has consumed over 1,200 hectares (3,000 acres) of woodland. High temperatures and strong winds fanned the flames in the rural area 100 kilometers (62 miles) west of Barcelona that broke out on Saturday evening. (AP Photo/Joan Mateu Parra)

BARCELONA, Spain (AP)  Firefighters in northeast Spain were battling a wildfire Sunday that has consumed over 1,200 hectares (3,000 acres) of woodland.

High temperatures and strong winds fanned the flames in the rural area 100 kilometers (62 miles) west of Barcelona that broke out on Saturday evening.

Around 300 firefighters, including members of the military emergency unit, combated the blaze that sent huge plumes of smoke into the sky, seeking to prevent it from moving into inhabited areas. Twenty-eight children and 14 camp counselors were evacuated from a nearby summer camp just in case.

Regional interior chief Joan Ignasi Elena said the effort was complicated by the hilly terrain, which limited access by ground units. Planes and helicopters made runs to dump water on the burning hills.

Authorities asked farmers in the area to clear their fields of crops that could fuel the fire.

We are in a critical moment, said Catalonias regional President Pere Aragones. We must avoid any risky behavior that could force us to divert resources to other emergencies.
OTTAWA - Canada's spy service closely monitored the burgeoning nationalist movement in the 1960s and '70s, poring over pamphlets, collecting reports from confidential sources and warily watching for signs of Communist infiltration, once-secret records reveal.

Members of the Committee for an Independent Canada speak to reporters following their three-day annual meeting in Ottawa on March 11, 1973. From left are: Jack Biddell, Mel Hurtig, Eddie Goodman, John Trent and Bob Page. THE CANADIAN PRESS

OTTAWA - Canada's spy service closely monitored the burgeoning nationalist movement in the 1960s and '70s, poring over pamphlets, collecting reports from confidential sources and warily watching for signs of Communist infiltration, once-secret records reveal.

The RCMP's security branch, responsible for sniffing out subversives at the time, quietly tracked the rise of the Committee for an Independent Canada, seeing it as ripe for "exploitation or manipulation" by radicals.

The committee, which attracted numerous political and cultural luminaries, pushed for greater Canadian control of the industrial, media and foreign policy spheres in an era of profound American dominance.

The Canadian Press used the Access to Information Act to obtain the RCMPs four-volume, 538-page dossier on the committee as well as a file on a forerunner organization from Library and Archives Canada. Some passages, though more than 60 years old, were withheld from release.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service, which assumed counter-subversion duties from the RCMP in 1984, transferred the records to the National Archives, given their historical significance.

The Mounties' interest was piqued in the spring of 1960 when author Farley Mowat gathered neighbours at his home in Palgrave, Ont., to form what would soon become the Committee for Canadian Independence.

Mowat was instantly spurred into action upon reading journalist James Minifie's book "Peacemaker or Powder-Monkey: Canada's Role in a Revolutionary World," rattled by its concerns about the erosion of Canadian sovereignty.

The fledgling committee advocated distancing Canada from western military alliances and reasserting the country's control over its airspace and territorial waters.

In August 1960, as the RCMP opened a file on the committee, a sergeant surmised the Communist party "must certainly be joyous" at the development given it had long espoused similar ideas. However, the Mounties had uncovered no information to suggest the group was "Communist inspired."

While Mowat's effort faded from the public conversation, hand-wringing about Canadian independence persisted.

Early in 1970, Toronto Daily Star editor Peter C. Newman, former Liberal cabinet minister Walter Gordon and economist Abe Rotstein hatched plans for the Committee for an Independent Canada during a meeting at Toronto's King Edward Hotel.

A statement of purpose published by the committee that September said it realized the benefits of Canada being neighbour to the most powerful nation in the world and rejected the idea of closing the taps of needed foreign capital.

"But our land won't be our own much longer if we allow it to continue to be sold out to foreign owners. Not if we allow another culture to dominate our information media. Not if we allow ourselves to be dragged along in the wake of another country's foreign policy."

A month later an RCMP corporal in the security service's Toronto detachment warned in a two-page memo the publicity the committee had garnered made it a "vulnerable target for subversive penetration."

Gordon, a longtime economic nationalist, was honorary chairman of the committee, with publisher Jack McClelland and Claude Ryan, director of influential Montreal newspaper Le Devoir, serving as co-chairmen.

The politically non-partisan organization's steering committee included dozens of notable members of the Canadian intelligentsia, including Mowat and fellow author Pierre Berton, publisher Mel Hurtig, poet Al Purdy, Chatelaine magazine editor Doris Anderson, lawyers Eddie Goodman and Judy LaMarsh (who had also been a Liberal cabinet minister), union activist and longtime NDP stalwart Eamon Park, and Flora MacDonald, shortly before she became a Progressive Conservative MP.

A source whose name is blacked out of a March 1971 memo provided the RCMP with committee literature including a letter from student co-ordinators Gus Abols and Michael Adams.

"The support of young Canadians is essential, because only through our united action will the government and the Canadian public generally realize the seriousness of our country's situation and the extent of our commitment to the preservation of Canada," the letter said.

Adams recalls being a graduate student the University of Toronto, strolling to class, when Goodman, whom he knew from Conservative political circles, pulled over his car and told the young man to jump in because "we're going to start up something that I think you'd be interested in."

Adams, who would go on to build Environics Research Group into a leading pollster, has fond memories of accompanying Gordon on a committee trip to London, Ont., to promote the nationalist cause to students.

As the "young guy" at committee meetings, Adams revelled in the impressive company.

"It was a wonderful group," he said. "They were incredibly nurturing and helpful."

For their part, however, RCMP security officers didn't seem to know what to make of the committee.

An August 1971 memo to divisions from RCMP headquarters said the committee had taken a moderate, middle class-oriented stance rather than a radical approach. Elements of the New Left and the Communist party had shown interest in the committee, but the RCMP was not aware of "any significant degree of influence or penetration."

Still, the Mounties would continue to eye the committee because its aims and programs "provide a potential for exploitation or manipulation by groups or individuals of a subversive nature."

On the contrary, the committee was formed to keep the nationalist movement from falling into the hands of the Communists and the far left represented by the NDP's Waffle initiative, said Stephen Azzi, a professor of political management at Carleton University in Ottawa.

"The RCMP intelligence unit appeared to be staffed by people with little knowledge, with scant research skills and with deep paranoia," Azzi said in an interview.

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The Mounties studiously monitored the committee through the 1970s, clipping news items and filing memos. A confidential source advised the RCMP of plans for the group's Ottawa demonstration in January 1975, suggesting they would muster "25-30 people instead of the 60 previously planned."

By this point, the committee was no longer a potent force in Canadian public life in any event, Azzi sai

Pierre Trudeau, the Liberal prime minister of the day, was openly skeptical of the nationalist agenda but had adroitly harnessed support for the movement to shore up electoral support, particularly in southern Ontario, he added.

Several of the committee's ideas were realized through creation of Crown corporation Petro-Canada, the Foreign Investment Review Agency, the Canada Development Corporation to foster Canadian-controlled enterprises, and new rules for homegrown content on the airwaves.

Many effects of those policies linger today, Azzi said. "I think our sense of Canada to a large extent was shaped in that period."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 25, 2021.
Writer Brenda Suderman and photographer Mike Deal continue to explore the attics and corners of the citys community-run museums this summer. Today they visit the shockingly huge collection at Manitoba Electrical Museum at 680 Harrow St. This 20-year-old museum highlights the history of the electrification of Manitoba, as well as displaying a wide array of electrical appliances and gadgets. The museum is now open 1 to 4 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday. Admission is $3 and free for ages 5 and under. Under public health measures, visitors must be fully vaccinated; unvaccinated children must be accompanied by fully vaccinated members of their household.

Writer Brenda Suderman and photographer Mike Deal continue to explore the attics and corners of the citys community-run museums this summer. Today they visit the shockingly huge collection at Manitoba Electrical Museum at 680 Harrow St. This 20-year-old museum highlights the history of the electrification of Manitoba, as well as displaying a wide array of electrical appliances and gadgets. The museum is now open 1 to 4 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday. Admission is $3 and free for ages 5 and under. Under public health measures, visitors must be fully vaccinated; unvaccinated children must be accompanied by fully vaccinated members of their household.

If youre searching for just the right mint-green-and-white vintage electric range, complete with stove-top lamp, three ovens and unique art deco controls, a Winnipeg museum might have a deal for you.

A rental deal, that is, since for the last several years, Manitoba Electrical Museum has supplied locally shot film and television productions with period kitchen appliances, office equipment and electrical gadgets.

"If theyre doing a 1930s kitchen, they can go on to our database and see what we have," explained volunteer Dave White from deep in the museums southwest Winnipeg warehouse, which is filled with large appliances and equipment.

MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS A learning circle that tours use to watch videos and talk about the impact hydro development has had on the province.

Outside of those rentals, the large majority of the collection of early electrical equipment stays connected to the museum, which tells the story of how Manitoba became electrified, said curator Pam McKenzie.

That story keeps expanding as more pieces are added to the 5,000 or so artifacts owned by the museum.

"I get at least two donations a week," said McKenzie of the continuous stream of appliances, personal gadgets and office equipment.

MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS A diorama of a line crew dressed in equipment from the mid-1900s.

"We dont buy any artifacts. Theyre just donated."

The collection predates the museum by three decades, started when former Hydro employees interested in electrical history started collecting retired equipment from the electrical utility.

Many of these larger artifacts, including vehicles, appliances, sewing machines, early radios and televisions and operating room lights are stored in an industrial park warehouse owned by Manitoba Hydro.

MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS A replica of a kitchen with early appliances including toy electric stoves that would have come with cake mixes and were baked with the heat from a lightbulb.

Some are used to change out existing exhibits at the Harrow Street location, and three museum vehicles frequently show up in local parades. A red 1975 four-door Renault 12 car  retrofitted in the United States with battery packs in the trunk and under the hood  was once one of seven owned by the Manitoba government as part of an effort to test out electric cars in our climate, said White.

"It could have been Eddie Schreyers car to begin with," he said, referring to the former New Democratic premier, in office from 1969 to 1977.

"They tested it and it was very heavy and it was hard starting it in the winter and you only (could drive) 40 or 50 miles."

ALEX LUPUL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS The batteries of a 1976 Renault electric car at the Manitoba Electrical Museums warehouse.

Others are oddities that might shock or delight visitors, such as two personal saunas or the Easy 3-cup plunger washer, which agitated clothes using brass cups mounted on a frame inside the washer.

"It would be the kind of thing (that) if we had more room, it would be nice to display," he said of the washing machine, which predates automatic washers.

Although the museum appreciates all donations, McKenzie asks potential donors to send a photo with an explanation before lugging over that vintage cast iron stove or Grandmas 70-year-old refrigerator to ensure a similar model isnt already in the collection. Even if its not really old, they will consider it.

ALEX LUPUL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS A vintage stove at the Manitoba Electrical Museums warehouse

Older appliances and household items often have decorative aspects that add to their collectability, including chrome on the exterior, or sleek designs, said assistant curator Shauna Matthews.

Over the years, the designs of household goods, whether sewing machines or kitchen ranges, have moved to become more utilitarian rather than beautiful items that are also functional.

"The esthetics have changed. Appliances like that used to be decorative and have (the function) incorporated into the design," she said.

MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS A record player with a wooden case, model 241RP, Spartan of Canada Ltd., c. 1940.

Although the big warehouse is off limits to visitors, a former Hydro workshop just south of the museum will be open to the public once museum volunteers can return at full complement. Visitors can wander through the tall shelves filled with hair dryers or stereo systems, reminisce about ones they owned or wonder at the absurdities of gadgets of the past, such as a bonnet-style orange hair dryer decorated with a face.

"These things were meant to have a long life," McKenzie said of many of the items encased in beautifully constructed wooden boxes lining the rows of shelves.

"They were made of metal and were sturdy and well built," she said.

ALEX LUPUL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS A variety of fridges at the Manitoba Electrical Museums warehouse.

The museum owns more than a few oddities  and even items of a bit more personal nature  in addition to the requisite toasters, mixers and hair dryers. Those personal care products often dont outlast their original owners, so they rarely get donated, said McKenzie.

"The ones we get tend to be in good condition because people saved them," she said.

A pair of Lady Sunbeam shavers  likely more than 50 years old  still have their original boxes and instructions. The items represent the push for people to adopt electrified models of everyday products.

MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS The museum has shelves of donated items that need to be catalogued and repaired, including several old fans.

"They were one of the first lady shavers for both legs and armpits," explained summer student Kim Cielos, who catalogued the museums collection of personal products this summer.

"Back then, they wanted to advertise more shaving products."

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Visitors this summer dont have to peek into storage rooms to view new artifacts, since some components in the main floor exhibits are regularly switched out. They can also tour a new lower-level exhibit on sustainable development, renewable resources and partnerships with Indigenous communities, due to officially open this fall.

MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS A mercury arc rectifier that was used to provide direct current power to the transit system in Winnipeg.

"Were telling a really important story of collaboration with First Nations," said McKenzie about the interactive exhibit, which includes short videos from Indigenous elders, a simulated woodland setting, and information about the current Wuskwatim and Keeyask hydro projects.

Now that the museum is open at 50 per cent capacity, McKenzie hope to spark interest among vaccinated Winnipeggers looking for something to light up their summer. They may have driven by and noticed the huge metal blades once used to generate electricity out on the front lawn, but never stopped to see more.

"Were the best kept secret in Winnipeg," she said.

"Most people are familiar with the yellow turbine (outside). They recognize that but theyve never been here."

brenda.suderman@freepress.mb.ca

MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS A collection of radios and an old television at the Manitoba Electrical Museum
As of Saturday, at least 84 soldiers from Canadas military have been deployed to four locations in Manitoba with a crucial mission: to fight a growing number of forest fires.

As of Saturday, at least 84 soldiers from Canadas military have been deployed to four locations in Manitoba with a crucial mission: to fight a growing number of forest fires.

Armed Forces members were sent from Canadian Forces Base Shilo near Brandon to tackle wildfires near Swan River, Nopiming, Gypsumville and Sherridon. Four of the soldiers deployed are combat medics, trained to provide emergency medical treatment and preliminary care for patients with urgent needs.

"We wanted to make sure each of the locations had at least one medically-trained professional," Lt. Miguel Moldez told the Free Press, on behalf of the Canadian Armed Forces, in an interview Saturday.

The military is expected to be at the scene until mid-August. Fire crews have also arrived from Nova Scotia, Quebec, Northwest Territories and Parks Canada.

Moldez said the number of soldiers mentioned in previous media reports has not been accurate. "From what I know about things on the ground, its 80 soldiers and four medics right now, and were looking at the possibility of bringing that total up higher," he said.

A commitment of 120 soldiers has been made by the military so far. All of those would come from 2nd Battalion, Princess Patricias Canadian Light Infantry at Shilo.

"That means this province is these soldiers home," Moldez said. "And so, of course, they want to do whatever they can to be there for people in need during this really difficult period."

More than 2,300 people have been evacuated because of at least 132 wildfires in Manitoba, as of Saturday. Most of those are members of First Nations and residents at Northern Affairs communities, near First Nations,who are now staying at hotels and temporary rooms in Winnipeg or Brandon.

Forest fires have disproportionately impacted Metis, First Nations and other Indigenous populations.

Six First Nations and three Northern Affairs communities were left stranded, when smoke spread across their areas and fires continued on Friday. Many lost electric power and hydro, with at least five communities still experiencing those concerns Saturday.

Manitoba Hydro said the outage is affecting more than 1,500 people and is expected to be restored on Tuesday.

The province said, however, there are no communities at immediate risk anymore despite those conditions. In a statement, a provincial spokesperson said scattered showers and thunderstorms over the weekend in the northern and western regions of Manitoba will likely alleviate some fires.

"The Manitoba Wildfire service will continue to action and prioritize fires with available resources based on the priorities of life, property and other values at risk," the statement reads.

Bloodvein First Nation members are requesting the following items be dropped off at the Quest Inn Hotel in Winnipeg, if people wish to provide help: food, clothing, shoes, toys and anything else for children to play with, while stuck in a hotel room.

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There are many pets left behind in communities where people had to immediately evacuate. Some of those are in active fire zones, so those small animals must fend for themselves.

Several donation sites in Winnipeg have been set up for the animals:

Winakwa Community Centre at 980 Winakwa Road;PetSmart at 1050 Leila Avenue;K9 Advocates at 159 Gunn Road;The Royal Manitoba Yacht Club at 90 Kenabeek Street.

temur.durrani@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @temurdur
Michelle Chubb, 23, still remembers how shocked she was when she opened her email to find a message from beauty brand Sephora inviting her to model for the company.

Michelle Chubb, 23, still remembers how shocked she was when she opened her email to find a message from beauty brand Sephora inviting her to model for the company.

"I was taken aback. I had to re-read it," Chubb said. "I didnt hesitate to say yes."

SUPPLIED IMAGES Chubb was recently featured as part of Sephoras all-Indigenous advertising campaign.

The Swampy Cree woman lives in the St. Norbert neighbourhood of Winnipeg. She is a member of Bunibonibee Cree Nation, also known as Oxford House, Man., but grew up in Cross Lake. She spent her childhood learning about her heritage from her grandfather and attending cultural ceremonies with her family.

Sephora announced its all-Indigenous ad campaign last month, which aims to "amplify the voices of Indigenous Peoples in Canada while paying homage to their knowledge, wisdom, diverse strengths and teachings," according to the companys news release.

Chubb said it was an exciting opportunity she hopes will lead to other modelling gigs.

"Seeing it inspired me to do more of my work," Chubb said. "I just felt really happy."

The photographs have since appeared at more than 80 Sephora locations and on the beauty retailers digital platforms. Chubb believes this type of representation by a beauty retailer would have inspired her younger self.

"I would have been excited for my future," Chubb said. "As a child youre being told you cant do something because youre Native, or what you cant pursue."

Chubb first rose to social media fame on popular video sharing app TikTok. Her posts  set to cultural music or todays hits  focus on her experiences as an Indigenous woman. She shares her daily life, traditions and recounts childhood trauma while raising awareness of issues effecting her community.

"My goal was to inspire Indigenous youth to come out of the shadows and be themselves," Chubb said. "I know a lot of Indigenous girls and boys who are shy because of what were told growing up. I just want them to be comfortable in their own skin."

Since downloading the app, Chubb has noticed an increase in Indigenous content creators, including local TikTokers Sherry McKay and Theland Kicknosway.

Chubb boasts an impressive 165,000 followers on Instagram and 433,000 on TikTok.

Aside from Sephora, Chubb has also joined forces with popular eyeglasses brand BonLook. She currently has a new partnership in the works but it is yet to be made official. She has also been interviewed by Teen Vogue and was named one of the Top 100 fascinating Manitobans of 2020 by well-known Winnipeg radio personality and philanthropist Ace Burpee.

Chubb is commited to continuing her work, but also hopes non-Indigenous people will take it upon themselves to learn about Indigenous history.

"It really takes a toll on us to have to educate others," she says.

Chubb can be found on Instagram and TikTok under the username @indigenous_baddie
Manitoba recorded 62 new COVID-19 cases and one death Saturday.

The five-day test positivity rate increased to 3.3 per cent provincially, the province's online COVID dashboard shows. That's up from three per cent Friday.

In Manitoba to date, 1,171 people have died due to the virus and its complications.

Manitoba's health officials no longer issue breakdowns of COVID-19 numbers on weekends, instead updating online data portals which provide less detailed information. On Saturdays and Sundays, the province does not provide the age of the people who died, nor break down by health region where new cases are.

The province's dashboard notes the number of deaths related to variant strains of the virus increased by one Saturday, suggesting the weekend death was linked to a variant.

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There are 103 people in hospital in Manitoba, a slight decrease from the day prior, with 25 of the hospitalized in intensive care.

There were 1,413 COVID-19 tests completed Friday, bringing the total number of tests done in Manitoba since the start of the pandemic to 864,248.

Of the new cases, 29 were linked to more contagious variants. Twenty-seven of the variant cases are unspecified variants and two are linked to the alpha variant.

As of Saturday, 65.2 per cent of the province's eligible population has been fully vaccinated with two doses.

The RBC Convention Centre vaccine clinic is allowing walk-in immunizations until the end of July, from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are available, the province said Friday.

Appointments can booked through the province's website or by phone at 1-844-626-8222.
WILMINGTON, Del. (AP)  The United States is in an unnecessary predicament of soaring COVID-19 cases fueled by unvaccinated Americans and the virulent delta variant, the nations top infectious diseases expert said Sunday.

Top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci responds to accusations by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., as he testifies before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, July 20, 2021. Cases of COVID-19 have tripled over the past three weeks, and hospitalizations and deaths are rising among unvaccinated people. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, Pool)

WILMINGTON, Del. (AP)  The United States is in an unnecessary predicament of soaring COVID-19 cases fueled by unvaccinated Americans and the virulent delta variant, the nations top infectious diseases expert said Sunday.

Were going in the wrong direction, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, describing himself as very frustrated.

He said recommending that the vaccinated wear masks is under active consideration by the governments leading public health officials. Also, booster shots may be suggested for people with suppressed immune systems who have been vaccinated, Fauci said.

Fauci, who also serves as President Joe Bidens chief medical adviser, told CNNs "State of the Union" that he has taken part in conversations about altering the mask guidelines.

He noted that some local jurisdictions where infection rates are surging, such as Los Angeles County, are already calling on individuals to wear masks in indoor public spaces regardless of vaccination status. Fauci said those local rules are compatible with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendation that the vaccinated do not need to wear masks in public.

Top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci responds to accusations by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., as he testifies before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, July 20, 2021. Cases of COVID-19 have tripled over the past three weeks, and hospitalizations and deaths are rising among unvaccinated people. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, Pool)

More than 163 million people, or 49% of the total U.S. population, are fully vaccinated, according to CDC data. Of those eligible for the vaccine, aged 12 and over, the figure rises to 57%.

This is an issue predominantly among the unvaccinated, which is the reason why were out there, practically pleading with the unvaccinated people to go out and get vaccinated, Fauci said.

Fauci said government experts are reviewing early data as they consider whether to recommend that vaccinated individuals to get booster shots. He suggested that some of the most vulnerable, such as organ transplant and cancer patients, are likely to be recommended for booster shots.

Top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci responds to accusations by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., as he testifies before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, July 20, 2021. Cases of COVID-19 have tripled over the past three weeks, and hospitalizations and deaths are rising among unvaccinated people. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, Pool)

He also praised Republicans, including Govs. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas and Ron DeSantis of Florida, and the second-ranking House leader, Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, for encouraging their constituents to get vaccinated. Their states have among the lowest vaccination rates in the country.

What I would really like to see is more and more of the leaders in those areas that are not vaccinating to get out and speak out and encourage people to get vaccinated, Fauci said.

-

This story has been corrected to say that 49% of the total U.S. population, not just those eligible, are fully vaccinated.
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP)  Tanzania on Saturday received its first batch of 1 million Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines donated by the U.S. government.

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP)  Tanzania on Saturday received its first batch of 1 million Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines donated by the U.S. government.

Tanzania had been among the few countries in Africa yet to receive vaccines or start inoculating its population, mainly because its former leader had claimed prayer had defeated COVID-19 in the country.

The vaccines were received by Foreign Affairs Minister Liberata Mulamula and the U.S. ambassador to Tanzania, Donald Wright, at the Julius Nyerere International Airport in the country's commercial capital, Dar es Salaam.

Former Tanzanian President John Magufuli, who died in March, had refused to accept vaccines after he claimed three days of prayer had healed the country of the virus in June 2020.

Magufuli, 61, was among the world's most prominent skeptics of COVID-19. Though his official cause of death was reported to be cardiac arrest, Magufuli's critics believe he died of COVID-19.

Magufuli's deputy, Samai Suluhu Hassan, took over as president in line with the country's constitution and became the first female president in Tanzania.

Hassan has reversed Tanzania's practice of denying COVID-19's spread in the East African country.

This story was first published on July 24, 2021. It was updated on July 26, 2021 to correct the dateline from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania to Nairobi, Kenya.
Don Murphy, owner of Murphys Bar and Grill in Chinatown, says he noticed nearby restaurants asked patrons for vaccination cards but received backlash.

He said: They got eaten alive on social media. I dont want to put my staff through that.



MONTGOMERY, Ala.  With COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations up sharply over the last month in Alabama but still far below when the pandemic was at its worst early this year, school officials have said vaccines wont be required in the fall and local systems can decide on their own whether to require masks or other precautions.

While the American Academy of Pediatrics is recommending that schools require face masks for children older than 2 and all adults, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey disagrees, an aide said.

Governor Ivey believes students need to be in the classroom without any type of mask requirement. She continues to encourage all eligible Alabamians to roll up their sleeves and get the vaccine to make COVID-19 a distant memory, spokeswoman Gina Maiola said Monday.



LITTLE ROCK, Ark.  Arkansas hospitalizations due to the coronavirus jumped by 106 over the weekend as the state led the nation in new cases per capita.
Its official. The great pandemic poutine famine is nearing its end.

Canadian premier Justin Trudeau has announced that, beginning Aug. 9, U.S. citizens will once again be allowed to cross into the Great White North. More than 14 months after the gates came down and the welcome mat was pulled up, International Falls will be international again.

It was a particularly unnerving moment in a generally unnerving year. It wasnt like our Good Neighbor to the North announced they were building a wall and we were going to be paying for it, but all of a sudden that 5,525 mile unfortified boundary which always seemed more like a suburban property line than the Berlin Wall was turned into a legally impenetrable DMZ.

The whole thing gave me a left out, locked out sort of feeling. Not that I had any particular plans to go there, but what if I wanted to? After all, it is less than 600 miles to Winnipeg 

Somehow, it sort of felt like I was being sent to my room.
New luxury apartments in Baraboo will likely be occupied by late spring as workers plan to start putting in floors this week.

Matt Buswell, vice president of construction for Americon Construction Company, said the Rapid River project at 325 Lynn Street has been focusing on concrete but now workers will focus on putting in wood panels that will shape the four floors of the building.

The whole building will be framed in three to four months, Buswell said. The goal is to get the roof on as quickly as we possibly can so were prepared and ready for the gloomy winter.

Interior construction will continue and leasing is slated to begin by the end of spring 2022 by 3 Amigos Property Management of La Crosse. According to the company website, 3 Amigos owns properties in the La Crosse area, as well as Holmen, Whitehall and Iowa. Apartments will likely be leased in phases, beginning with the top floor and moving down.

Buswell said there will be 66 units, which will range from studios to three bedrooms. The luxury complex features amenities like balconies and central air in every apartment, a community room, workout area and an outdoor living space that will overlook the nearby Baraboo River. The four-story building will also have underground, heated parking for all tenants.
Jordan was moving from out of state to a dream job in Madison when his car broke down and was not worth fixing. Jordan said he reached out to groups that help veterans and received help. He was given a 2010 vehicle which he picked up at Countryside Chevrolet, Buick, and GMC.

Im just so blessed, Jordan said. Over the past six seven months I have been able to get on my feet, and I couldnt have done that without all of them.

Bill Sherer, founder and executive director of Nation of Patriots, said it has been 12 years since the Patriot Tour began, but he originally did not feel it would last five years. However, the organization is still going strong with its original mission.

They are starting to understand the recipe that we have here, Sherer said. It is really special. The team we have here in Beaver Dam. The team we have on a National scale. We got a good recipe. We have one mission. We have one event, and we do it all for one cause. Combine that with ultimate transparency. Every single dollar you give us goes to the cause we support.

The tour began in Las Vegas on May 13 and will return to Las Vegas on Sept. 11.
I always thought that the lab leak was a long shot, but I thought it was worth investigating. I did then, and I do now, he said.

But that possibility seems even more remote based on a new summary by Worobey and others that lays out the case for so-called zoonotic spillover from the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.

One key revelation, he said, is a recent report by a team of wildlife biologists debunking claims by Chinese authorities that no illegal animal trade occurred at the Huanan market. Instead, the biologists found evidence of sales involving raccoon dogs and palm civets, two Asian mammals linked to previous crossover outbreaks in humans.

The paper by Worobey and 20 other researchers was posted July 7 on the website Zenodo, an open scientific repository where researchers can easily upload their data for others to read and analyze. Throughout the pandemic, scientists have been using such open-access sites to quickly share their findings to aid the global fight against the virus.

As a viral detective of sorts, Worobey, the head of UAs Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, has previously traced the origins of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the 1918 influenza pandemic, but his focus these days is squarely on the coronavirus.
Getting vaccinated against COVID-19 can protect against serious illness, hospitalization and death. For some University of Wisconsin System students this fall, it will also result in a tuition break.

In what is likely the broadest vaccination incentive program for Wisconsin to date, the System announced Sunday that it will award $7,000 scholarships to 70 students who get the shot and attend a campus that reaches a 70% vaccination rate.

All UW campuses except Madison are participating in what the System is dubbing the 70 for 70 campaign, an effort to encourage vaccination among students that will cost about $500,000.

We really inculcated a culture of responsibility with the students (last year) and we want to do the same thing (this year), only more with the spirit of competition, interim System President Tommy Thompson told reporters on Friday. I want to get a little bit of rivalry going across the state.
New York State Police have identified the woman who died in a skydiving incident in Otsego County, Saturday.

They say it appears 59-year-old Karen Bernard, of Wildwood, Florida, jumped out of a plane to skydive, when her parachute malfunctioned.

It happened just after 9am, Saturday, July 24th, in the area of County Highway 34, in the town of Westford.

State Police are investigating.
Yan Jiaxin

Many residents of Qiaotuo (a village in Tai'an, a county in Anshan, a city in Northeast China's Liaoning Province) are grateful to Yan Jiaxin, one of the villagers. Why? Yan, a university graduate who returned home to establish Xinyang Crafts Plant (manufacturing toys, knickknacks and handwoven items), during the past few years has put a lot of effort into helping the residents attain wealth by creating handmade products. Given Yan and her employees' efforts to develop their business, an increasing number of rural residents have been living happy, prosperous lives.

Despite the fact Yan is one of the few university graduates in Qiaotuo, the villagers' well-being remains the top concern of Yan. She gave up the opportunity to work in Dalian (another city in Liaoning Province) in 2017, after she graduated from university. Within a short period of time, she returned to her home village to start her own business. With the encouragement of her parents, and the help of the members of both the village's Party committee and the village's committee, Yan set up the crafts plant in her family's courtyard. She was determined to revive her hometown's traditional crafts, and to help residents realize their dreams of getting rich through hard work.

During the first year, Yan made special trips to Yiwu (a city in East China's Zhejiang Province), and other regions of the country, to conduct market surveys on crafts, and to apprentice under skilled craftspeople, so she could improve her craft-making skills.

Yan also visited villagers, to teach them how to create the crafts. Yan's efforts paid off, as an increasing number of villagers went to her plant, to seek employment. Given Yan and her employees' tremendous efforts to develop the enterprise, the plant has generated considerable profits during the past few years.

Yan Jiaxin (L) and a local villager

Many left-behind women (whose husbands have left home to work elsewhere), in Qiaotuo and its neighboring villages, have taken raw materials from Yan's plant, so they could make handwoven items at home, to help their families meet their daily expenses.

During last year's epidemic prevention and control period (to combat novel coronavirus disease), the plant provided employment opportunities to many residents, who could not return to their work posts in other regions of the country.

With Yan's help, nearly 100 impoverished women, from Tai'an's neighboring towns and townships, have escaped poverty by creating crafts during the past few years. Given the sound development of Yan's plant, she has employed nearly 1,000 residents (of Tai'an and its neighboring towns and townships). Their products have sold well in many countries, including Germany and Canada.

Yan is pleased to see her and her employees' efforts have yielded fruitful results; for example, many rural residents have escaped poverty. "I'll make greater efforts to help farmers attain greater wealth by selling their products," says Yan.

Source: Anshan Women's Federation

Photos by Yao Jianfeng

(Women of China English Monthly May 2021 issue)
Tourist population boom putting strain on health service and Delta variant spread, warn Betsi chiefs

Health chiefs have admitted that higher than usual visitor numbers are already putting a strain on local infrastructure and likely to result in further spread of the Delta strain of Covid-19.

In a vaccination update earlier this week, the Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board cited a recent survey showing the region as the most popular destination for Britons looking to holiday in the UK this summer.

But the move has prompted calls for assurances that north Wales public services are being offered adequate support to deal with such an influx described as far in excess of previous years.

Sykes Holiday Cottages annual poll showed that 62% of British people intend to spend their main summer break in the UK this year, up from 50% in 2019, mainly due to ongoing uncertainty over foreign travel due to Covid-19.

While such a population boom is welcome news for many businesses dependant on tourism, following a difficult 18 months for hospitality and several other sectors, there are fears in some quarters that public services will struggle to cope.

Gill Harris, the health boards Executive Director of Nursing and Midwifery, noted that such an influx was also highly likely to lead to an increase in cases of the highly transmittable Delta variant, first discovered in India.

She wrote, This week marks the start of the summer holidays and with news that north Wales is the UKs most popular destination for holidaymakers, we expect the number of visitors to the region to be far in excess of that seen in previous years.

This is already placing significant additional pressure on our services and it is highly likely to lead to a marked increase in cases of the Delta variant.

The comments have prompted one MS to write to the First Minister, seeking assurances that extra support would be available for GPs, hospitals and other agencies such as the police, in light of such an unprecedented, albeit temporary, population boom.

The Welsh Government pointed out that the 111 non-emergency freephone service was recently extended to cover the region, in a bid to try and direct patients to the most appropriate health services.

But Sian Gwenllian, the MS for Arfon, said said she was very concerned about the wording used.

I wish to know urgently what exactly the Welsh Government has planned to deal with this situation, she added.

Is there an emergency plan in place that brings together all the relevant partners?

What additional support is available to GPs, Hospitals, Public Services of all kinds, the Police and the many other agencies that will have to cope with these unprecedented pressures?

And what additional support (financial and in terms of workforce) will be available to them over the summer/autumn?

My constituents need reassurance that everything is being done to protect them from the adverse effects of the massive population surge happening in our communities.

The Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board was approached to comment but said they had nothing to add to what already noted in the vaccination update.

In response, however, a Welsh Government spokesperson said: The NHS has plans in place to respond to increases in pressures throughout the year.

We have made more funding available to help manage urgent and emergency care and the 111 service has been rolled out across north Wales to provide advice over-the-phone to people with non-emergency care needs.

Despite a rise in coronavirus cases in the community, thanks to the success of the vaccination programme, the link with serious illness and hospitalisations has been weakened.

But we need everyones help to bring coronavirus under control and if you need healthcare, please think about using the right health service for your condition.

By Gareth Williams  BBC Local Democracy Reporter
NATOs UK-led Carrier Strike Group (CSG21) has completed military exercises in the Indian Ocean, after transiting the Suez Canal earlier this month.

The Carrier Strike Group, with its main warship the HMS Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier, was launched in May, beginning a 28-week deployment spanning over 26,000 nautical miles. Alongside Elizabeth are six Royal Navy ships, a Royal Navy submarine, US Navy destroyer The Sullivans, and a frigate from the Netherlands. The Carrier Strike Group is carrying out over 70 engagements and exercises with 40 nations across the Mediterranean, Indian Ocean and Indo-Pacific and, in the next days, a provocative operation against China in the South China Sea. Following this, a series of exercises with be held in the Philippines Sea with the US, Australia, France, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea.

The UK Carrier Strike Group 2021, led by HMS Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier, departing the UK (credit: Royal Navy/Flickr)

Last Wednesday, CSG21 began three days of operations after meeting up with the Indian Navy in the Bay of Bengal. The exercises involved 10 ships, two submarines, approximately 20 aircraft and almost 4,000 personnel. The mission represents a deepening of military relations between Britain and India, with a British High Commission, New Delhi statement explaining, An Indian warship will also exercise with the Royal Navy off the coast of the UK in August.

The statement, published on the UK government website, declared, The deployment represents the UKs commitment to deepening diplomatic, economic and security ties with India and in the Indo-Pacific region. It demonstrates both the UKs support for the freedom of passage through vital trading routes and for a free, open and inclusive order in the Indo-Pacific.

It adds, From defending democratic values and tackling shared threats, to seizing new trade opportunities through engagements with Singapore, the Republic of Korea, Japan, India and others, the deployment marks a step-change in UK engagement in the region.

CSG21 has been portrayed as carrying out a series of exercises to ensure that the Elizabeth, one of the UKs two new aircraft carriers, is battle ready. A review of the operations already carried out, in regions of the world that are tinderboxes, shows how reckless the entire venture is.

Its first move on leaving base at Portsmouth was to participate in the NATO exercise Steadfast Defender, held from May 20 to May 28 off the coast of Portugal. Alongside CSG21 were the USS Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group, and Standing NATO Maritime Group 1 and 2 which include eight to twelve destroyer warships and frigates.

In June, a Russian patrol ship fired warning shots at the CSG21 British destroyer HMS Defender and a Russian warplane dropped bombs in its path, after Defender entered waters in the Black Sea off the coast of Crimea, which is claimed by Russia. The UKs provocation was sanctioned by the United States as part of a long-planned operation .

Russia warned that if such an incursion was repeated by the UK, then it would bomb any warships involved. Despite these warnings, further military exercises aimed against Russia have been launched.

On July 9, the Daily Telegraph reported that UK Merlin helicopters hunted a Russian submarine which the newspaper claimed stalked the Royal Navys Carrier Strike Group (CSG) when the task force passed through the eastern Mediterranean. The helicopters dropped sonobuoys to listen for the distinctive sounds of submarines. The Telegraph noted, The hunt for the submarine took place four days after the confrontation in the Black Sea between HMS Defender, a Type-45 air defence ship, and Russian forces.

Ukraine and the UK are due to begin a series of military exercises, Operation Cossack Mace, this month. The exercises, in preparation for a land conflict with Russia, involve military forces from the US, UK, Denmark, Sweden and Canada. The British Army announced July 15, Over the next few weeks soldiers from the 4th Battalion, The Royal Regiment of Scotland (4 SCOTS), will be in Ukraine taking part in Exercise Cossack Mace, in partnership with soldiers from the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU).

The 4th Battalion were deployed in the imperialist wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The day prior to the Black Sea events, UK and US Marine Corps F35B jets carried out operational sorties in the Middle Eastthe first combat missions ever flown from the Elizabethin support of Operation Shader and US Operation Inherent Resolve. Set up in 2014, ostensibly to target Islamic State, both operations consist of constant air strikes and hostile surveillance missions in a host of countries including Iraq, Syria, Libya, Tunisia and Lebanon.

While located in the Mediterranean, the Elizabeth completed joint naval training June 1-4 with the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle. Exercise Gallic Strike involved 15 ships and 57 aircraft and included a sea-to-land strike simulation and joint manoeuvres between French Rafale marine and F-35B aircraft.

UK F-35B Lightning landing on the deck of HMS Queen Elizabeth (credit: Royal Navy/Flickr)

Another Mediterranean operation participated in by CSG21 was Falcon Strike 21, a multinational training exercise from June 7-15 led by the Italian Air Force. The exercise, carried out from Italys Amendola Air Base, saw F-35 Lightning stealth fighters from four nations train together for the first time. Captain James Blackmore, commander of HMS Queen Elizabeths Carrier Air Group, commented that the exercise was based on harnessing the full potential of these enormously powerful aircraft and apply[ing] their advanced capabilities to an increasingly complex and contested battle space.

The UKs Ministry of Defence noted of the use of F35B jets during Operation Shader and US Operation Inherent Resolve that for the CSG21, which has spent previous weeks in the Mediterranean working with NATO allies and partners, it marks a change of emphasis. From exercises and international engagements, the Carrier Strike Group is now delivering its full might of naval and air power

Commodore Steve Moorhouse, Commander of the United Kingdom Carrier Strike Group, said, The Carrier Strike Groups period working with our NATO partners in the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Black Seas offers unmistakable proof that the United Kingdoms most important overseas defence commitment remains the security of the Euro-Atlantic region.

He boasted, While HMS Queen Elizabeth launched counter-Daesh missions over Iraq and Syria from the Eastern Mediterranean, HMS Defender and HNLMS Evertsen were conducting concurrent operations 1,600 miles away in the Black Seatrue strategic reach.

On July 12, the Elizabeth and the USS Ronald Reagan carrier strike group, alongside the Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group, conducted a large scale joint interoperability exercise in the Gulf of Aden. The USS Ronald Reagan is the only forward deployed United States aircraft carrier. The Royal Navy reported that the two-day operation saw the three navy task groups, comprising US, UK and Dutch ships, test their abilities in anti-air, anti-surface and anti-submarine warfare tactics and techniques.

The crews practised manoeuvring in close formation, hunting simulated enemy submarines and defending against simulated adversaries in the air.

CSG21 proceeds to the South China Sea under conditions in which the Biden administration in the US has ramped up tensions with Beijing. Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued a provocative statement July 11 dismissing Chinas claim to the South China Sea. Nowhere is the rules-based maritime order under greater threat than in the South China Sea, Blinken stated, warning, The United States reaffirms its July 13, 2020 [Trump administration] policy regarding maritime claims in the South China Sea.

Just days later, Boris Johnsons UK government confirmed that the Carrier Strike Group would complete its planned South China Sea operation and hinted that this could have dire military consequences. According to the Daily Mail, on a visit to Tokyo last week, Defence Minister Ben Wallace declined to say whether the fleet would breach the 12-mile zone around military bases China has built on disputed rocks in the South China Sea.

A vocal section of Johnsons ruling Conservative Party, led by former party leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith and backed by sections of the military, are demanding Downing Street and the armed forces rethink this journey and sail even more provocatively through the Taiwan Strait. US Pacific Fleet commander, Adm. John Aquilino, has declared Taiwan the most significant flashpoint now that could lead to a large-scale war between the US and China.

The possibility of a conflagration involving nuclear powers is ever present in these events. Speaking in Japan, Wallace declared, The world is a more anxious place, and as a result more on edge There is definitely a danger that that anxiousness tips into more aggressive measures, but I think we are still some way off a military conflict in Asia.
Firefighters in southern Oregon increased the containment of the Bootleg Fire -- the nation's largest wildfire -- Saturday, but the raging flames continued to spread as officials declared weather warnings in the area.

'This fire is resistant to stopping at dozer lines,' said Jim Hampton, a fire behavior analyst. 'With the critically dry weather and fuels we are experiencing, firefighters are having to constantly re-evaluate their control lines and look for contingency options,' he noted in a statement posted on InciWeb, the clearinghouse for fire information in the US.

The fire is currently 46% contained, an increase from Friday. But the fire also got bigger, scorching 408,930 acres as of Sunday, a more than 6,000-acre expansion since Friday.

Saturday's dry and unstable conditions prompted a Red Flag Warning at the fire's site, according to InciWeb. The National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) said the warning is issued when there is 'severe fire weather like strong sustained winds, gusts and low humidity, combined with a high fire danger rating.'

Additionally, smoke and haze from other nearby fires lingered throughout Saturday as temperatures remained warmer.

'The smoke is expected to keep temperatures down a couple degrees ... which may help overall fire activity. Unfortunately, this smoke may impede air operations on the fire,' according to InciWeb.

Meanwhile, extreme fire behavior from the Bootleg Fire helped create a tornado last weekend, according to a post on the Bootleg Fire Info Facebook page Saturday.

The July 18 tornado was confirmed with the Medford National Weather Service Forecast Office, the post said.

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown told CNN's Jake Tapper Sunday morning that the state is getting federal support from the Biden administration to help fight the Bootleg Fire, but future fire prevention is key.

'It's incredibly important with climate change that we get into these forests and start doing the fitting and harvest and prescriptive burning, so that we can create healthier landscapes that are more resilient, for wildfire,' Brown said.

Brown signed legislation this past week that would arm the state with tools and resources to make communities 'more adaptive' to wildfires.

The legislation includes resources for adequate firefighting tools and prescriptive and mitigation efforts. Brown also recently signed the 100% clean energy bill, which she described as 'the most aggressive clean energy bill in the country.'

Overall, crews are battling 88 large wildfires throughout the US, with six new large fires reported Saturday, the NIFC said.

Nearly 22,000 firefighters and support personnel have been deployed to tackle the fires, which have collectively burned more than 1.4 million acres, the agency said. Most of the fires are spread across Western US states, where extreme drought conditions have been reported.

The climate crisis is making deadlier and more destructive wildfires the new normal, devastating homes, forcing thousands to evacuate and even destroying trees intended to offset carbon emissions.

Hundreds more fires are burning in the Canadian province of British Columbia, where a state of emergency was declared July 20.

One hundred firefighters from Mexico arrived in British Columbia Saturday to help combat the wildfires burning in the region, Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General of British Columbia Mike Farnworth said during a news conference welcoming the crews.

Over the next 30 days, Mexican firefighters will work alongside wildfire service crews and firefighters in British Columbia to battle the 275 forest fires burning in the area, Farnworth said.

'The crews here from Mexico are top rate, incredibly skilled ... We cannot thank the Mexican government enough for assisting us,' Farnworth added.

Thousands evacuated as wildfires spread

The rapid spread of the Bootleg Fire put more than 2,000 people in the surrounding area under some form of evacuation orders as the fire has grown to become Oregon's third-largest since 1900.

'It's kind of a dubious honor,' Oregon Department of Forestry spokesperson Marcus Kauffman said Thursday of the fire that was started July 6 by lighting.

Meanwhile, the Tamarack Fire along the California-Nevada border has destroyed more than 66,744 acres as of Saturday and at least 10 structures in those states.

Additional evacuations were announced Friday, bringing the total to 2,439 evacuees, according to InciWeb.

Nevada on Thursday received a grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to fight the fire after requesting assistance earlier that day.

'At the time of the request, the fire threatened approximately 800 homes in and around Holbrook Junction,' FEMA said Friday in a news release. 'The fire also threatened a water treatment plant, power distribution lines and substations, cellular communications towers, and U.S. Highway 395.'

Wildfires prompt additional emergency declarations

In California, where nine large fires are currently active, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday declared a state of emergency in four northern California counties due to the hasty spread of flames.

Butte and Lassen counties are under states of emergency prompted by the state's largest fire, the Dixie Fire, the governor said in a news release. The Dixie and Fly fires have pushed officials to put Plumas County under the emergency declaration as well as Alpine County due to the Tamarack Fire.

The Tamarack Fire also prompted Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak to put Douglas County under an emergency declaration Friday.

'Now, more than ever we must stand united and use all our available resources to combat this growing threat in order to help our fellow Nevadans receive the aid they need,' Sisolak said in a news release.

A state of emergency allows officials to access more funds and resources.

The-CNN-Wire

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ABERDEEN, Miss. (WTVA)  An attempt to get in a locked camper, a shooting and a crash claimed the lives of a man, a boy and a teenager in Monroe County  all three cases the coroner described as unrelated accidents.

The first death happened Friday night when sheriff's deputies and emergency medical responders found the body of Dennis Parker, 54, in a small window of the camper he was living in on Chapel Grove Road.

Coroner Alan Gurley said it is believed Parker had locked his keys inside the camper, then stood on a chair and tried getting inside through the window when he got stuck and asphyxiated.

Gurley said the second death happened late Saturday morning when Charles Garza, 6, suffered an accidental gunshot wound at his home in Amory. He died at the hospital in Amory.

The third death occurred late Saturday morning when Christopher Michael Roberson, 18, of Smithville, apparently lost control of his pickup truck and crashed it into a utility pole on Highway 23 east of town.

According to the coroner, the truck overturned, the teen was thrown from the vehicle and he died at the site of the accident from multiple trauma. He was not wearing a seat belt.
Charleston, WV (25301)

Today

Showers early then scattered thunderstorms developing later in the day. High 78F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 60%..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms during the evening, then partly cloudy overnight. Low 61F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 50%.
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Fairmont, WV (26554)

Today

Partly cloudy with afternoon showers or thunderstorms. High 77F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 50%..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms during the evening, then mainly cloudy overnight. Low near 60F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 40%.
Morgantown, WV (26505)

Today

Partly cloudy early. Scattered thunderstorms developing in the afternoon. High 77F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 50%..

Tonight

Cloudy skies early, followed by partial clearing. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low near 60F. Winds light and variable.
Clarksburg, WV (26301)

Today

Partial cloudiness early, with scattered showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. High 78F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 50%..

Tonight

Mostly cloudy with scattered thunderstorms mainly before midnight. Low 59F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 40%.
Weather Alert

.Monsoonal moisture will spread east into portions of south central and southeast Wyoming Tuesday. Showers and thunderstorms will develop during the late morning, increasing in coverage and intensity in the afternoon. Some of the showers and thunderstorms will be capable of producing rainfall up to an inch per hour. Heavy rainfall over recently burned areas will increase the risk for flash flooding. ...FLASH FLOOD WATCH IN EFFECT FROM TUESDAY AFTERNOON THROUGH TUESDAY EVENING... The National Weather Service in Cheyenne has issued a * Flash Flood Watch for portions of south central Wyoming and southeast Wyoming, including the following areas, in south central Wyoming, North Snowy Range Foothills, Shirley Basin, Sierra Madre Range, Snowy Range and Upper North Platte River Basin. In southeast Wyoming, Laramie Valley and North Laramie Range. * From Tuesday afternoon through Tuesday evening. * Heavy rainfall from showers and thunderstorms will increase the threat for flash flooding in the watch area. * Recently burned areas will be more susceptible to flash flooding, especially in and around the Mullen Burn Scar. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... You should monitor later forecasts and be prepared to take action should Flash Flood Warnings be issued. &&
Weather Alert

...AIR QUALITY ALERT IN EFFECT UNTIL 1 PM MDT TUESDAY... The following message is transmitted on behalf of the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality, Air Quality Division and the Wyoming Department of Health. WHAT...Air Quality Alert for Wildfire Smoke. WHERE...Much of Southeast Wyoming from Douglas to Cheyenne. WHEN...Until 1 PM Tuesday. IMPACTS...Heavy smoke from Montana and Pacific Northwest wildfires. HEALTH INFORMATION...The Wyoming Department of Health recommends the elderly, young children, and individuals with respiratory problems avoid excessive physical exertion and minimize outdoor activities during this time. Wildfire smoke is made up of a variety of pollutants, including particulate matter and ozone, which can cause respiratory health effect. Although these people are most susceptible to health impacts, the Department of Health also advises that everyone should avoid prolonged exposure to poor air quality conditions. CURRENT CONDITIONS...The Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality, Air Quality Division offers near real-time air quality data for Wyoming's monitoring stations and health effects information to help the public interpret current conditions. Current air quality conditions across the state of Wyoming can be found at http://www.wyvisnet.com/
Weather Alert

...FLOOD ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 11 PM MDT THIS EVENING FOR CENTRAL SWEETWATER COUNTY... At 837 PM MDT, Doppler radar indicated heavy rain due to thunderstorms. Minor flooding is ongoing or expected to begin shortly in the advisory area. As of 814 PM, Southwest Wyoming Regional Airport reported 0.94 inches of rainfall in about an hour. Areas between Highway 430 and Interstate 80, east and southeast of Rock Springs could experience some flooding. Salt Wells Creek could have rapid rises and could cause some flooding. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... Turn around, don't drown when encountering flooded roads. Most flood deaths occur in vehicles. Be aware of your surroundings and do not drive on flooded roads. In hilly terrain there are hundreds of low water crossings which are potentially dangerous in heavy rain. Do not attempt to cross flooded roads. Find an alternate route. &&
Lady Kitty Spencer has married fashion businessman Michael Lewis. (Getty Images)

She may be yet to reveal her wedding gown  but Lady Kitty Spencer has treated her social media followers to a stunning polka dot dress instead.

Princess Diana's niece, 30, wowed in the monochrome frock by Dolce & Gabbana during an evening out with friends in Florence, Italy ahead of marrying fiance Michael Lewis.

In a post on Instagram, the model  who is the cousin of Prince Harry and Prince William  could be seen posing in the famous Piazza del Duomo.

Captioning the image, she wrote: "Early hours of the morning with not a soul in sight."

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Earlier, the eldest child of Earl Spencer accessorised with a bright pink bobbed wig in reference to Netflix show Money Heist.

Both posts have received thousands of 'likes', with many sending their well-wishes ahead of her much-anticipated nuptials.

It has been reported that Lady Spencer married the 62-year-old fashion businessman Lewis this weekend at the Villa Aldobrandini in Frascati, near Rome.

Guests included Pixie Lott, Idris Elba's wife Sabrina Dhowre Elba and Made In Chelsea star Mark-Francis Vandelli, as well as the bride's twin sisters Eliza and Amelia.

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In May, Lady Spencer revealed how she was shocked at the attention she received after attending the Duke and Duchess of Sussex's 2018 wedding.

She revealed that her Instagram following jumped from 37,000 to 500,000 overnight after being photographed attending the Windsor Castle nuptials.

Speaking to Town & Country magazine, the model  who was mostly raised in her mother's native South Africa  said: "I woke up the next day and looked at my phone and thought, Whoops, did I take someone elses by mistake?

"It was very weird, and a little bit overwhelming."

Watch: Celebrity wedding dresses
Paris Hilton has urged other survivors of abuse to come forward and tell their stories. (Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty/MTV/ViacomCBS)

Paris Hilton wants other survivors of childhood abuse to "use your voice" and speak out as she did.

The 40-year-old TV personality spoke at an event for non-profit organisation One Young World of her pride at taking the decision to come forward with allegations against a school she attended as a teenager.

Read more: Sarah Silverman apologises to Paris Hilton for 2007 joke

Hilton claimed last year that she experienced psychological trauma at a correctional school in Utah during the 1990s, alleging she was strip-searched, put in exclusion rooms and that she and other students were drugged with unknown medications.

At the One Young World event, Hilton said: "For me it was so traumatic that I didnt speak about it for 20 years, because what I went through was just so horrible that I didnt even want to think that it was real."

Watch: Paris Hilton proud of Britney Spears for speaking out over conservatorship

Hilton said that taking the decision to speak her truth was "one of the most empowering moments of my life".

The socialite said her younger self would be proud of her for speaking out and said she has "turned my pain into a purpose" since she went public with her allegations.

Read more: Paris Hilton reveals thoughts on Britney Spears conservatorship

She added: "Its so healing and its so important for all of us to really expose these people for what theyre doing so it doesnt happen any more."

The institution at the centre of Hilton's claims, Provo Canyon School, has faced allegations of abuse throughout its history, with recording artist Kat Von D also among those to make claims of misconduct.

Paris Hilton appeared via video call at the One Young World event in Munich. (Oliver Sold/One Young World)

Hilton has connected her trauma from her time at Provo Canyon School to subsequent problems in her life, including the sex tape scandal she experienced in 2003.

"That would never have happened if I hadn't gone to that school," Hilton said last year, explaining she never would have formed a relationship with Rick Salomon, who leaked the video.

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Read more: Hilton says sex tape humiliation will hurt her forever

She added: "I never would have let someone like that in my life if I hadn't gone through such experiences. And therefore, I would have never put myself in that situation.

"But I just wanted love so bad. I didn't really know. I was so naive. And I trusted the wrong person. And that's something I'll regret for the rest of my life."

Watch: Paris Hilton will front cooking show for Netflix
Everything's bigger at Costco, and that includes its plans for the summer: The wholesale retailer is opening up several new locations across the U.S., including three that are having their grand openings this week. If you've been looking to bulk up on your staplesand to see if those Kirkland Signature products, sheet cakes, and the cult favorite $1.50 hot dog and soda special is worth the hypethere may be some good news for you. Read on to find out if one of the five new Costco locations opening up in summer 2021 is near you.

RELATED: Costco Just Announced It's Bringing Back This COVID Precaution.

1

Tennessee

New location: Murfreesboro (1524 Beasie Road)

Details: The Murfreesboro Costco just opened its doors this past week on July 20, after more than six years of planning. More than 1,400 people visited the new Costco on its first day, according to the Daily News Journal. Tennessee's newest Costco includes a tire service center, a pharmacy, an optical center, and a food court.

Opening date: July 20

2

Arkansas

New location: Little Rock (16901 Chenal Parkway)

Details: This newly opened location includes a pizza kitchen, an independent optometrist, a pharmacy, a food court, and plenty of other perks for Costco members. And people were lining up to see it for themselves. "We wanted to be the first ones here," Costco member John Bui told a local NBC News affiliate. "No budget, no goal except to hit every aisle."

Opening date: July 21

RELATED: This Insider Secret Will Save You Money Every Time You Shop at Costco.

3

Oklahoma

New location: Moore (2651 S. Telephone Road)

Details: The newest Oklahoma Costco location boasts 150,000 square feet and includes a gas station, tire service center, hearing aid center, optical department, pharmacy, and food court.

Opening date: July 22

4

Illinois

New location: Naperville (1255 E. Ogden Avenue)

Details: Naperville already has one Costco that opened in 2003, but this new store will be part of the redevelopment of the East Ogden Mall, which has been sitting vacant for the last seven years. If you want to sign up now, head to 1163 E. Ogden Ave., Suite 363weekdays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and weekends from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.to become a member before the store opens next month!

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Opening date: August 19

RELATED: 15 Tricks Costco Uses to Get You to Overspend.

5

Missouri

New location: Springfield (279 North Eastgate Avenue)

Details: Not much is known about this new Costco, but you can also sign up to become a member already before it opens. On the Costco website, it says future shoppers can head to 1630 E Bradford Pkwy., Unit B, on weekdays from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and weekends from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. to do so.

Opening date: Expected to open in August 2021

RELATED: The 20 Worst Things to Buy at Costco.
Zahra Haider

Four days after the headless body of a former Pakistani diplomats young daughter was discovered in Islamabad, her death has ignited a wave of fury across the globe and sparked calls for stronger protections for women in Pakistan.

Near the Toronto waterfront, writer and activist Zahra Haiderwho grew up with both the 27-year-old victim, Noor Mukadam, and her alleged killer, Zahir Jafferhosted a vigil in Queens Park on Friday night.

Haider opened the vigil with a quote from writer Mohammed Hanif: There was not a single daywhen she didnt see a woman shot or hacked, strangled or suffocated, poisoned or burnt, hanged or buried alive... Most of lifes arguments, it seemed, got settled by doing various things to a womans body.

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Haider said she had known both Mukadam and Jaffer for many years, but she is speaking out now about what she knows because she fears he could get away with the alleged murder.

Hes very well-connected. I want to ensure that he cant use his privilege to get out of this, she told The Daily Beast.

The body of Mukadam, the daughter of former Pakistani ambassador to South Korea Shaukat Mukadam, was found earlier this week in Jaffers house in one of Islamabads wealthiest neighborhoods. The body bore marks of torture and a stab wound in the temple, and police have recovered both a knife and a pistol from the home.

Jaffer, the son of an influential Islamabad businessman, was arrested at the scene and has been charged with Mukadams murder. He had allegedly attempted to attack those who first arrived on the scene, and was subsequently tied up when police and Shaukat Mukadam arrived.

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There is no doubt he did it, Shaukat Mukadam told Dawn. My daughter was innocent and loved animals; I have served the nation, and I want justice.

The circumstances surrounding Mukadams death are not entirely clear. She had told her parents she was going to Lahore for a few days, but authorities say cell phone data shows she never left Islamabad.

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Details of the relationship between Jaffer and Mukadam also remain murky. Jaffer, whose family was reportedly acquainted with Shaukat, called the former ambassador to say that Mukadam was not with him on July 20, the same night her body was discovered.

Islamabad police have requested Jaffer be placed on the exit control list, as he is a citizen of both the U.S. and Pakistan. He had previously been deported from the United Kingdom as the result of a sexual harassment and rape case against him, according to Dawn.

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The grisly death, along with the deaths of two other women killed this week in Pakistan, has reignited calls for reform and greater protections from domestic violence. Mourners and protesters online organized around the hashtag #JusticeforNoor. In Lahore, demonstrators gathered and held signs reading, Let us breath and Protect your daughters, Educate your sons.

The death has also shaken Pakistans upper echelon. Pakistani Foreign Minister Zahid Chaudhri wrote that he was deeply saddened by news of Mukadams murder.

The shock of her death was deeply felt in Toronto, where Haider said between 40 and 50 people gathered in Queens Park on Friday to honor Mukadam. Some of her extended family was in attendance at the vigil, where mourners shared memories of Mukadam, prayers for her, and tears for roughly two hours.

It was the least that I could do, Haider said of the vigil. I just want to ensure that it doesnt die out.

Zahra Haider

She said she had felt uncomfortable around Jaffer since she knew him as a child, when she said he was very jumpy.

I wasnt too friendly with him. He was always more introverted. At social gatherings, he was always in the shadows. He displayed erratic behavior when we were young, she said.

More recently, she said, Jaffer had bombarded her with misogynistic messages. She shared Instagram messages purportedly from Jaffer from 2013 in which he called her a slut, a bitch, a f--k face bimbotic ho. Screenshots of the messages show someone identified as Zahir Jaffer asking her for naked pictures and threatening to titty f--k you till I slice off your breast nipplex [sic]. She said he sent similar texts to others.

Mukadam, she said, was a warm and sweet person who genuinely cared about other people.

She never said anything malicious about anyone. She was kind. She had an air of innocence about her, Haider said, adding that she cant stop thinking about the killing.

Noor Mukadam Courtesy of Zahra Haider

Haider said she hopes against hope for justice.

We want justice for Noor and to avenge her murder, Haider said. It would be historical to see if he gets punished for what he did because thats not something that happens in Pakistan.

Mukadam had participated in such activism herself. Mourners circulated a picture of her from last year protesting a brutal gang rape with a sign reading Hang them!

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Convicted serial killer Rodney Alcala appears in court in New York, Monday, Jan. 7, 2013. AP Photo/David Handschuh, Pool

Rodney Alcala was tried and convicted on seven counts of murder in his lifetime, although police suspect he killed many others.

DNA evidence linked Alcala to the murders of four women in Orange County.

Alcala was known as the "Dating Game Killer" because he was a contestant on the television show 'The Dating Game' in 1978.

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Convicted serial killer Rodney James Alcala, 77, an Orange County man who was on California's death row, died of natural causes in the early hours of July 24 at a hospital in Kings County, according to a news release from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Alcala was known as the "Dating Game Killer" because he was a contestant on the television show "The Dating Game" in 1978. Host Jim Lange did not know that Alcala had already murdered at least five women and been charged with the attempted murder of a young girl when he introduced him as an eligible bachelor on the show, according to ABC News.

None of his victims were connected to the show.

In 2010, an Orange County jury convicted Alcala of five counts of first-degree murder, according to the news release.

He was sentenced to death for the killing of 12-year-old Robin Samsoe, as well as the 1977 deaths of 18-year-old Jill Barcomb and 27-year-old Georgia Wixted; the 1978 death of 32-year-old Charlotte Lamb, and the 1979 death of 21-year-old Jill Parenteau, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said.

Following Alcala's conviction, authorities released more than 100 photos of unidentified women and children found in a storage unit that belonged to Alcala in an attempt to find out if there were further victims, CNN reported. Alcala lured women by offering to take their picture, according to The New York Times.

NBC News reported that three years later, Alcala was additionally sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for the murders of two young women in New York in the 1970s: Cornelia Crilley, in 1971, and Ellen Jane Hover, in 1977.

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In 2016, prosecutors in Wyoming charged Alcala with the murder of Christine Ruth Thornton, who was 28 years old and six months pregnant when she disappeared in 1978, according to the news release from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

The department also said that investigators have either suspected Alcala of or linked him to other murders in Los Angeles and Marin County in California; Seattle, Washington; New York; New Hampshire; and Arizona.

Read the original article on Insider
Irans authoritarian regime is facing fresh pressure from Iranian protesters over a drought in the southwest of the country -- with protesters chanting anti-government slogans just as the regime is installing a hardline president.

The protests, which have been going on for over a week, have taken place in a number of cities and towns in the Khuzestan region over the drought. Irans Fars News Agency reported that at least one protester and police officer had been killed in the protests.

IRAN SAYS IT HAS FURTHER ENRICHED URANIUM, DRAWING WIDESPREAD CONDEMNATION

It blamed "rioters and armed militants disguised among protesters" for the violence but the regime has also acknowledged the anger over the drought.

"People showed their discontent, but we cannot have any complaint since the issue of water in the hot climate of Khuzestan is not a minor issue," Khamenei said, although he too accused opponents of trying to exploit the situation..

The Human Rights Activists in Iran group says that security forces have fired tear gas and water cannons, while Amnesty International accused the regime of using live ammunition against protesters -- describing the move as "horrifying."

The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), an umbrella group of Iranians opposed to the regime, said the protesters were fighting for liberation from the regime as well as water.

"Hail to #Khuzestans martyrs, hail to those who have risen for water and freedom," NCRI President-elect Maryam Rajavi tweeted. "The Iranian people have nothing to lose under the rule of the criminal mullahs; they will fight to the end for their inalienable rights, water, bread, freedom, & the peoples sovereignty."

Other NCRI officials tweeted out video showing that protests were specifically targeting the regime.

The State Department, meanwhile, told reporters that the administration was following reports of protests as well as internet shutdowns by the regime.

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POMPEO ACCUSES BIDEN ADMIN OF WORKING TO MAKE IRAN AMERICA'S SENIOR PARTNER IN MIDDLE EAST

"We urge the Iranian government to allow its citizens to exercise their universal rights of freedom of expression as well as freely access information online," a spokesperson said.

The days-long protests are the latest blow to an already embattled regime, which has faced an economic downturn in recent years due to not only the COVID-19 pandemic but the "maximum pressure" policy by the Trump administration which re-introduced sanctions on the regime that were scrapped under the Iran deal.

The Biden administration has signaled an openness to rejoining the deal, and talks have been ongoing in Vienna between signatories to the 2015 deal. However, those talks have appeared to stall, amid further uranium enrichment in Tehran.

Meanwhile, hardliner Ebrahim Raisi won the presidential election in a contest marred by accusations of rigging and a low turnout. Raisi said he would not meet with President Biden, and said the removal of sanctions by the U.S. is non-negotiable.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
President Joe Biden's administration has spent roughly $2 billion to pay for military contractors tasked with guarding unused materials after the Democrat put a pause on construction of the border wall.

Biden's cohort shelled out roughly $3 million per day to "guard steel, concrete, and other materials in the desert," according to a report from the Senates Subcommittee on Government Operations and Border Management, of which Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford is the chairman. The $2 billion figure is roughly 20% of the $10 billion transferred to the Department of Defense by former President Donald Trump to build the border wall, a process that was halted by Biden on his first day in office.

"For years I have called out federal waste, but the Biden Administration is literally going for broke with this nonsense. Our border patrol agents are doing their best to secure our border, but they need additional barriers, roads, and technology to help keep us safe. Instead, President Biden is paying professional construction contractors to babysit metal to the tune of $2 billion and counting, while at the same time weve seen a 20-year high number of migrants crossing our open border," Lankford said in a statement, adding that Biden is paying "not to build the border wall."

DEMOCRATS PLAN TO ZERO OUT WALL FUNDING AND REDUCE BORDER PATROL MONEY AMID HISTORIC SURGE

As part of his decision to halt construction on the southern border barrier, Biden commissioned a 60-day study of the construction process, though GOP leaders allege that neither the Department of Homeland Security nor senior figures in the administration have released details of the inquiry.

"The public needs to have access to the findings, data, and methodology of the Biden Administrations border wall study," the report read.

Lankford also took the time to bash the administration for the apparent lack of transparency.

It is absolutely absurd that Americans are paying contractors to guard metal gates that President Biden refuses to install because he wants to study the wall, he said. Stubbornly refusing to spend money approved for the wall is not executing the law. Its ignoring the law and ignoring the very real national security concerns posed by illegal entry across our very open southern border."

Story continues

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Trump constructed 453 miles of new and repaired border barriers by the time he left office, and approximately 300 more miles were planned.

The Biden administration has faced bipartisan backlash as unprecedented numbers of migrants continue to flood the southern border. In June, agents encountered roughly 190,000 attempted illegal crossings, a 21-year high after previous months shattered records.

Washington Examiner Videos

Tags: News, Joe Biden, Biden Administration, Border Crisis, Border, Donald Trump, James Lankford, Defense Department, Military

Original Author: Jake Dima

Original Location: Biden administration spent $2 billion 'not to build' border wall, Republicans say
Bradly Sinden produced a stunning final-round fightback to guarantee at least a silver medal in the mens -68kg taekwondo competition.

The Doncaster 22-year-old trailed his Chinese opponent Shuai Zhao by seven points before summoning a series of scoring shots to turn the tie around.

Sindens success followed a shock first-round loss for double defending champion Jade Jones, whose hopes of becoming the first British woman to win golds at three consecutive Games were ended in a 16-12 defeat to Refugee Team athlete Kimia Alizadeh.

Bradly Sinden produced a sensational last round fightback (Mike Egerton/PA)

Sinden, who won the world title in Manchester in 2019, had cruised through his two opening contests, compiling a total of 92 points in wins over New Zealands Tom Burns and Hakan Recber of Turkey.

Zhao, who won Olympic gold in the lighter -58kg category in Rio and also has two world titles to his name, was certain to put up sterner opposition and so it proved as he edged the opening stages.

Sindens hopes of making the final in his first Games appeared to hang by a thread as a pair of big head kicks put his Chinese opponent in full control.

Kimia Alizadeh celebrates her victory over defending Olympic champion Jade Jones (Mike Egerton/PA)

But the Briton stayed focused and pounced as Zhao tired in the final minute of the contest, pouring forward to secure a gold medal match against Uzbekistans Ulugbek Rashitov later on Sunday.

Earlier Jones, 28, who had ended a long wait for her first world title in 2019, led early against Alizadeh but could not make her advantage count and fell to a disappointing defeat.

For an opening bout it was as tough as they come against Alizadeh, who became the first Iranian woman to win an Olympic medal when she took bronze in Rio behind Jones.

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Alizadeh, also a two-time world medallist who beat Jones in the 2015 event in Russia, subsequently left her homeland to train in Germany, a decision which led to a period of inactivity that meant she was not seeded in the womens -57kg category.

Any hopes Jones may have had of challenging for a bronze medal via the repechage were ended when Alizadeh was subsequently beaten in her semi-final match by Tatiana Minina of Russia.
If you have information about any of the photos, ask to join the Nash Collection Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/46835158424213 by emailing Lipi Turner-Rahman at ilipi@wsu.edu or calling her office at 509-335-4849.

All photos in the Irwin Nash Images of Migrant Labor Digital Collection are online. To browse the photos, visit https://content.libraries.wsu.edu/digital/collection/nash/search .

Irwin Nash photo exhibit planned in May 2022

The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Washington State University in Pullman will host an exhibit of the Irwin Nash Migrant Labor Collection in May 2022.

Lipi Turner-Rahman, manager of the Kimble Digitization Center at WSU Libraries, oversaw uploading of nearly all of the images over several months. She said the museum will have a soft opening in early May 2022, and a formal opening in fall 2022.

The exhibit will run through December 2022 and will feature approximately 50 photographs from the collection.

It will also include narratives and stories from the people photographed, Turner-Rahman said,

"This is a big undertaking and I would like to collaborate with diverse community groups," along with WSU Vancouver and the Tri-Cities, she said.
News

Washington, DC - Attorney General Mark Brnovich and Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt are co-leading a coalition of 26 states to protect Americans right to self-defense at the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS). The states filed an amicus brief in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Corlett, urging the justices to declare New Yorks subjective-issue firearm license regime unconstitutional.

Law-abiding citizens should not require the consent of faceless bureaucrats to exercise their right to keep and bear arms, said Attorney General Mark Brnovich. New York cannot override the Second Amendment or the natural right of self-preservation. I will continue to vigorously protect Americans constitutional rights."

Attorney General Brnovich and the coalition argue New Yorks subjectiveissue concealed carry permit laws harm public safety and are contrary to the original public meaning of the Second Amendment. The State of New York requires citizens to demonstrate a special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community or of persons engaged in the same profession to obtain a concealed permit to carry a firearm outside the home. Practically speaking, it requires New Yorkers to prove that they have already been a victim of violent crimes before they may protect themselves from potentially becoming victims of violent crimes.



The coalition's brief is filled with examples of citizens in good legal standing who were denied permits after demonstrating a need, proving New Yorks proper cause requirement instead serves as a de facto ban for virtually all ordinary citizens. The attorneys general argue that if the Second Circuit Court of Appeals' misinterpretation of the Second Amendment is upheld, the decision threatens the liberty of citizens in every state, not just New York.



The Attorneys General state that the original meaning of the Second Amendment allows citizens to bear arms for self-defense outside their homes. Citing the Heller v. D.C. SCOTUS decision, the coalition argues, In Heller, following the text and history of the Second Amendment, this Court held that the federal constitution guarantee[s] the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation. Further, the Heller decision made it clear that any prohibition that makes it impossible for citizens to engage in self-defense violates the Second Amendment.



Forty-two states, including Arizona, have objective-issue systems where a permit is issued to an individual who meets a certain set of objective criteria (background check, mental health records check, fingerprinting, knowledge of applicable laws, firearms training, or other requirements).



The coalition demonstrates with empirical evidence that citizens who are concealed carry holders are significantly less likely than the general public to commit a crime. The states also argue that objective-issue permitting and concealed carry permits decrease crime in general and allow citizens to defend themselves outside their homes. A 2013 review by the National Research Council reveals that victims of crime who resist with a gun are less likely to suffer serious injury than victims who either resist in other ways or offer no resistance at all.



Arizonas experience with an objective-issue regime is telling. Arizona implemented a licensed concealed carry regime in 1994 and then a right-to-carry for all law-abiding citizens, even without a license, in 2010. In 1994, Arizona experienced 10.5 murders per 100,000 people, while the nationwide rate was 9 murders per 100,000. By 2016, Arizonas murder rate was 5.5 per 100,000, nearly matching the national rate of 5.3.



Joining Arizona and Missouri are the state attorneys general of Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.
News

Phoenix, Arizona - Kelly Pichardo, 31, of Bronx, New York, appeared virtually Wednesday in federal court on charges that she interfered with a flight crew member and committed simple assault. Leeza S. Rodriguez, 30, also of Bronx, New York is scheduled to appear next week on the same charges. Pichardo and Rodriguez were previously indicted by a grand jury on three counts related to events that took place in February 2021.

The indictment alleges that on February 24, Pichardo and Rodriguez, while on board an American Airlines flight from Dallas to Los Angeles, interfered with the ability of the flight crew to perform their duties by assaulting a crew member. The indictment also alleges that Pichardo and Rodriguez each assaulted a passenger during the flight. Pichardos and Rodriguezs actions compelled the flight crew to conduct an unscheduled landing in Phoenix, Arizona.

It is a violation of federal law on an aircraft in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States to interfere with flight crew members in the performance of their duties or to lessen their ability to perform those duties by assault or intimidation.

A conviction for Interfering with a Flight Crew Member carries a maximum penalty of 20 years of confinement and a $250,000.00 fine. A conviction for Simple Assault carries a maximum penalty of 6 months of confinement and a $5,000.00 fine.

An indictment is simply a method by which a person is charged with criminal activity and raises no inference of guilt. An individual is presumed innocent until evidence is presented to a jury that establishes guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

The FBI investigated this case with assistance from the Phoenix Police Department. Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Hakala is prosecuting the case.

CASE NUMBER: 21-CR-00494-DWL

RELEASE NUMBER: 2021-042_Pichardo
Arizona News

Phoenix, Arizona - Attorney General Mark Brnovich announced today that a State Grand Jury indicted Denise Birdwell, Gary Aller, Steven Nielsen, and Kay Hartwell Hunniuctt for their alleged role in the procurement for construction of the Elona Ranch and Sossaman middle schools in Higley Unified School District (HUSD).

HUSD was required to follow the procurement process when issuing Request for Proposal 013-203. The procurement process prohibits any party that provides input on a project from receiving any direct or indirect benefit from the project. The indictment alleges that in 2012, Birdwell, who was HUSD Superintendent at the time, was aware that Aller and Nielsen had participated in the pre-bid process which provided a competitive advantage to a bidding company owned by Aller and Nielsen, Education Facilities Development Services (EFDS), and disadvantaged other bidders. It is further alleged that despite EFDSs principals participation in the procurement process, EFDS was awarded the contract under RFP 013-203.



Following the award of RFP 013-203 to EFDS, Birdwell, Aller, and Nielsen are accused of signing documents related to the project attesting that the award of RFP 013-203 was done in compliance with the HUSDs procurement rules and the Arizona Administrative Code.



Birdwell was also charged with two counts of Violation of Duties of a Custodian of Public Monies for allegedly approving the use of $6 million in Adjacent Ways Funds to facilitate the private bond funding required to build the two middle schools. Use of Adjacent Ways Funds is limited to making improvements to assure the safe ingress and egress to the schools. Adjacent Ways Funds are not fungible and may not be mingled with other funds.



The State Grand Jury also charged Birdwell with seven counts of Conflict of Interest alleging that she had a substantial interest in payments from school vendors, including architectural firm Hunt & Caraway and Core Construction. It was purported that many payments were deposited into a bank account Birdwell held jointly with Kay Hartwell Hunniuctt. The indictment further alleges that neither Birdwell nor Hunnicutt claimed these payments on their tax returns resulting in the State Grand Jury returning three counts of filing a False Tax Return against Birdwell and three counts of filing a False Tax Return against Hunnicutt.



All defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.



Assistant Attorney General Mary Harriss is prosecuting the case.
Arizona News

Washington, DC - Attorney General Mark Brnovich is leading a coalition of 15 states in urging the Biden Administration to reject a plan to reinstate a 2014 discipline policy that brings race-based decision-making into schools discipline policies.

The Biden Administration is attempting to tie the hands of local schools and prohibit teachers from keeping classrooms safe, said Attorney General Mark Brnovich. Whether its pushing the disingenuous Critical Race Theory or implementing illegal discipline policies, Washington D.C. needs to stay out of our local classrooms.

The attorneys general submitted an official comment to U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona opposing the reinstatement of the 2014 Dear Colleague Letter or any similar policy that requires schools to include disparate impact requirements in disciplinary guidelines.



In 2014, the Department of Education (DoE) under President Barack Obama, issued a controversial Dear Colleague Letter that threatened to cut off federal funding to schools with racial disparities in how often students were disciplined. Under this type of disparate impact theory, schools were presumed guilty until proven innocent, even if there was no evidence of actual discrimination. DoE rescinded the Dear Colleague Letter in 2018 under President Donald Trump but is now considering reinstating the misguided policy.



The 2014 Dear Colleague Letter was a disastrous policy for all students, including students of color. When New York City implemented two rounds of discipline reform to comply with the DoE letter, a survey administered citywide to teachers and students showed an increase in physical fights in school, drug and alcohol abuse, and gang activity, particularly at schools with greater numbers of minority and low-income students. Additionally, New York City schools reported more than a 300 percent increase in incidents of harassment, discrimination, and bullying after the discipline reform was implemented. Studies in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh showed similar results: discipline reforms focused on disparate impact led to decreased student achievement and increased arrest rates, particularly at disadvantaged schools.



Stories from teachers around the country illustrate the destructive effects of the 2014 Dear Colleague Letter:

Oklahoma City teachers were told that referrals would not require suspension unless there was blood.

In Louisiana: At the beginning of the year, a student assaulted a teacher in broad daylight in a hallway of our school. He was back the next day.

I had a student threaten me physically in my classroom, to put his hands on me and, he would have been back in the classroom the very next morning had I not said, I will get an attorney and I will get a restraining order against this student. Otherwise, the administration would have done nothing.

Moreover, policies that require school districts to include a disparate impact standard violate the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act. They also compel administrators to create unlawful quotas based on a students race. Judge Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals wrote: Racial disciplinary quotas violate equity in its root sense. They entail either systematically overpunishing the innocent or systematically underpunishing the guilty. They place race at war with justice. They teach schoolchildren an unedifying lesson of racial entitlements. People Who Care v. Rockford Bd. of Educ., Sch. Dist. No. 205, 111 F.3d 528, 538 (7th Cir. 1997)



The attorneys general are asking Secretary Cardona not to repeat the mistakes of the 2014 Dear Colleague Letter and to continue allowing local school districts and governing boards to set their own discipline policies.



Joining Attorney General Brnovich are the attorneys general from the states of Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas and Utah.
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New Delhi: Revolt Motor is planning to launch a low-priced electric bike in India, the Revolt RV1, in a bid to take a big slice of the electric vehicle market in India. The RattanIndia-invested automaker currently sells two bike models in the Indian market: the flagship Revolt RV400 and Revolt RV300.

Anjali Rattan, promoter of RattanIndia Enterprises Ltd (REL), said the production of the new model will commence from early next year and it will be a 100 per cent indigenised e-bike. RattanIndia has acquired a 43 per cent stake in Revolt Motor for Rs 150 crore in late April.

"The 2-wheeler market in India is still grappling with BSVI norms while the world is moving towards green EVS. So India's largest two wheeler market is ready to be transformed by new technology," she added.

Revolt RV1 launch date

Rattan said that the Revolt RV1 will go into production from early next year. "We will be phasing out RV 300 model eventually. In its place, we will be introducing a new model, RV1, at a lower price, which would be a new model altogether, she told PTI.

"By December this year our product will become completely make-in-India. We have been importing parts from China but we are now focusing on every single supply from India. The manufacturing of the new bike will start from January, she said. Revolt Motors currently has its manufacturing base in Manesar (Haryana). Also Read: Domino's goes green! Your next pizza delivery may arrive in Revolt Motors electric bike

In an announcement on Sunday, Dominos Pizza has said that the company will acquire the existing inventory of Revolt 300 bike's existing model to convert its entire fleet into electric vehicles. Also Read: HDFC Bank's Aditya Puri top earner among bankers in FY21, check salaries of other bank chiefs

- With inputs from PTI.
New Delhi: Domino's Pizza has inked a partnership with RattanIndia-backed electric vehicle maker Revolt Motors with the aim to convert its existing fleet of fuel-based vehicles into electric bikes. In an official statement, Domino's said that the company will procure the entire existing inventory of Revolt's RV300 bike model and will progressively acquire its customised Revolt model to transform its fleet as part of the partnership.

The quick-service restaurant (QSR) chain has already piloted delivery with Revolt electric bikes in some areas. After conducting the trials successfully, the company has now decided to partner with Revolt for its green push.

RattanIndia Enterprises Business Chairman Anjali Rattan said, "Revolt is happy to join hands with Domino's in this partnership which not only makes sense environmentally but also offers great cost savings for the company."

Revolt Motors will customise its existing bikes for Jubilant Foodworks, which operates fast-food chains such as Domino's Pizza and Dunkin' Donuts. These bikes are expected to suit the business needs of the firm.

Revolt Motors said that the bikes will enable a zero-emission delivery experience. Currently, Jubilant operates one of the largest delivery fleets in India. The partnership signals the companys will to switch towards a cleaner future.

Revolt believes that this partnership is just a start of a potential revolution to convert massive delivery bike market electric in the years to come, the company added. Also Read: PF update! 8.5% interest to be credited in next few days, Check PF balance via SMS, missed call

Given the falling prices of electric bikes due to lower production costs and a slew of incentives being announced by central and various state governments, these bikes not only save the environment but also make economic sense, the company said. Also Read: THIS new Instagram filter censors its creators work

- With inputs from PTI.
New Delhi: HDFC Bank's Aditya Puri emerged as the highest grossing banker among the top three private sector lenders in his retirement year with total emoluments of Rs 13.82 crore. His successor Sashidhar Jagdishan, who took over as the chief executive and managing director of the largest private sector lender on October 27, 2020, grossed a salary of Rs 4.77 crore for the fiscal year, which included payments as a group head till his elevation.

Puri's overall payments included Rs 3.5 crore as post-retirement benefits.

Its immediate rival ICICI Bank's MD and CEO Sandeep Bakhshi "voluntarily relinquished" his fixed compensation of basic and supplementary allowances for FY21, which had seen wide-scale impact of the COVID pandemic, as per the second largest lender's annual report.

Bakhshi, however, did receive allowances and perquisites amounting to Rs 38.38 lakh, the document said, adding he also got Rs 63.60 lakh as performance bonus from ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company as deferred variable pay for FY17 and FY18.

Amitabh Chaudhry, who has been leading the third largest private sector lender Axis Bank, got paid Rs 6.52 crore, the bank's annual report said, adding that the top management was not given any salary increment in FY21.

In the case of ICICI Bank, material risk takers including executive directors, chief financial officer and company secretary voluntarily opted for a 10 per cent salary reduction from May 1 in their payments, possibly because of the impact of COVID. Its executive director in-charge of wholesale banking Vishakha Mulye grossed Rs 5.64 crore, as per the annual report.

When compared with the bank's median salary, the allowances drawn by Jagdishan were the highest at 139 times the median salary of a bank employee, while Chaudhry earned 104 times the median and ICICI Bank executive directors drew 96 times the median salary.

Data available for 'crorepati' bankers, or those earning above Rs 8.5 lakh a month, revealed that HDFC Bank had 200 executives in this exclusive club, including key management personnel, serving officials and those who left the lender midway through the fiscal year. Also Read: Domino's goes green! Your next pizza delivery may arrive in Revolt Motors electric bike

In comparison, Axis Bank had 69 bankers in the category who served throughout the year, while 17 employees who would otherwise have been in the club left it midway through the year, as per the annual report. Also Read: PF update! 8.5% interest to be credited in next few days, Check PF balance via SMS, missed call
New Delhi: Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal on Saturday expressed confidence that India will continue to attract high foreign direct investment (FDIs) in the current financial year.

He said India has received highest ever FDI in the Covid-impacted 2020, in contrast with a shrinkage in investment inflows globally.

In 2020-21, FDI into the country grew by 19 per cent to USD 59.63 billion. Total FDI, including equity, re-invested earnings and capital, rose 10 per cent to USD 81.72 billion during 2020-21 as against USD 74.39 billion in 2019-20.

"This year, we are very confident that we will continue this streak of seven continuous years of historic highs in our foreign investments," Goyal said at the CII-Horasis India Meeting webinar.

Similarly, he said, India's exports too are recording healthy growth and would reach USD 400 billion by the end of the current financial year.

During July 1-21, export crossed USD 22 billion and it is "poised to cross USD 32-33 billion by end of the month (July), which means our run rate is on track to achieve USD 400 billion of exports target for the first time ever".

Further, he said that currently India is in talks with 16 countries including the UK, the EU, Australia, Canada, and the UAE for trade agreements.

With some countries, India is working for early harvest agreements which will allow the country to quickly identify areas of mutual interest and progress negotiations faster towards a comprehensive economic partnership agreement, or FTAs, the minister said.

"We have focused our efforts on a few very promising agreements where I can clearly see huge comparative advantages for India to get market access and the ability to trade both in goods and services in a much bigger way. The UK, EU, Australia, Canada, UAE are countries with whom we can very quickly expand our discussions and engagements," he added.

India has inked FTAs with several countries, including Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and ASEAN members.

Under such agreements, two trading partners significantly reduce or eliminate import/customs duties on the maximum number of goods traded between them.

Talking about vaccination, he said the government had permitted the private sector to procure 25 per cent of Covid-19 vaccines but they are not buying. Also Read: Revolt Motors big update! Indian EV maker to launch more affordable e-bike Revolt RV1

"CII should take a lead and get all of you to ensure that you take that 25 per cent vaccines... Some industry group said we will do one crore vaccinations...Nobody has gone to Bihar, North East, Jharkhand to run campaigns to remove vaccine hesitancy," he said. Also Read: Clubhouse denies alleged data breach of user phone numbers

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New Delhi: Hours after the tragic incident in Himachal Pradesh's Kinnaur district which killed nine people, Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed condolences and said all arrangements are being made for the treatment of those injured.

Modi said and also announced an ex gratia of Rs 2 lakh each for the next of the kin of the deceased and Rs 50,000 to the injured from the Prime Minister's National Relief Fund. He made the announcement on Twitter. He wrote: "An ex-gratia of Rs. 2 lakh each from PMNRF would be given to the next of kin of those who lost their lives in an accident in Kinnaur, Himachal Pradesh. Rs. 50,000 would be given to the injured."

An ex-gratia of Rs. 2 lakh each from PMNRF would be given to the next of kin of those who lost their lives in an accident in Kinnaur, Himachal Pradesh. Rs. 50,000 would be given to the injured: PM @narendramodi  PMO India (@PMOIndia) July 25, 2021

President Ram Nath Kovind too expressed condolences to the kin of deceased and wished speedy recoveries tothe injured. "Deeply saddened by the news of the death of many people in the landslide accident in Kinnaur, Himachal Pradesh. I express my deepest condolences to the bereaved families and wish the injured a speedy recovery," the tweet from President`s official handle read.

Atleast nine people were killed and three others injured in multiple landslides in Himachal Pradesh's Kinnaur district on Sunday, police said. A bridge collapsed as a result of boulders rolling down a hill due to a landslide.

The police said they have started rescue operations and further details are awaited.

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Guwahati: In his address at the first public event in Assam after victory in the assembly elections, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said the BJP is strengthening its base in the North East region.The formation of the BJP government in Assam for the second time means that Assam has permanently rejected terrorism, riots and is moving towards development, Shah said.

Today, Amit Shah launched and laid the foundation stone of various development projects of Assam in Guwahati.

While addressing the public event, Shah said, "BJP is strengthening its base in North East. Prime Minister Narendra Modi`s leadership has been accepted by everyone."Lauding the efforts of former and current Assam Chief Ministers, Shah said, "For the last five years, the way the duo of former Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal and current Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has run the government, people of Assam have preferred the path of development.

Himanta Biswa Sarma is the new CM as he preferred the path of development. I congratulate the Assam Ministers, CM Sarma as they mark BJP`s second consecutive innings in the state.

"Targeting the opposition, Amit Shah hailed Prime Minister Narendra Modi`s new Cabinet and highlighted the Centre`s priorities towards the north-eastern region. "Since independence, not once have five ministers from North East been selected in Cabinet. This was done for the first time in PM Modi`s Cabinet. This shows where North East stands in BJP and PM Modi`s priorities. We want to increase North East`s contribution in development," said Home Minister Amit Shah.

Shah also said, "PM Modi has started a new development road in North East. He has visited the region 35 times in 7 years! No other PM has travelled to the region so many times."Appreciating Assam`s heritage and culture, Shah said, "BJP wants to protect and preserve Assam`s language, its heritage, and its culture. BJP believes that the languages, dialects, cuisines, and other such traits are India`s jewels and we need to preserve them.""Under PM Modi, the Bodoland Agreement was done.

We have already met 90 percent of the conditions of the agreement," Shah said."We`ve already given land in 9 areas out of the 14 demanded under the Bru-Reang Agreement, and before 2022, 35,000 Bru families will get land to live, food grains, pension, and respect as Indian citizens," Shah said.

Last year, in January 2020, Amit Shah had presided over the signing of a historic agreement between the Government of India, Government of Assam, and Bodo representatives in New Delhi to end the over 50-year old Bodo crisis.

Further, a permanent solution has been found out for the problem that has cost the region over 4,000 lives. With this Bodoland agreement, over 1,500 armed cadres gave up violence and joined the mainstream. A Special Development Package Rs 1500 crores over three years was given by the Union Government to undertake specific projects for the development of Bodo areas.

"The fruition of this vision can also be seen in the Bru-Reang agreement signed on January 16, 2020, to end the humanitarian crisis in Meghalaya and Tripura, the recent surrender of 644 armed cadres in Assam, and the surrender of 88 armed NLFT cadres in Tripura to bring them to the mainstream, in addition to this agreement," Shah had said last year.

(With agency inputs)

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New Delhi: The Chhattisgarh Board Of Secondary Education (CGBSE) will announce CGBSE class 12 result 2021 today (July 25, 2021) at 12 noon. The students who appeared in the CGBSE class 12 examinations 2021, will be able to check their scores at the official website of the state board- cgbse.nic.in and results.cg.nic.in, after the results are announced.

Students will be able to check their CGBSE results by using their roll number and date of birth.

CGBSE Class 12th Result 2021: How to check

Step 1- Visit the official website of CGBSE- results.cg.nic.in

Step 2- Click on the CGBSE Class 12 result 2021 link

Step 3- Enter your roll number, date of birth and other details

Step 4- Click on submit

Step 5- Your result will be displayed on the screen

Step 6- Download and take a printout for future reference

It is to be noted that CGBSE was one of the few boards that conducted class 12 board exams this year. Unlike many other boards, CGBSE did not cancel its board examination in view of the coronavirus pandemic but conducted it in a unique manner, where the students were handed the question paper at home and were asked to write the exam and hand over the answers to the school authority for checking.

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New Delhi: With a significant decline in the number of new COVID-19 cases, the Delhi Metro and DTC buses have been allowed to run at full capacity from Monday (July 26).

The decision was announced by the Delhi Disaster Management Authority (DDMA) on Saturday.

The authority, however, said that no standing passengers will be allowed in both.

Earlier, the two public transport modes were allowed to run at 50 per cent capacity only due to the prevailing COVID-19 situation.

The government has also decided to open cinemas, theatres and multiplexes in the national capital with 50 per cent capacity.

In further relaxation, 100 people will be able to attend the funeral instead of 20 from Monday, while, 100 people will be allowed at weddings instead of 50.

The government has also permitted the spas to open. However, it comes with a rider that only those employees who are fully vaccinated will be allowed to work.

People who visit the spa would be given a form through which information regarding their infection and history of COVID-19 would be collected.

The Delhi government has not yet considered opening schools and colleges.

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New Delhi: The Delhi police have arrested the Managing Director of Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services Limiteds (IL&FS) Transportation Network in connection with a case of cheating, forgery and criminal misappropriation of about Rs 100 crore.

The police arrested Ramchand Karunakaran after his anticipatory bail was dismissed by the Delhi High Court.

The case was registered against the accused based on a complaint by Ashish Begwani, Director of Enso Infrastructures, who was lured by tall promises to make an investment in IL&FS Rail Ltd.

Begwani invested Rs 170 crore in order to take a 15 per cent stake in the project.

However, over a period of time, complainant observed that the company is not performing profitably and funds are being misused. It is alleged that bogus contract orders worth Rs 21.88 crore were issued to Silverpoint Infratech Ltd, the police said in a statement.

It was alleged that directors of the IL&FS Rail Ltd and other officers of the company intentionally siphoned off the funds of the company to the tune of Rs 70 crore causing loss to the investors company.

During the investigation, it is found that accused persons had made payments to several companies without executing any work. Money was routed through several layers of the different shell companies, the police said.

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New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday (July 25, 2021) expressed that he is happy to see that nearly 75 per cent of inputs for his 'Mann Ki Baat' come from people who are under the age of 35.

During the 79th episode of his monthly radio programme, PM Modi said, "Through a study by My Gov India, I have noticed that about 75 per cent of the people who send messages and suggestions for Mann Ki Baat are below the age of 35 years, that is, the suggestions of the youth are the power of India."

He said that Mann Ki Baat is a medium where 'there is positivity - there is sensitivity'.

I am happy that almost 75% of the inputs for #MannKiBaat come from people under the age of 35, says PM @narendramodi. pic.twitter.com/lw4ondVSDS  PMO India (@PMOIndia) July 25, 2021

"In Mann Ki Baat, we talk positively, its character is collective. This activism of the youth of India for positive thoughts and suggestions makes me happy. I am also happy that through 'Mann Ki Baat' I get an opportunity to know the mind of the youth as well," the Prime Minister expressed.

The Prime Minister also informed that he is unable to take up all the inputs he receives for Mann Ki Baat, but he does forward many of them to the concerned government departments.

I am unable to take up all the inputs I receive for #MannKiBaat but I do forward many of them to the concerned government departments, says PM @narendramodi. #MannKiBaat pic.twitter.com/Ohn6jZH1Oe  PMO India (@PMOIndia) July 25, 2021

Mann Ki Baat is Prime Minister Modi's monthly radio address to the nation, which is broadcast on the last Sunday of every month.

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New Delhi: India recorded 39,742 new COVID-19 cases and 535 deaths in the last 24 hours, the Union Health Ministry informed on Sunday (July 25, 2021). India's total coronavirus caseload has now increased to 3,13,71,901, of which, 4,20,551 have succumbed to the virus, while 4,08,212 are active cases. A decline of 765 cases was recorded in the active COVID-19 caseload in a span of 24 hours.

A total of 3,05,43,138 people have recovered from the COVID-19 infections in the country. At least 39,972 people recovered from the infection on Sunday, taking the national recovery rate to 97.36 percent.

India reports 39,742 new COVID cases, 39,972 recoveries, and 535 deaths in the last 24 hours Active cases: 4,08,212

Total recoveries: 3,05,43,138

Death toll: 4,20,551 Total vaccination: 43,31,50,864 pic.twitter.com/RwEFllVzWw  ANI (@ANI) July 25, 2021

"More than 45.37 crore (45,37,70,580) vaccine doses have been provided to States/UTs so far, through all sources and a further 11,79,010 doses are in the pipeline," said Union Health Ministry in a release.

According to a PTI report, India's COVID-19 tally had crossed the 20-lakh mark on August 7, 30 lakh on August 23, 40 lakh on September 5 and 50 lakh on September 16. It went past 60 lakh on September 28, 70 lakh on October 11, crossed 80 lakh on October 29, 90 lakh on November 20 and surpassed the one-crore mark on December 19. India crossed the grim milestone of two crore on May 4 and three crore on June 23.

A total of 4,20,551 deaths have been reported so far in the country including 1,31,429 from Maharashtra, 36,352 from Karnataka, 33,889 from Tamil Nadu, 25,041 from Delhi, 22,749 from Uttar Pradesh and 18,064 from West Bengal. The health ministry stressed that more than 70 percent of the deaths occurred due to comorbidities.

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New Delhi: Hours after Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal overturned the AAP government's decision to appoint a panel of lawyers of its choice to argue cases related to the farmers' protest, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Saturday (July 24, 2021) called it an 'insult to the people of Delhi'.

Kejriwal took to his official Twitter account and wrote, "Overturning decisions taken by the cabinet is an insult to the people of Delhi. The people of Delhi elected the AAP government with a historic majority and defeated BJP. Let BJP run the country, let AAP run Delhi."

He added that such interference in everyday work is an insult to the people of Delhi and that 'BJP should respect democracy'.

                           ,                          https://t.co/FQbQzuvMkL  Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) July 24, 2021

Earlier in July, the Kejriwal-led Cabinet had taken a decision that lawyers chosen by the Delhi government will fight cases of violence during the farmers' tractor rally on Republic Day, rejecting the Delhi Police's panel of lawyers.

However, Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia informed on Saturday the Delhi lieutenant governor has invoked his special powers granted under the Constitution and referred the matter to the President.

"But, today, the L-G has changed it. The Constitution has given him (L-G) the right that in case of a disagreement with the elected government, he can send the matter to the Centre and the President of India for reference," Sisodia said.

He also informed that in the interim, Baijal has approved a panel of 11 law officers chosen by the Delhi Police to argue the cases.

"The L-G is to intervene in issues of the city government only in 'exceptional circumstances' and not in every other matter," Sisodia stated.

"What is the need of an elected government in Delhi if everything has to be done through Centre via LG," he further asked.

Sisodia added that the central government is afraid that the panel of lawyers appointed by Arvind Kejriwal will expose the conspiracy led by the central government against the farmers in court.

Fearing that Modi Govt's anti-farmer conspiracy would be exposed in Court- LG rejected the panel of lawyers decided by @ArvindKejriwal Govt Overturning cabinets decisions like this is an insult to the people of Delhi#ModiInsultsDemocracy pic.twitter.com/E8JIzApuFZ  AAP (@AamAadmiParty) July 24, 2021

This, reportedly, is the first time the LG has reserved any matter for consideration of the President, owing to the difference of opinion with the Kejriwal dispensation, since the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi (Amendment) Act, 2021, came into force on April 27 this year.

(With agency inputs)

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Srinagar: One of the three militants killed in a gunfight with the security forces in Jammu and Kashmir's Bandipora district had exfiltrated to Pakistan via Wagah border in 2018, police said on Sunday (July 25).

The militant was killed on Saturday (July 24).

"A resident of Bandipora, Sariq Baba had exfiltrated via Wagah border in 2018 and had infiltrated recently through the LoC", Vijay Kumar, Inspector General of Police (Kashmir) told reporters.

Kumar said Sariq was affiliated with the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) outfit. The other two militants killed in the gunfight at the Sumlar-Aragam area in Bandipora district on Saturday were foreigners.

The gunfight had started after militants opened fire on a joint party of the police, Rashtriya Rifles, Marcos (Para Special Force), and CRPF in the forest area.

A search operation was resumed in the area this morning in Bandipora as there could be more militants hiding in the thick forest.

(With agency Inputs)

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Haridwar: As the month of Sawan dedicated to Lord Shiva begins on Sunday (July 25), marking the beginning of the Kanwar Yatra, the Haridwar administration said they will strictly watch state borders to prevent devotees from entering Haridwar for the pilgrimage.

This year, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic the Yatra has been cancelled in Uttarakhand.

As per Abudai Krishnaraj, senior superintendent of police (SSP), Haridwar, entry at `Har ki Pauri` has been restricted as well, news agency ANI reported..

"Restrictions on Kanwar Yatra to be implemented strictly with 24-hour duty at the border. Entry at Har ki Pauri has also been restricted. Surveillance has been increased on all routes to ensure pilgrims don`t enter the state. If they do, action to be taken against them," he said.

The SSP also informed that the Haridwar administration has spoken to DMs across the state to arrange shuttle buses for pilgrims entering (despite restrictions).

"They will be respectfully taken to a nearby temple to offer water and will be sent back," Krishnaraj added.

Haridwar administration has also not allowed the setting up of Kanwar market around Har ki Paudi river bank.

Boundaries of Haridwar district have been sealed to prevent the entry of Kanwariyas from across India and Har ki Paudi ghat for the festival.

The administration has recently ordered the sealing of Har Ki Pauri ghat for Kanwariyas by putting barricades from July 24 to August 6.

The decision was taken during an inter-state border meeting in Haridwar in which officers of Uttar Pradesh, Himachal, Punjab, Delhi and Haryana were present.

Apart from Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand and Delhi have also banned the Kanwar Yatra to avoid overcrowding and prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Kanwar Yatra is an annual pilgrimage in which devotees of Lord Shiva travel by foot or via other means to collect sacred Ganga water from Haridwar, Gaumukh and Gangotri in Uttarakhand and Sultanganj in Bihar to worship at Shiva shrines in their respective regions.

(With inputs from news agencies)

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New Delhi: As many as 112 people lost their lives, 99 still missing due to incessant rainfall in Maharashtra till Saturday (July 24, 2021) night, said the Relief and Rehabilitation Department. The heavy downpour has forced about 1.35 lakh people to evacuate from the flood-affected areas, according to the state government's data. "As per the data of July 24 at 9.30 pm, about 1 lakh 35 thousand people have been evacuated from the flood-affected areas. A total of 112 deaths have been reported and 3221 animals have died. A total of 53 people were injured and 99 are missing," said Relief and Rehabilitation Department.

Floodwater has entered the roads and fields, submerging many areas of the Sangli district in Maharashtra. The locals of the area have been alerting the passersby of the rising water levels. "Situation is not okay. Water is receding towards Samdoli now. Many cars are also stuck here," said a local, Sumit. "We are sitting here to ensure that floodwater doesn`t enter Samdoli. If water goes beyond here, our daily route will be shut," another villager, Pramod was quoted by ANI as saying.

NDRF teams rescued 1,800 stranded people:

On Saturday, the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) said it has retrieved 52 bodies from sites of landslides, rescued 1,800 stranded people, and evacuated 87 others to safer places in Maharashtra, which has witnessed floods due to heavy rains.

An extensive search is on for missing persons, National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) said in a statement, adding that rescue and relief operations are being run in Maharashtra`s Raigad, Ratnagiri and Satara districts. For immediate response during the flood in any part of the country, 149 NDRF teams have been deployed or prepositioned, the force said.

The force officials also added that, in addition to this, over eight teams are being airlifted to Maharashtra, four each from Kolkata and Vadodara.

Army efforts under Operation Varsha:

The Army under Operation Varsha has mobilised columns for flood relief in Maharashtra and has taken over 100 people to safe locations. A total of 15 flood relief teams from Aundh Military Station and Bombay Engineering Group, Pune have been deployed for flood relief and rescue operations in Sangli, Palus, Burli, and Chiplun, as per a press release issued by the Army.

The army is also providing cooked meals and drinking water in tankers to the locals and set up medical camps wherein medical teams of Army Doctors and Nursing Assistants have been deployed to provide necessary first aid and medicines to locals being evacuated from flood-affected areas.

Government announced ex-gratia, free ration:

The state government has announced financial assistance of Rs 5 lakh each to the kin of the victims, while the Central government has announced Rs 2 lakh each. Besides, ration kits including rice, pulses and kerosene will be distributed in affected areas, said Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar.

Additionally, Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray visited the worst-hit Taliye village near Mahad, where more than 50 people perished under a hillslide on Friday.

Meanwhile, the worst-hit districts were Kolhapur, Raigad, Sangli, Ratnagiri, Satara, Sindhudurg, Mumbai and Thane, hitting a total of 890 villages.

(With agency inputs)

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New Delhi: Addressing the 79th edition of his monthly radio programme Mann Ki Baat, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday (July 25) adduced the example of himself and his nonagenarian mother Heeraben Modi to encourage people to get COVID-19 vaccination. Urging people to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, Modi said that he and his mother are fully vaccinated and asked people to trust science as avoiding the jab can prove to be dangerous.

I have myself been vaccinated with both doses. And my mother is close to a hundred years of age... she too has taken both doses. At times, some people develop fever but it is very minor, just for a few hours. Not getting vaccinated can prove dangerous," ANI quoted Modi as saying.

Talking about the upcoming festivals, he urged people to abide by all COVID-19 protocols. "During festivals and gaiety, do remember that corona is not yet gone from amidst us. You do not have to forget COVID-19 related protocols, he added.

Further, the PM stressed on the need to address vaccine hesitancy, based on rumours, and said that India achieved the feat of inoculating million people in a single day.

Meanwhile, from Tokyo Olympics to Kargil Diwas, PM Modi touched on various other subjects during his radio programme. He also hailed several entrepreneurs for their incredible efforts in nation-building including Software Engineer Sai Praneeth who built a platform for weather information for farmers, Isaak Munda who runs a popular YouTube channel, IIT alumni who started a 3D printing start-up, farmer Bikramjit Chakma who cultivates berries, Sanjay Rana for his free chole-bhature for vaccinated people among others.

PM Modi also said that as the country enters its 75th year of Independence, every citizen should lead a "Bharat Jodo Andolan'' just like Mahatma Gandhi had led the "Bharat Chhoro Andolan". In addition, he stated, We have to move forward with Nation First, Always First.

(With agency inputs)

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New Delhi: The UK Foreign Office officials have been briefed on the current COVID-19 pandemic situation in India, where many big cities are practically COVID-free, and encouraged to consider a review of the travel ban on visitors from India, Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla said on Saturday (July 25, 2021).

Shringla, who arrived in the UK for a two-day visit on Friday to take stock of the Roadmap 2030 towards closer UK-India ties agreed between Prime Ministers Narendra Modi and Boris Johnson, also shared plans for a reciprocal vaccine certification system to be unveiled by the Indian government soon to facilitate international travel.

During his visit, he held meetings with senior UK government representatives, including Permanent Under-Secretary in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) Sir Philip Barton and FCDO minister for South Asia Lord Tariq Ahmad. Mumbai, Delhi, big cities are practically free of COVID. But we can't rest on that situation because we are constantly vigilant, telling our citizens to take precautions so that we don't have a third wave, said Shringla.

I briefed them [UK officials] on the COVID situation in India. I pointed out that France had cleared visitors from India without quarantine, if they are double vaccinated and have a negative test. The US has upgraded India in the travel scheme, encouraged the UK to do the same and they took note of it, he said, in response to a question on international travel.

Under the current rules, India remains on the travel red list, which effectively bans visitors from India, with returning citizens required to undergo a compulsory 10-day hotel quarantine on entry to Britain. With reference to instances of the India-made Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, Covishield, not being recognised by the European Union (EU), the Foreign Secretary reiterated that AstraZeneca had applied to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) on behalf of the Serum Institute of India (SII) in a letter dated May 14.

It's an Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine being manufactured under a transfer of technology in India so there can't be any difference in product between that produced at the Serum Institute of India (SII) or anywhere else, said Shringla.

The EU has said they will leave it to individual member states to decide and 14 EU countries have already recognised Covishield, two of them have also recognised Covaxin suo moto. We are now asking all countries that you recognise our vaccine certification on a mutual reciprocal basis, recognising the integrity of that process, he said. The Foreign Secretary also reflected on the severe second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic faced by India earlier this year and welcomed the critical support from partner countries with essential supplies, including the UK.

When I met my UK interlocutors, I also thanked them for the level of spontaneous support we received in the form of oxygen plants, concentrators, cylinders. One of the first flights that came in was from the UK. It was a great morale booster, which lifted confidence at a time when things looked despondent, not for any other reason but the short period of time when there was a gap between demand and supply, he recalled. Giving an update on the current situation in India, the Foreign Secretary said India had now reached a point where it is able to supply its excess liquid oxygen and life-saving medication like Remdesivir to neighbouring countries in need, including Nepal, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Thailand.

Wherever there is need, it is incumbent upon us as a member of the international community to support those needs, he said.

What is important to note is that this is a global phenomenon. It is cyclical; it is going to happen in different parts of the world, he added.

On India's vaccination drive, the Foreign Secretary said 410 million doses of vaccines have been administered and production is being ramped up in the country to increase the rate of acceleration. Our effort is to ensure all eligible 950 million citizens in the country are vaccinated and we'll attain a level of immunity that will make the impact of COVID-19 minimum, he said.

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New Delhi: Keeping with Indias Neighbourhood First policy, Indian Railways on Saturday (July 25, 2021) delivered medical oxygen to Bangladesh amid the COVID-19 pandemic. External Affairs Minister (MEA) S Jaishankar took to Twitter to inform about the delivery. "Neighbourhood First delivers again. Oxygen Express from India arrives in Bangladesh," EAM Jaishankar tweeted.

This is the first time in history, Indian Railways delivered 200 metric tonnes of liquid medical oxygen (LMO) to Bangladesh. Over 10 containers were sent via the Oxygen Express.

"Indian Railways Oxygen Express is set to embark on its journey to Bangladesh. This is the first time ever that the Oxygen Express is put into operation to neighbouring country. Today, an indent was placed at Tata in Chakradharpur Division under South Eastern Railway to transport 200 MT of Liquid Medical Oxygen to Benapole, Bangladesh," said the Ministry of Railways in a statement.

Neighbourhood First delivers again. Oxygen Express from India arrives in Bangladesh. pic.twitter.com/1l06pFxmHb  Dr. S. Jaishankar (@DrSJaishankar) July 24, 2021

The Oxygen Express with 10 containers departed from Tatanagar in Jharkhand on Saturday and is expected to reach Benapol in Bangladesh tomorrow. The loading of 200 MT of LMO in 10 containers was completed at 09:25 am.

"It may be noted that Oxygen Expresses were started by Indian Railways on April 24, 2021, to provide respite to Indian states requiring medical Oxygen. More than 35000 MT of LMO was transported to 15 states. Around 480 Oxygen Expresses were operationalised," it added.

Till now, the Oxygen Express trains have delivered over 30,000 metric tonnes (MT) of Liquid Medical Oxygen (LMO) to various states and union territories in the country. Since it started operations on April 24, 2021, around 480 such trains have carried 36,841 tonnes of liquid medical oxygen.

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New Delhi: MP John Brittas has moved the Supreme Court seeking a court-monitored probe into reports of alleged snooping of activists, politicians, journalists and constitutional functionaries using Israeli spyware Pegasus.

A massive political row has erupted after media reports claimed that Pegasus spyware was used to conduct surveillance on about 300 Indians, including ministers, political leaders, government officials and journalists.

According to news agency PTI, Brittas, who has filed a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court said that recent allegations of snooping have caused concern among a large section of people in India and that snooping would have a chilling effect on free speech and expression.

He has sought a court-monitored investigation into allegations of snooping using Pegasus spyware.

In a statement on Sunday, Brittas, who is a CPI-M member, said that despite the very serious nature, the central government has not cared to investigate into the allegations involved in the issue but "made only a hopeful hope that the time tested processes in our country are well-established to ensure that unauthorised surveillance does not occur".

"Therefore, the queries were raised in the Indian Parliament with respect to this leakage. But the government has neither denied nor admitted the snooping by the spyware," he said.

Amid a row over the Pegasus spyware issue, the government had said that illegal surveillance was not possible with checks and balances in the country's laws and alleged that attempts were being made to malign the Indian democracy.

On July 19, IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw told the Lok Sabha that media reports on alleged snooping published a day before the start of the Monsoon Session of Parliament "cannot be a coincidence" and stressed that there is "no substance" behind the sensationalism.

However, the minister did not specify whether the Indian government was using Pegasus spyware.

Brittas, on Sunday, also claimed that allegations lead to two inferences, either snooping was done by the government or by a foreign agency.

If it was done by the government, then it was done in an unauthorised manner. If snooping was carried out by some foreign agency, then that is an act of external aggression and needs to be dealt in a serious manner, Brittas pointed out.

The NSO, the company which owns the technology, has also "clearly rubbished the claims in the report", the minister had said.

The NSO had said that the list of countries shown using Pegasus in the report was incorrect and many countries mentioned were not even the clients of the company, as per the minister's statement to the Lok Sabha on July 19.

(With inputs from news agencies)

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Varanasi: A portion of the land outside the Gyanvapi Masjid in Varanasi was handed over to the Kashi Vishwanath Temple Trust in exchange for another piece of land.

The committee governing the mosque gave away 1,700 square feet of land to the Temple Trust. In return, it got land measuring 1,000 sq feet of the same value.

Both the plots are equal in value, Sunil Verma, Chief Executive Officer of the Kashi Vishwanath Temple Trust was quoted as saying by PTI.

The land given to the temple is part of the property of the Waqf Board. As the land could not be bought, a plot that was equal in value was handed over to the masjid committee, Verma said.

Earlier this year in April, a Varanasi court had granted permission to the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) to carry out a survey of the Kashi Vishwanath temple and Gyanvapi Mosque complex.

The court was hearing a plea filed by a lawyer Vijay Shankar Rastogi seeking the land on which Gyanvapi Mosque stands be transferred to Hindus.

The petitioner claimed that the mosque was built by Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb in 1664 after bringing down a portion of the Kashi Vishwanath temple.

In January 2020, the Anjuman Intezamia Masjid Committee had filed an objection against the petition seeking a survey of the Gyanvapi compound.

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New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will address the nation through the 79th edition of his monthly radio programme Mann Ki Baat at 11 am on Sunday (July 25).

The programme will be aired on All India Radio and Doordarshan. The radio programme will be streamed live on PM Narendra Modi's official YouTube channel along with PMO.

The upcoming edition of Mann Ki Baat assumes special significance as it comes amid the Parliaments monsoon session. It is also the first programme since the cabinet reshuffle which saw many new faces appointed to various ministries.

In the last edition of the programme, PM Modi stressed the need for water conservation and discussed techniques such as rainwater harvesting to deal with the issue.

"The monsoons have come. Let us once again focus on water conservation. When the clouds rain they just don`t rain for us, they also rain for our future generation. The rainwater gets collected on the ground, it increases the groundwater level, and that is why I believe water conservation is a way of service to the nation," he had said.

Modi also hailed water activists such as Satchidananda Bharati from Uttarakhands Pauri Garhwal who hard work to resolve the issue of water scarcity in the region.

PM Modi had also urged people to shed vaccine hesitancy saying that it was crucial in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

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New Delhi: One unidentified terrorist has been killed in the Munand area of Jammu and Kashmirs Kulgam district in an encounter with security forces on Sunday (July 25, 2021), informed the Jammu and Kashmir Police. "One unidentified terrorist killed in Kulgam encounter. Search is going on," a police officer said.

An encounter broke out between security forces and terrorists on Sunday morning in Kulgam. The search operation is underway.

"Encounter has started at Munand area of Kulgam. Police and security forces are on the job. One unidentified terrorist was killed. Search going on. Further details shall follow," tweeted Kashmir Zone Police.

The firefight between terrorists and security forces broke out 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 presence of terrorists. As the forces zeroed in on the spot, they came under a heavy volume of fire that triggered the encounter.

As the security forces cordoned the suspected spot, the hiding terrorist fired upon the searching party, which was retaliated, and an encounter started, said a police officer.

Additionally, a second operation is going on in Shokbaba forests of the upper reaches of Bandipora where the security forces claim to have killed three terrorists and a police officer added that one more is in hiding. The operation is going on.

As per the data provided by security forces, 10 encounters were seen and 21 terrorists were killed in the month of July. This year security forces claim they have killed 86 terrorists till now of different terror outfits in Kashmir.

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New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday (July 25) addressed the nation through his monthly radio programme Mann Ki Baat. It was the 79th edition of the programme.

From Tokyo Olympics to Kargil Diwas, PM Modi shared his thoughts on various subjects. He also hailed several entrepreneurs of the country who made significant achievements in various fields ranging from technology such as 3D printing to farming.

Here are the top 10 highlights of PM Modis address:

1. Not only me but the whole country was thrilled to see the Indian players carrying the tricolour at Tokyo 2020. Today our athletes have the strength of your love and support. So, together let's extend our best wishes to all our players and encourage them: PM Modi

2. Victory Punch Campaign has now started to support Olympic players on social media. You too share your victory punch with your team, cheer for India. The spirit of patriotism unites us: PM Modi.

3. Tomorrow is Kargil Diwas day. This time the glorious Kargil day will be celebrated in the middle of Amrit Mahotsav. So, it becomes even more special. There are so many freedom fighters and great men, whom the country is remembering in the Amrit Mahotsav. Programmes related to this are also being organized continuously by the government: PM Modi

4. You will remember, to celebrate 75 years of independence, 'Amrit Mahotsav' started from Sabarmati Ashram of Bapu on 12th March. Bapu's Dandi Yatra was also revived on this day, since then, programs related to 'Amrit Mahotsav' are going on across the country from Jammu and Kashmir to Puducherry, from Gujarat to Northeast. So come, let us take this nectar resolution to 'Amrit Mahotsav' that the country will remain our biggest faith, our biggest priority. We have to move forward with the mantra of Nation First, Always First: PM Modi

5. An event is going to be held this time on August 15. This is an effort related to the national anthem. A website rashtragaan.in has been created for this. With the help of this website, you will be able to sing the national anthem, record it and join this campaign: PM Modi

6. I urge you to support our local artist and lend your support to the cause of Vocal for Local. Share your pictures using local products with #MyHandloomMyPride. It is your effort, that today the sale of Khadi has increased manifold in the country. Buying Khadi is a public service, it is a service to the nation: PM Modi

7. Though a study by MyGovIndia, it has been found that about 75 per cent of the people who send messages and suggestions for Mann Ki Baat are below the age of 35 years. That is, the suggestions of the youth are the power of India: PM Modi

8. Mann Ki Baat is a medium where there is positivity - there is sensitivity. In Mann Ki Baat we talk positively, its character is collective. This activism of the youth of India for positive thoughts and suggestions makes me happy: PM Modi

9. At this time of festivals and festivities, it must be remembered that COVID-19 has not left us yet. You must keep following COVID-19 norms and stay healthy and happy: PM Modi

10. PM Modi hailed several entrepreneurs for their incredible efforts in nation-building including Software Engineer Sai Praneeth who built a platform for weather information for farmers, Isaak Munda who runs a popular YouTube channel, IIT alumni who started a 3D printing start-up, farmer Bikramjit Chakma who cultivates berries, Sanjay Rana for his free chole-bhature for vaccinated people and others.

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Hyderabad: UNESCO has conferred the World Heritage inscription to the historic Rudreswara Temple, also known as the Ramappa Temple, at Palampet in Mulugu district of Telangana, Union Minister G Kishan Reddy said on Sunday.

The Rudreswara temple was constructed in 1213 AD during the reign of the Kakatiya empire by Recharla Rudra, a general of Kakatiya king Ganapati Deva. The temple is dedicated to Lord Shiva and worshiped by devotees. The presiding deity is Ramalingeswara Swamy.

It is also known as the Ramappa temple, after the sculptor who executed the work in the temple for 40 years, an official release said.

The Union Culture and Tourism Minister G Kishan Reddy said in a tweet: "It gives me immense pleasure to share that @UNESCO has conferred the World Heritage tag to Ramappa Temple at Palampet, Telangana. On behalf of the nation, particularly from people of Telangana, I express my gratitude to Hon PM @narendramodi for his guidance & support".

Kishan Reddy in a release said that owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, the meeting of the World Heritage Committee of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) could not be conducted in 2020 and the nominations for 2020 and those for 2021 were discussed in a series of online meeting that are currently underway.

The discussion on Ramappa Temple took place on Sunday, he said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi also extended his greetings to the people of Telangana.

"Excellent! Congratulations to everyone, specially the people of Telangana. The iconic Ramappa Temple showcases the outstanding craftsmanship of great Kakatiya dynasty. I would urge you all to visit this majestic Temple complex and get a first-hand experience of it's grandness," he said in a tweet.

Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao hailed the decision of UNESCO to recognise the historical Ramappa Temple as the World Heritage Site.

"The Spiritual and cultural property developed by the Kakatiya Kings with a tremendous creativity, sculptural value has a very special place in the country's cultural heritage," Rao said according to a release from CMO.

He said under self-governance, the state government is making all efforts to revive and restore the historical, spiritual and proud cultural heritage of Telangana. The Chief Minister thanked UNESCO member Nations, Central Government for its support.

Telangana Minister for Tourism V Srinivas Goud said in a tweet, "Happy to announce that the 800-year-old architectural marvel of Kakatiya era Ramappa Temple is inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site."

Kishan Reddy congratulated the entire team of Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) for their untiring efforts towards making the Ramappa Temple a World Heritage Site and also thanked the Ministry of External Affairs for their efforts.

The temple complexes of Kakatiyas have a distinct style, technology and decoration exhibiting the influence of the Kakatiyan sculptor. The Ramappa Temple is a manifestation of this and often stands as a testimonial to the Kakatiya creative genius.

The temple stands on a six feet high star- shaped platform with walls, pillars and ceilings adorned with intricate carvings that attest to the unique skill of the Kakatiyan sculptors.

Rudreswara (Ramappa) Temple is a masterpiece of Kakatiya style of temple architecture with the use of engineering innovation by creating floating bricks, sand-box foundations, material selection knowledge and ingenuity in stone sculpting as a technological ensemble.

The sculptural and form modification, evolution of temple art, sculpture and use of technology in material selection and making as displayed in Rudreshwara Temple are masterpieces of human creativity.

The sculptural art and decoration specific to the time and Kakatiya Empire have an outstanding universal value. The distinct style of Kakatiyas for the gateways to temple complexes, unique only to this region confirm, the highly evolved proportions of aesthetics in temple and town gateways in South India.

European merchants and travelers were mesmerised by the beauty of the temple and one such traveler had remarked that the temple was the "brightest star in the galaxy of medieval temples of the Deccan," the release added.

M Panduranga Rao, trustee of Kakatiya Heritage Trust (KHT), told PTI they had been preparing a dossier proposing that the Ramappa Temple to be included in India's nominations for the World Heritage Site list since 2010 along with the Telangana State Archaeological Department and ASI.

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New Delhi: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will be visiting India on July 27-28, which, notably, will be his first visit to the country after assuming office. New Delhi attaches considerable importance to the visit of Secretary Blinken and looks forward to taking forward the conversation with the US on numerous issues, be it Afghanistan, Indo-Pacific, Pakistan-sponsored terrorism, bilateral, regional, addressing COVID-19 or global developments, according to a source familiar with the agenda of the meeting.

It continues the high-level visits from the Biden Administration after the visits by US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in March, and Special Envoy on Climate Change John Kerry in April.

Secretary Blinken`s visit reciprocates the visit by External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar to the US in May this year.

The two leaders have also had detailed conversations this year in the UK (at the G7 meeting) and Italy (at the G20 meeting).

Issues like augmenting trade and investment, and tapping opportunities in healthcare, education, digital domain, innovation and security, will be important elements of the conversation said another source.

In the defence domain, both sides are expected to explore ways and means to deepen their collaboration.

This will cover policy exchanges, exercises, and defence transfers and technologies. These would be covered in greater detail during the fourth 2+2 Ministerial Dialogue due in the US later this year.

As both countries grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic, discussions will cover containment of virus and pandemic recovery efforts.

India will press for gradual resumption of international travel, while maintaining health protocols, especially easing the mobility of students, professionals, business travellers, family reunions, humanitarian cases, etc.

Sources told ANI, "The need for resilient supply chains of critical medicines and healthcare equipment is likely to come up."

"On vaccines, India will continue to push for ensuring open and consistent supply chains for materials and items required for vaccine production, as India ramps up both for domestic vaccination and as for global supplies thereafter," sources added.

Discussions on deepening Quad engagement are also expected to be a key focus area of talks, with the possibility of a Foreign Ministerial Quad meeting later this year.

India and the US will also take forward the Quad vaccine initiative to enable the supply of vaccines produced in India from early 2022 to countries in the Indo-Pacific region, said a source.

Afghanistan witnessing massive violence will be the central issue, implications of the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, and the need for sustained pressure on Pakistan on terror financing and terror havens will be part of the agenda.

Two sides will also exchange assessments about the Indo-Pacific region, with focus on COVID-19 assistance, economic slowdown and security scenario.

Latest developments pertaining to West Asia and Central Asia are also likely to be covered, sources said.

An official told ANI, "Climate change remains an important area of our conversation, particularly the potential for green collaborations as well as climate finance and transfer of clean technologies to developing countries."

"India will also engage with the US on other global issues. Political and cultural rebalancing are important trends. India supports a truly multipolar, democratic and diverse world order and expects international conversations to reflect this evolution. We believe in equity and fairness, whether in development, climate change or global decision-making," the official added.

"India believes issues such as human rights and democracy are universal and extend beyond a particular national or cultural perspective. India is proud of its achievements in both domains and is always glad to share experiences. As a long-standing pluralistic society, India is open to engaging those who now recognise the value of diversity," the source added.

Discussions will also cover working together in the UN, especially with India holding the Presidency of the UN Security Council in August 2021.
New Delhi: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is scheduled to arrive in New Delhi on Monday evening and will stay till July 29. She is scheduled to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi on July 28 and is also likely to meet several Opposition leaders during her visit.

On Sunday, TMC Supremo held a special Cabinet meeting. "The reason behind calling this special Cabinet is not clear. There could be discussions on some special issue. The ministers have been informed about the meeting. The CM will leave for Delhi after the Cabinet meeting," an official told PTI.

This reported meeting has renewed buzz over formation of an anti-BJP front ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. Banerjee, who is likely to spend a few days in Delhi, has apparently timed her visit to coincide with the monsoon session of Parliament as senior leaders of opposition parties will be in town.

The talk of an anti-BJP front gained momentum after leaders of various parties and prominent individuals came together at NCP chief Sharad Pawar's Delhi residence last month. The meeting was hosted by Pawar and called by former union minister Yashwant Sinha, who is now in the TMC. Sinha, a former BJP stalwart, is a strident critic of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
New Delhi: As the Delhi Disaster Management Authority (DDMA) further relaxes lockdown restrictions in Delhi from Monday (July 26, 2021), 'when will school reopen' in the national capital still remains the most common question asked by the Delhiites. Giving rest to all the speculations, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Friday (July 23, 2021) said that he will first review the experience of other states where schools are reopening and then take a decision on schools in the national capital.

The chief minister, however, reiterated the Delhi government's stand that the ideal situation for reopening schools would be after vaccination is complete.

"The ideal situation would be to open schools after vaccination. We will see for some days the experiences of other states where schools are opening and then decide. Parents are still worried about their child's safety," the AAP supremo said.

ALSO READ | Wise to re-open primary schools first before secondary schools, says ICMR Chief

Earlier last week, Kejriwal had cited concerns over a possible third wave of COVID-19 and had said that there are no plans to reopen schools till the vaccination process is over.

This is to be noted that the schools in Delhi were first shut in March 2020 due to the coronavirus-induced nationwide lockdown. However, the Delhi government had allowed physical classes for 9-12 grades in January this year, which were again suspended following the sudden rise in COVID-19 cases.

The states that have partially reopened schools in July include Gujarat, Maharashtra, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar while Himachal Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh have announced the reopening of schools in the first week of August.

Delhi on Saturday recorded no death due to COVID-19 and 66 fresh cases. The capital has so far seen 14,35,844 infections and 25,041 coronavirus-related fatalities and currently has 587 active cases.

Delhi Health Bulletin - 24th July 2021 #DelhiFightsCorona pic.twitter.com/0vWABePh8Z  CMO Delhi (@CMODelhi) July 24, 2021

Meanwhile, more than 69,000 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine were administered in Delhi on Saturday, taking the cumulative number to over 96 lakh. A total of 55,58,874 men and 41,11,264 women have been inoculated so far, of which, as many as 46,79,471 people in the 18-44 age group have received at least one dose of the vaccine.

(With agency inputs)
Kashmir: The security forces in Jammu and Kashmirs Kupwara district recovered four improvised explosive devices (IEDs) on Sunday. The explosives were recovered during a cordon and search operation (CASO) in the north Kashmir district.

During a search operation, SOG Kupwara along with Kupwara police and 41 RR Army jointly recovered 4 IEDs under a big stone, and later with the help of Bomb Disposal Squad (BDS) all explosive was destroyed under a controlled blast, a police official said.

The operation was conducted at Nadarnag Avoora in the districts Trehgam area, officials said. A BDS has reached the spot for disposal of the explosive devices, they said.

The recovery includes four IEDs, four bundles of wire which is approximately 40 meters, around 10 meters each bundle, the official said.

The timely recovery of the explosives helped in averting a major tragedy.

Meanwhile, one unidentified terrorist was killed in Munand area of Jammu and Kashmirs Kulgam district in an encounter with security forces on Sunday. "One unidentified terrorist killed in Kulgam encounter. Search is going on," a police officer said.

An encounter had broken out between security forces and terrorists on Sunday morning in Kulgam.

As per the data provided by security forces, 10 encounters were seen and 21 terrorists were killed in the month of July. This year security forces claim they have killed 86 terrorists till now of different terror outfits in Kashmir.

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Bengaluru: Karnataka Chief Minister BS Yediyurappa on Sunday told reporters that he is expecting a message from higher ups in Bharatiya Janata Party about his fate as speculation about him vacating the CM's post gathers momentum.

Whle talking to reporters Yediyurappa said, "If I get the message by evening, I will let you know immediately."

On July 22, Yediyurappa had hinted of a possible leadership change by July 25, talking to reporters on he said he is waiting for the party leaders' direction, adding that he 'will abide by those directions'.

"Our party national president has reposed a special trust and affection on me. The party leaders are going to give a direction on July 25 based on which I will start working. There is a special programme on my completion of two years. After participating in it, I will abide by the directions of our national leaders," he said.

He reiterated his objective to strengthen the party so that it comes to power again. The development comes amid speculations of his resignation as has been on the receiving end of a rebellion from some BJP MLAs in the state. Leaders like MLA Basanagouda Patil Yatnal, Tourism Minister CP Yogeshwar and MLC AH Vishwanath have spoken against Yediyurappa.

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New Delhi: Last year, actress Payal Ghosh had accused Bollywood director Anurag Kashyap of sexually harassing her. In her statement to ANI, she had said, "He made me feel uncomfortable. I felt bad about it, whatever happened shouldn't have happened. If someone approaches you for work, it doesn't mean the person is prepared for anything." However, the director had denied the charges and labelled them to be baseless. Anurag's ex-wives Kalki Koechlin and Aarti Bajaj had also vouched for his innocence on social media.

A few days ago, Anurag Kashyap's daughter Aaliyah Kashyap commented on the whole ordeal and what she went through when her father faced such a serious accusation. The 20-year-old revealed that misrepresentation of her fathers character deeply impacted her and can even exacerbate her anxiety - a mental health condition that she has been dealing with for quite some time now.

Days after Aaliyah's interview, Payal raised eyebrows with her latest Instagram post shared on July 24, where she spoke about being molested at a young age and addressed it to an unnamed person. She wrote, "I have been almost of your age, when I was molested by your father and was under psychiatric treatment for years. Just like you....!!! my dad is also like a teddy bear to me and the best dad ever. I lost my mom, when I was just 7 years old, and the best part is despite my dad looking super handsome, he didn't marry any other woman to take care of me. Anyways, I have gone through anxiety attacks for years ...... How true it is Karma hits back.. yeah,looks like it does in real terms #karma."

Check out her cryptic post:

In her interview on Zoom By Invite Only season 2, Aaliyah also spoke about getting anxiety due to such claims levelled against her father. "This is what gives me anxiety, and not really the hate. I know that whatever hate I get for him is just from people who dont have anything better to do with their lives. My dad also has been trying to make more of an effort to keep his things away from me because he doesnt want it to make my anxiety worse."

Vouching for her fathers character, Aaliya continued, "People think he is a terrible man, but ask anyone close to me and they will say that hes the biggest softy teddy bear youll ever meet." In her post, Payal has mentioned the same phrase but has not addressed Aaliyah directly. She wrote, "Just like you....!!! my dad is also like a teddy bear to me and the best dad ever."

Last year after the actress publicly accused Kashyap of harassment, Payal Ghosh had told India TV that it took her six years for her to gather the courage to talk about the incident.
New Delhi: While investigating the porn film case, Mumbai Police Crime Branch has found a hidden cupboard in actor Shilpa Shetty's husband and businessman Raj Kundra's Viaan and JL Stream office in Mumbai's Andheri during searches.

"Crime Branch has found a hidden cupboard in businessman Raj Kundra's Viaan and JL Stream office in Mumbai's Andheri during searches in connection with a pornography case," Mumbai Police informed.

As per sources, Raj Kundra will soon face money laundering and Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA) cases against him as Enforcement Directorate (ED) is likely to register cases under these Acts against him.

Kundra, 45, was arrested by the Mumbai Police late on July 19 along with 11 other people on charges related to alleged creation of pornographic films and was placed in police custody till July 23. Currently, the case involves alleged creation of pornographic films and publishing them through some apps.

Kundra has been named as the key conspirator by the Mumbai Police which has slapped charges against him under Sections 420 (cheating), 34 (common intention), 292 and 293 (related to obscene and indecent advertisements and displays) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) besides relevant sections of the IT Act and the Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act.

A Mumbai court on July 20 sent businessman Kundra to police custody till July 23 and in another bail hearing his custody was later extended till July 27.

The case was registered with Crime Branch Mumbai in February 2021 about the creation of pornographic films and the use of apps.
Mumbai: The property cell of the Mumbai Crime Branch on Sunday (July 25) summoned Television actor and model Gehana Vasisth and two other people for questioning in connection with a pornography case, a police official informed on Sunday.

The three persons summoned have to appear before the crime branch before 12 noon today. Gehana Vashisht alias Vandana Tiwari, who is currently released on bail, was earlier arrested in February 2021 in the pornography case.

She got bail after four months. Meanwhile, investigating the porn film case, Mumbai Police Crime Branch has found a hidden cupboard in actor Shilpa Shettys husband and businessman Raj Kundras Viaan and JL Stream office in Mumbais Andheri during searches.

"Crime Branch has found a hidden cupboard in businessman Raj Kundras Viaan and JL Stream office in Mumbais Andheri during searches in connection with a pornography case," Mumbai Police informed.

As per sources, Raj Kundra will soon face money laundering and Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA) cases against him as Enforcement Directorate (ED) is likely to register cases under these Acts against him.

Kundra, 45, was arrested by the Mumbai Police late on July 19 along with 11 other people on charges related to the alleged creation of pornographic films and was placed in police custody till July 23.

Currently, the case involves the alleged creation of pornographic films and publishing them through some apps.

Kundra has been named as the key conspirator by the Mumbai Police which has slapped charges against him under Sections 420 (cheating), 34 (common intention), 292 and 293 (related to obscene and indecent advertisements and displays) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) besides relevant sections of the IT Act and the Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act.
Come August 1, bank customers will see several changes in important banking transactions like salary, pension and EMI payments. The Reserve Bank of India has come up with new guidelines and further changed the rules of the National Automated Clearing House (NACH).

From next month, you dont have to wait for working days to get your salary credited in your account as these services will be available throughout the week and also on weekends.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has further changed the rules of the National Automated Clearing House (NACH) and according to the new guidelines, the services of NACH will be available seven days a week. Currently, these services are available only when banks are open, from Monday to Friday.

The new NACH rules showed that the payments such as salary and pensions can be transferred on weekends which is not possible now as it is only available when the banks are open.

Sometimes when the first day of the month falls on the weekend, the salary disbursal is delayed as banks are not open and on the next working day, it is credited.

Recently, RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das had announced several key financial, economic measures amid the pandemic. Among other measures, he had announced 247 availability of RTGS and NACH from August 1, 2021.

A bulk payment system operated by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), NACH facilitates one-to-many credit transfers such as payment of dividend, interest, salary, pension, etc and the collection of payments pertaining to electricity, gas, telephone, water, periodic instalments towards loans, investments in mutual funds, insurance premium etc.

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Its a piece of good news for WhatsApp users as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has now confirmed that the multi-device support feature is coming soon. This feature is already available on the beta version of its app on Android but it was not ready to use for iOS users.

However, there is an update now which further reveals that WhatsApp has unveiled the multi-support feature for iOS users too, reported WABetaInfo.

Picture this, WhatsApps upcoming multi-device functionality feature allows users to connect up to four devices with their account and it will not need the primary device, the smartphone for this.

So basically now you can use your WhatsApp account on four devices at the same time which means if you are using it via phone, then you can also log in to the account on a tablet, laptop.

Notably, this WhatsApp feature is not made available to the main app for the wider public yet. Facebook will first test it in its beta app, remove all the bugs and then roll out this update onto the main app.

The blog also reports that WhatsApp is not rolling out the multi-device support feature to all iOS beta users. WhatsApp is still partially rolling out the feature for specific users, so its possible your WhatsApp account is not eligible yet, the blog site wrote in a post.

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New Delhi: Thiruvananthapuram MP and Congress leader Shashi Tharoor is known for his fondness for English jargon words. He is often in limelight for the use of his English language. The Oxford University debate is one living example of it. In a recent development, Shashi Tharoor has posted an exotic description of our very own favourite Bhelpuri.

Tharoor posted the recipe of the common Indian street food on his Twitter handle. The post is amusing and has undoubtedly gone viral like any of his other tweets using his rich vocabulary skills.

As received on @WhatsApp. Good for weekend consumption! pic.twitter.com/2z5pYspZei  Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) July 24, 2021

Shashi Tharoor shared the photo-post Bhelpuri recipe stating that he received it on WhatsApp. The description is written by him and it is attracting a lot of users, and we are doubting that it must have been done as an intended pun for Tharoors penchant for multisyllabic words. He posted the recipe with the caption, As received on @WhatsApp. Good for weekend consumption! Face with tears of joy.

Describing the bhel used in the savoury snack as the exotic crispy wild rice from the Western Ghats rainforest, Shashi Tharoors exotic Bhelpuri recipe stated that the snack comprised of the chefs secret micro-greens sourced from exclusive greenhouses in the Nilgiris, luscious salsa-rosso of Ras Al-Khaimah dates, and exceedingly rare Assamese Bhoot Jolokia chillies (ghost pepper). The recipe further added that the preparation can be seasoned with a sauce of sweet Kerala beach-sand soil-grown tamarind and Malabar organic raw sugar.

It further read that all these ingredients are then tossed in a bronze bowl with macedoines (usually a mixture of vegetables or fruit cut into small pieces) of Gujarati winter shallots (onion) and Vidarbha heritage potatoes and riotously festooned with a cacophony of Hyderabadi chickpea-flavored crunchies bugea and papdy cooked a la Marwaraise.

The post is getting traction on Twitter and received more than two thousand likes instantly.

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New Delhi: In a viral video that has caught the attention of the netizens, a land in Haryana can be seen suddenly rising above the water. The clip, shared on the Facebook page of Jagat Vani, has garnered over 4.3 million views.

The undated video shows a cracked ground, submerged in water, suddenly uplifting. One of the men asks people to stand back as the land continues to rise a few feet above the water in this shocking clip. Someone can be heard exclaiming, See this, how the land is rising. This is a new experience.

Have a look at the video here:

The video got the netizens talking about the reason behind this occurrence. While someone guessed it could have been due to tectonic activity, another user claimed it was due to methane trapped in the earth.

Not really due to tectonic activity, but methane trapped in the earth gets released getting the wet layer to form a bubble, that is what seems to be happening here, wrote a user.

Refuting the methane theory, another user wrote, If this was caused by methane, then this much methane could have caused breathing issues to the people standing and recording...It is unlikely to be methane, but who knows.
New Delhi: The ministry of defense of Afghanistan on Saturday (July 24) claimed that their security forces have killed as many as 262 Taliban terrorists across various provinces in just 24 hours.

The forces further said 176 terrorists were injured during the operations and 21 Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were defused.

262 Taliban terrorists were killed and 176 were wounded as a result of #ANDSF operations in Laghman, Nangarhar, Nuristan, Kunar, Ghazni, Paktia, Kandahar, Herat, Balkh, Jowzjan, Helmand, Kunduz & Kapisa provinces during the last 24 hours. Also, 21 IEDs were discovered & defused, the ministry said in a tweet.

262 #Taliban terrorists were killed and 176 were wounded as a result of #ANDSF operations in Laghman, Nangarhar, Nuristan, Kunar, Ghazni, Paktia, Kandahar, Herat, Balkh, Jowzjan, Helmand, Kunduz & Kapisa provinces during the last 24 hours.

Also, 21 IEDs were discovered & defused. pic.twitter.com/VCF9wRbiV4  Ministry of Defense, Afghanistan (@MoDAfghanistan) July 24, 2021

According to the ministry, security operations are being conducted continuously throughout the country, especially in the territories the Taliban has advanced.

Meanwhile, the government has imposed a curfew across almost all of the country on Saturday in an attempt to stop the Taliban from invading cities.

Apart from Kabul and two other provinces, no movement will be allowed between 10 pm and 4 am.

The fight between the Taliban and Afghanistan government forces has escalated over the last two months as the United States has announced to withdraw its troops from the country.

About 650 US troops are expected to remain in the country to provide security for diplomats after the main American military force completes its withdrawal.

Moreover, several hundred additional US forces will remain at the Kabul airport, potentially until September. They'll assist Turkish troops providing security, a temporary move until a more formal Turkey-led security operation is in place.

Also Read: More than 100 civilians reportedly killed in Spin Boldak, Afghanistan

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New Delhi: In a bid to boost COVID-19 vaccination, Pakistan has banned domestic travel of unvaccinated adults, i.e., people above 18, IANS cited media reports as saying. As per a document accessed by Dawn and issued by the National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC) no unvaccinated citizen of 18 and above will be permitted to undertake domestic air travel from August 1.

"Restriction is for domestic air travel and people travelling from Pakistan to abroad or from abroad to Pakistan are exempted from restriction. It is also not applicable on link flights if these are within 72 hours of arrival or departure," IANS quoted the document as saying.

Further, it added that partially vaccinated individuals, foreign nationals, Pakistani nationals possessing documentary proof of vaccination abroad and patients who are clinically advised against vaccination due to risk of reaction will be exempted from the restriction.

The announcement comes amid the countrys overall COVID-19 caseload standing at 1,004,694 with 2,819 people testing positive for the virus in the last 24 hours, while the death toll has reached 23,016. Asad Umar, head of the NCOC, on Saturday urged citizens to get vaccinated and follow the standard operating procedures citing that the risk of transmission was not over.

Earlier, in June, Pakistans Punjab had decided to block SIM cards of citizens who refuse to take the jab in order to fight vaccine hesitancy. The decision was taken at a meeting in Lahore chaired by the province's health minister Dr. Yasmin Rashid.

(With agency inputs)
Washington: NASA`s Insight lander has revealed deep interiors of the Red Planet for the first time, confirming that the planet`s centre is molten (Earth`s outer core is molten while its inner core is solid).

Three papers based on the seismometer`s data on stationary lander were published in the journal Science, providing details on the depth and composition of Mars` crust, mantle and core.

The scientists found the crust was thinner than expected and may have two or even three sub-layers. It goes as deep as 20 kms if there are two sub-layers, or 37 kms if there are three.

Beneath that is the mantle, which extends 1,560 kms below the surface.

At the heart of Mars is the core, which has a radius of 1,830 km.

"When we first started putting together the concept of the mission more than a decade ago, the information in these papers is what we hoped to get at the end," said Bruce Banerdt, InSight`s principal investigator.

"This represents the culmination of all the work and worry over the past decade," added Banerdt from NASA`s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

Ive mapped the interior of Mars for the first time and found some surprises: - Crust: thinner than expected, with maybe two or three sub-layers

- Mantle: a single layer (969 mi/1,560 km), simpler than Earths

- Core: larger than expected (1,137 mi/1,830 km radius), and molten pic.twitter.com/cLgQVkwBnz  NASA InSight (@NASAInSight) July 22, 2021

Before NASA`s InSight spacecraft touched down on Mars in 2018, the rovers and orbiters studying the Red Planet concentrated on its surface.

The stationary lander`s seismometer has changed that, revealing details about the planet`s deep interior for the first time.

Like Earth, Mars heated up as it formed from the dust and larger clumps of meteoritic material orbiting the Sun that helped to shape our early solar system.

Over the first tens of millions of years, the planet separated into three distinct layers - the crust, mantle, and core - in a process called differentiation.

Part of InSight`s mission was to measure the depth, size, and structure of these three layers.

Confirming the size of the molten core was especially exciting for the team.

"This study is a once-in-a-lifetime chance," said Simon Stahler of the Swiss research university ETH Zurich, lead author of the core paper.

"It took scientists hundreds of years to measure Earth`s core; after the Apollo missions, it took them 40 years to measure the Moon`s core. InSight took just two years to measure Mars` core."

The earthquakes most people feel come from faults caused by tectonic plates shifting. Unlike Earth, Mars has no tectonic plates; its crust is instead like one giant plate.

But faults, or rock fractures, still form in the Martian crust due to stresses caused by the slight shrinking of the planet as it continues to cool, according to NASA.

InSight scientists spend much of their time searching for bursts of vibration in seismograms, where the tiniest wiggle on a line can represent a quake or, for that matter, noise created by wind.

"What we`re looking for is an echo," said Amir Khan of ETH Zurich, lead author of the paper on the mantle.

"We`re detecting a direct sound - the quake - and then listening for an echo off a reflector deep underground."

These results are only the beginning.

While InSight`s energy level is being managed, its seismometer is still listening, and scientists are hopeful they`ll detect a quake bigger than 4.0.
New Delhi: Afghanistan is now squarely blaming Pakistan for supporting the Taliban insurgency with the topmost officials attacking Pakistan`s links with terror in quick succession.

Afghanistan National Security Advisor Hamdullah Mohib fired another salvo at Pakistan, as he said that as many as 15,000 militants could enter Afghanistan from Pakistan to fight the Afghan forces.

Mohib said Pakistan has been a safe haven for the Taliban and that the group has been using Pakistani madrasas to recruit fighters.

"Every year, the Taliban were defeated in Afghanistan but they had an opportunity to recuperate, to re-recruit people from Madrasas in Pakistan and bring them back the next year.

"This year, we estimate that 10,000 fighters have come in from Pakistani madrasas to fight in Afghanistan this fighting season and intelligence shows that they could be as many as 15,000 more new recruits coming towards Afghanistan," Mohib said.

"The Taliban have had safe havens in Pakistan... throughout this period they enjoyed their leaders living there at peace and in Pakistan, their injured were treated in Pakistani hospitals, they had military and emotional support and financial support from elements within the Pakistani military establishment and it continues to be the case," he added.

Afghanistan President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani too slammed Pakistan. On a visit to the Special Operations Command Center in Kabul, Ghani said that the Taliban has "deep ties" with Al Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and Jaish-e-Mohammed and the group want Afghanistan "to become a haven for insurgents".

A video that has been doing rounds on social media shows Pakistani militias crossed the zero point of the Durand Line at Spin Boldak. Local reports say the Pakistani military has fired hundreds of rockets across the Durand crossing, killing and wounding dozens of people.

First Vice President Amrullah Saleh recently posted the photo of the signing of the Instrument of Surrender in Dhaka in 1971 on Twitter and said Afghanistan does not and will not ever have such a picture.

"Dear Pak Twitter attackers, Taliban, and terrorism won`t heal the trauma of this picture. Find other ways," VP Saleh wrote. "Yes, yesterday I flinched for a fraction of a second as a rocket flew above and landed few meters away," he wrote.

In the 1971 war, following which Bangladesh was created, Pakistan had to publicly surrender to the joint forces of the Indian Army and Bangladesh`s Mukti Bahini, which was the largest military surrender after World War 2. Pakistan`s General Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi, along with 93,000 troops, surrendered and signed the Instrument of Surrender on December 16 in Dhaka after a 13-day war.

Saleh has been tweeting about Pakistan Army supporting Taiban in the Spin Boldak area.

(With agency inputs)

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